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In 1995 China instituted a 40‐hour work week resulting in what is now called “long weekends.”The purposes of this research was to determine what Chinese children prefer to do during the new long weekend, and the extent of their influence on what the family does. The study was conducted among 618 third and fourth grade children who were asked to “Draw what comes to your mind when you think about the long weekend.” The children were also asked to take home a questionnaire to their parents. The drawings were assessed using content analysis. The drawings mainly show that children want to play, preferably away from home. The results of the questionnaire to the parents reveal that the children pretty much determine what the entire family does on the weekends, and that in general they will go places and do things that provide fun for the children. Some indicators of spending for family weekend leisure were obtained that have significant marketing implications.

Purpose – Since the 1970s, with the end of dictatorship and accession to membership of the European Union, women's status and social image have dramatically changed in Greece. The chapter investigates the extent to which a space for women's leisure has evolved in Greece in the last years. Indeed, leisure time has been widely seen as a modern social temporality where processes of individuation, cultural participation, and appropriation intersect. The purpose of the research is to investigate not only the uses and meanings of leisure by working, married women, but also their desires, aims, and attitudes regarding this social temporality.

Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative research methodology is employed involving semistructured interviews with 40 women living and working in Athens.

Findings – The findings of the study show evidence of the growing importance for Greek women of leisure time as an opportunity for more autonomy and independence in the mid of various social, economic, and familial constraints. Leisure activities, especially in the public sphere, are increasingly demanded by women as a right to “a time of one's own” distinct from family leisure. Within this framework, leisure activities become a source of transformations, especially in the familial life, as new values and lifestyles emerge from the sphere of free time forming new subjectivities. Thus, leisure time represents a base from which many Greek women fight against traditional stereotypes and roles daring to confront a male dominated society in economic, political, informational, and scientific spheres.

Research limitations/implications – The social homogeneity as well as the small size of the sample do not allow for wider generalizations.

Originality/value – The chapter discusses a largely neglected aspect of women's everyday lives in Greece. It analyses the gendered nature of leisure and offers insights on its significance for women's individuality and recognition in Greece.

The purpose of this paper is to establish how consumer knowledge is transferred among family members in multi-generational families, based on the consumer socialisation theory. Understanding how consumers learn about consumption and are socialised as consumers is critical to developing marketing strategies throughout the family lifecycle. Central to current conceptions of consumer socialisation is the idea that individuals make decisions as outcomes of previous socialisation processes. However, socialisation takes place in the meso-level social setting and there is need to understand how these meso-systems interact when it comes to consumption.

Using a social system design and dyadic analysis, the authors tested knowledge transfer and consumer socialisation agency in multi-generation families in Vietnam, yielding a sample size of 654 individuals and 218 families.

The authors demonstrate the role of consumer socialisation agency on consumer knowledge transfer between people within families. The study illustrates that where knowledge is limited, family-related services and household products will be jointly considered within the family.

This study was undertaken within a single country setting, but the technique and findings have wider implications for collectivist family decision-making in other settings. The limitations of cross-sectional research are acknowledged; the method specifically overcomes issues with self-reported measures by collecting data from multiple people within the social system.

Our findings suggest that consumer knowledge and learning is bi-directionally transferred through consumer socialisation agency. In complex new market situations, marketers can target the social system and ensure that knowledge will be transferred between members.

Social system design and dyadic analysis have not previously been used to examine meso-level consumption settings. The results provide unique understanding of consumer learning in social settings.

Although much satisfaction research examines the role of demographics, few examine the phenomena of family cohesion or travel party composition and the role they play in influencing satisfaction. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to leverage the two to further understand satisfaction.

Data from 400 vacationing families were analyzed to examine the factors of family cohesion, activity satisfaction and overall vacation satisfaction.

Contrary to previous research, the results suggest that family cohesion is comprised of two primary factors: emotional bonding and decision making, family boundaries and coalitions. The findings suggest that family cohesion and activity satisfaction contributed to overall vacation satisfaction. However, as an addition to extant research, the findings demonstrate that travel party size moderated this relationship.

This research challenges findings of extant research on family cohesion and extends satisfaction research by introducing the effect of family cohesion and travel party composition. Both suggest and offer opportunities for future academic research. Practically speaking, this research also provides insight for practitioners as to why “travel party composition” should be regarded as an operative, rather than a descriptive term.

Practically speaking, this research also provides insight for practitioners as to why “travel party composition” should be regarded as an operative, rather than a descriptive term. Given the results of this research, the moderating effect of travel party composition is an interesting academic finding. Operationalizing this component in practice is challenging. However, practitioners can take the knowledge of the positive relationships between family cohesion, participation in activities, and overall vacation satisfaction, as well as the moderating effect of travel party composition, into account when evaluating guest satisfaction scores, programming activities, and resolving guest issues.

In addition to challenging findings of prior research, this research utilizes data gathered during family vacations; therefore not relying on recall or issues with memory effect. In addition, it extends existing research through the exploration of moderating variables. Finally, the research has practical implications for practitioners to attend to satisfaction of the increasing global family leisure market.

The purpose of this study is to systematically analyze how homeworkers perceive, interpret and make sense of their situations in relation to work and leisure participation. Thus, this study examines the dynamics by which homeworkers struggle to manage leisure and work in their everyday lives, with a special emphasis on how they interpret and make sense of their leisure–work dilemmas.

Using the framework of a dynamic intersection of identity orientation and border-setting approach, this study analyzes qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 13 young, home-based teleworkers in Shanghai.

