`A book to get you thinking. It has proved impossible to convey accurately the exciting, wide-ranging, seemingly effortless trawl across a wide variety of schools, disciplines and thinkers which Rojek employs to support his argument. He uses a direct personal style which shines through the closely argued material and keeps you turning the pages to the very end. Students brought up in the modernist traditions of sociologies of leisure may find this book challenging and ultimately even frustrating, but it is an essential text which I hope will appear on recommended reading lists everywhere leisure is studied' - Work, Employment & Society

This book explores the meaning of leisure in the context of key social formations of our time. Chris Rojek brings together the insights of Marxism, feminism, Weber, Elias, Simmel, Nietzsche and Baudrillard to produce a survey - and rethinking - of leisure theory. At the same time he presents a radical critique of the traditional `centring' of leisure, on `escape', `freedom' and `choice'.

He describes the relations between capitalism and leisure, the meaning of free time for workers in a capitalist system, and the gendered nature of leisure. He then discusses the social construction of leisure under modernity and the main competing arguments. Finally he examines postmodernity. Revealing how leisure practices have responded to living in a risk society, he shows that `free' time becomes something very different when simulation and nostalgia lie at the heart of everyday life.