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Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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European leisure studies at the crossroads? A history of leisure research in Europe

Hans Mommaas
a a

Department of Leisure Studies, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, Tilburg, 5000 LE, the Netherlands E-mail: Published online: 13 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Hans Mommaas (1997) European leisure studies at the crossroads? A history of leisure research in Europe, Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19:4, 241-254, DOI: 10.1080/01490409709512253 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01490409709512253

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European Leisure Studies at the Crossroads? A History of Leisure Research in Europe

HANS MOMMAAS
Department of Leisure Studies Tilburg University Tilburg, the Netherlands
In this contribution, a generalized picture is given of the history of leisure research in Europe. It is based on a comparative study of the history of leisure research in six European countries: Spain, Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (Mommaas, Van der Poel, Bramham, & Henry, 1996a). Across Europe, leisure research has been dominated by sociological perspectives and concerns. Sociology has very much acted as a mediator of collective, public concerns, dealing with issues of enlightenment/civilization and cultural participation/welfare. However, from the late 1970s onward, the collective, educational project of free time has lost much of its former significance. On one side, there is now much more academic attention to issues of time, consumption, play, and pleasure. However, at the same time, these issues have become disconnected from former collective concerns of leisure and/or free time. This leads to two interrelated questions: Are leisure studies still in need of a unifying project of leisure? and If so, what should such a project look like? Keywords Europe, history, sociology of leisure

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The field of leisure research in Europe today is faced with a somewhat paradoxical situation. On one hand, there is a growing amount of research on issues of time and consumption, sports participation and media involvement, shopping and tourism, and culture and everyday life. The research expresses an increasing level of sophistication and results in an ever-expanding number of publications. On the other hand, however, there is a feeling of loss, or even of crisis. Somewhere amid the turmoil of attention to people's pastime activities, the notion of leisure seems to have become sidetracked or simply left behind. Adorned with an independent significance, a "surplus meaning," transcending its constituent parts, leisure once legitimated the construction of an independent field of research. That significance seems to have lost some of its institutional, normative, and/or cognitive strength. Of importance is that, from the very beginning, leisure research in Europe was a topicoriented field of research dominated by sociological perspectives but strongly leaning toward public policy interests. One might put this even more strongly: All along its modern history, collective projects have been decisive in delivering the economic and cultural resource base from which European leisure research as an independent field of research and education became possible in the first place. Crucial to today's feelings of loss is the fact that something has changed with regard to the public significance of the notion of leisure. Leisure no longer seems to have that self-evident public authority and importance once Received 6 July 1997; accepted 2 October 1997. This essay is a shortened, adapted version of the conclusion of a cross-comparative research project on leisure research in Europe (see Mommaas, Van der Poel, Bramham, & Henry, 1996a). Address correspondence to Hans Mommaas, Department of Leisure Studies, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, the Netherlands. E-mail: j.t.mommaas@kub.nl. 241
Leisure Sciences, 19:241-254, 1997 Copyright 1997 Taylor & Francis 0149-0400/97 $12.00+ .00

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associated with it. Not being a basic discipline itself but a primary building block deeply engrained in the history of the social and/or behavioral sciences, leisure research is in need of a revitalized "mission" or legitimation, a public and/or cognitive project able to (re)unite it as a specific research and education area. In this article, I want to put the current unease in Europe with the study of leisure into focus by presenting the history of European leisure research. What was the precise nature of the public projects that, until recently, legitimated leisure research as an independent field of study? And what made those collective projects become less self-evident today? These questions are answered making use of the results of a cross-national comparative research project that involved six groups of investigators in a study of the history of leisure research in their own countries (i.e., Spain, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Poland; see Mommaas, Van der Poel, Bramham, & Henry, 1996a). In their respective conclusions, all authors speak words of disintegration, fragmentation, and diversification, although with different evaluations. What is happening here? What homogeneity or unity is becoming fragmented? And how should we evaluate this against the background of the history of leisure research? Is there a need, and are there grounds, to revitalize the leisure concept? Or should we just accept this state of affairs as part and parcel of the flimsiness and lightness of the present "postmodern" existence?

