Review: Gelber, S. (1983). Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball

Flickr:  Hastings Historical Society:  Uniontown Baseball Team ca. 1900

Gelber, S. (1983). Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball. Journal of Social History, 16(4), pp.3-22.

Gelber, an historian at University of Santa Clara, argues for a congruence theory of leisure, that hobbies are embedded in, informed by, and mirror the larger social, economic, and political realities (in contrast to compensatory theories, which see leisure as constructed to provide for deficiencies in the larger reality).  Baseball was a product of 19th century industrialization and reflected and reinforced the values of that reality.  It was a game that reflected the transitional nature of a society whose economy demanded specialized labor concentrated in factories, in which work was highly regulated, and depended on the orchestrated effort of a team of workers.

“By concentrating less on the role of nature in baseball and more on the nature of the roles of its players, a very different pattern emerges. The game's attraction lay in its congruence with everyday experience. It was popular because it was similar to, not because it was different from, day to day life. Baseball provided the male business worker with a leisure analog to his job. In the game he experienced social relationships and psychological demands similar to those he knew at work. Indeed, he was working at playing, and by doing so was minimizing dissonance between those two aspects of life. Baseball brought psychological harmony. It appeared to be different from work because it was outdoor play, but underneath it was the same.”  

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