Leisure Studies

Foundations

Leisure studies was created in North America in the 1950s and 60s. These were not the first scholars to study leisure, but they were the first to describe themselves collectively as leisure scholars. At that time, leisure scholars paid little if any attention to commercial leisure and consumer cultures. Their leisure was serviced by public and voluntary sector providers. This is no longer the case (leisure studies today has wider horizons), but the initially limited perspective of leisure studies helps to explain why the study of consumption and consumer cultures developed as separate enterprises.

It would be an oversimplification to say that the birth ...