Alan Tomlinson:

Theorising a Critical Politics of Sport

Text of oral presentation at Political Studies Association Inaugural Sport Group Meeting, University of Reading

April 6 2006

Opening comments
In the book Power Games: A Critical Sociology of Sport (2002) critical sociology is presented, by John Sugden and myself, as one of six overlapping elements characteristic of our sociological approach to researching sport: its importance is, of course, amplified in the subtitle of the book itself. At its simplest, we wrote in the opening chapter of that book, ‘to be critical is to be sceptical – that is, never take things at face value … seek out official statistics, but expecting them to be unreliable, in some cases even fraudulent; go in search of evidence that contradicts official wisdom … question authority’ (p. 11). It is this sense of the ‘critical’ that underlies my reflections and commentaries in this presentation. It is in an undeniable sense Gramscian, recognising the constructedness – and therefore the potential deconstruction – of commonsense; and carrying with it echoes of the Marxist commitment to praxis in both the sense that human agents are the architects of the world that they inhabit, and the sense that such agents can become the architects of renewal, reform and change. Some of that might be pie in the sky of course: to lay bare the features of commercial sport spectacle or the minutiae of the business economics of sport is hardly to threaten the media barons or the business opportunists (though it depends where, how and for whom one writes). But the point is to recognise the inherently critical nature of the analytical exercise. To engage in critical work with no or little sense of the potential impact of one’s work in the world beyond the circuits of academic publication and communication, is to betray the second sense of praxis referred to above. This is not to say that critical work always has obvious repercussions and affects practices; too often it is too timid, not even seeking to reach out into the world of practices; too often it is undervalued when it does seek to reach out, elbowed aside by armchair theorists and dismissed as merely applied. But critical work itself is by definition a form of cultural practice, potentially interventionist and imbued with an incipient agency of its own. It is in this sense that the term critical is employed in this contribution to thinking about the politics of contemporary sport. In the following sections I will a) comment (very briefly) upon the strengths and weaknesses of some sociological approaches to the critical theorisation of sport, b) consider, in slightly more detail, some of the established approaches to researching the politics of sport, and ask whether a developed or sustained sense of the critical characterises those approaches, c) review the core meaning of critical in the work of Theodor Adorno. Apologia come best at the beginning: I am no political scientist, and this is a text for a 15 minute presentation (and therefore inevitably skeletal). It is an exploratory mix of methodological reflection, a contemporary history of ideas in sport studies, and review of the canon. So, in the spirit of the workshop and cross-disciplinary dialogue, I hope that these comments will provoke responses from which I as well as others can benefit.

a) Critical theory as developed in sociological work on sport includes Marxist and feminist work, more general cultural studies work (often linked to notions of cultural politics) and what one might call variants of political economy (in which the cultural and the economic feature equally in the analysis). Such work is geared towards not just the analysis of the object, but its critique and potential transformation, usually in terms of a leftist political perspective. The problem with such work is that the transformation may be a project conceived apart from the analysis of the case at hand: the critique is known and in place before the analysis. Let me take two examples. First, Garry Whannel’s Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sport, published in 1983 and soon to be re-released as a contemporary classic re-contextualised in terms of the changing politics of the last quarter of a century, and the author’s own personal and academic journey. In this splendidly accessible synthesis, Whannel looked at broad arguments about politics and the meaning of sport, key historical influences upon the history of sport in Britain, and capitalism and the state. His concluding chapter, ‘arguments for socialism’ (also the title of the Pluto Press book series in which the title appeared) was a form of manifesto: a clarion call for a ‘genuinely egalitarian sport system, with adequate facilities and finance’; a call for fuller more open debate on élite, national and competitive sport; and a discussion of what a strategy for a ‘socialist transformation of sport’ might be (unfortunately, the cited example of a ‘people’s culture of sport … built from below’ is Cuba). The main question to ask here is: did the final chapter need the preceding discussions? Garry would argue – indeed, did so with me over lunch earlier this week – that the conclusion (proffered as critical analysis cum cultural politics) is rooted in the book’s foregoing analyses. But I would argue that the final chapter can stand alone, that from a socialist point of view the politics of sport is a matter of projection of alternatives. You don’t need the chapters and the arguments so lucidly laid out in the main text: the answers lie in the socialism that is brought to bear on the analysis, the critique comes ready made, imposed upon the empirical phenomenon of sport in Britain from above. My second example, published in the same year, is Richard Gruneau’s Class, Sports and Social Development. Gruneau proposed that ‘the most obvious task of a critical theory of sport is to define the “problematic”, the field of concepts and arguments’ (p. 142) necessary to the task. His answer drew upon Raymond Williams’s categories of dominant, emergent and residual, linked to notions of class practice, privilege and cultural reproduction. But not all sport and play, he concluded, is locked into those processes: play has a profane dimension and can represent (Paul Willis is cited here) ‘a kind of revelatory probing of the world’ (p. 150); and sport could also be a form of metaphor for ultimate possibilities (p. 151). For Gruneau, then, the critique of sport becomes ‘a part of the much broader attempt to discern the alternatives within which human reason and freedom can make history’ (p. 153). The problem here is that for all Gruneau’s eloquent scholarship and intellectual stock-taking, this battle-cry doesn’t come out of the historical and sociological study of Canadian sport itself. It is a political vision, a notion of the critical stemming from a particular interpretive stance, not a methodological premise, and far from reliant upon the scholarly analysis at the heart of the book. There is a kind of top-down critique model that has become something of an orthodoxy in sociological work on sport, looking for power and cultural reproduction and finding it/them at work in the most innocent of everyday practices. And now, to some of the most prominent positions in established work on the politics of sport.

