Since 1930 the sociology of leisure in North America and Europe has not developed in a linear or cumulative fashion. Rather, research agendas, the accepted premises for research and theory, and the ”common wisdom” of the field have been revised and challenged. Change did not come in one great overturning, but in a sequence of revisions. A dialectical model seems to be most appropriate to follow the sequence. Through the 1950s, there was an accepted consensus as to both issues and premises. This common wisdom was eroded as well as challenged by new research. The ”revised consensus” expanded agendas for both research and theory without completely overturning earlier developments.
Since 1985, a more critical antithesis with multiple sources has emerged to subject the second consensus to a more thoroughgoing revision. The sources of this antithesis have included conflict or neo-Marxist theory, gender-focused critiques, non-Western perspectives, and various poststructural analytical approaches. Critiques are associated with concepts such as hegemony and power, commodification, cultural and social fragmentation, gender and patriarchical structures, imperialism, world views, symbol systems, ideologies, and existential action. Now a central question concerns the kind of synthesis that will be developed in the ongoing process.
The dialectical sequence provides a dynamic framework for a review of central areas in the study of leisure. Although many issues and lines of research can be identified, four have consistently been most salient. In a highly abbreviated form, we will summarize the dialectics of theory and research in relation to (1) work and time, (2) family and community, (3) aging and the life course, and (4) the nature of leisure.
WORK AND TIME
Leisure and Work Domains. When sociologists turned their attention to leisure in the 1960s, three perspectives were adopted. The first, based on earlier community studies, approached leisure as a dimension of the social organization of the community (Lundberg, Komarovsky, and Mclnerney 1934; Dumazedier 1967). The second, exemplified by David Riesman and initiated at the University of Chicago, viewed leisure as social action that created its own worlds of meaning. The third, the one that came to shape domain assumption and research agendas, emerged from the sociology of work. Its fundamental premise was that economic institutions are central to the society and economic roles the primary determinants of other roles. Especially leisure was assumed to be secondary and derivative. As a consequence, various models of determination by work were proposed that modeled leisure as similar to work (”spillover” or identity), contrasting (compensation), or separate (Wilensky 1960; Parker 1971). The bias, however, was clearly toward some kind of determination rather than segmentation.
As research proceeded, the ”long arm of the job” was found to be both shorter and less powerful than expected as only limited, modest, and sometimes inconsistent relationships were found between leisure styles and occupational level and type (Wilson 1980). In a fuller perspective, on the other hand, it was evident that economic roles are determinative of the social context of adult lives— schedules, control of resources, autonomy, and other basic conditions (Blauner 1964). Leisure is part of the reward structure of a social system with differential access to resources based largely on socioeconomic position.
A second revision of the common wisdom concerned time available for leisure. The long-term reduction in the average workweek from as high as eighty hours in the early days of the industrial revolution to about forty hours in the post-World War II period along with the five-day workweek and paid vacations for many workers had led to an unquestioned assurance that more and more leisure time would be the product of increased economic productivity. In the 1970s, however, the declining rate of the decrease moving toward stability produced a revised consensus suggesting segmented time scarcity and a variety of social timetables. Most recently, analysis of labor statistics indicates that workers in high-pressure occupations and some services may have average workweeks much longer than forty hours (Schor 1991) even though time-diary research identifies a small overall increase in time for leisure (Robinson and Godbey 1997). Considerable attention has also been given to those impacted by the time scarcities of those, mostly women, with multiple work, household, and caregiving roles.
A next challenge to the early common wisdom was a recognition of leisure as a dimension of life with its own meaning and integrity. Leisure is more than leftover and derivative. It has its own place in the rhythm and flow of life. First, leisure came to be defined more as activity than as empty time. Among the themes emerging were relative freedom of choice, distinction from the obligations of other roles, and the variety of meanings and aims that might be sought in such activity. Just as important as the revised definition, however, was the identification of leisure as something more than a derivation of work. Social life could not be divided into a work versus leisure dichotomy, but consisted of multiple sets of intersecting roles. Leisure, although it has a particular relationship with the bonding of family and other immediate communities (Cheek and Burch 1976), had multiple contexts, connections, and meanings (Kelly 1981).
