Leisure Education Governance for Ageing Well: The Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP)

This paper explores the theoretic and practical implications of the serious leisure perspective (SLP) – the theoretic framework that synthesizes three main forms of leisure, known as serious pursuits (serious leisure / devotee work), casual leisure, and project-based leisure – when applied to the development and analysis of leisure education governance for ageing well. Leisure in this paper, mainly dealt with in the process where there is a dynamic interplay between people and the society, is defined as un-coerced, contextually framed activity and leisure education is also viewed as a lifelong developmental process. My plan is to critically review previous theoretic and empirical studies on the issues relating to leisure education governance. First, the author proposes that leisure and leisure education need to be reappraised with reference to the contemporary context which seems to have an age-integrated structure between education, work and leisure that were once perceived to be clearly separated by a simple image of economic work life. Then, I draw attention to discussions of governance (especially, policy network theory) being construed as a theoretic and practical perspective at the policy level. Here, some of issues which agencies (or actors) must consider, when preparing a practical alternative to leisure education governance for ageing well, are reviewed. Lastly, this paper applies the SLP to the development and analysis of leisure education governance, while trying to come up with better solutions to the problems it could face. Due to these efforts, the paper contributes to the development of a corpus not only focused on knowledge of leisure education governance but also on knowledge for leisure education governance.