Early Modernity and the Formation of Free Time/Leisure

In tracing the historical background of the project of leisure research, I must begin with a note on concepts. It is rather common in the global academic world to speak of "leisure" as the organizing principle behind the field of study referred to here; from a European perspective, however, this is in fact rather problematic. In most language communities in Europe, instead of leisure, free time (yrije tijd, Freizeit, temps libre, tiempo libre, fritid, czas wolny) is the concept used in everyday conversation. As such, "free time" covers both the "strong," temporal dimensions of the phenomenon (free time as a period of time freed from specific obligations) and its "soft," cultural dimensions (free time as a quality of activities, as freedom, play, pleasure, relaxation, intrinsic motivation, involvement). However, the situation is rather complex and differs not only per language community but also per intellectual school. Some scholars use the concept of free time to cover both "objective" (or time-related) and "subjective" (or meaning-related) connotations. Others use concepts of leisure (loisir) or related classical notions (ocio, Musse) to demarcate qualitative from quantitative issues. In addition, there are those (especially in the Anglo-Saxon language community!) who repudiate the notion of free time altogether, as a result of its presumed ideological status (the "false" or "liberal" connotation of freedom and free choice). In a significant way, these complications already express the composite character of the history of the construct of free time/leisure, from the very beginning interconnecting temporal and qualitative issues. In its modern form, the phenomenon must be traced back to the "long 19th century," lasting from the second half of the 18th century until the beginning of the 20th century. In general terms, three interrelated techno-economic, juridical-political, and sociocultural developments are of importance. The first was the rise and spread of industrial capitalism, responsible for the expansion and institutionalization of an already older time-based organization of work. This led to a more strict temporal demarcation of the spheres of work and nonwork, work and pleasure, and production and reproduction. The second development was the rise of the national civil state, with its nationally integrated public space in which all citizens became equal before the law. As a result, not only the sphere of work, but also the sphere of nonwork, was liberated from premodern feudal bonds: "the

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master's right in the master's time and the workman's right in his own time" (Bailey, 1978, p. 180). The final development was the rise of new urban middle-class factions involving new social professionals such as social statisticians, philanthropists, hygienists, sanitarians, educationalists, professors, teachers, lawyers, doctors, public officers, and inspectors. This urban middle class functioned as an impetus for the further "modernization" of the new public order. However divided by their specific political and denominational affiliations, the new professions saw themselves as part of a generalized community of sociocultural "engineers," with transnational and transatlantic connections, involved in the "enlightenment" (rationalization, civilization) of national society and its governance (Lacey & Furner, 1993). They occupied and reproduced a sociocultural space created on the basis of (a) an expanding national state bureaucracy; (b) a gradual collectivization of caring systems; (c) a growing body of voluntary associations active in hygienic, philanthropic, and/or cultural-educational work; and (d) an expanding domain of higher education and science (Manicas, 1987; Rothblatt & Wittrock, 1993). The first "discourses" on free time/leisure can be traced to the turmoils, panics, conflicts, commitments, and Utopias involved in the institutionalization of this new time-spatial arrangement of work and nonwork. They were part and parcel of the "disembedding" (cf. Giddens, 1990) by industrial capitalism of parts of the population from local-traditional forms of integration, "re-embedding" them within more abstract urban and mass-production-based living conditions. These transformations went along with periods of class conflict and class organization, and there were concerns over national/local order and the rise of "the social question." To enhance labor control and labor productivity, employers aimed at a strict and gender-specific time-spatial segregation between the spheres of production and reproduction, banning local folklore and local pleasures as much as possible from the shop floor. At the same time, educationalists, reformers, and hygienists encouraged a further gender-specific division of the reproductive sphere, propagating the division between the private household and public life. Everyday life became reorganized and categorized along a time-spatial grid dominated by the abstract rationalities of industrial capitalism and civil society. Also, free time or leisure came into existence as a separated domain of debate and intervention.

Early Leisure Research and the Project of National Civilization

Of course, across Europe, this modernization process had its time-spatially specific trajectories (cf. Therborn, 1995; see also Delantly, 1995; Tilly, 1990; Wilterdink & Zwaan, 1991). During the 19th century, in the northwestern part of Europe, industrialization was comparatively advanced by an earlier and more strongly institutionalized national state apparatus. This can be related to a more strongly developed, capital-intensive urban system involving a differentiation between the political and the economic and a powerful economic and cultural middle class. That middle class functioned as a catalyst for the further rationalization/nationalization of the economy, politics, culture, and the sciences. In general terms, this explains why the beginning of a social-cum-empirical sensibility for the lives of industrial workers can be traced back to the middle of the 19th century and the northwestern fringe of Europe. From the 1830s onward, we find examples of inquiries into the living conditions of the working class in France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom (see Samuel, 1996; Corijn & Van den Eeckhout, 1996; Bramham & Henry, 1996). These "surveys" were organized by royal commissions, Parliamentary committees, or individual reformers, often members of national/royal academies of science or national reform organizations. At stake was an almost "anthropological" curiosity in exploring and