The Challenge of Critical Theory. The domain assumptions of functional sociology have been challenged by critical analyses with roots in neo-Marxist cultural studies (Clarke and Critcher 1986; Rojek 1985), historical study that focuses on power and the struggles of the working class, and social construction approaches that take into account the interpretive symbolic activity of social actors (Rojek 1995).
The central theme of the critical challenge is social control by ruling elites. Leisure is seen as a critical element in the hegemony of ruling elites in a capitalist society. In order to assure compliance in the routinized ”Fordist” workplace, the political arena, and the marketplace, leisure has emerged as central to the capitalist reward and control system. Leisure is, from this critical perspective, a market-mediated instrument that binds workers to the production process and to roles that support the reproduction of the capital-dominated social system. Leisure is defined as a commodity that must be earned and is indissolubly connected to what can be purchased and possessed.
A number of themes are gathered in this critique. The power to enforce compliance is masked behind an ideology in which ”freedom” comes to be defined as purchasing power in the marketplace of leisure. Such ”commodity fetishism” (Marx 1970) of attachment to things defines life and leisure in terms of possessions. Leisure, then, becomes ”commodified” as the consumption of marketed goods and services, entertainment in contrast with commitment to involving, challenging, and developmental activity (Kelly and Freysinger 1999). Social status is symbolized by leisure display (Veblen 1899). Absorption in mass media, especially low-cost and easy-access television (Robinson and Godbey 1997), legitimates consumption-oriented values and worldviews (Habermas 1975). What appear to be varying styles of leisure reflect the profoundly different conditions of work, family, and leisure assigned by class, gender, and race (Clarke and Critcher 1986).
A Prospective Synthesis. The fundamental presupposition of any sociology of leisure is that leisure is a thoroughly social phenomenon. It is a part of the culture and a product of the social system. Leisure is not separate and secondary, but embedded in the institutional structures, social times, and power allocations of the society. In a complex social system, both individual self-determination and institutional control differ by economic and social position. Leisure is not segmented, but woven into the system. Out of the current dialectic between the consensus and the critique, a number of issues call for attention.
The first agenda is to move beyond ideologies to examine the lived conditions of poor, excluded, and disinherited children, women, and men. Their struggles for life in the present, and their struggles for a future, are reflected in what they do to express themselves, create community, fill ordinary hours and days, and seek new possibilities.
The second issue is to identify the ways in which economic roles provide contexts, resources, limitations, and orientations for the rest of life— family and community as well as leisure. In a ”post-Fordist” global economy with a loss of linear work careers and fragmented cultural schemes, the question is not the simple determination of life and leisure by work, but how determinative definitions of both the self and society are learned in a power-differentiated social context.
The third issue is meanings. Purchasing is not necessarily commodification and owning is not fetishism. What are the commitments, symbols, meanings, self-definitions, and worldviews that are the cognitive context of decisions and actions? What are the meanings and outcomes of leisure-related spending, media use, packaged entertainment and travel, and images of pleasure? Possession may be a way of life or an instrument of activity. Does leisure reflect a culture of possession? Or is there a deep paradox between alienation and creation that permeates the entire society?
The fourth issue revolves around time. It is necessary to discard misleading models about average workweeks and the ”more or less leisure” argument. Rather, what are the actual patterns and varieties of time structure and allocation? How do these patterns and possibilities vary by economic role, gender, life course, family conditions, ethnicity and race, location, and other placement factors? Time remains a basic resource for leisure action, one that not only varies widely but is one index of the possibility of self-determination.
FAMILY AND COMMUNITY
Leisure as a Context for Family Bonding. If leisure is not just activity determined by and complementary to work, then is there some other critical relationship to the social system? The evident connection is to family and other immediate communities (Roberts 1970). Most leisure is in or around the home. The most common leisure companions are family and other close friends and intimates.
