The Sociology of Fun

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 For my children Nancy and Joshua
and my grandmother Betty Hutchings.
This was her idea really.
 Acknowledgements

My thanks go to the first cohort of students that took the Third Year
Undergraduate Course, ‘A Sociology of Fun’, in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Sussex in the spring of 2014. They are an
inspirational group of people who gave themselves wholeheartedly to the
study of fun. So, thanks and credit to Laurie Amar, Sophie Anscombe,
Charlene Aure, Ashley Barnes, Megan Bond, Rhyanna Coleman, Jess Di
Simone, Geraint Harries, Zsuzsa Holmes, Rosie Hyam, Jennie Leighton,
Juliette Martin Useo, Ella Matthews, Jess Midgely, Becky Reynolds, Amy
Sarjeant, Beth White and Lainey White.
Thanks must also go to the 201 people that took part in the ‘fun’
survey.
I would like to thank people working at the Salvage Café in Hove in
the spring and summer of 2015, where much of this book was written. In
particular, I would like to say thank you to Matthew English, Tazz Khan,
Lauren Joy Kennett, Holly Macve and Joshua Taylor who were patient
in the face of what must have seemed like some weird questions at times.
I would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan publishers, especially
Philippa Grand, Beth O’Leary, Harriet Barker and Amelia Derkatsch for
their support and encouragement during the production of this book.

vii
viii Acknowledgements

Finally, I would like to thank my family. My mum and dad, Deborah

and Barry, who provided the perfect backdrop for my fun growing up—I
realise how lucky I am that they are my parents. I want to thank my
brother, Joe—who probably does not know how prominently he features
in my stories of fun throughout my life. Now my partner, Bree, is pro-
viding the perfect backdrop for my and my children’s fun—which is as
important to me as anything. Thank you, Bree.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Theorising Fun 27

3 Fun and Games: Childhood 47

4 Fun and Frivolity: Adulthood 83

5 Fun at Work 121

6 Phenomenal Fun 155

7 Fun and Recollection 183

8 Conclusions 197

Bibliography 207

Index 209
ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Schema of fun 40

Fig. 4.1 Average personal wellbeing by age group UK 2012–13 91

xi
 1
Introduction

Towards a Sociology of Fun

Fun is taken for granted. In everyday talk people use the term anticipating
that others will know what they mean when they describe something as
fun. In fact it is so taken for granted that outside of dictionary definitions
there is very little in the way of explanations for what fun is and how to
discern it from other social experiences. What we know is that sometimes
we have it and sometimes we don’t, one person’s idea of it is not neces-
sarily another’s and having too much of it is often frowned upon. Much
of the literature that is used in this book refers to fun as rooted in activi-
ties presumed to be fun—‘camping and water-based activities’ are ‘popu-
lar and fun’ according to a study of ‘rural family fun’ (Churchill et al.
2007: 282)1—or conflates fun with things like play (Yee 2006; Churchill
et al. 2007; Kelty et al. 2008), happiness (Cameron 1972; Jackson 2000;
Sumnall et al. 2010), leisure (Scanlan and Simons 1992; Bengoechea
et al. 2004; MacPhail et al. 2008) or deviance (Riemer 1981; Redmon
2003; Keppens and Spruyt 2015). Whilst it is the case that all of these

