Academic leisure crafting: More than a respite to breath?

Abstract

In the context of the increased frustration and anxiety around managerialism of universities, this article explores how a group of 11 academics, from three different universities, diverse disciplines and levels are responding collectively outside of their work. Moreover, it tracks the enactment of the 'Slow Swimming Club', initiated by the author and jointly participated in and shaped by these academics. The club represents a particular form of leisure crafting, called slow swimming. Using an autoethnographic approach, the impact of the Slow Swimming Club was explored over a 10-year period. The article reflects on the initial effect of this practice, around an individualised compensatory respite from the academics' feelings of frustration and insecurity. This respite was framed in terms of temporal and aesthetic task crafting. The article then reflects on how the external, counterperformative nature of leisure crafting has opened up time and space for job crafting, back in their universities. The differentiating feature of this research is around the role of academic agency in moving beyond respite towards structural contestation and more systemic change. It also highlights the importance of the relationship between leisure and work within this crafting process. Through placing the aesthetic and temporal dimensions in the foreground, the article offers a significant conceptual contribution to crafting typology. It also extends slow scholarship, by advocating an embodied, sensual and experiential response to the fast pedagogies of managerialism.

“Leisureship”: Impact of pursuing serious leisure on leaders' performance

“…In addition to spillover between domains, theory on the work-nonwork interface (Edwards & Rothbard, 2000) proposes that two roles, in the sense of role identity theory (Stryker & Burke, 2000), can also interact through a compensatory mechanism. Cross-domain compensation can arise from need discrepancies in the work domain, such as an unmet competence need (Hewett et al, 2017), personal values in conflict with the work role (Jones, 2021;Vogel, Rodell, & Lynch, 2016), lack of calling at work (Berg, Grant, & Johnson, 2010), or lack of meaning (Kujanpaa et al, 2021).…”

“…However, the family role is not as amenable to crafting as a leisure role (De Bloom et al, 2020). Engaging in compensatory leisure crafting has been shown to increase meaning-making in the work role (Petrou, Bakker, & van den Heuvel, 2017), work engagement (Vogel et al, 2016), and job performance (Jones, 2021). Compensatory leisure crafting in response to high stress was found to lead to increased workplace wellbeing (Nimmi & Donald, 2022;Petrou & Bakker, 2016).…”

Using leisure crafting to reduce emotional exhaustion at home during the COVID‐19 pandemic through better sleep and not thinking about the pandemic

“…Existing studies have revealed that individuals may engage in leisure activities at home (e.g., Hirano, Umegaki, Suzuki et al., 2016; Saxbe et al., 2011), thereby allowing them to craft those leisure activities at home. Although leisure crafting was initially found to address individuals' needs, recent studies have disclosed that individuals may use leisure crafting to acquire resources (e.g., Chen, 2020; Chen & Wu, 2022; Jones, 2022; Pöllänen, 2015).…”

Guest editorial: Introducing the Special Issue on current trends in careers theory and research

“…Since its introduction by Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001), interest in job crafting has grown exponentially. Researchers have introduced new forms of job crafting, such as the role-based approach embedded in the JD-R model (Tims et al , 2012), approach crafting and avoidance crafting (Bruning and Campion, 2018), promotion and prevention crafting (Bindl et al , 2019), career crafting (Lee et al , 2021), leisure crafting (Jones, 2021), collaborative crafting (Salas et al , 2015) and others. While most research has documented the positive effects of job crafting for the individual as well as the organization, research that examines the negative consequences is sorely needed.…”