The basis of the first common wisdom was the series of community studies beginning in the 1930s (Lundberg, Komarovsky, and Mclnerny 1934; Lynd and Lynd 1956). Leisure was found to be a web of ordinary activity, mostly social interaction and tied to the institutions of the community from the family outward to status-based organizations. From this perspective, the later work of Cheek and Burch (1976) argued that the primary function of leisure is to provide a context for social bonding, especially that of family and ethnic community.
An anomaly in family leisure began a revision to the first consensus. The family context was reaffirmed and the centrality of the family to leisure supported (Kelly 1983). Despite the traditional focus on freedom as the primary defining theme of leisure, activity with major components of obligation was found to be most important to most adults. The major theme was that leisure was closely tied to central roles, not separate from them.
Leisure, then, is bound to both the roles and the developmental requirements of life (Rapoport and Rapoport 1976). In fact, from this perspective it may be quite central to life, not residual or secondary at all. It is a primary setting for social bonding and expression as well as for human development. The implied issue, on the other hand, is the consequences for the nature of freedom and choice in leisure. No activity embedded in primary role relationships can ever be free of accompanying obligations and responsibilities (Kelly 1987a, chap. 6). Leisure might be more central but is also less pure and simple.
Power and Self-determination in Leisure Roles. First, there is the challenge posed by changing family patterns now that an unbroken marriage and family through the life course has become a minority probability. The most radical response and antithesis, however, begins with the suggestion that leisure, like other areas of life, has roles. That is, the expectations and power differentials that characterize family, work, and community roles are found in leisure as well. Currently the most salient source of this challenging antithesis is the focus on gender, especially from a feminist perspective (Henderson et al. 1996).
The critique calls for sociologists to go beneath the leisure rhetoric of freedom and self-expression to the realities of lives with limited power of self-determination. From this perspective, the history of the culture is characterized by male domination of women in profound and multifaceted ways that permeate every aspect of life (Deem 1986). Women have been repressed in where they are permitted to go and what they are allowed to do in leisure. Men have had the power to sexualize social contexts to objectify women and their bodies. Physical power and even violence have rendered many leisure times and places unsafe for women.
Even in the home, women’s leisure is fundamentally different from that of men. It is usually women who are expected to do the work that makes ”family leisure” possible. It is the ”hidden work” of women that offers relative freedom to much of the leisure of men and children. Women both enable men’s leisure and are leisure for men.
What, then, is the meaning of freedom and self-determination for any subordinate population segment? What about the poor, the racially and ethnically excluded, those cut off from opportunity in abandoned urban areas, and even many of the old? Again, many potential leisure venues in the inner city are unsafe, especially for children and the old. The resources of time, money, access, and autonomy are evidently unevenly distributed in any society.
In this antithesis, the connections of leisure to nonwork roles and resources, especially family and community, and the positive evaluation of how leisure contributes to development through the life course are brought up against a critical model of society. Leisure may indeed be indissolubly tied to family and community, but in ways that reflect social divisions and dominations as well as expressive action.
Leisure’s Immediate Context: a New Agenda. Leisure takes place in its small worlds, but also in the larger scale of the society. Further, its actualization is in the midst of real life. Research may be based on premises of systemic integration and the benefits of leisure as well as challenged by critiques reflecting ideologies of subjugation and alienation. A new agenda for research, however informed, should be directed toward the actual lived conditions of decisions and actions, relationships and roles. In such an agenda related to community and family, several themes are highlighted by critiques of the common wisdom:
First, the realities of leisure as a struggle for action and self-determination in the midst of acute differences in power and access to resources will receive more attention. Especially gender, race, and poverty will reconstitute research strategies and frames past the easy assumptions that leisure is equally free and beneficial for all. The realities of family instability and crisis as well as of community divisions and conflicts will be taken into account as the immediate communities of leisure are reformulated.
Second, underlying the new agenda is the theme of differential power, not only power to command resources but to determine the course of one’s life and what is required of others. In the action of leisure, there is both a relative openness for action and modes of repression that stimulate submission and resistence.
