Fitness Clubs and the Dynamics of Reflexivity of Leisure (original) (raw)
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Beyond Play, Playfully: The Cultural Location of Fitness Activities
This paper explores the cultural location of fitness training. It locates fitness training as a particular style or frame of activity intersecting the fields of leisure, sport and body transformation. It shows that non-competitive, recreational physical activities may indeed be as imbued with ideological values as competitive sports, and that the instrumentalization of pleasure is a powerful element of contemporary commercial leisure culture. However, it also goes further to consider how “fun”, which is organized as a relevant experience of fitness training, is related to a particular image of self which stresses autonomy, flexibility and “positive thinking” as key elements of wellbeing.
‘You can all succeed!’: the reconciliatory logic of therapeutic active leisure*
European Journal for Sport and Society, 2016
Broad cultural trends such as spectacularization and individualization as induced by consumer culture are transforming the global scene of sport practice with effects that may appear as socially reconciliatory. Commercialization has worked in two directions: while competitive, professional sport is becoming a global media phenomenon, with increasingly global and yet fragmented audiences; ordinary sport practice is being individualized in the Global North and shaped by the individualizing and totalizing logic of therapeutic active leisure. In this paper, the notion of therapeutic active leisure is proposed and explored with particular reference to the development of the fitness field. As I shall show it sits between sport and gymnastics and expresses the socioeconomic need to control the health of the population through individualized commercialized formations, by working through consumers' pleasures rather than citizens' duties.
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2004
This thesis examines the sense of community within two keep-fit exercise organisations: a voluntary sports club (TRYM) and a commercial training centre (ELIXIA A). Starting from a typology which makes a distinction between "normativity" and "expressivity" as vehicles for a sense of community, it identifies a variety of community forms within the two organisations under study. "Normativity" as a principle for community implies that the individual is linked to community by a feel for and a will to take part in a set of collectively defined/shared practices, norms and rules. "Expressivity", on the other hand, links individual to community by the feeling towards the person that participation produces. This latter type is thought to be compatible with the description of contemporary individuals as increasingly self-reflexive. However, it is argued that "cognitive reflexivity" as understood by Giddens and Beck is insufficient as a principle for understanding social practice and experiences. This thesis uses a reworked concept of "aesthetic reflexivity" to argue that embodied, emotional and aesthetic experience is integral to any individual choice. Furthermore, the aesthetic reflexivity of an individual is understood as rooted in social and symbolic structure. This position has consequences for how the analysis of the sense of community within the organisations is constructed. It is stated that to interpret how organisations shape communities one must consider how it structures interaction, how it structures symbolic meaning, and also, how these structures are interpreted by members. Two main questions are asked; 1) What features of the training centre and the sports club are important in shaping different varieties of community, and how? and 2) What characteristics of individual members are important in shaping different attachment forms to and experiences of community? A sense of community is identified in three different groups: in the fitness exercise group for men and the aerobics group for women at TRYM and in the group for "Mature adults" at ELIXIA A. The first is understood as a based on "normativity", the other two on "expressivity".
Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 2015
While the identification of risks associated with sedentary lifestyles provided a strong foundation for what we understand by 'fitness' today, research across the social sciences and humanities has been rather more ambivalent about the term. One important cause for concern here is the cultural proximity of 'fitness' to consumer culture by means of the 'fitness industry'. It has been shown, for example, that the pursuit of fitness has become increasingly, if not exclusively, a matter of attending to the body as a marker of social status: something to be consumed for; something to be consumed by others. In this paper, findings from a study on the meaning of fitness are presented in order to explore how consigning fitness to consumption activity can also overlook complex self-understandings that accrue on the basis of ongoing activity and increased experience. Specifically, findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 experienced gym-goers indicate the importance of a more generalised understanding of fitness (than has been explored in previous research), one that focuses more on the alignment of intention and action in everyday life situations than on the alignment of bodies with normative physical ideals. The paper concludes by acknowledging that, while consumption activity has become a critical component within the cultural imagery of fitness, there is a great deal of nuance yet to be drawn out when examining the relationship between biopolitical discourse and everyday practice in this context.
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World Leisure Journal, 2002
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Leisure Studies and Culture. Reflections on Creative Leisure from an Empirical Research Perspective
Leisure is a significant sector because of its economic importance and its impact on well-being or on current lifestyles. The enjoyment of culture, as a personal decision of the subject that experiences it, is also considered leisure; but neither culture as human production is all leisure, nor is leisure all culture. This article examines the encounter between both concepts from the idea of creative leisure and data obtained from empirical research. From a humanistic approach, one of the great exponents of the relationship between leisure and culture is creative leisure, which has become the current embodiment of the concept of leisure inherited from classical culture. The development of the subject is based on the analysis of the study on Cultural Activities in Spain 2010-11, as well as data relating to two specific researches, conducted at the Institute of Leisure Studies at the University of Deusto, Bilbao (Spain): one on the practices and experiences of leisure in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and the other focused on the Experience of Leisure in people who practice a consolidated leisure. From among the conclusions, we highlight the imbalance between the culture of reception and its creative aspect, which makes it necessary to differentiate between leisure practices associated with a broad vision of humanistic leisure and cultural practices whose meaning has been reduced to the consumption of so-called cultural industries. Still, it is evident that there is a wide range of confluence and, in both cases, it is possible to differentiate the two aspects, creation and re-creation, as different scopes of the same reality.
The economic basis of all industrial nations has changed dramatically over the last four decades from manufacturing to services. Services now represent between 60 and 70 per cent of the cross domestic product of developed nations. The tendencies of capitalist economies are to transform more activities into services that can be delivered in multiple standardized versions, thus enabling profits to grow in proportion to the volume of sales. The standardization of bodily movement is a practice that has remained ubiquitous in world-class sports and physical education. During the past fifteen years, the global trade of fitness services has highlighted this standardization. This paper explores processes of standardizing movement in the fitness industry, using as the Les Mills (LM) Fitness programs as a case study. With licensees in 70 countries, the company has gained widespread recognition as the world‘s biggest producer of branded fitness classes. Based on participant observation in fitness classes, media texts of the ML website and interviews, the paper examines what kind of intangible touchpoints are hidden in the fitness services to make them attractive to customers. Three different themes are tightly connected here: the experience design of fitness services, the standardization of bodily movement and group fitness choreographies transmitted vertically and horizontally on the global market. The paper attempts to reveal some patterns, mechanisms and interests underlying the design of fitness services in the global market. While the global delivery system of fitness services aims at transcending the body, the phenomenological description of the lived body becomes a key factor in revealing the nature of standardization. Reflecting on the global delivery system of fitness services and its effects on interaction between instructors and fitness clients, the paper wants to analyze how the global industry of fitness services standardizes bodily movements to make profit from them.
Reflections on reflexivity in leisure and tourism studies
Leisure Studies, 2013
""While leisure and tourism researchers have come some way in addressing issues of reflexivity in their own research, this effort towards engaging with positionality has lagged approximately ten years behind when the broader social sciences confronted the ‘reflexive turn’. This research note draws upon two cases from my own research with lifestyle travellers to illustrate how a reflexive approach can help to generate more trustworthy, richer texts in qualitative leisure research. Keywords: methodology; reflexivity; leisure; tourism""
Sociologica, 2011
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