Foreign leisure studies: between humanitarian reflection and empiricism

In the article, for the first time on the material of publications in specialized scientific journals ("World Leisure Journal", "Leisure Sciences", "Leisure Studies", "Journal of Leisure Research", etc.), current leisure studies abroad are analyzed. The article presents an overview of modern foreign studies of leisure, trends in their development. Modern foreign leisure studies are considered as a complex scientific discipline that actively integrates scientific data of cultural studies, sociology, art history, pedagogy, statistics and demography, urban studies, medicine, management theory and other sciences. There is a rather weak representation of humanitarian articles in leading foreign scientific journals on leisure studies, as well as the empirical focus of research, their applied sociological and social and psychological nature. The conclusion is made about the existence of a general leisure-learning paradigm, which is expanded due to the potential of interdisciplinary research, and not about their multiparadigmatic nature. This trend is reflected in the concept of "paradigm proliferation" (D. K. Parry, K. V. Johnson, V. Stewart, 2013). Despite the difference in approaches, the main features of this paradigm are largely similar to the national tradition, in which the social conditionality of leisure is considered axiomatic, first, and secondly, an active personal attitude to it, i.e. motivation, its perception and content; third, the need for purposeful formation of conditions and cultural guidelines for leisure behavior. The comparative analysis shows a special research attitude of Russian scientists who prefer to study leisure from the point of view of pedagogy, which predetermined the formation of the pedagogical paradigm of social and cultural activity in Russia at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century.