b) Work on the politics of sport - in the second, 2003 edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, Lincoln Allison notes how definitions of sport have changed through time, but that modern sport has been characterised by moral and political aims, and emphasises that modern sport has been widely conceived as a form of political socialization, has expressed political struggles, and has been seen as having political functions. Allison stresses the defeat of amateurism as the outcome of the long struggle between an amateur-élite ethos and a professional-commercial one; and sport’s contribution to the ‘development and preservation of national identities’ (p. 508), citing the history of sport in the British Isles, post-1945 Soviet Union and post-colonial African states as indicative examples. In many respects this encyclopaedic cameo captures the essence of work in the field of the political analysis of sport. In his own three (edited) volumes – The Politics of Sport, The Changing Politics of Sport, and The Global Politics of Sport – Allison has contributed to this sort of work in commissioning valuable work on nationalism and national identities, and on the political influences upon and uses of sport in a variety of contexts and settings. An overview of the politics of sport by Barrie Houlihan, in the Dunning and Coakley Sage handbook (2000) reaffirms these concerns as central emphases in the politics of sport. Research has recognised the state as an organ of political socialization, generating policy outputs in a variety of national settings, stimulated by a range – or an interlocking mix – of motives including, in the domestic sphere, social control, military preparedness, social integration, nation-building, and image-enhancement (pp. 215-16); and on the international scene, sports diplomacy (from bridge-building to boycotts). And sports organizations (the IOC, FIFA) can provide a focus for understanding the inherently political nature of sport, including its commercial and capitalist dimensions and issues of equality.

Numerous other valuable contributions have confirmed the importance of these directions of research, but the question that I want to pose is whether such works have a less developed (or at least less explicit) critical edge than what one might call the sociological/cultural studies orthodoxy and if so, why? My own answer is that the notion of critical has been, relatively speaking, underplayed in a lot of work on policy and politics, anchored as such work has been in useful and revealing analyses of political and policy processes, practices and ideologies. Of course there are exceptions, including the reforming and campaigning zeal of a John Hoberman. But is there a source from which political work on sport more generally might derive a more critically theoretical edge? The following section considers some aspects of the work of Frankfurt School theorist Adorno.