Third, the pervasiveness of sexuality, gender roles, and sexual orientation throughout life in society will gain greater prominence in leisure sociology. One set of issues revolves around sexuality and related emotions to leisure. Simple models of explanation based solely on rational action will be recognized as inadequate. Also, gender will be seen as negotiated identity and power of self-determination rather than a simple dichotomized category.
Fourth, the danger of leisure’s becoming increasingly privatized, bound only to immediate communities and the small worlds of personal life construction, is a perspective that runs counter to the functional view of leisure as a context for social bonding. There may be a negative side to a focus on the family basis of leisure activity and meanings. As technologies increasingly make the home a center of varied entertainment, leisure could become more and more cut off from larger communities.
In general, leisure is surely not peripheral to the central concerns and relationships of life. That, however, does not lead simply to bonding without domination, to development without alienation, or to intimacy without conflict.
AGING AND THE LIFE COURSE
Continuity and Change in the Life Course. The earliest common wisdom was simply that age indexed many kinds of leisure engagement. In a simple model, age was even referred to as a cause of decreased rates of participation. It was assumed that something decremental happened to people as they aged. The rates of decline varied according to activity: rapid for sports, especially team sports; more gradual for travel and community involvement. Attention given to those in their later years, generally their sixties and seventies but sometimes their fifties as well, suggested that such ”disengagement” might even be functional. Perhaps older people needed to consolidate their activity and recognize their limitations.
The revised common wisdom began by recasting age as an index of multiple related changes rather than an independent variable. Further, the revised framework became the life course rather than linear age (Neugarten 1968). A number of themes emerged:
First, in the Kansas City study of adult life, normative disengagement was replaced with activity (Havighurst 1961). Instead of making a necessary or desirable withdrawal from activity, older people were found to revise their patterns and commitments in ways that fit their later life roles and opportunities. Leisure was conceptualized as multidimensional in meaning as well as in forms. More recently, this approach has led to a discovery of the ”active old,” those before and in retirement who adopt lifestyles of engagement in a variety of leisure activities and relationships. Further, such engagement has been consistently found to be a major factor in life satisfaction (Cutler and Hen-dricks 1990).
Second, the model of inevitable decrement was challenged by research that failed to measure high correlations between age and functional ability. Rather, a model of aging that stressed continuity rather than loss and change was applied to leisure as well as other aspects of life (Atchley 1989). A return to earlier socialization studies provided a base for a revised model that identified lines of commitment rather than age-graded discontinuity. Especially the ”core” of daily accessible activity and interaction remains central to time allocation through the life course (Kelly 1983).
Third, the life course also provided a perspective in which intersecting work, leisure, and family roles and opportunities were related to developmental changes (Rapoport and Rapoport 1976). Leisure is not a list of activities dwindling with age, but a social environment in which many critical issues of life may be worked out. Developing sexual identity for teens, expressing intimacy for those exploring and consolidating family commitments, reconstituting social contexts after midlife disruptions, and ensuring social integration in later years are all central requirements of the life course that are developed in leisure. Not only interests, but also significant identities are often found in leisure as well as in family and work (Gordon, Gaitz, and Scott 1976).
In the revised consensus, then, the life course with its interwoven work, family, and community roles was accepted as a valuable framework for analyzing both the continuities and the changes of leisure. Leisure was seen as tied not only to role sequences but also to developmental preoccupations. The life course was found to incorporate revisions and reorientations rather than being simply an inevitable downhill slide measured by participation rates in selected recreation pursuits.
An Integrated View of Life . . . and Leisure.
The regular and predictable transitions of the life-course model, however, seem to gloss over many of the realities of contemporary life. A majority of adults in their middle or later years have experienced at least one disrupting trauma in health, work, or the family that has required a fundamental reconstituting of roles and orientations (Kelly 1987b). Further, conditions are not the same for all persons in a social system. Race, gender, class, and ethnicity designate different life chances.
