The Leisure of Young People in Contemporary Society
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2012.754n2006Keywords:
Cultural capital, leisure, post-industrialism, social capital, youthAbstract
This paper examines how the leisure of young people in Western Europe has changed since the 1950s. It considers the effects of the extension of the youth life stage, the shift into a post-industrial era, and the steep increases in leisure spending that have occurred. The paper considers the ways in which youth cultures have now become milieu where social relationships and divisions are changed rather than reproduced, argues that this is most plausible in relation to gender, for some but not all ethnic divisions, and wholly implausible in relation to social class. It is argued that class differences in childhood leisure socialisation which result in the acquisition of different amounts and types of cultural capital, plus the social relationships formed among social equals, enable class differences to be maintained throughout the youth life stage even though young people on most social class trajectories share much leisure in common.
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