c) Critical theory – ‘How is critical theory possible?’, the late Gillian Rose asked in an article in Political Studies in 1976, subtitled ‘Theodor W. Adorno and Concept Formation in Sociology’. Her answer was ambivalent, but her sympathy for the project clear. She summarised Adorno’s distinction between critical sociology and a non-critical sociology: ‘Critical sociology or theory is oriented to the idea of society as a subject in spite of all experience of reification, and critical sociology gives direct expression to that experience. Non-critical sociology, on the other hand, accepts reification, repeats it in its methods, and thereby loses the perspective according to which society and its laws reveal themselves’ (1976: 76). Rose notes that Adorno writes recurrently of the complete reification of society and consciousness of society – reification being ‘when a relation among men appears in the form of a property of a thing’ (p. 73). So the role for critical theory is to expose the hold of what Adorno labelled the cultural industry upon what we would now refer to as the processes of meaning production , cultural practice and identity-formation: for Adorno, then, much of popular culture, including passing references to sport and the stadium, is implicated in the domination of the consciousness of the masses: his critical theory must, then, question the reification characterising the present state of society, and offer a form of thinking differently – this is his notion of the negative dialectic, in which a critique of the reified nature of the current situation and relations of domination celebrates artistic and cultural innovation, and points to the (utopian) possibilities of a different future and an alternative consciousness. To be critical here, across the complex and wide-ranging body of Adorno’s work, means to read the relations of mass production and ideological domination into the products and practices of mass culture. It is to find the politics – a populist authoritarian one – in the everyday practices of the culture: so for Adorno there is little point in studying close-up the meanings of an act – a sport contest, a form of popular music – for its meanings are simply those of the wider characteristics of the society. Take an example from the world of sport, the English Premier League and the Championship. If Adorno were in England in 2006 he would see the big money, the dazzling marketing, the corporate profiles, the intertextuality of sporting contest, fashion and consumption. He would be able to offer critical analyses of the increasing commodification of the game, the reach of capital, the reification of consciousness: his negative dialectic would label the sport as oppressively ideological. But he would know nothing of the tradition, the passion, the life-affirming dramas of the matches; nothing of the aesthetics of the body; nothing of the patterns of fandom, of regional identity and the symbolic expression of locality, of the wit and riposte of sport gossip between encounters. Despite claims that Adorno’s thinking/philosophy is a process of ‘interpreting minute particulars’ (Simon Jarvis, Adorno – a critical introduction, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 10), Adorno’s interpretive analyses are locked in the limits of his macro-theorising.

In Adorno’s negative dialectics the study of the cultural form or practice itself is un-necessary: the aphoristic comment replaces rigorous cultural analysis. Critical theory is just that: too uninformedly critical, and too theoretical for its own good.

Closing comments
In developing a critical theorisation of politics of sport, it is not, then, Adorno and the Frankfurt School that will provide the answer. The negative dialectic is the tool of a social theorist/philosopher, not the social scientist: but the notion of cultural analysis as critique is a powerful one, and should not be altogether abandoned. A critical social scientist of sport must be more prepared than were the likes of Adorno to do basic empirical analysis, detailed and convincing analyses of selected ‘minute particulars’, and so to tease out the politics of participation in and affiliation to sport; and to bring a sceptical perspective to the processes and practices within the sports world and sports (cultural) industry. The illuminating and rigorous work already established in the politics of sport provides a basis for this, but spiced with some investigative herbs could develop a more critical flavour – and do this the right way round, the critical theorisation arising from the empirical analysis. This could show some of the sociological critical orthodoxy a thing or two about concept formation and theory generation in the social scientific analysis of sport.

END

The Emergence and Development of UK Leisure Studies

This address was first delivered as the opening presentation at Leisure Studies 25 (September 21, 2006), a symposium to celebrate a quarter of a century of success of the Leisure Studies Association's journal Leisure Studies. The presentation is also to be reproduced in the Leisure Studies Association's Newsletter in the Autumn of 2006.

Opening Comments
Thank-you to Leisure Studies and its Editorial Board, and to Loughborough University, for the invitation to reflect on the last quarter of a century and more during which leisure studies has established itself in the UK. Sheila Scraton is briefed to talk of achievement, Ken Roberts of weaknesses. So I’ve got the mapping slot, the chance to look back in a descriptive overview. At first that looks easy; after a little more thought, if I’m to avoid my views on achievements and weaknesses, the danger is that the title invites a chronology or narrative of contributions to the field. But such accounts are of course always selective, and I have had my go at such accounts in the journal – two gos in fact, in 1989 and 2006. So in this talk I will seek neither to repeat my views in detail, nor provide an anatomy or genealogy of the published field. I will refer briefly, in the following section, to some aspects of these published observations on the emergence of the field, but my main question about its development will be why it has not developed further, or impacted more, in the research and scholarly life of the UK academy. I will do this by making some general points about the emergence and development of leisure studies as both a research focus and an institutionalised part of the higher education curriculum , and then looking at the social scientific, mainly sociological, context of its impact.

