Privatization, home-centredness and leisure
This paper is concerned with the changing relationships between home life, family life and leisure, and sets out to investigate how adequately these are captured by the familiar idea of ‘privatization’. Despite its superficial attractiveness, the privatization thesis is found to be wanting in its central proposition of a growing overlap between people's home, family and leisure activities. There are theoretical grounds for suggesting that there must be limits to how far home, family and leisure can coincide, and evidence from a range of recent studies is drawn upon to support the argument that the growth of home-centredness is not necessarily at the expense of wider patterns of sociability. It is concluded that the privatization thesis is insufficiently sensitive to the diversity of people's situations and goals.