In this perspective of continuity and change in a metaphor of life as journey, a number of issues call for attention. First, salient differences in life conditions are more than variations in starting points for the journey. Rather, deprivation and denial are cumulative in ways that affect every dimension of life. Second, individuals come to define themselves in the actual circumstances of life, not in an abstracted concept. Identities, the concepts of the self that are central to what we believe is possible and probable in our lives, are developed in the realities of the life course. Third, the structures of the society, including access to institutional power, provide forceful contexts of opportunity and denial that shape both direction and resources for the journey.
In this revised life-course approach, leisure remains as a significant dimension, tied to family, work, education, community, and other elements of life. Changes in one may affect all the others. Leisure, then, is distinct from the product orientation of work and the intimate bonding of the family, and yet is connected to both.
Leisure and the Life Course: New Agendas.
From the perspective of the life course, research focusing on leisure now requires several revised issues. Among the most significant are:
First, leisure is woven through the life course. It is existential in a developmental sense. That is, leisure is action that involves becoming, action in which the actor becomes something more than before. For example, leisure is central to changing early socialization in the increased activity scheduling, electronic entertainment and interaction, and professional supervision of upper- and middle-class children. It is the main context for exploring sexuality and romance for teens and young adults.
Second, the developmental orientation of some leisure is highlighted by this perspective that recognizes lines of action as well as singular events and episodes. What has been termed ”serious leisure” by Robert Stebbins (1979) is activity in which there is considerable personal investment in skills and often in equipment and organization. Such investment places serious leisure in a central position in identity formation and expression. Leisure identities may provide continuity through the transitions and traumas of the life course. Yet, how women and men define themselves and take action toward redefinition has been a subject of speculation more than research.
Third, what is the place of leisure in the schema of life investments and commitments? Further, how do those investments differ according to the life conditions of men and women as they make their way through the shifting expectations and possibilities of the life course? Xavier Gallier (1988) presents a model of the life course that emphasizes disruptions rather than linear progress. In an irregular life journey, work, family, and leisure may rise and fall both in salience and in the ”chunks” of time they are allocated. He proposes that education, production, and leisure become themes woven through life rather than discrete sequential periods.
THE NATURE OF LEISURE
As already suggested, perspectives on the nature of leisure have changed in the modern period of scholarly attention from the 1930s to now. The change is not self-contained, but reflects shifts in theoretical paradigms as well as drawing from other disciplines, especially social psychology.
Leisure as Free Time and Meaning. Despite repeated references to Greek roots and especially Aristotle, the first accepted operational definition of leisure was that of time. Leisure did not require that all other role obligations be completed, but that the use of the time be more by choice than by requirement. How choice was to be measured was seldom addressed. Concurrently, international ”time-budget” research quantified leisure as one type of activity that could be identified by its form (Szalai 1974). Leisure was assumed to be clearly distinguished from work, required maintenance, and family responsibilities.
The first consensus, although persisting in many research designs, did not endure long without amendment. To begin with, it was obvious that any activity might be required, an extension of work or other roles. Further, even such simple terms as ”choice” and ”discretionary” implied that the actor’s definition of the situation might be crucial. In the 1970s, the field claimed more attention from psychologists, who focused on attitudes rather than activities. Leisure was said to be defined by attitudes or a ”state of mind” that included elements such as perceived freedom, intrinsic motivation, and a concentration on the experience rather than external ends (Neulinger 1974). Attention was directed toward meanings, but wholly in the actor rather than in definitions of the social context. Such psychological approaches were one salient influence on sociologists, who added at least three dimensions to the earlier time- and activity-known to common definitions.
First, in the 1950s, the Kansas City research (Havighurst 1961) along with the community studies tied leisure to social roles. The satisfactions anticipated in an activity involved meanings and relationships brought to the action context as well as what occurred in the time frame.
Second, the immediate experience might be the critical focus for leisure, but it occurs in particular environments that involve social learning, acquired skills and orientations (Csikszentmihalvi 1981), and interaction with components imported from other role relationships (Cheek and Burch 1976). Freedom is perceived, or not, in actual circumstances.
