Leisure Design: A Critical Review

Research on crafting in the leisure domain, an extension of job crafting literature, has increased rapidly amidst and after the COVID-19 pandemic driven by the expansion of remote and hybrid work practices that leave more time and freedom for workers to structure their work and engage in leisure activities. Similar to job crafting, which refers to adjusting the work activities to meet individual needs and desires, leisure crafting (Berg et al., 2010; Petrou & Bakker, 2016), or off-job crafting (van Bloom et al., 2020), refers to shaping such activities at leisure. These conceptualizations define crafting in the leisure domain either as fulfilling central human psychological needs (de Bloom et al., 2020; Petrou & Bakker, 2016), or shaping leisure resources and demands (Tsaur et al., 2023). For purposes of this review, we will refer to these activities uniformly as leisure design. Because the boundaries between work and non-work domains as well as how people allocate time across these domains are socially constructed (Ashforth et al., 2000; Feldman et al., 2020), this emerging research on leisure design reflects the social meanings on how workers should spend their time outside of their work. We conducted an integrative critical review of 43 studies on crafting in the leisure domain published since 2010 to provide a synthesis of this emerging literature and reflect on how it reflects our understanding of and approach to workers' time use outside of work. Based on this review, we identify four themes, which represent the social meanings of leisure design that are reproduced in research. These themes portray leisure design as: 1) finding meaning when there is none at work, 2) recovering from work, 3) improving well-being, and 4) optimizing work performance. Our findings reveal two main tendencies in leisure design research. First, leisure design research largely understands the function of leisure as compensating for work and/or benefitting work. Second, this research reflects the social norms concerning leisure time use, and specifically the worker's responsibility to engage in leisure activities that benefit productivity and performance at work. Although these approaches are presented as a ‘win-win' situation that enable workers to enjoy leisure while amassing benefits for work, they also beg the question of whether research is normalizing the encroachment of work onto the private live of the workers. Propositions for future research will be discussed.