Producing the crisis : the state of leisure studies

This article examines the common perception that Leisure Studies is in crisis. It reviews some recent millennial evaluations of the state of Leisure Studies and prescriptions for its development. The author sceptically assesses the prevailing crisis diagnoses and its prescribed causes and 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, and 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.