Título en español.

Abstract

Leisure studies have been recognized as a field of knowledge since the decade of the nineties. However, in Puerto Rico, research on leisure has been at best sporadic. As a term, "leisure" appears quite frequently in public discussions in a demeaning way, as a synonym for vagrancy, or worse. It is also use indiscriminately as "free time". One of the objectives of our work is to clarify these terms, making proper distinctions between leisure and the different types of activities often conflated with it. It is a challenge for the social sciences to determine what all of the activities that we identified as leisure may have in common. A challenge that it is not becoming any easier, given the current changes in the labor market, new communication technologies, and the emergence of theoretical perspectives arising from the experiences of transmodern societies. Hence, there is a pressing need to continue elaborating and examining critically known theoretical proposals on leisure. From the three main definitions that traditionally guide leisure - the autonomy of the subject, the experience of pleasure or satisfaction, and the autotelic character of the selected activities, the authors propose an experimental definition of leisure in which the first is considered the defining element. We propose that the enjoyment of leisure comes from the experience of reclaiming a sphere of personal autonomy in a social scenario in which increasing labor precariousness and the intensification of demands on workers results in a greater hetero-conditioning of the subjects in the post-work societies.