Amateurs, professionals, and serious leisure

Abstract

For fifteen years, Robert Stebbins has conducted extensive research on amateurs and professionals in theatre, music, archaeology, astronomy, baseball, football, magic and stand-up comedy. His publications give theme of in-depth scholarly attention. This text brings together findings of this research project to provide a theoretical framework that reveals commonalities across these eight fields. Throughout this project Stebbins has built on work of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss and their notion of theory. First, Stebbins extensively observed routine activities of amateurs and professionals in each field studied. Then, as he became more familiar with life-styles of participants, he conducted lengthy, unstructured, face-to-face interviews with, in most cases, 30 amateur or professional respondents. Each field demanded special methods of observation, analysis, interviewing, probing and reporting. As much as possible, however, Stebbins asked similar questions of all respondents in all fields so as to permit generalizations across these diverse fields. The result was a grounded theory of each field studied. Stebbins has developed a formal grounded theory of amateurs and professionals based on research accumulated in all eight substantive fields. By transcending a variety of contexts, he argues, one can gain a more enduring appreciation of elements that affect peoples' experiences in work and pursuits. A review of findings across this wide range of activities, including his findings and ideas on hobbyists and career volunteers, enabled Stebbins to derive better definitions of main concepts of project, such as amateur, the public, and serious leisure -- as well as professional, where he distinguishes between client-centred and public-centred professionals who, while sharing numerous ideal-typical attributes, vary as to power and control they have over their work in a democratic society. He presents inductive conclusions about careers and costs and rewards in eight amateur-professional fields considered. He examines external world of amateurs and professionals in light of such issues as family ties, relations among amateurs and professionals and among amateurs and their employers, public images, critics and journalists, community contributions, and question of marginality for amateurs who are caught between work world of professional and casual world of majority of population. He concludes with an exploration of future role of in relation to predictions of greater unemployment and increased time and longevity.