• Alex Savin
• March 23, 2022
• Share Now

Leisure and travel in modern societies

In contemporary society where life is so fast and hectic, besides achieving professional success, having some free leisure time is important. Modern societies have created a real business out of traveling and leisure time, with travel being an extremely developed industry today.

Leisure as a Natural Human Need

Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure, or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as “traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business, and other purposes”.

Leisure, or free time, is time spent away from business, work, and domestic chores. It is also the periods before or after necessary activities such as eating, sleeping, and, where it is compulsory, education.

The distinction between leisure and unavoidable activities is loosely applied, i.e., people sometimes do work-oriented tasks for pleasure and long-term utility. A distinction may also be drawn between free time and leisure. For example, Situationist International maintains that free time is illusory and rarely free; economic and social forces appropriate free time from the individual and sell it back to them as the commodity known as “leisure”.

Cultural differences: Time for leisure varies from one society to another. However, anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers have significantly more leisure time than people in more complex communities. As a result, band societies such as the Shoshone of the Great Basin came across as extraordinarily lazy to European colonialists.

Tourism is an important component of modern life and a highly lucrative industry for many countries, yet its importance has been generally unrecognized in the academic arena. In The Tourist Gaze, John Urry examines the concept of tourism from a sociological perspective, demonstrating that tourism is a unique and central element in contemporary society. With his primary focus on the changing nature of tourism, Urry reveals its connection to the broader cultural changes of postmodernism.

Leisure and Travel as a Social Phenomenon

During the last decade, particularly following Urry’s text, the perspectival concept of the institutional/professional “gaze” has emerged come into currency in tourism studies. While few reviews of Urry’s important work on the place and significance of tourism in postmodern society pay much attention to the French litero–philosophical construction le regard (which gave rise to the English term “the gaze”), Leiper has produced a useful foundational review of Urry’s debt to Foucauldian thought. This current article endeavors to take over where Leiper left off and provides a more searching critique of the power of surveillance (le regard) in tourism. For Leper, it is a dialectical representation of Foucauldian thought concerning the eye-of-power. It acts through the institutions/organizations/agencies of tourism and travel (and tourism and travel research). 

Such power of surveillance – such power of judgment and governance – is shown to be an authoritative mix of normalizing discourse and universalizing praxis which routinely privileges certain understandings of heritage/society/the world in and through tourism – as the eye-of-power can do in any institutional, professional, or aggregative setting. Through this Foucauldian vision, the individual who works in tourism (and they who travels!) is seen to be homo docilis – i.e., someone who not only participates in the regulation of the world and the mastery of its social, cultural, natural, and geographical environments but who regulates and thereby constrains themselves through the ocular centric out-looks which they uphold. The article seeks to reinvestigate the involvement of decision-making individuals in investigative agendas in tourism research and development practices in tourism management by hopefully making them much more other-regarded (and also self-aware) in terms of the governing suppositions and presuppositions they work to.

This article explores some of the connections between time and leisure, arguing that leisure patterns are especially significant for changing notions of time. It is further argued that the once hegemonic clock-time is being supplanted in `disorganized capitalism’ by a mix of instantaneous and glacial times. A variety of empirical indices of these are developed. It is then shown that contemporary leisure patterns are transformed through de-traditionalization and increased reflexivity, processes that presuppose these newer forms of time. In conclusion, some implications for a place are briefly developed.

Conclusion

Tourism is an important component of our lives. It developed into a very lucrative industry and will continue to do so as the interest in spending free time traveling or doing interesting activities is increasing.