Establishing the fun in leisure

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Abstract
Fun is a term commonly heard in everyday life, a term sometimes used synonymously with leisure. Therefore, one might expect the leisure literature to reflect these associations. This is not the case. This article establishes the theoretical distinctiveness of fun, because fun has been undertheorized. An analysis of leisure, social leisure, sociability, interactive leisure, and emotionality in leisure is undertaken to identify the background premises about fun. Occasionally, leisure researchers implicitly identify fun in the social interactional world but tend to deemphasize both the social world and the importance of fun. Fun is distinctive from the enjoyment of leisure, yet leisure theories tend to emphasize exclusively the enjoyment, self‐referential modes of interaction, saying little about fun. Fun is defined as a social‐emotional interactional process wherein persons deconstruct social‐biographical inequalities to create a with‐equal‐other, social‐human bond.