Volunteering and its nonprofit organizations have commonly been analyzed in economic terms, with volunteering being referred to as "unpaid (productive) work". This economic definition has been around far longer than that of volunteering conceived of as leisure, which is discussed as the volitional definition. By means of a lengthy literature review, this book sets out the theoretical and empirical contributions of the serious leisure perspective to understanding volunteer motivation. This second approach began more than 40 years ago. It answers the key motivational question of why people engage in unpaid productive work, laborious or not. Since in this conception payment in cash or in kind is not an incentive to perform such work, what encourages people to volunteer? The serious leisure perspective, unlike mainstream economics, can shed considerable light on this question.

This short book discusses the relatively new concept of project-based leisure in leisure research, and relates it to individual and community well-being and quality of life. The book defines PBL as a short-term, reasonably complicated, one-off or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time, or time free of disagreeable obligation. Such leisure requires considerable planning, effort, and sometimes skill or knowledge. The book discusses how PBL contributes to subjective well-being, though doing so more modestly than serious leisure and occupational devotion. The book surveys existing field research of the author’s own and other studies, and provides original insights on how PBL activities can be used to generate community involvement and subjective well-being.

The Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP) is a theoretic framework developed by Robert A. Stebbins in 1973, that brings together three main forms of leisure known as serious leisure, casual leisure, and project-based leisure. The SLP has evolved considerably since 1973, and this textbook provides a synthesis of the many concepts and propositions, as well as the data supporting them. In this overview, Stebbins organizes the entire framework along conceptual lines, with careful attention to level of empirical support and validation of each concept, presenting an up-to-date version of the SLP that allows interested students and researchers of social psychology, sociology, and leisure studies, to pinpoint exact elements of the theory, the empirical base and its application.

Serious Leisure offers a comprehensive view and analysis of the current state of the sociology of leisure. Defining and differentiating the way people use their free time, Stebbins divides such activity into categories of serious, casual, and project-based leisure that he further separates into a variety of types and subtypes. Together they comprise what he calls "serious leisure." In this perspective, serious leisure constitutes systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity sufficiently substantial and interesting in nature and requiring special skills, knowledge, and experience. Casual leisure, though immediately, intrinsically rewarding, is by contrast a relatively short-lived pleasurable activity, requiring little or no special training to enjoy it. Project-based leisure is a short-term, reasonably complicated, occasional creative undertaking carried out in free time. Stebbins sets out the basic concepts and propositions that make up the three forms, focusing on their essential elements. He takes stock of the serious leisure literature as well as that for casual and project-based leisure. Stebbins sees "serious leisure" realized by way of a set of foundational concepts--organization, community, history, lifestyle, and culture--and several of their component areas. He reviews the history and background of the concept of serious leisure and then adds historical commentary on, first, casual leisure and, then, project-based leisure. Finally, he examines the future and the importance of the serious leisure perspective in a globalizing world, and some of its critical links with other fields of knowledge and practice, notably the nonprofit sector and preventive medicine. Together with its original insights, Serious Leisure offers a single, handy, coherent, comprehensive resource. It will be of interest to sociologists, labor studies specialists, and economists.

This pivot provides a conceptual statement of an approach to understanding the interrelationships of work, leisure, and “chore” activities in daily life, and how they are managed in practice. Drawing on the sociology of everyday life, Stebbins puts forward the notion of Pondering Everyday Life (PEA), a thinking process/activity in which we routinely understand, coordinate, organize, remember, and compare our involvements in work, leisure, and non-work obligations. This perspective demonstrates how the interrelation between these three domains helps bring meaning and continuity to everyday life. As a micro- and meso-level conception that takes into account social, cultural and historic context, Stebbins contemplates how and what PEA can tell us about an individual’s view of their own life. Pondering Everyday Life will be of interest to students and scholars across leisure studies, social psychology, and the sociology of leisure and work.

Acknowledging that the challenge facing social science is how to inject some order into the common-sense notion of leisure lifestyles, this book, written by a major player in the field of leisure, considers how to turn the study of both serious and casual leisure into a useful concept for guiding research.

Non-work obligations can undermine our well-being and lifestyles, but scholars of work and leisure alike have largely ignored this element of our lives. This book, written by an established authority in the field, shines a light on the significance of this ‘third space’ in our lives and offers a guide to finding contentment in discontentment.

This book illustrates how leisure, as with other complex ideas that hold currency in today’s world, suffers at the level of common sense, due to a combination of oversimplification, moral depreciation, and even lack of recognition. Leisure’s modern legacy is both profound and immense, as a product of approximately 45 years of steady research, application and theory development. The common sense view of free-time activities, therefore, can and should be challenged. Stebbins provides this confrontation by tackling four particular themes: that gatekeepers within the institutions of higher education and funding agencies for research often fail to attach adequate resources to the idea of leisure; that the general population are guided by certain common sense definitions and largely unaware of how an informed view of free time could be beneficial; that practitioners within certain fields continue to refuse to engage with the idea of leisure despite its benefit for their clients; and that the weak reception of the science of leisure within mainstream social sciences suggests a similarly warped understanding of how people use their free time. Leisure’s Legacy will be of interest to scholars of Leisure Studies and all those wishing to learn more about the vital importance of leisure in modern Western society.

There have been many analyses of leisure, drawing on the social, historical, cultural, temporal, and geographical contexts in which acts of leisure are pursued. Yet these studies lack a theoretical framework that can explain how leisure studies interact in various social contexts (cultural, temporal, or geographical), or as Robert A. Stebbins conceptualizes it, at levels of society. Here Stebbins explores leisure studies at society's micro, meso, and macro levels. He considers all three as they manifest themselves in the everyday pursuit of leisure, while focusing on the heretofore neglected middle, which he calls the meso side of life. Stebbins not only draws these perspectives together, but does something no one else has: he focuses on the big picture of leisure. Leisure Activities in Context examines the entire micro-macro/agency-structure dimension, using theory and research from leisure studies and the sociology of leisure as the vehicles to accomplish this. This book will be a useful theoretical sourcebook on the study of leisure because it provides a blueprint of issues that scholars and students can use to draw deeper meaning from their own studies, and a framework for future research.

Multispecies Leisure: Human-Animal Interactions in Leisure Landscapes seeks to ‘bring the animal in’ to the leisure studies domain and contribute to greater understanding of leisure as a complex, interwoven multispecies phenomenon. The emerging multidisciplinary field of human-animal studies encourages researchers to move beyond narrow focus on human-centric practices and ways of being in the world, and to recognise that human and non-human beings are positioned within shared ecological, social, cultural and political spaces. With some exceptions, leisure studies has been slow to embrace the ‘animal turn’ and consider how leisure actions, experiences and landscapes are shaped through multispecies encounters between humans, other animals, birds and insects, plants and environment. This book begins to address this gap by presenting research that considers leisure as more-than-human experiences. The authors consider leisure with nonhuman others (e.g. dogs, horses), affecting those others (e.g. environmental concerns) and affected by the non-human (e.g. landscape, weather), by exploring the ‘contact zones’ between humans and other species. Thus, this work contributes to greater understanding of leisure as a complex, multispecies phenomenon. The chapters in this book were originally published as a Special Issue of the Leisure Studies.