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administering the terra incognito of the impoverished and crowded backyards of recently industrialized urban areas. The systematic and meticulous cataloguing of facts about the working and living conditions of the urban-industrial proletariat was, first of all, supposed to enhance the rational grounding of legal or educational measures and to inform politicaleconomic disputes and the development of social reform strategies. In methodological terms, the early investigations into workers' lives can best be typified as monographic and/or sociographic, inductive, empiricist, and evolutionist. Central is the ideal of a "science of the legislator" (cf. Bauman, 1987; Winch, 1993) capable of delivering the general principles that would enable an external (i.e., "objective") diagnosis of society, thus adorning social reform with an aura of professional certainty and political impartiality. The attention paid in these often astonishingly detailed and systematic studies to the pastimes of industrial workers varied. Often, the studies restricted themselves to material living conditions. If the inquiries involved workers' pastimes, these pastimes were investigated as possible indicators or parameters of the moral orientation, cultural elevation, and/or social integration of workers. Hence, there was a strongly defined interest in drinking, gambling, the frequentation of pubs, the organization of family life, the reading of books, gardening, and the visiting of theatres, lectures, and political meetings. Overall, laborers' free time was distrusted as a potential source of idleness, waste, and drunkenness. At the same time, free time was regarded as a powerful resource in terms of popular education, political-moral organization, and national enlightenment. Hence, laborers' activities became captured in generalized dichotomies, adorned with a universal-scientific status but in reality expressing the Weltanschauung of the middle classes involved. Central were contradictions such as those of the cultivated and the vulgar, the educated and the idle, the rational and the impulsive, the active and the passive, and the general and the particular. Free time/leisure would not begin to be treated as an independent object of research until the World War I period (the 1920s and 1930s). To begin with, there was the Russian revolution of 1917, the socialist and communist radicalism of the Weimar Republic in 1918/1919, the socialist revolution attempt in Hungary in 1919, and the march of the Red Army through Poland in 1920. These events point at the increased strength of the left in European class conflicts, resulting in a growing anxiety among national conservative and denominational elites. As a consequences, new social policies were developed, accompanied by laws on labor conditions (e.g., the famous legislation on the 8-hour working day and new legislation on paid holidays). In addition, there was the postwar prevalence in Europe of neomercantilist state policies with their emphasis on economic and social intervention. Furthermore, a new phase in the expansion of the university system resulted in the sometimes rather reluctant spreading of the "modern" social sciences across Europe (Manicas, 1987).1 The economic crisis following the krach of 1929 subsequently revitalized debates about the possibility of a further reduction of weekly working hours, thus enabling a better distribution of employment, a preservation of existing jobs and industries, and a more balanced relation between production and consumption. This resulted in aims to establish the 40-hour working week and/or the 2-day weekend, turning free time/leisure into an object of transnational and transatlantic debate (Cross, 1993). Within this context, workers' spare time became an independent object of political

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Manicas (1987, p. 209) explains the late introduction and slow expansion of the social sciences in Europe, relative to the United States, by pointing out the presence in Europe of a professoriate functioning as a feudal "Mandarin class" with strong links to the higher circles of government and finance and no wish to alter its ways.

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debate and organization, from Poland and the Soviet Union in the East to the Netherlands and Belgium in the West. International conferences were organized, such as the 1924 International Labor Organization conference on leisure. The number of free-time-oriented organizations increased. Among them were the World Association for Adult Education (established in 1918), the Socialist Workers' Sport International (1920), and the International Office for Allotments and Workers' Gardens (1926) (Beckers & Mommaas, 1996). As a consequence, this period witnessed an increase in free-time/leisure-oriented research. Central to the research was the question of the possible consequences of an increase in free time and how those consequences could be influenced positively. Was there a need for public intervention, for enlightening cultural and recreational activities able to compete with local folklore (regarded as backward and primitive) and with the new commercial pleasures (considered as exploitative, passive, and "quantitative")? Research strategies mostly followed established inductive-evolutionist canons o f research, cataloguing workers' activities in as detailed a manner as possible (e.g., Sledsens's research in Belgium, the various sociographic research projects in the Netherlands, Friedmann's research in France, and Seebohm Rowntree's inquiries in the United Kingdom; see Corijn & Van den Eeckhout, 1996; Samuel, 1996; Mommaas, 1996; Bramham & Henry, 1996). However, in addition to conventional monographic and/or sociographic research projects, this period also witnessed the first use of participation statistics and timebudget studies. Building on the application in social reform research of the family budget method (i.e., the famous cross-national family budget study of Le Play; see Samuel, 1996) and on the introduction in the working environment of methods of time measurement (part of Taylor's scientific management approach), the time budget method had become a useful social research tool by the 1920s. This was the case not only in the United States (i.e., the 1913 study done by George Bevans, a student of Giddings) but also in the Soviet Union (the 1920s work done by Stroumiline) and various countries in Europe (see Lanfant, 1972; Szalai, 1972). Results of these studies, in terms of leisure activities, continued to be interpreted from a superior, "external" or "legislative" perspective. They are read as indications of the level of workers' cognitive edification, moral civilization, and/or social integration. Overall, the studies remain organized and evaluated from the viewpoint of the project of the integration of industrial workers into a national/rational public space. PreWorld War II research on free time thus formed part and parcel of a modernization project aimed at the production of free time. Central was the aim of securing a time freed from work and of using that time for civilization purposes (useful leisure, rational recreation, workers' emancipation).