Third, although the dimension of freedom recurs in the literature, studies of experiences and activity engagements found that leisure seldom is monodimensional. The meanings, outcomes, motivations, and experiences themselves are multifaceted (Havighurst 1961; Kelly 1981).
Leisure, then, in the revised approaches is a more complex phenomenon than either the earlier sociologists or the psychologists proposed. In fact, the consensus broke down under the weight of multiple approaches that ranged from individualistic psychology to functional sociology, from presumably self-evident quantities of time to interpretive self-definitions and lines of action, and from discrete self-presentations (Goffman 1967) to actions embedded in life-course role sequences (Rapoport and Rapoport 1976).
Revolt against the Abstract. Antithetical themes came from several directions.
First, which is fundamental to accounting for life in society, the interpretive acts of the individual or the social context in which the action takes place (Giddens 1979)? Further, since the forms and symbols by which action is directed are learned and reinforced in the society, can action be prior to the context? The nature of leisure, then, is neither an acontextual nor a determined social role. Rather, it is actualized in processual action. And this process has continuities that extend beyond the immediate to personal development and the creation of significant communities (Kelly 1981).
Second, a number of critical analysts have raised questions about the positive cast usually given to leisure. Such positive approaches seem to presuppose resources, options, perspectives, and self-determination that are in fact unequally distributed in societies (Clarke and Critcher 1986). Do the unemployed and the poor have enough resources for discretion and choice to be meaningful concepts? Do histories of subjugation and life-defining limits for women in male-dominated societies make assumptions of self-determining action a sham? Such opportunity differences are most substantive in a market system of buying, renting, or otherwise acquiring resources. The real contexts of leisure are not voids of time and space, but are extensions of the structures of the society and ideologies of the culture. There is clearly an ”other side” to leisure that includes many kinds of activity with destructive potential such as gambling, substance use, and sexual exploitation. There are also negative elements in other activities such as physical violence and racial stereotyping in sport, sexual violence in socializing, and even turning driving into a contest endangering others. All social forms of exploitation and exclusion are found in leisure (Rojek 1995; Kelly and Freysinger 1999).
Third, a consequence of this distorted and constricted context of leisure is alienation. Leisure is not entirely free, creative, authentic, and community-building activity. It may also be, perhaps at the same time, stultifying and alienating. It may separate rather than unite, narrow rather than expand, and entrap rather than free. It may, in short, be negative as well as positive. It is not a rarified ideal or a perfect experience. It is real life, often struggle and conflict as well as development and expression.
The dialectic between expression and oppression that characterizes the rest of life in society is the reality of leisure as well. Being role-based in a stratified society means being limited, directed, and excluded. The contexts of any experience, however free and exhilarating, are the real culture and social system. The multiple meanings of leisure include separation as well as community, determination as well as creation, and routine as well as expression. The former simplicity of leisure as essentially a ”good thing” becomes alloyed by situating it in the real society with all its forces, pressures, and conflicts.
Leisure as a Dimension of Life. The question, then, is what does such extension and critique do to any conceptualization of the nature of leisure? Leisure encompasses both the existential and the social. It has myriad forms, locales, social settings, and outcomes. Leisure is neither separated from social roles nor wholly determined by them. Leisure has developed amid conflict as well as social development, in division as well as integration, with control as well as freedom. It may involve acquiescence as well as resistance, alienation as well as authenticity, and preoccupation with self as well as commitment to community. Leisure, then, is multidimensional and cannot be characterized by any single or simple element.