1
Clearly this will be a moot point for those that hate camping.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

B. Fincham, The Sociology of Fun,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-31579-3_1
2 The Sociology of Fun

areas may contain elements that people would describe as fun, there is
precious little in the way of theorising or describing what it is. Fun per-
tains to other areas of life but is rarely viewed as a defining feature of
it. The most pertinent example of this is found in the recent interest in
issues of happiness and well-being. Opinions and expertise on happiness
emanate from a wide array of academic disciplinary backgrounds. People
working in psychology, psychiatry, economics, social policy, health stud-
ies, philosophy, geography and youth studies—to name a few—have
been applying themselves to understanding what constitutes happi-
ness, its relationship to well-being, how to measure it and importantly
how to instil a sense of it in individuals and populations (Rodriguez
et al. 2011; Bok 2010; Veenhoven 2009; Waite et al. 2009; Diener and
Biswas-Diener 2008). At the same time as the world economic recession
of 2008–2009 reverberated through economies several national govern-
ments became interested in measures of happiness in populations. In the
UK the government decided to conduct a survey through the Office for
National Statistics to assess how ‘happy’ the British population was in
2011 (Directgov 2010). The intention of officially monitoring happiness
was to steer government social policy (Stratton 2010). Elsewhere, the
governments of France and Canada developed national happiness mea-
sures at the same time as the UK (Stratton 2010). The discussions about
happiness and well-being were generally centred on a few core themes,
the most prominent being wealth and income, job satisfaction, feelings of
community, relationships with friends and family, environment, cultural
activities, health and education (Directgov 2010). The thinking is that if
you can get a sense of these facets of a person’s life as successful or unsuc-
cessful, attained or unattained, then you should be able to infer levels of
happiness. However, the point for this book is not to dwell on the obvi-
ous difficulties in defining and then measuring something subjective like
levels of happiness—or whether it is a worthwhile pursuit or not—but to
note that there has been an important omission from almost all discus-
sions about what makes people happy—namely, fun. The absence of fun
perhaps relates to the conflation of happiness with well-being where fun
is peripheral to the more weighty matters of physical health or economic
security—but when considered alongside happiness, this absence is odd.
During two particular studies I have been involved with, one looking
 1 Introduction 3

at informal labour markets and the other into the relationship between
mental health and work, the importance of fun to people became appar-
ent. In interviews when asked what made them happy—particularly at
work—many participants identified having fun as a fundamental reason
for being happy. Obviously, this is not a novel observation, as Donald
Roy points out in Banana Time several commentators in the 1950s had
made similar points. As an interviewee in work on assembly line workers
by Walker and Guest said, ‘We have a lot of fun and talk all the time … if
it weren’t for the talking and fooling you’d go nuts’ (Roy 1959: 158). The
role of fun for making situations at worst tolerable and at best enjoy-
able is clear—which is what makes the omission of fun as an object of
serious study all the more perplexing. There is a general absence of any
engagement with fun as a central feature of happiness; rather, fun is a by-
product of activities that are supposed to make us happy. This book is an
attempt primarily to acknowledge the central role fun plays in our lives
and also to develop a sociological approach to fun.
By way of an introduction to fun and sociology, this chapter estab-
lishes the parameters within which the rest of the book operates. Here a
sociological definition of fun is, very broadly, outlined. There is a descrip-
tion of how fun has been conceptualised by academics historically—with
specific reference to the 1950s literature on ‘fun morality’. There is an
account of references to fun outside of sociology and many of these will
be picked up in further chapters. Important for a sociological definition
are the ways in which fun operates differently in various contexts—work,
family, education, leisure, and so on—and this contextual aspect is high-
lighted here. It is also in the introduction that the distinctiveness of fun
as performing specific social functions—and its relationship to power—
is introduced. After the historical view, further debates that the book
engages with are outlined. More generally, the book questions the ‘taken
for granted’ nature of references to fun. Do people mean the same things
when they talk about ‘having fun’? Why is one person’s idea of fun dif-
ferent from somebody else’s? The relationship between fun, happiness
and well-being is also addressed. This is the first book that explicitly sets
out a ‘sociology of fun’. As such it is an exploration of the different ways
that fun features in everyday life and how sociology can bring something
distinctive to that analysis.
4 The Sociology of Fun

The Importance of Fun

As I have indicated, the idea for a concerted study of fun emerged during
2010–2011. Carl Walker and I had just published a book called Work and
the Mental Health Crisis in Britain (Walker and Fincham 2011) and it was
also the period in which the UK government, under the premiership of
David Cameron, was developing the ‘National Wellbeing Programme’.
This initiative had disappeared from public consciousness fairly soon
after an initial flurry of interest—but the aim, according to the Office for
National Statistics, was to ‘produce accepted and trusted measures of the
well-being of the nation’ (Office for National Statistics 2011). They went
on to broadly define well-being and talk about why it was important to
try and measure it:

Well-being put simply is about ‘how we are doing’ as individuals, as

communities and as a nation and how sustainable this is for the future.
Measuring National Well-being is about looking at ‘GDP and beyond’.
(Office for National Statistics 2011)

It is worth noting that the government became interested in measur-

ing well-being in the depths of the worst economic recession since the
1930s. A cynic might suggest that this interest was inspired by a govern-
ment trying to suggest that GDP is not the best way to rate the success
of any given society at a time when the economy was going from bad to
worse. This view was hardly undermined by the disappearance of govern-
mental concern in measuring well-being during the economic recovery.
However, my interest was piqued by what I had noticed in the study of
mental health and work and a significant absence in the well-being index
survey. During the study of the relationship between work, employment
and workers’ feelings of mental well-being, an interesting dichotomy
emerged in interviews in relation to the idea of fun. On the one hand,
interviewees talked about how important it was to have fun whilst at
work and that it not only signalled good relationships between colleagues
but was also a key factor for continued healthy engagement with work.
On the other hand, when describing instances of fun, people represented
 1 Introduction 5

it as frivolous, unimportant in relation to other aspects of being at work.

