Abstract
The growing number of volunteers in the heritage sector indicates a desire for a leisure experience by pursuing a subject interest with like-minded people. Millar and others have suggested that volunteers are the `ultimate frequent visitors', and as the day visitor market for museums and heritage attractions declines, this paper offers the repositioning of `heritage visiting' from day visits to longer term connections with particular heritage attractions via volunteering. It draws on Stebbins's concept of serious leisure as a way of reading museum volunteering as a leisure practice and argues that museum volunteering is a way of practising heritage as leisure that is `self-generated', with museum volunteers active in constructing their own identities. According to the concept of `serious leisure', museum volunteers become part of a social world inhabited by those knowledgeable about heritage and history. The paper concludes by examining the adequacy of Stebbins's P-A-P system for analysing the power relations between museum professionals and volunteers in the museum social world.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 194-210 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | International Journal or Heritage Studies |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Mar 2006 |
Keywords
- History
- Heritage
- Visitors
- Volunteers
- Serious Leisure
- United Kingdom