Work and Leisure

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Contemporary International Issues Essay Work and Leisure Critically examine how global changes in the relationship between work and leisure patterns could affect the lifestyle of people in nations throughout the world. This essay aims to critically examine how global changes in the relationship between work and leisure patterns could affect the lifestyle of people in nations throughout the world. Firstly, there will be an analysis on what changes have been in the relationship between work and leisure throughout the world in this essay. And then there will be a critical examination about how these changes could affect the lifestyle of people. Work provides an individual with income, self-identity and status. In Western societies, paid employment is considered to be the most important type of work. (Haworth, 2004) It shows that work can not only provide people substance satisfactory but also can give us psychology needs. Leisure can be defined, as time not spent working or meeting the necessaries of life. It is also linked to quality of life issues. A question of the relationship between work and leisure is one of the most important sociological studies. Historically, the study of the work-leisure relationship has given rise to five main research themes, summarised by Gilles (1998). The first theme concludes that work-leisure relationships are dependent on value changes, and more particularly on the decline of the work ethic, on the less and less central place given by workers to work and on the increasing development of leisure values. The second research theme emphasises the idea of the ‘spillover’ of work into leisure which argues the relative dependence of leisure in relation to work. The third research theme mainly focuses on leisure as compensation, in other words, leisure is certainly directly influenced by work but translates equally into a
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