Research on Serious Leisure & Information in the Hobby of Cooking

In library and information studies (LIS) we seek to understand the nature, organization, and use of information in life. Scholarship to this end has been unevenly distributed. Research has predominantly focused on academic or professional contexts, which are a narrow slice of the human experience. There are a minority of studies of information phenomena within everyday situations, and only a few about the universally cherished realm of leisure. As a result, theoretical insights about the engagement with information are unduly narrow and rational in character, and information provision to everyday life and leisure settings may fall short of potential. To broaden understanding and to better serve leisure audiences, I am exploring information phenomena in the context of serious leisure (Stebbins, 2001).

Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of, "...an activity that participants find so substantial and interesting that, in the typical case, they launch themselves on a leisure career centered on acquiring and expressing its special skills, knowledge, and experience" (Stebbins, 1992, p. 3; see the website ). Three main forms of serious leisure are amateurism, volunteering, and hobbies. To quickly grasp the essence of serious leisure it helps to reflect upon one's own favorite non-work activities that have been cultivated over a lifetime and which generate feelings of pleasure, challenge, and accomplishment. Since serious leisure takes the form of a career that involves learning, engagement with information is at its heart. While many social and psychological features of serious leisure have been explicated, there has been no sustained attention to information phenomena therein. My theoretical and methodological work explores the information dimension of serious leisure (Hartel, 2003, 2005) and my dissertation research entails description and analysis of information in one variety: the hobby of gourmet cooking.

The hobby of gourmet cooking is the enduring, skillful preparation of high quality or exotic foods during free time and for pleasure (adapted from Stebbins, 2003). It is one of the most popular pastimes in the U.S. and has several million participants. The hobby is a serious leisure social world, a collective that shares practices, culture, a discourse, and tools (Unruh, 1979).There are features to the hobby of cooking that make it especially fascinating to library and information studies. Information on cooking is abundant, exists in all media channels, and stimulates every sense. There are vivid genres such as the recipe, menu, and cookbook. In the homes of those who cook, culinary information tends to accumulates over the years or even generations into collections that pose unique classification, retrieval, and use challenges. My dissertation takes a scientific ethnographic approach to answer the question: What are the information activities and information resources in the hobby of gourmet cooking and how are they situated in a home environment?