ABSTRACT
Is there really anything special about leisure that would suggest a dierent methodological debate from the rest of the social sciences? As a relatively new arrival, it is likely to draw heavily on other subject areas. But not being part of an established discipline facilitated multi-disciplinary (then inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary) approaches, which, in the words of 1066 and All That, ‘was a good thing’. There is, of course, the subject matter itself, where apparent relative autonomy in leisure might encourage a dierent ontological position among its researchers. Easily overlooked by critical theory, it is at the heart of postmodernist theories, the very arena of cultural formulations, lifestyles and the construction of personal identities. But leisure itself has proved dicult to dene (Parry and Long, 1990) and a slippery concept to address adequately in empirical research. The obvious conceptual confusion around leisure has even been evident in sub-categories like sport, with the obvious shortcomings of the oft-quoted denition from the Council of Europe (2001). Such denitional slippage may well have frustrated a sense of advance.
