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 of leisure studies was a straightforward response to the growth of leisure and recognition of its importance in people's lives. There were additional influences that gave North American leisure studies a specifically North American character. The 1950s and 1960s were years of steady expansion in higher education in the United States. By the end of the 1960s, around half of all young Americans were graduating high school and enrolling in college. This expansion led to a graduatization (a more recently coined term) of occupations for which a college degree was not formerly required. These occupations included professional and management jobs in the public parks and recreation services. By World War II, the United States already had public recreation services, which included urban and national parks. Parks were the jewels in public leisure provisions. University departments with parks and recreation and similar titles were created to supply these leisure services with qualified labor, and the subject taught in these departments was called leisure studies. The departments gave parks a privileged position in their teaching and research portfolios, but students were also prepared for work in sports, with the disabled, the elderly, at-risk youth, and in other specialist leisure fields.

The United States' leisure scholars have never created a scholarly association. They have always aligned with and met during conferences of the National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA), which is primarily an association of parks professionals. There is a College of Leisure Sciences, a group of leading leisure scholars, currently with around one hundred members, which also holds its meetings at NRPA conferences. The NRPA launched North America's first academic leisure journal, the Journal of Leisure Research, in 1969. In 1978, this was joined by a second journal, Leisure Sciences. Canada's leisure scholars organized the first of what became a triennial series of congresses in 1975 and in 1983 created the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies (CALS). These congresses have become the main primarily scholarly forum for leisure researchers and teachers from all over North America.

During the 1970s, leisure studies spread to Britain. The North American subject was a model, and the existing leisure studies literature was largely American in origin. However, the British version of leisure studies was not an exact replica. The circumstances in which leisure studies was established in U.K. higher education were broadly similar to the favorable conditions in America in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, U.K. higher education was expanding, especially in polytechnics, which at that time paralleled universities in a binary higher education system. A feature of the polytechnics was supposed to be their greater responsiveness to the economy's labor requirements. By the 1970s, the United Kingdom had a set of national agencies with responsibilities for the arts, the countryside, sports, and tourism, plus the older British Broadcasting Corporation. Then, during the 1970s, as part of a broader rationalization (we would now say modernization) of local government, formerly separate local authority departments of baths, parks, libraries, playing fields, and so on were merged in departments, which usually had leisure or recreation in their titles. Thus, national agencies and local government were then creating leisure services jobs to which graduates from leisure studies departments could be recruited.

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