Unlike the purpose of family-friendly employment policies, homeworkers who had striven for a better leisure life ended up with frustration and disappointment, regardless of their attempts at separate leisure–work borders or not. In contrast, the overwhelming work in a homeworking context paradoxically led to a more fulfilling and satisfying life for most who prioritized work over all else in life.

In the cases of home-based work or other flexible work policies that aim to make a better balance of work and life, public attention has been directed merely toward a debate of whether these policies lead to an enhanced quality of leisure life or an intensification of work intrusion. However, understanding the complexity of such emerging phenomenon requires a richer, more nuanced explanation. In this light, this qualitative study of homeworkers’ lived experiences is sociologically relevant for deciphering the relationship between leisure and work in the late-modern society that entails an evolving process of negotiating identities and situational variability.

This paper aims to examine a mediating model of work-to-leisure conflict (WLC) based on the job demand-control-support model (JDCS model) and conflict roles of work and non-work life. This model proposes that work loading, time-off autonomy and support from supervisors and co-workers are related to WLC and leisure satisfaction.

A sample of 457 frontline employees drawn from within the hospitality and tourism industry completed a study questionnaire. All hypothesized relationships were estimated using structural equation modeling.

Results support a theoretical model in which WLC works as a partial mediator between job stress variables and leisure satisfaction. Findings suggest that low workload and flexible time-off contribute to alleviating WLC and facilitating leisure satisfaction and with the addition of high co-worker support, directly benefit employee leisure satisfaction.

Management implications related to job design and work-related social support are discussed.

The current study contributes to the existing knowledge base by testing WLC as a partial mediator between work loading–leisure satisfaction and time-off autonomy–leisure satisfaction relationships. These findings help human resource management managers broaden their understanding of the role of WLC in balancing frontline employees’ life in work and non-work domains.

The aim of this chapter is to emphasize the importance of archival material and how, despite its secondary nature, it is capable of providing first-hand information for researchers. By providing a variety of examples from tourism, hospitality and leisure, this chapter demonstrates how this underused data can be a valuable resource for these areas of study. In order to illustrate how to use archival material as data, a step-by-step process to analyzing archival photographs is provided. The chapter discusses the challenges and ethical considerations associated with using archival material while also providing suggestions for the use of this data source in future studies.

The study questions how spreading working hours through the day (night) and week might affect how people use their time and participate in leisure and social activities. We make use of closed two‐daystime‐use‐diaries and questionnaires asked employees of the Swiss railway (sample size of 1,400 diarydays), to access the implications of atypical forms of working hours on the workers’ leisure time as well as the time arrangements of the employees’ partners and children. The empirical investigation revealed that people who work shifts are less likely to live in households made up of several persons (an average of 13.6 per cent compared, with 18.8 per cent among people who do not work shifts). Shift workers who live together with others in a household are more likely to share a household with a partner who also works shifts: 30.6 per cent of partners/spouses also work shifts, compared with 14.4 per cent of partners/spouses of non‐shift workers. Subdividing households according to single‐ or multiple‐person households shows that shift workers achieve a slightly longer period of social time than non‐shift workers. On the one hand, this points to a social environment which adapts to the irregular and asynchronous working hours of the person concerned. On the other hand, comparison with sociological theory literature and other time‐budget studies brings out that the social framework conditions and the extent to which working hours can be planned exert a definite influence on a functioning social environment. The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) tries – and manages – to take this into account, as the survey results clearly show. Thus, it is not possible to draw the conclusion that shift workers are in principle at greater risk from social isolation. In fact, it should be pointed out that the negative consequences of asynchronous working hours can be compensated for by individual adjustments. However, in this regard, certain operational and social framework conditions are a prerequisite for the success of these individual efforts.

The purpose of this study is to analyse facilitators and constraints of Portuguese south‐eastern residents face when making decisions for leisure travel participation.

The inquiry anchors on a case study research, supported by a theoretical sampling and data triangulation. The main findings result from an interpretative and comparative analysis of 48 long interviews.

The research findings suggest that the main determinants of leisure traveling decisions of Portuguese south‐eastern residents are motivations, travel companion, time and money. The study finds 35 other factors, most of which classified as structural factors. It also suggests that the decision to take leisure travels derives from the tourist's causal historical wave, and that most of the factors which influence the decision are aggregate ones rather than individual.

The study limitations derive from the geographical and sampling scope of analysis, restricted to 48 Portuguese south‐eastern interviewees; but, it raises some interesting ideas which, if applied to a more extensive sample, may contribute to give insights of the usefulness of the ecological systems theory to explain tourist consumer behavior.

The study is the first to explore the decision for travel leisure participation from an ecological perspective in Portugal.

Following Snir and Zohar workaholism was defined as the individual's steady and considerable allocation of time to work‐related activities and thoughts, which does not derive from external necessities. It was measured as time invested in work, with consideration of the financial needs for this investment. The effects of attitudinal and demographic variables on workaholism were examined through a representative sample of the Israeli labor force (n=942). Using independent‐samples t tests, the following findings were revealed: respondents with a high level of occupational satisfaction worked more hours per week than those with a low level of occupational satisfaction. The same can be stated of self‐employed versus salaried workers. On the other hand, people with a high level of family centrality worked few hours per week than those with a low level of family centrality. The same was revealed with people who defined an activity as work if “you do it at a certain time,” compared with those who did not define it thus. No significant difference in weekly work hours was found between respondents with a high level of leisure centrality and those with a low level of leisure centrality. A one‐way ANOVA revealed a significant effect for religiosity: secular people worked more hours per week than non‐secular people (religious and those with a loose contact with religion).