It seemed to be something to be a bit embarrassed about (Walker and
Fincham 2011). It was also clear that the way people were framing fun in
their own lives was distinct, but related to, ideas of happiness.
In the ONS survey there was no mention of fun at all. There was no
attempt to assess the role fun played in a person’s sense of well-being. In
fact I could not find specific mentions of fun in any of the many well-
being indexes being developed at the time (Canadian Index of Wellbeing
2015; Office for National Statistics 2015; OECD 2015; The State of the
USA 2015). The implication was that well-being is predicated on certain
aspects of life, but fun is not one of them.
These two trains of thought led to a very simple existential question.
What would a life without any fun be like? Just asking the question sum-
mons up a terribly bleak scenario. If the absence of fun is so bad, then it
must be important. If you think through the implications of the ques-
tion, and where an absence of fun impacts, it is squarely in the realms of
happiness and well-being—it is a very bad thing to have no fun.
In terms of well-being and happiness people are happier than they
would otherwise be if they have fun.
It became apparent quite early on that fun is complicated. It is a multi-
dimensional, multifunctional social phenomenon. It defines experiences,
characterises people, embellishes memories; it feeds moments with posi-
tivity, establishes the conditions for good relationships; it draws distinc-
tions between good and bad times and it enhances life. It is curiously
ambiguous—we know when we are having it, but struggle to define it.

Do We Know What Fun Is?

As is often the case, in books like this dictionary definitions are only
useful in as much as they provide a starting point but little else. The
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes fun as ‘diversion, amusement,
sport; also, boisterous jocularity or gaiety, drollery. Also, a source or cause
of amusement or pleasure’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2011).
This clearly does not encompass our experience of fun. The semantics of
6 The Sociology of Fun

experiences are difficult, and as an approximation dictionary definitions

are always reductive—but for something as profound and significant as
fun, the OED inevitably lacks depth. My disquiet about this definition is
in part because of the etymology of the word fun. Its meaning has diversi-
fied over the centuries from describing cheating in the seventeenth cen-
tury to a pejorative description of low wit or mockery in the nineteenth
century to its modern meaning, associating fun with ‘exciting goings on’
(Blythe and Hassenzahl 2004: 92). The history of the word fun is suf-
fused social class, judgement and transgression. Blythe and Hassenzahl
give a particularly illuminating and concise explanation of the role of
the industrial revolution in shaping contemporary notions of fun. They
explain that in the routinisation and mechanisation of work the boundar-
ies between work and leisure—or not being at work—became clear, but
more importantly, the processes of rationalisation in work leads to the
development of fun as a mode of resistance to routine and regimentation.
This, and an association of a lack of middle- or upper-class sophistica-
tion with fun, made it a working class, subversive activity. To a certain
extent this can still be seen today, particularly in the rhetoric of ‘taking
the piss’ or ‘having a laugh’. As will be explored later in the book, there is
often a transgressive or subversive element to the ways in which we have
fun—and this is still often associated with a lack of sophistication. This
chequered past echoes in contemporary settings, and this in turn needs
to be factored in to any account of what fun is today. These echoes do
not necessarily have to refer to industrialisation and class specifically, but
make sense of the outside or transgressive element that is often a compo-
nent of fun. As will be addressed later, the trivialisation or marginalisa-
tion of fun—when it is so important to feeling good—may have closer
ties to social control and productivity than we care to imagine.
Despite sporadic interest in fun in a variety of contexts, there has never
been a sustained attempt to pin down what is meant by fun. There are a
number of reasons as to why this might be. For example, Goffman sug-
gests in Encounters:

Because serious activity need not justify itself in terms of the fun it provides,
we have neglected to develop an analytical view of fun and an appreciation
of the light fun throws on interaction in general. (Goffman 1961: 17)
 1 Introduction 7

