Turing Points in the Journal of Leisure Research—The First 20 Years

Abstract

Depending on your point of view, I am a newcomer to the Journal of Leisure Research (JLR). My formal involvement with the JLR goes back to 1993 when I was asked to serve as an associate editor for the journal. The journal was already in its 25th year of publication! A year later I had an article of my own appear in the journal. I was appointed Editor of JLR in 2001 and served two-three year terms (2002-2007). However, I was very familiar with JLR long before I began reviewing manuscripts and submitting articles of my own. I read numerous articles from JLR during my doctoral work. Like many hopeful scholars, I dared to hope that my ideas might find expression in what many people regarded as the preeminent leisure journal in the world.As I look back at the journal's 40-year history, I am simply awed the quality and diversity of manuscripts. The journal has thrived and clearly succeeded in its goal of being an outlet for the multidisciplinary study of leisure. The field of leisure studies has changed a great deal since the journal began publication in 1969. A great deal of that change has occurred in the pages of JLR. Indeed, the journal has published many articles that have fundamentally shaped our thinking about leisure. My goal in this article is to highlight 5 articles from the first 20 years of the journal that I believe served as turning points in our understanding of leisure.A few disclaimers are in order before I proceed. First, I have limited my choice of articles to ones that preceded my formal involvement in editing and writing for peer review. Thus, my focus is on early articles that stimulated my thinking about leisure. Second, I recognize that my choices are entirely subjective and reflect my interest areas. Others would surely (and appropriately) highlight the importance of other articles that had a formative influence on leisure studies. Third, space limits my ability to survey additional articles. There are dozens of influential articles from the early years and I apologize to individuals who feel slighted because I have not highlighted their work. Finally, the articles I review have all been cited extensively other scholars. This means that there is some consensus among leisure scholars that these articles have been influential.The first article I want to highlight comes from Volume 1 of the journal. It was written William Burch, Jr. (1969) and remains an important sociological contribution to leisure scholarship. Burch theorized that leisure choices are shaped by the social circles of workmates, family and friends (p. 138). Burch provided empirical support that preferences for styles of camping were shaped childhood socialization and the interpersonal transactions that occur within families and among friends. Although this finding seems rather straightforward today, Burch's ideas challenged conventional wisdom in his day that leisure choices were a function of people's need to seek compensation from the tensions of modern life or their desire to seek familiar experiences across different life domains. It is also worth noting Burch's work provides a useful and overlooked example of grounded theory using quantitative data. My experiences as JLR editor, associate editor, reviewer, and a longtime consumer of leisure research have led me to conclude that leisure scholars assume that grounded theory is created using qualitative data only. Glaser and Strauss (1967) thought otherwise (see Chapter VIII of their book) and Burch's seminal work remains an important example to the contrary.The publication of Bryan's (1977) ideas about recreational specialization was a major turning point in outdoor recreation research. A key premise of his work is that participants involved in the same activity can be arranged along a continuum of involvement from casual to committed. Bryan believed that along the continuum there are characteristic styles of participants that can be represented in the form of a typology. …