An outline of the action approach to leisure studies (original) (raw)
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Leisure/Loisir, 2021
Recent calls for papers in numerous academic journals within leisure studies have focused on a global and nation-specific climate that leans towards autocratic policy development, fascist rhetoric as the norm, and a greater expansion of a neoliberal philosophy. A critical leisure approach critiques leisure studies and leisure research for what the construction of leisure is in its origin and in its function. The aim of this discussion is to present counter, critical narratives to leisure studies. Two hundred and ninety-two texts that focused on the ‘critical’ in leisure were read and analyzed through critical discourse analysis and political discourse analysis. The analysis resulted in a historiography that articulates four key alternative or counter traditions: Critical Leisure Studies; New Leisure; Post-Leisure Studies; and Anti-Leisure, which could aid leisure studies into taking on a role as a ‘new’ cultural studies.
Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory
1999
Leisure studies is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be shaken to get it working once again, and if that does not do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its gears, springs, sprockets and levers cleaned, oiled, and its 'movement'the clock's condition embodied in its 'tick-tock' soundmade to run in an even balanced beat. Unlike clockmenders, scholars overhaul subject fields by leaving parts behind that after decades of use have become unnecessary to their workings, replacing these with new ones. They cannot afford to be sentimental when it comes to replacing old parts; if getting the clock back 'in beat' is the objective, then it is best to replace what no longer works. This gives us the impression that things in our subject field change while ostensibly remaining the sameeven if this is not really the case. Just over two decades ago, Chris Rojek published Decentring Leisure, the fruit of his attempt to overhaul leisure studies. This book changed our understanding of leisure forever. Like clockmending, it is a study that draws parallels with deconstructionism. This term is derived from the work of Jacques Derrida, a philosopher with a uniquely sharpened ability for remedying subject fields that have lost their beat. If the job of the clock-mender is to disassemble the 'movement' in a clock, work on it, and then put it all back together again, the job of deconstructionism is to disassemble and reassemble subject fields; that is, take them apart, to not only demonstrate how they are necessarily contingent to time and place, but also to reveal the gaps and absences they render unintelligible. Deconstructionism works with the assumption that all subject fields contain hidden and unexpected meanings, which often signify points of resistance. In this regard its central aim is to show how subject fields do not come up to scratch under their own terms of reference. A successful deconstruction not only changes a subject field, but it also conceives new ways of seeing. Rojek's study is a deconstruction of leisure studies in the sense that not only does it call for a critique of taken for granted assumptions made about leisure, but it also prompts changes in our perceptions about the potential and the limits of leisure studies. Leisure studies after Decentring Leisure was supposed to be business as usual and a return to normality but in reality it was just the opposite. It is the norm in leisure studies to adapt Tolstoy's famous sentence about families and say that good books tend to be good in the same ways. Certainly, if you encounter something that is radically different you are liable to suspect, and perhaps to go on suspecting, that it is different because it is not good. Tolstoy also wrote that the greatest threat to life is habit. Habit, he argued, destroys everything around us. By familiarizing us to the point that we no longer really see anymore, habit destroys our critical faculties. In his important book Thinking Sociologically (1990) the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that the cure for habit is defamiliarization. In opening up leisure studies to new and previously unanticipated possibilities Decentring Leisure restores leisure studies for us, by remedying the blindness, so that we come to see what it is that is important about leisure in the contemporary world. In so doing it brings the furniture of the critical imagination back into focus. The idea of 'decentring' leisure not only assumes that leisure studies is a discursive formation that exists independently of individual leisure scholars, but also that it should go about its day-today business by undermining the significance of its own unifying centre
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure – Meanings, Motives and Lifelong Learning [Book Review]
Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 2014
Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure proposes that we are entering into a new phase of leisure, brought about by the social, cultural and technological changes taking place in modern societies. While the editors acknowledge that change has always existed, they call out the pace of change and the manner in which leisure is consumed as key differentiators from the past. The book examines the key debates in leisure centered on three themes: meanings, motives and lifelong learnings. In doing so, Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure seeks to better understand the relationship between leisure and the individual, and the ways in which people look at and make sense of the world around them. A surprisingly moving experience, the book will resonate with those who have engaged in leisure experiences which have left them wanting something more, the exact nature of which they are unsure.
