Producing the Crisis: The State of Leisure Studies

Abstract

This article examines the common perception that the field of leisure studies is in a state of crisis. It reviews some recent millennial evaluations of the state of leisure studies and prescriptions for its development. It sceptically assesses the prevailing diagnoses of crisis and its causes and prescribed cures, especially those that seek to fix the object of leisure studies. It is argued that leisure studies practitioners have often not taken sufficient account of the wider historical and social conditions that produced the field in the first place, or of the institutional forces that, in changing, have re-fashioned leisure studies and problematised the work-leisure dialectic out of which the field of study was formed. The article concludes with a call for those who identify with leisure studies to be more self-reflexive about the conditions of their practice and to be less restrictive in their conception of what constitutes leisure, and leisure studies.