ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses developments in the leisure society story during from the 1980s to 1999. While the standard evolving leisure society of the 1960s and 1970s had been viewed as emerging in an environment of steady economic growth, the 1980s and 1990s were marked by recessions and crises which disrupted this perspective. Economic instability stimulated less sanguine views on the role of work in late capitalist economies. Talk of a leisure society was therefore replaced by somewhat exaggerated anticipations of ‘the end of work’ and the ‘jobless future’.
