Modernisation theory and leisure in late-developing countries

The latest versions of modernisation theory claim that, since the end of communism and the globalisation of capitalism and the market economy, all countries have joined the same modernising trajectory. An implication is that, in those countries that have recently joined this trajectory, leisure forms and practices should be converging with those in the more advanced western countries. This paper argues that recent trends in leisure in post-communist East-Central Europe and Eurasia, and in East Asia, are broadly supportive of the theory, but that traditional practices that are compatible with modern lifestyles survive everywhere, that there are specific late-development effects, and correspondingly there are enduring distinctive features of leisure in the first-wave, western industrial societies.