The Extraprofessional Life: Leisure, Retirement and Unemployment

Abstract

Many professionals seek to experience in their extraprofessional lives in leisure, retirement and unemployment the equivalent of the `spirit of professional work'. This maxim denotes the distinctive set of shared values, attitudes and expectations that form around a type of professional work, where the work itself is seen by its practitioners as socially important, highly challenging, intensely absorbing, and for these reasons and others, immensely appealing. It is argued that professionals who feel this spirit find it so powerful that they search for its equivalent in their extraprofessional lives. This remarkable, albeit relatively rare, orientation is found only in certain kinds of work and its equivalent is found only in certain kinds of leisure. These professionals, compared with most other workers, are generally inclined to spend much less time in leisure activities. But when they do engage in leisure, it too is distinctive. Professionals tend to find there another central life interest or two, which is also motivated by the experience of flow and undertaken in the company of other participants whose orientation to the interest resembles that of the spirit of professional work. The research reviewed in this article generally supports this proposition. The spirit, however, is more strongly felt in the spheres of leisure and retirement than in the sphere of unemployment. Still, even if some fail to find this spirit, every professional of both sexes and of all ages has access to it, in the sense that it inheres in the work itself.