Personal Being and the Human Context of Leisure
Tom and Cyril Barrett (eds), The Philosophy of Leisure (London: Winnifrith Macmillan, 1989), Chap. 5, pp. 80 103. Extended version of a paper delivered at a conference on ‘Approaches to the Study of Leisure’, European Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick, November 1986., 1986
The aim of this paper is to carry out a philosophical intervention in the area of leisure theory. My concern in doing so is to argue the thesis that the proper philosophical context for theoretical refection on the phenomenon of leisure is to pay due regard to the overall human context of the world of meaning which constitutes and is constituted by authentic personal and social-cultural creativity. The broader philosophically significant political context of the latter is that form of political constitution and organization of civil society which enables the realization of authentically meaningful leisure activities; that is, the best modes of life which is considered worthwhile to lead. This paper can be considered as philosophical intervention in two ways. First, it carries out a metacritique of a particular social constructionist theory of leisure – that of Chris Rojek in his Capitalism and Leisure Theory. Secondly, building on this critique, it puts forward a radical philosophical view on personal being and the human context of leisure considered as a constitutive human praxis.
The Study of Leisure in Britain: Theory and Methods in Bourdieu and Bennett
(Bennett et al. 2008) set out to test the relevance of Bourdieu’s seminal work on leisure, taste and social reproduction (especially Bourdieu, 1986). The substantive findings show that each of the main stratifying variables (class, gender, ethnicity and age) affect different areas of leisure in distinctive and separate ways, and critical implications follow for Bourdieu’s key concepts: field, habitus, symbolic capital, distanciation. However, Bennett et al. have also raised some methodological controversies. For example, they followed Bourdieu in using multiple correspondence analysis instead of the more usual multivariate analysis to map relations by searching for statistical dependence. However, conclusions from their research are not used systematically to test some important theoretical models as Bourdieu does. Bennett et al. avoid or reject rather than testing notions of symbolic violence and social reproduction, for example, possibly from a (theoretical) commitment to complexity. Bennett et al. also used conventional ethnographic approaches (and focus groups) in gathering subjective data. This is also a departure from Bourdieu who has offered a number of methodological and political objections to conventional ethnography (and other kinds of subjectivist research). He sees ethnography as offering symbolic violence to the accounts of participants, and recommends a new approach – ‘understanding’. Again, this is to be informed by social theory not just ‘the data’ as they allegedly emerge. Implications of this discussion for understanding leisure and its sociological dimensions are discussed. A particular dimension, central to Bourdieu’s work, is the role of the education system acting as a ‘relay’ between leisure pursuits and social stratification and this particularly needs to be restored to the Bennett study. Keywords: higher education, sociology of leisure, symbolic violence, social reproduction
Becoming Political: An Expanding Role for Critical Leisure Studies
This article explores the intersection of politics and leisure, pointing to the fact that power has always been present in leisure activities, settings, practices, and institutions. In noting some of the past contributions of leisure scholarship, it also highlights a need for increasingly political leisure research, where knowledge production, epistemologies, and methodologies help unpack multiple critical leisures. Using engagements with Foucauldian biopolitics, political ecology, and radical political thought, this article sets the stage for the eight manuscripts that engage with critical components of political dimensions of leisure. In light of the pressing catastrophes of our time, we contend that scholars and educators can and should be engaged in building a more critically diverse and intellectually productive academy.
Aesthetics of leisure—disciplining desire
World Leisure Journal, 2002
This paper critically reflects upon the nature and significance of aesthetics and its multiple representations within leisure. The paper focuses upon one specific leisure context, the health club environment, and presents a critique of aesthetics within the discursive context of modernity and postmodernity. The paper outlines the emerging territory of aesthetics (Nickson et al, 2000; Van Maanen, 1990; Witz et al, 1998; Du Gay, 1996) and challenges its notion as a passive entity, instead suggesting that aesthetics resides within a 'society of signs' (Rojek 1995) or 'regime of signs' (Deleuze and Guattari 1984) with inscriptive and territorializing tendencies. The contention here is that the health club environment services and supports such a society in i t s construction, reaffirmation, maintenance and reactivation of desire. Desire (Nietzsche, 1967; Foucault 1984; is intrinsically linked to the aestheticisation process as exemplified in the search for the body image of the 'other' Foucault 1984). However, this paper argues that this quest for the 'other' establishes a process of regulation and surveillance of the self, resulting in a continual dissatisfaction of desire alluded to through the metaphor of travel. Moreover, it is suggested that a paradox exists within the health club environment, reflecting both discourses of modernity and postmodernity. Modernity is represented in the rationalised body process and its deferral within a techno-centricldependency culture. The postmodern discourse is represented in a consumer culture of instant gratification, where identity is transmuted through the sign.