Blythe and Hassenzahl (2004) are rare for their attempt to systemati-
cally address how to theorise fun and whilst there are many references
to it in various places, there is rarely any attempt to explain what the
phenomenon is. Rather, it is up to the reader or listener to fill in the gaps
by inferring fun from references to other things—happiness, laughter or
whatever. So, whilst many people refer to fun, few try to pin down what
they or—in the case of empirical research—their participants/informants
mean when they talk about it. As I say, these oblique references mean that
we have to infer from the points of reference used by writers when they
talk about fun.
For example, the relationship between leisure, culture and consump-
tion gives clues as a hegemonic construct of fun through capitalist provi-
sion of leisure spaces/activities and the development of leisure industries.
Whilst not directly addressing fun they, nonetheless, often called upon
fun as the motivation for the consumption of particular leisure activities
and/or products. The relationship between sporting activities and fun,
particularly when encouraging youth participation, predominates refer-
ences to fun and leisure (Fine 1989; Seefeldt et al 1993; Siegenthalter and
Gonzalez 1997; Jackson 2000; Strean and Holt 2000; Bengoechea et al
2004; Macphail et al 2008). Generally the term ‘fun’ is used quite unre-
flexively and an assumption is made that we all know what it means, even
when we acknowledge that it means different things to different people.
For example, Bengoechea et al. (2004) correctly state that fun has differ-
ent meanings depending on perspective and context. In their study of fun
in youth sport, Bengoechea et al. first point out that fun and enjoyment
are distinct yet related (Bengoechea et al. 2004: 198) and then immedi-
ately say that ‘for research purposes fun and enjoyment should be consid-
ered synonymous because “fun” is the term that children commonly use
to refer to enjoyable experiences’ (198). Later in the same paper, a section
is dedicated to discerning ‘different meanings in fun’ (204)—differences
observed in the testimonies of sports coaches are reduced to ‘achievement
and non-achievement dimensions of the experience of fun’ (204), the
former accentuating winning or striving to win being associated with fun
and the latter concentrating more on ‘pleasure and avoiding pain’ (206).
What is interesting in this example is the difficulty the authors have in
specifying what the phenomenon being reported to them consists of.
8 The Sociology of Fun

For a start, the interviewees are all adult coaches and not children, so the
initial conflation of fun and enjoyment is curious—unless the authors
imagine that adults use the terms interchangeably also. A telling part of
the paper that highlights the problem for many commentators in this
field of study is the association of fun with wasting time fecklessness but
the understanding that fun is what many people want to have. Once
again in the Bengoechea et al. example:

A comment by Carla, a rowing coach (boys and girls, 14–18) illustrated

potential negative connotations of fun when depicted as non-achievement,
non-performance aspect of sport: ‘like I don’t like the word “fun” because
it implies, you know, fooling around, and carefree, and not paying atten-
tion.’ Scanlon and colleagues (Scanlon and Simons 1992; Scanlon et al.
1993) have noted that the enjoyment construct suffers from a pre-conceived
notion of frivolity or what they refer to as the ‘pizza parlor phenomenon’.
(Bengoechea et al. 2004: 205)

The conflation of fun and enjoyment in studies of sport is common

(MacPhail et al. 2008; Bengoechea et al 2004; Scanlan and Simons 1992)
but so is the observation that fun is something that is distinct and often
distracting. Strean and Holt suggest that fun should be considered a
‘subset’ of enjoyment, so, whilst one could experience enjoyment and
not describe it as fun, fun is always enjoyable. Their conclusion comes
from the persistent idea in sports studies of ‘positive affective’ responses
to sport (Strean and Holt 2000: 85). It is difficult to disagree with the
simple assertion that fun is always enjoyable, but this is something that
I will return to later in the book—as with much of fun it is not that
straightforward.
In the introduction to his excellent edited collection For Fun and Profit,
Richard Butsch summarises key debates in studies of leisure. Of particular
interest is the argument that developed between those that saw the provi-
sion of officially sanctioned leisure activities for the ‘working classes’—
parks, playhouses, bars, and so on—as social control in action and those
that concentrated on the ways in which these activities or spaces were
subverted by those for whom they were supposed to be provided (Butsch
1990: 6–7). Once again, fun as a form of resistance comes into focus.