Leisure research and social change: A millennial state of the art

This paper reports on an effort by the authors to engender debate about the state of leisure research. We seek to respond to those in the field who have challenged us to think about whether our research and practice is actively engaging issues of social change. To do this, we developed an analytical framework based upon the major tenets of critical theory and used it to evaluate the abstracts from four leisure research journals from 2000–2004. By presenting our framework and evaluation criteria, we are in no way judging the quality of these articles or their respective journals. We are, however, seeking to provoke discussion about the direction of the field as we present the results of our assessment and offer suggestions for further evaluations and possible directions for future research.