A further issue is whether leisure is really a domain of life at all. Is leisure clearly distinguished from work, family, community, church, and school: or is it a dimension of action and interaction within them all? In the Preparation period, leisure is a social space for the exploration and development of sexual identities as well as working out the issues of peer identification and independence from parents and the past. It also stresses the theme of expression that is central to developing a sense of selfhood, of personal identity among emerging social roles. In the Establishment period, leisure adds the dimension of bonding to intimate others, especially in the formation and consolidation of the family. In the Third Age, leisure has meanings tied to both integration with significant other persons and maintenance of a sense of ability when some work and community roles are lost (Kelly 1987b). Leisure, then, might be conceptualized as being woven into the intersecting role sequences of the life course rather than being a segregated realm of activity. Productivity is not limited to work, nor bonding to the family, nor learning and development to education, nor expression to leisure. Production, bonding and community, learning and development, and relative freedom and self-authenticating experience may all be found in any domain of life.
Yet there must also be distinguishing elements of leisure or it disappears into the ongoing round of life. Further, those elements should be significant in relation to central issues of life such as production and work, love and community, sexuality and gender, learning and development, emotion and involvement. Leisure should connect with the lived conditions of ordinary life rather than being an esoteric and precious idea to be actualized only in rare and elite conditions.
Leisure, then, may be more a dimension than a domain, more a theme than an identifiable realm (Kelly 1987a). That dimension is characterized by three elements: First, it is action in the inclusive sense of doing something, of being an intentioned and deliberate act. Such action is existential in producing an outcome with meaning to the actor. Second, this action is focused on the experience more than on the result. It is done primarily because of what occurs in the defined time and space. Third, leisure as a dimension of life is characterized by freedom more than by necessity. It is not required by any role, coercive power, or repressive ideology. Leisure is not detached from its social and cultural contexts, but is a dimension of relatively self-determined action within such contexts. Its meaning is not in its products as much as in the experience, not in its forms as much as in its expression.
The Sociology of Leisure in the Future. Leisure sociology, then, is not a closed book or a finalized product. Rather, central issues are currently being raised that promise to reform the field in its premises as well as conclusions. No common wisdom will go unchallenged, no consensus remain unchanged, and no theoretical formulation be above conflict. Yet, every challenge, every conflict, and every developing synthesis provides a new basis for at least one conclusion: Leisure is a significant dimension of life that calls for both disciplined and innovative attention. From this perspective, a number of issues are likely to receive greater attention in the new century (Kelly and Freysinger 1999):
The first issue is the ascendancy of the market sector as the primary leisure resource provider, with an estimated 97 percent of total spending. In a global economy, leisure including tourism is attracting more investment capital with a significant bias toward upscale markets, big-ticket toys, sport as business and spectacle, and entertainment with multiple entrance fees. This bias combined with media images of a commodified ”good life” may underlie trends away from skill-based physical activity and ”serious” leisure with high time costs. Is there a fundamental conflict between developmental and consumptive leisure?
The second issue is the emergence of a global culture. The dominant direction of the dispersal is currently from the West through the mass media. However, as communication links and business and cultural contacts become more common, both the concepts and the practices of leisure in the West will become more affected by other cultures.
Third, a focus on gender is leading away from male-oriented ”reasoned action” modes of leisure decisions and toward the significance of emotions and especially sexuality. Since all social interaction is gendered and most has deep dimensions of sexuality, leisure will be understood more as a multidimensional process rather than a singular choice. Leisure, then, is both contextual and contested.
Fourth, leisure becomes more a part of ”ordinary life” rather than segregated activities with special designations. In a more fragmented social milieu, elements of leisure may be located in almost any social context. Further, if work itself loses familiar continuities, then leisure may become more central to identities and persistent lines of meaning as individuals seek to make sense of their lives.
Fifth, there will likely be concerns over many negative aspects of leisure. Will easy entertainment lessen personal investments in challenging leisure? Will available and affordable electronics damage the social fabric of associations and intimate relationships? Will leisure increasingly become privatized at the cost of community exploitative of the poor and powerless? Will leisure become spectacular rather than engaging, violent rather than sharing, destructive of natural environments, and divisive rather than integrating?
The basic questions, of course, are those of the kind of society that is emerging and the kind of people who will live in it. It is clear, whatever is ahead, that leisure will be a significant dimension in a variety of forms and contexts.