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Welfare Modernism and the Democratization of Culture

It was not until the post-World War II period that free time became a relatively independent and systematic object of study across Europe, with its own specialists, its own courses, and its own codifications and definitions, cross references, journals, and debates. Although continuities do exist, it would be a mistake to see this as a logical corollary of prewar developments. It could just as well be argued that the institutionalization of postWorld War II leisure research must be explained in terms of the discontinuities that distinguished postwar European reality. The study of leisure "materialized" in an institutional and intellectual climate that differed considerably from prewar conditions and orientations. First, Europe witnessed an unprecedented period of economic growth. Despite continuing disparity, and despite very different economic conditions, all national economies

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whether communist, authoritarian capitalist, or liberal/social capitalistexperienced significant economic progress (for an analysis, see Therborn, 1995). Second, there was the spreading across Europe of mass consumption, beginning in Sweden and Britain in the late 1950s and reaching Spain and Poland in the 1970s and Greece and Portugal in the 1980s (Therborn, 1995). Together with the revolutionary expansion of higher education, the spreading of mass consumption gradually started to undermine or relativize situated cultural classifications and hierarchies (Thompson, 1990). Third, as a part of the general reconstruction of national economies, Europe went through a phase of rapid (re)industrialization and mechanization, along with a shift to service sector activities. Economic reconstruction led to periods of full employment but also invoked debates about the quality of work and the danger of workers* alienation. These debates were no longer couched in a discourse of class and capitalism but were related to notions of "technological civilization" and/or "postindustrial society." Fourth, from the late 1950s onward, in the context of a situation of full employment, European economies experienced a renewed reduction of working hours in the various forms of longer weekends, fewer weekly working hours, and/or increases in paid vacations. The reduction of working hours again began in the Northwest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reaching Spain and Poland in the 1970s (restricted, in the case of the latter, to a 48hour working week and 2 free Saturdays each month; see Olszewska & Roberts, 1989). Fifth, economic developments delivered the revenues necessary for the exceptional expansion of states' social and cultural involvement. As part of this, between roughly 1960 and 1980, most European countries witnessed a historically unique increase in policies aimed at the stimulation of various forms of leisure (e.g., sports, recreation, the voluntary sector, the media, the arts, tourism). As a consequence, there was an increasing demand for specialized leisure-oriented personnel and knowledge (Bramham, Henry, Mommaas, & Van derPoel, 1993). Among both social researchers and social planners, these institutional changes were coterminous with fundamental changes in epistemic or ideational orientations. By the 1960s, t^social sciences were generally accepted as an important instrument in the information and justification of social state interventions. However, the social sciences of the 1960s were quite different in their orientation and position from those of the preceding period. All over Europe, from communist Poland to Christian-democratic Holland, Belgium, and France and fascist Spain, examples can be found of a sea change in the social intellectual climate. At stake was a move away from classical, humanist, or collectivist European social thought. Through the efforts of certain intellectuals, these prewar "heroic narratives" (Alexander, 1995) were partly kept responsible for the disasters of two subsequent world wars. In the postwar era, they became associated with "tradition-oriented particularism," "metaphysical speculation," and "cultural rigidity." Instead, orientation turned toward the United States, where the social scientific climate was dominated by the scientific realism and cultural pluralism instigated by Lazarsfeld's survey research paradigm, Merton's notions of social engineering and middle range theory, and Parsons's orientation toward systematic theorization and modernization theory.2 It is important to stress how this notion of the "Americanization" of "European" social thought is a shorthand description of a very complicated development. Suffice it to point out that (a) what was imported from the United States largely consisted of formerly exported European social thought; (b) postwar American scientism also distinguished itself from the founding fathers of American social thought; and (c) within postwar American social thinking, deep cleavages existed among the empiricism of the Lazarsfeld approach, the systematic theorizing of Parsons, and the more historical or qualitative approach of scholars such as Mills and Riesman (Turner & Turner, 1990). Add to this the com2

