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Barbership singing is often dismissed by its critics as merely an enjoyable hobby. Though long popular with both its public and participants, it has been relatively neglected in the field of music studies. Robert A. Stebbins demonstrates that barbershop singing is an elaborate and complicated form of serious leisure that provides its participants with distinctive lifestyles. The Barbershop Singer is a unique case study of this significant musical genre, describing the social world of the barbershop singer and exploring its appeal for both male and female singers. Robert Stebbins traces the history of barbershop singing and compares and contrasts the worlds of jazz, classical music, and barbershop as serious leisure pursuits. Stebbins also reveals its costs and rewards, its complex organizational structures, the social marginality felt by its more dedicated participants, and the main problems facing the art today. Although barbershop singing is clearly a circumscribed social world, understanding how it works expands current knowledge of the variant forms of social participation available to citizens of the modern world. The Barbershop Singer will be of interest to sociologists as well as those involved in the world of barbershop.

Throughout this project Stebbins has built on the work of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss and their notion of "grounded theory." First, Stebbins extensively observed the routine activities of amateurs and professionals in each field studied. Then, as he became more familiar with the life-styles of the participants, he conducted lengthy, unstructured, face-to-face interviews with, in most cases, thirty amateur or professional respondents. Each field demanded special methods of observation, analysis, interviewing, probing, and reporting. As much as possible, however, Stebbins asked similar questions of all respondents in all fields so as to permit generalizations across these diverse fields. The result was a "substantive grounded theory" of each field studied. In Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure, Stebbins has developed a "formal grounded theory" of amateurs and professionals based on the research accumulated in all eight substantive fields. By transcending a variety of contexts, he argues, one can gain a more enduring appreciation of the elements that affect peoples' experiences in work and leisure pursuits. A thorough review of the findings across this wide range of activities, including his findings and ideas on hobbyists and career volunteers, enabled Stebbins to derive better definitions of the main concepts of the project, such as "amateur," "the public," and "serious leisure" -- as well as "professional," where he distinguishes between client-centred and public-centred professionals who, while sharing numerous ideal-typical attributes, vary as to the power and control they have over their work in a democratic society. He presents inductive conclusions about careers and the costs and rewards in the eight amateur-professional fields considered. He examines the external world of amateurs and professionals in the light of such issues as family ties, relations among amateurs and professionals and among amateurs and their employers, public images, critics and journalists, community contributions, and the question of marginality for amateurs who are caught between the work world of the professional and the casual leisure world of the majority of the population. He concludes with an exploration of the future role of serious leisure in relation to predictions of greater unemployment and increased leisure time and longevity.

Optimal Leisure Lifestyle: What we need to know
Robert A. Stebbins, Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary, Canada, tells us what an optimal leisure lifestyle consists of, including finding balance in everyday living. Professor Stebbins explains that the OLL is a contextual phenomenon, where a person's diverse work, leisure, and obligatory non-work activities are coordinated along, among others, the dimensions of time, money, and available resources.

AbstractAn association is "a relatively formally structured nonprofit group that depends mainly on volunteer members for participation and activity and that primarily seeks member benefits, even if it may also seek some public benefits" (Smith, Stebbins, & Dover, 2006, p. 23). The arts that give birth to these organizations can be classified as either fine art or entertainment art. Every art association is embedded each in its own art world and its own social world. Members of these association are mostly amateurs or hobbyists in their art.Publications on arts-related amateur, hobbyist, professional, and mixed-member associations are reviewed. Their prime mission is to foster, present, and sometimes chronicle the art that its members prize. Many of these works report on the structure of the associations as well as on the recruitment, artistic development, deployment of artists, dissemination of their art, and retention of their members. Also reviewed is a selection of publications bearing on what could be called "arts consumption clubs," or groups such as book clubs, dance clubs, and jazz clubs established to generate interest in a given art. Some of the publications reviewed center on associational management, use of volunteers, and financial base of the group.

Abstract
Fellowship and friendly social relations during free time, referred to here as leisure-based sociability, is a prominent reward of participation in many groups based on volunteer membership, consisting for this review mainly of amateurs, hobbyists, altruistically oriented volunteers, and the associations of these three. This benefit is analyzed according to two subtypes: sociable nonprofit associations and social clubs. The goal of this issue of the Voluntaristics Review is to examine the leisure component of these two subtypes as framed in the serious leisure perspective (SLP) as set out in Stebbins (2007 [2015], in press; see also www.seriousleisure.net), put nonprofit sociability in organizational context, and then review the empirical literature bearing on it. Studies and theoretic treatises approaching nonprofit groups from another angle (e.g., organizational structure, management issues, funding sources, governmental regulation, type of employment) are not reviewed. Specifically, this review centers on the relevant books, articles, and chapters listed in the SLP website, which itself centers on amateurs, hobbyists, and career volunteers (the serious pursuits), casual leisure, and project-based interests and includes its extensions in the theory and research on the leisure-related aspects of aging and retirement, arts and science administration, library and information science, positive psychology, therapeutic recreation and disability studies, and tourism and event analysis. Compared with the various specialties in leisure studies, the SLP casts by far the broadest theoretical and empirical net in that interdisciplinary field. The research reviewed shows that such talk—generically known as socializing—reflects one or more of fourteen themes. In general, members find sociability in these clubs and associations in and around the core activities they pursue there and on which the two subtypes have formed. The studies reviewed here, taken together, provide considerable validation of the proposition that leisure-based sociability is a prominent reward of participation evident in a multitude of volunteer groups. Leisure-based sociability is itself micro-analytic in scope, but viewed through the lens of the SLP, it can be further understood using meso- and macro levels of analysis.