ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews principal approaches to understanding leisure futures. It focuses on ‘futuristic’ analyses of the future, including literary accounts of how future societies might be organised. The chapter describes the predictions and forecasts made by social scientists who substantiate their projections by analysing social science data drawn from a range of sources. It provides an overview of major theories of social change and examines their implications for leisure. The chapter introduces the data bases used by futurologists to construct various leisure scenarios, depending upon the assumptions they introduce into their models, and shows the way in which the key elements or factors. Veal stresses five major measures of leisure: participation rate, number of participants, volume of activity, time, and expenditure. The chapter also provides the briefest outline of important theories of society and of social change.