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At stake here was not just a different way of doing research. At stake was a paradigm that delivered a fresh technocratic outlook on the internal organization, social roles, and the professional self-image of the social sciences. In addition, the model mirrored and, in turn, stimulated and justified a liberal, technocratic modernization rhetoric. That rhetoric became popular not only in the 1960s Kennedy administration (Woodiwiss, 1993) but also, by emulation, among European administrations. Despite vast differences, these changes produced three developments in terms of the issue of free time/leisure. First, there was a tendency toward an increasingly stimulating, instead of simply prohibiting, preoccupation of the state with people's pastimes. Gradually the state took over responsibilities from the voluntary sector, and thus leisure and culture began to be seen as collective goods. Second, the dominant ideational orientation moved away from former "totalizing" models of cultural thinking (i.e., based on notions of evolutionism and organicism). Instead, ideological and scientific thinking became dominated by models of cultural democracy3 or standardized individualism. Third, because of the gradual institutionalization of the labor time conflict, the issue of free time/leisure was generalized from an issue primarily involving industrial laborers to an issue potentially involving the entire population.

Leisure Research and the Spreading of Culture

Just as in the prewar period, postwar leisure research developed within the gray zone between state intervention, voluntary work, and academic research. In part, this research was based on "strong individuals" taking up leisure as part of a great diversity of social and intellectual concerns and interests (one might think here of the important influence of scholars such as Pieper, Friedmann, De Grazia, Dumazedier, Roberts, and Parker). Also, in part, there was the growing demand for policy and market research able to produce data of importance in the planning, justification, and evaluation of an increasing amount of public and private leisure provisions. Together, these developments led to a rather characteristic melange of approaches. On one extreme, standing on the shoulders of the older tradition of mass-cultural critique or enlightened pedagogics, we find abstract contemplations not based on systematic empirical investigations. On the other extreme, supposedly inspired by "modern" American empirical research models, there was bleak empiricist "head-counting" devoid of any explicit theoretical reflection. In an attempt to summarize the large variety of themes and subjects addressed in postwar leisure research across Europe, one might distinguish two central topics of attention. A first topic area concerned the work-leisure relationship. Central here were debates about the possible alienation/liberalization of work and/or leisure, the search for conceptualizations of the work-leisure relationship, thoughts about the possible fusion of work and leisure, and ideas about future changes in the distribution of work and/or the economics of production. At stake was a search for factors that could enhance workers' productivity (especially in the East; see Lanfant, 1972) or that could improve the quality of work and/or leisure in postindustrial (Riesman, Bell) or technological (Ellul) society.

plexities involved in the demarcation of "European" social thought (what about Britain? see Albrow, 1993) and the problematic nature of the theme is sketched (see also Scaff, 1993). 3 It is important to stress that most of the time this "cultural democratization" was not aimed at a public revaluation of folk, popular, and/or mass culture. Instead, it was aimed at opening up to the national population the hegemonic middle-class cultural domain (the domain of voluntary work, the arts, recreation, and sports).

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In the beginning, this work-leisure couplet was central to the thematic self-understanding of the postwar leisure research discipline.4 Nevertheless, in the course of time, a different theme began to dominate the empirical research agenda and to provide the young discipline with institutional links to the expanding domains of planning and administration. At stake was that broad area of research and debate commonly summarized under labels of "leisure participation." The focus was on the uneven engagement of various segments of the population in public leisure provisions (i.e., in the field of sports, the media, culture, recreation), on the investigation of the various leisure needs of the population, and on the relation between leisure participation and the quality of life. The analysis involved either "simple" attendance figures or more sophisticated time budget data. The projects could be targeted at the national population writ large or at specific disadvantaged groups such as urban youth, women, or a city's population. Downloaded by [University of Glasgow] at 02:09 28 July 2013 From an academic point of view, this area of study first developed as an appendix to the sociology of culture and social stratification and/or the economics of consumption. But there were also links to debates concerning the quality of life under conditions of free time and mass consumption and to the planning of educational and provision programs. These programs were expected to compensate for the commercial pleasures of mass cultural consumption and to enhance social equality and people's choice. In addition, there was an expanding private leisure sector eager to implement the latest models of statistical analysis in an attempt to become more professional and market oriented. In this context, the concept of free time facilitated a more integrated study of a population's involvement in a variety of public activities, thus also enabling an analysis of possible substitution effects. In terms of research methodologies, this period became dominated by the model of quantitative, correlational survey research based on a combination of empirical-analytical and deductive-instrumental thinking. The dominant professional model was that of the social researcher-cum-engineer analyzing the social mechanisms responsible for the uneven participation in leisure or influencing the quality of work and/or leisure. Knowledge of these mechanisms, based on the comparative discovery of correlational sequences, would enable the development of programs targeted at a cure for systematic "dysfunctionalities."

