The question "whatever happened to the leisure society?" aims to turn the leisure studies multidisciplinary gaze to the shifts in leisure practices, industries and economies over the past 30 years or so. The call for this timely reflection aims to not only consider work-leisure shifts but also seeks to evaluate developments in the theorising of leisure. Such an engagement in 2007 is appropriate given the recent 30th anniversary of the LSA's first publication in 1976. This was pivotal in establishing the LSA as an academic forum to debate leisure and the significance of leisure in public policy-making and the emergent cultural industries.

The LSA 2007 conference will re-evaluate the status of work in the field in relation to established and more recent contributions, analytical themes and research agendas. This will be done in both national and international terms.

This evaluation will be both retrospective, reviewing legacies and challenges, and concerned with contemporary developments and interventions.

Cultural pundits and social scientific forecasters of the earlier post-war period heralded leisure as a form of utopian progressiveness, and predicted a decline in work and the benefits accruing from traditional work activities, alongside an increase in the aspiration to achieve personal, relational and cultural satisfactions in and through leisure. Understanding both the key changes in the work-leisure relationship, and appropriate ways of studying such processes and changed practices, has become the major challenge for leisure scholars and researchers.

Posing the question of what has happened to the leisure society, and developing relevant and effective frameworks for the critical analysis of such processes, is, therefore, central to the credibility of the leisure studies field in academic and practitioner spheres.

In order to do this the conference, recognising the swing from production to consumption in matters of both labour and leisure, focuses on emerging industries and economies that are based on knowledge, culture, creativity and media. It is widely claimed that shifts towards a knowledge economy, and the dominance of the cultural and creative industries, are the most significant social, economic and political concerns of a globalizing and post-Fordist era. Strong governmental interest, across the advanced economies of late modernity, is expressed in these industries, and this further signals the need for critical academic analysis. Such analysis is impossible without drawing upon the most relevant disciplinary approaches and cultivating appropriate multidisciplinary frameworks and interpretations.