Introduction to theme issue on leisure meanings and mechanisms in East Asia

Historically, the leisure studies field has focused on western meanings of leisure and only recently has it begun to explore other traditions. Thus, the first paper by Zhao and Wu (2022) in this theme issue is a valuable contribution to our understanding of traditional Chinese leisure through an in-depth study of the etymology of Chinese words relevant to leisure as well as the leisure perspectives of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. While this first paper in this theme issue draws upon etymology, history, philosophy, and religion, the remaining five papers explore current leisure meanings and mechanisms within the East Asia context through social scientific studies, of which one is qualitative and four are quantitative. The qualitative study by Li and Stodolska (2022) examined the meaning and meaning-making mechanism in Chinese conspicuous outbound tourism to understand how tourists constructed and operationalized conspicuous consumption in order to make sense of their subjective travel experience. Tourists personalized their travel experience to signal values consistent with their cultural assets and social identities in order to attain their desired status. In the next paper, also within the Chinese context, Weifei et al. (2022) studied the role and internal mechanism of corporate leisure welfare in alleviating employee burnout and found a significant mitigating effect of leisure welfare upon burnout. Furthermore, employee satisfaction combined with leisure welfare had a significant negative moderating effect on the mechanism of mitigating burnout. Bizen and Ninomiya (2022), based on volunteering as a leisure activity, investigated the mechanisms between motivation, constraints and constraint negotiation that emerge when a person considered whether to volunteer at a full marathon in Japan. Motivation for volunteering stimulated negotiation that led to volunteer activities, but constraints had no effect on negotiation or participation. Shi et al. (2022) analyzed the behavior characteristics and spatiotemporal distribution of multi-day leisure travel in China by group composition. Groups with children or elderly persons preferred driving over rail travel and they tended to travel for longer periods and visit more cities while groups without children or elderly persons chose high-quality tourism resources. In the final paper, based on a survey in Taiwan, Tsaur and Yen (2022) investigated attitudes to leisure time and leisure time use. The Leisure Time Perspective Scale, that was developed to explore perception of time for leisure participation, was found to have seven dimensions: social orientation, persistence, pace preference fit, polychronic orientation, effective organization, time-use meaning, and structured routine.

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