Emergence and development

Leisure Studies emerged in the UK in the 1970s out of an alliance of interests; policy analysts and policymakers; environmentalists and planners; physical educationalists; and sociologists with a specialism – work, the economy, or youth, for instance – that reached into the sphere of leisure. Social history also made telling contributions, in work on recreation and moral reform, leisure and social control, and social class as an influence upon taste and popular culture, work often related to the early phase of industrialization in Britain. The Leisure Studies Association (LSA) was formed in the mid-1970s and created conferences and publications that felt topical, timely and interventionist. You can consult the LSA website on this and see the range of coverage. The journal was a direct consequence of these activities, and the excitement among the early editorial board – meeting in the late John Roberts’s home in North London, or at a no-charge polytechnic boardroom or base in central London – was generated by the aspiration to establish a genuinely interdisciplinary initiative relevant to issues of the day; and to do so in a rigorous and scholarly, yet accessible, form. In those early days Stan Parker always questioned the need for extensive footnotes or over-long lists of references – this was, it is important to add, several years before the spectre of the Research Selectivity initiative in the universities, to become, in its third guise in 1992, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The journal was open to applied research, analyses of professional practice, interdisciplinary approaches, and discipline-based contributions (say, in history or political science, certainly not just sociology) that would inform an understanding of the place of leisure in particular times and places. I leave it to colleagues, for the moment, to judge whether the journal has managed to uphold these founding principles.

Of course there was earlier work on leisure, preceding the shaping of leisure studies as a subject community or association. Among the most prominent names in the UK were Ken Roberts, who published Leisure in 1970, and Stan Parker, hot on the heels of Ken the following year with The Future of Work and Leisure. A couple of years later Parker, together with the Smiths (Michael from Salford and Cyril from the governmental policy sector), published the edited collection Leisure and Society in Britain. This was when Penguin was still publishing academic books, when New Society was prospering, and the collection was published by the Allen Lane division of Penguin Books. Michael Smith, primary drafter of the general introduction to the book, argued for leisure to be seen as ‘a positive experience of freedom; of freedom to enter into obligations and relationships, to pursue interests and opportunities’ (p. 5). Re-reading this, there’s an emancipatory idealism at the heart of such a project. It’s fair to say, I think, that this phase of the study of leisure was driven by a kind of liberal interventionism, undeniably a form of cultural politics. One of the fascinating things, looking back the third of a century to the Penguin collection, is to see that Raymond Williams features in the opening part and the (fifth) and final part of the Reader, defining (primarily working-class) cultural institutions, and proposing alternative cultural relations (re-shapings). The liberal interventionists saw no problem in this: a different emphasis maybe, but in its eloquent and literary Williamsesque radicalism, part of the same overall debate. The reader/text began with culture, ended with education, planning and policies, and in between gave space to contributions on work, the life-cycle, and the leisure industries.

As the field further developed, challenges from more radical sociologies, figurational sociology, cultural studies, black studies, feminism, radical geographies, let alone post-modern frameworks and epistemologies driven by cultural politics, were to expose the fragility of any consensual approach. But when we look at the leisure-related work published initially in the field, by both the LSA and the journal, we should not write off the vision of these pre-journal and pre-Association pioneers.

