ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the way leisure providers often think about leisure in modern industrialized societies: as a product or service which someone or some organization must provide. Leisure has become increasingly ‘commoditized’; not completely by any means, but there is a definite trend. The skills of the professional leisure providers are used, paradoxically, to bolster the world of work and money and to keep the informal or self-service economy at bay. Leisure is after all supposed to be the realm of individual freedom and choice. In mixed economies the public sector, the state, is involved in leisure in three different ways: in encouraging and subsidizing certain activities, in controlling and discouraging certain other activities and in using other activities for economic or political ends. In the area of controls on leisure by government two opposed trends can be seen at work. The state becomes involved in subsidizing, providing and promoting certain forms of leisure for a variety of reasons.