The End of the Post-World War II Era

Looking back from the perspective of the 1990s, it is apparent how the relative optimism and self-assurance that dominated the postwar field of European leisure studies depended on often unacknowledged circumstances. In Western Europe, America's "eastern frontier" (Delantly, 1995), the Cold War stimulated an unprecedented integration. This culminated in 1958 in the creation of the European Economic Community and, the introduction to a subsequent period of "peaceful coexistence." Economic expansion, although unevenly spread, stimulated the idea of the universal successfulness of Keynesian policies, with the state finally having mastered the economy and class conflicts. Especially in northwestern Europe, the ongoing expansion of the state apparatus, the increase in productivity and affluence, and the ongoing reduction of working hours indeed enabled the notion of free time as a sphere of life situated outside the determinism of political-economic structures. Hence, the "problem of leisure" could be reduced to a cognitive issue soon to be dealt with by the expanding efforts of research-based social-educational and provisional programs.
One might think here of important agenda-setting books such as those of Smigel (Work and Leisure; 1963), De Grazia (Of Time. Work, and Leisure; 1962), and Parker (The Future of Work and Leisure; 1972).
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However, this self-assured climate would not last very long. From the late 1960s onward, a sequence of often unexpected and sometimes rather paradoxical events slowly but steadily started to undermine established certainties. Three developments must be stressed: (a) the expressive revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s and its aftermath, (b) the economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the related political-economic changes, and (c) the "opening up" of the political map of Europe. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of young intellectuals launched a critique on four fronts. First there was the standardized democracy of suburban middle-class consumer culture, with its presumed middle-class superficiality and cultural instrumentality. Second, a critique was launched against technocratic models of social planning, with their emphasis on the "end of ideology" and the end of class. Third, questions were raised about prevailing "paternalistic" definitions of culture grounding existing educational and provisional programs. Fourth, a more critical or left-wing-inspired approach to the social sciences developed, criticizing the dominant configuration of "American" modernization theory and empirical-analytic research (cf. Alexander, 1995). In the late 1960s, cities across Europe (from the East to the West and from the South to the North) experienced student riots, often triggered by very local circumstances. The riots were led by a generation experiencing a major phase of social mobility, growing up in the affluence and cultural openness of postwar mass consumption and pop culture. In the context of this increase in economic and cultural possibilities, former cultural hierarchies started to look quite obsolete if not outright ridiculous. Leisure became a sphere of cultural sabotage and militancy, a breeding place for counter-cultural activity and self-expression (cf. Martin, 1983). Even in traditionalist and totalitarian countries such as Spain, more left-winginspired versions of social theory developed in this period, drawing attention to the ongoing importance of class structures (Tezanos, 1990, pp. 152153). In communist Poland, the student riots sought a "revisionist" turn in orthodox Marxism and a further opening up of the academic field for Western intellectual thought (instead to be confronted with an outbreak of party-sponsored antisemitism) (Kwasniewicz, 1993, p. 175). However, at the same time that critical thinking started to "demystify" the dominant conformities of science, culture, and leisure, an economic crisis gradually changed the institutional conditions within which this renewed demystification of leisure and culture took place. In the 1970s, the postwar political-economic system started to disintegrate. This was first instigated by the problems of the U.S. economy, trying to cope with the deficit caused by the costs of the Korea and Vietnam wars (Woodiwiss, 1993). In the early 1970s, an unprecedented increase in oil prices forced by the oil-producing countries speeded up a latent world recession. The economic crisis that followed formed an important impetus for a major flexibilization of the prevalent Fordist politico-economic regime (cf. Murray, 1989). Mediated by an increase in national deficits (the product of economic stagflation and an increase in social demand), this resulted in a shift from welfarism to enterprise culture. In the former, leisure was seen as a collective good, as a citizens' right; in the latter, however, leisure became evaluated as a consumer good (Bramham et al., 1993). In addition, economic restructuring went along with a restructuring of urban economies, with cities becoming involved in an intensified interurban competition for companies, visitors, and residents. The latter resulted in an increase in local government attention to the role of leisure and culture as vehicles of urban imagery strategies and economic regeneration (Bramham et al., 1989; Bianchini & Parkinson, 1993; Corijn & Mommaas, 1995). Together, these developments marginalized both the postwar models of public leisure participation and the 1970s models of emancipation and humanist socialism underlying the critique of conventional leisure education models.