As leisure studies emerged in master’s and then undergraduate programmes of the HE institutions, out of Physical Education and Recreation Management bases, perhaps the policy and planning, and critical sociological, frameworks, came to dominate the university and polytechnic curricula. And, as I have discussed in Leisure Studies 25/3, with sport science leading the way in its BASES-inspired specialisms, (1) and with the RAE stimulating specialist claims in university research, the all-embracing framework of leisure studies has lost ground to the more marketable sport tag. Systematic work needs to be done on these trends in curriculum design and national institutional positioning, but I suspect that we all began to lose our nerve in the mid-1990s, when it became clear just what the stakes of the RAE actually were; I handed on the BSA Leisure and Recreation Joint Study Group, (2) and with John Sugden established the Sociology of Sport Study Group. As an institutional RAE manager, I withdrew from my role as LSA Publications Officer, and directed my staff towards the journals. Leisure Studies, the journal, may have benefited from this – if the Brighton experience is typical of other colleagues – but leisure studies, the field, certainly has not. Our biggest undergraduate programme in the Sport and Leisure Cultures area in Brighton was Leisure Policy and Administration; now it is Sport Journalism. Getting the confident recruits to the latter to recognise the importance of locating sport within cultures, discourses and politics of leisure has turned out to be one of my most demanding pedagogic challenges. For more of my public self-denunciations – perhaps I’m affected at the moment by my current reading of the biography of Mao Tse-Tung - please see the discussion with David Andrews in Leisure Studies 25 (3). But let me now move back from the curriculum to the wider academic context, and, recognising the prominence of the sociological in the emergence and development of leisure studies, ask how work in our field has fared in the wider social scientific landscape.

Leisure in – or out of – the social scientific canon

Where, then, does the subject leisure fit in the social sciences? For the purposes of this overview I have taken a look at some basic contemporary sociological sources. Oxford University Press’s A Dictionary of Sociology (edited by John Scott and Gordon Marshall, 2005) offers a very brief overview of some sociological concerns with the theme of leisure, but claims that ‘leisure has rarely been a central concern of sociologists. However, as a consequence of the “cultural turn” in English-speaking sociology in the early 1990s there were signs of increasing sociological interest in the media, sport, cultural studies and consumerism, and so the subject of leisure generally may come to feature more persistently in future research’ (p. 359). Chris Rojek’s (mid-1980s) theoretical overview and intervention is cited at the end of this entry/commentary.

How long does it take for such signs to manifest themselves in the mainstream, or at least in the wider sociological consciousness? Is a decade and more long enough? Or is even the cautious judgement of these prominent dictionary writers a case of over-optimism? In 2006, Anthony Giddens published the 5th. edition of his Polity Press book, Sociology. In his 22 chapters and 1,094 pages he found no need for any separate entry or subsection, let alone chapter, for ‘leisure’. Early chapters on defining the subject, the globalized world, and theoretical thinking are followed by ones dedicated to social interaction and everyday life, the life-course, families, health, class and stratification, poverty and welfare, inequality, sex and gender, race and religion, media, organization and networks, education, work, crime and deviance, politics (and terrorism), cities and urban spaces, and environment and risk. OK, you might think, the topic of leisure is so well-established now that it needs no chapter of its own; it permeates numerous of those chapter topics: Anthony Giddens, author at postgraduate level of a dissertation touching on the sociology of leisure/sport, will have integrated our social scientific understanding of leisure into his overarching analysis of society. So it does not matter that leisure – and the same goes for sport – does not even warrant an entry in the index. It will appear, from time to time, in his coverage – how could you talk about the media without touching on changing leisure patterns, everyday life without addressing the nature of non-work practice? But such academic uses of leisure are usually employed as an illustration of some bigger theoretical point: for instance, in the way that Robert Puttnam has used the bowling-alley as a metaphor for the decline in civic participation and communal cultural practice of the citizens of the USA. Giddens actually uses Puttnam’s work in his chapter on organizations and networks.

Among the sociologists

BSA 2006 had one of those great general titles – ‘Sociology, Social Order(s) and Disorder(s) – that allow you to offer anything at all, as long as the identified streams are accommodating enough. And if not – as BSA 2007 is offering – there is often an Open Stream. In Harrogate there were round about 220 papers, 3 plenaries, a dozen or so study group or panel meetings, and 9 posters. Leisure (the same goes for sport and tourism) featured in no stream headings. The main headings were Cities/Spaces, Citizenship, Culture, Gender/Sexuality, Crime, Identity, Education, Risk/Safety/Justice, International Order, and, lest there not be enough chances for you there, Social Theory, Researching, and History. Around 57 papers offered under these headings might have been acceptable on an LSA conference programme – certainly at least in a programme such as our Sussex conferences in 1984 and the end of that decade. But leisure was approached in these sociological circles as an aspect of deviance, consumption, cultural identity, public space, urban lifestyle, youth culture, or public policy – and the list could go on. There is, as I’ve implied above, an argument that this registers as a success for the field. But, the papers that I attended on the nineteenth century history of urban leisure, on the remaking of heritage spaces, and on changing sources of and influences upon cultural identity in post-war Britain, cited virtually none of what, from the perspective of the LSA, its publications and its journal, might be claimed as the established leisure studies literature. What should we learn from this? That contemporary sociologists are relatively ill-read? That databases under-represent the research and scholarship achieved by leisure scholars and researchers? That the leisure studies community speaks in too limited circles and networks? More systematic analysis of these questions might lead the leisure studies constituency to consider future alliances with disciplines and complementary interdisciplinary fields.

