Preface

Abstract

The road to publishing this special issue has been a twisting and winding one, with numerous delays, misplaced directional signs, potholes, and precipitous inclines and declines. The project was conceived in the Spring of 1983 when there was a lot of talk about empirical research on burnout, and it seemed feasible that a collection of empirical studies could be brought together as a state of the art review representing the first ten years of work since Freudenberger (1974) adapted the term. The idea was to assemble a set of studies which would reflect the developing state of empirical knowledge regarding burnout. We planned to announce the special issue in the 1983 autumn issue of JSSR, receive and review articles throughout 1984, and then publish the issue in 1985 as a ten-year benchmark collection.