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Third, in the 1970s and 1980s, the political map of Europe was drastically redrawn. In the 1970s, there was the final defeat of Iberian totalitarianism, the result of a growing internal opposition and international isolation. Salazar's Portugal had its "carnation revolution" in 1975. In that same year, following Franco's death, a constitutional monarchy was established in Spain under King Juan Carlos de Bourbon (Gonzalez & Urkiola, 1993). Spain had its first democratic elections in 1978, followed by the formation of a democratic constitution. Even more influential was the defeat of communism in the 1980s. Against the background of a deepening of the economic crisis and an increase in Western monetary and military-technological pressures, the disintegration of communist totalitarianism began with Gorbachev's perestrotka in the Soviet Union, and the formation of Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s and culminated in the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989. These developments implied the final demise of the Cold War period and the falling away of a major alternative for capitalism. In addition, they implied the disintegration of a former political-economic and military cohesion in the West, as well as in the East, resulting in an upsurge of nationalism, fundamentalism, and regionalism. In Poland, the coming into power of Solidarity in 1989 was followed by an economic and political restructuring aimed at a further integration of Poland in the global market economy, based on the standards of the World Bank (Jung, 1993). As a consequence, a fierce market-oriented conservatism replaced the former postcommunist socialism, with state policy showing itself "openly hostile to many elements of the welfare state and its practice of subsidising various social activities, such as leisure" (Jung, 1993, p. 205). In the West, together with the ongoing economic crisis, the disintegration of communism additionally weakened left-wing political and theoretical thinking, instead stimulating a further revival of market-oriented liberalism (cf. Alexander, 1995).

The Reappraisal of Leisure Research

Not until the late 1970s and early 1980s did critical thinking finally enter the domain of European leisure research. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the study of leisure had not yet become very much involved with mainstream social theoretical thinking; thus, it also played only a minor role in the critical rethinking of general social theory. When, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, critical thinking entered the domain of leisure studies, its influence was threefold. A first object of critique was the notion of culture used within leisure research. Arguments were made for a more receptive analysis of the "positive" meaning of popular or subcultural practices, and the foundations of established leisure-education programs were questioned. Second, there was criticism of the dominant objectivist research approach with its fixation on formal, statistical procedures, ignoring not only the meaning people themselves attached to their leisure activities but also the institutional preconditions of leisure as such. Third, there was a questioning of the unreflexive use made of the notion of "postindustrial" or "free time society," with its emphasis on democratic pluralism and free choice, instead pointing at the ongoing importance of concepts of class and power. The influence of neo-Marxism on the study of leisure has perhaps nowhere been as noteworthy and productive as in the United Kingdom. This must first of all be related to the role of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), a postgraduate research center established around 1964 by the Marxist historian Richard Hoggart (see Turner, 1990). The ongoing interest of the center in the "lived experiences" of workingclass cultures (and in the ideological role of the media in structuring those experiences) was obviously closely related to issues of leisure. In 1980, this resulted in a combined workshop

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of the British Sociological Association and the Leisure Studies Association that was an initiative of a new generation of leisure researchers eager to import critical thinking in the leisure studies field. Representatives of "conventional" leisure studies and of critical cultural studies.exchanged arguments (see Tomlinson, 1981). In the years that followed, the influence of the CCCS would result in an alternative introduction to the topic of leisure (Clarke & Catcher, 1985), more interest in ethnographic and institutional research, and a growing attention to issues of class, race, and gender (although the latter had to wait for a feminist critique on the neglect of women in cultural studies). The increasing importance of cultural studies (itself oriented toward a mixture of Gramscian neo-Marxism, French poststructuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis) signaled a broader move away from postwar American social theory back to Europe and to "classical" or "grand" social thought. This represented a shift in ideational orientation that can also be traced to the domain of leisure studies. Formerly dominated by "weak" versions of American-based scientism and functionalism, leisure research became influenced by the ideas of Giddens, Bourdieu, and Elias. However, at the same time that critical thinking and a renewed interest in social theory finally became part of the leisure studies field, questioning the hegemony of former positivist and functionalist approaches, the economic and fiscal crisis again started to change the leisure studies research agenda. Most important has been the shift, noticeable all over Europe, to a more market-oriented approach to leisure, stimulating an interest in leisure as a consumer good (Bramham et al., 1993). This has resulted in a shift away from collective issues of leisure participation and social inequality to more localized issues of public reach, of marketing and management, consumption and tourism. In addition, in the 1980s, postmodern social and cultural thinking, with its emphasis on the local, on (theoretical and cultural) eclecticism and assemblage, and on choice and reflexivity, gradually found its way to the leisure studies field. Furthermore, postmodern thinking stimulated an interest in consumer culture, leading to issues of aesthetics, imagery, pleasure, desire, deconstruction, the body, identity, and style. Leisure research has related itself rather ambivalently to postmodern thinking. Of course, from a variety of positions, cross connections are made and maintained (e.g., the works of Featherstone, Lash and Urry, and Rojek). However, in general, these cross connections are made by people from outside the conventional domain of leisure research and remain on a rather general level of analysis. Mediating the "old" concerns (the work-leisure relationship and issues of leisure stratification) with new circumstances (the further proliferation of leisure and consumption possibilities, the commodification of leisure, global economic and cultural restructuring, the enduring crisis of the welfare state, the postmodern sensibility for the local and the everyday, the flexibilization of labor time), some additional fields of research have emerged. Here one can think of research into the changing patterns and meanings of free time in the context of an enduring flexibilization of labor relations. Also, there is the question of how changing relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and age can be traced to the domain of leisure participation in a postindustrial, postmodern society. Furthermore, the topic of the changing role of leisure and culture in urban regeneration processes reflects a further concern for leisure studies (together with the possible consequences of this in terms of changing sociocultural and spatial relations of inclusion and exclusion). Finally, there is the issue of the changing structure of public and private leisure provision resulting from the transformation of the relations among the national state, local government, and globalizing cultural industries.

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Leisure Research at the Crossroads?

In one way or another, all of these topical changes have added to a further pluralization of the field of leisure research, also resulting in the boundaries between leisure studies, on one side, and consumer and cultural studies, on the other, becoming more fluid. In the words of Giddens (1990), we could speak of subsequent phases of "detraditionalization" or of a further radicalization of levels of "reflexivity." The time that leisure research could unproblematically be grounded in a collective interest in the participation of a nation's population in public culture seems to be over. On one extreme, there is Poland, with its frantic turn toward monetarist policies, resulting in a disappearance of leisure studies departments and a fragmentation of the body of leisure researchers. This has been accompanied by an increase in the volume of work on leisure markets (notably in relation to consumption and tourism) taking place in the offices of consultants and promotion agencies (Jung, 1996). In Spain, the field of leisure studies is plagued by an institutional and theoretical fragmentation. However, as a result of the relative young age of the Spanish welfare state, this has yet to be evaluated in terms of a case of development rather than a case of decline (San Salvador del Valle, 1996). In France, the status of leisure as an autonomous field of research seems to be threatened. Of importance is the competing upsurge of the topic of daily life in the new "sociality" of postmodern society, a topic very much related to French postmodern sociology (Samuel, 1996). In the United Kingdom, the leisure studies field seems to be grappling with the claims of postmodernism and with shifts in the experiences of leisure, lifestyle, and consumption under postindustrial, post-Fordist circumstances (Bramham & Henry, 1996). Belgian leisure studies is drawing back to the traditional academic disciplines and to pure marketing and management (Corijn & Van den Eeckhout, 1996). And, in the Netherlands, leisure studies has to face a centrifugal pluralization of its research domain (Mommaas, 1996). In a certain sense, this situation can be called rather ironic. At the same moment that authors working within the domain of leisure research notice a certain fragmentation or "evaporation" of their research field, topics related to leisure (consumption, culture, pleasure, desire, tourism, sports, time-space) seem to be enjoying a larger popularity and interest than ever before. The question, then, seems to be whether and how the field of leisure studies can realign itself to these new areas of interest (redefine its relation to them). The history of leisure research suggests that this cannot be dealt with on a purely cognitive or analytical level aiming at ever-nuanced notions of leisure. Instead, the issue seems to be one that involves the public significance of leisure. Is there still a collective project of leisure possible or even desirable, giving leisure research a new public forum/legitimation, and, if so, what could such a project look like?

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