Concluding observations and plea

David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950), included several essays on leisure in his Abundance for What? And Other Essays (1964). His 1957 essay noted the importance of leisure (i) in providing meaning, satisfaction and challenges that work no longer provides; (ii) in its increasing indistinctness from work, with interpersonal relations growing in importance (I remain a little confused about this point); and (iii) expressing in non-work spheres ‘widely shared roles as consumers’ that ‘influence’ workers’ outlooks ‘as much as their segregated roles as producers’. In other words, Riesman postulated that leisure – conceived as time and activities away from formal work and occupational activity – has become a source of identity in a period of increasingly selective consumption: in Riesman’s terms, workers’ leisure-time specialities articulate ‘income or prestige or both’ (p. 155).There is a rebalancing under way here, with status accruing from leisure rather than work (p. 154). Yet, as Riesman observed in a further essay on ‘Leisure and Work in a Post-Industrial Society’ (1958) the sociological significance of leisure remained scarcely developed in comparison to the sociology of work or occupations: ‘we have little comparable information concerning the sociology of leisure … very few inventories of how leisure is actually spent’ (p. 174).

Half a century on in the UK we can claim to have moved beyond this starting point. And as a Professor of Leisure Studies I am grateful for the opportunity to have done work in an interesting and socially extremely important field, to have contributed to work and study on leisure, its place in contemporary life, and leisure-related institutions and practices such as sport. The title has allowed me to be true to my intellectual roots in the humanities and undertake contemporary historical analyses, as well as addressing and debating with political scientists, sociologists and social theorists on conceptual and theoretical questions concerning citizenship, civil society, consumption, identity, spectacle, and globalization. Some forms of leisure have afforded us undreamt-of opportunities to research, debate and speak internationally: the essential internationalism of sport and tourism has made this possible. Professor of Leisure Studies has also been a good ice-breaker at parties and social gatherings, among doctors and social workers, bankers and management developers: I feel that I should reveal this professional identity with a relaxed look and an air of composure. But if leisure studies is to make still more of its potential in the UK we should not relax too easily: there remains much to be done. Here is my own plea for the future.

First, play to interdisciplinary strengths, both in our publishing strategy in our own journal and in appropriate other interdisciplinary and discipline-based journals. Journals concerned with gender, cultural studies, cultural theory, media, race/ethnicity, space and politics, the city and public culture – submit our work to these as well as to the leisure, sport, tourism, and physical education journals, and we might fulfil the promise hinted at in the Oxford Dictionary’s glance at our field. And enter dialogue with the disciplines. We have done this over the years with the BSA (in the Leisure and Recreation, and Sociology of Sport groups), but not enough, or at least not with sufficient consistency, to profile the scholarly accomplishments of the field and get our work cited and recognised (as my comments on the BSA 2006 event evidence). But we should show the disciplines that they should draw upon the accomplishments of interdisciplinary fields. At its annual conference in Reading in 2006 the Political Studies Association staged the first meeting of its new research group on sport: papers on sport policy, contestation of water-based sports space, a critical theorisation of sport, and the political economy of football (and community) were included in the two sessions: it felt exciting and innovative to be there. If we are truly interdisciplinary we must keep up with, and continue to get to know, the disciplines, and in turn show those disciplines the quality and import of the work that we are doing. Our challenge – in agenda-setting for research, in the identification of research degree projects and recruits, and in curriculum design at undergraduate and postgraduate levels - is to sustain the promise of the connection-making cross and inter-disciplinary approach: to avoid a fragmentation back into the disciplines, a fragmentation in which leisure studies is almost absent from the UCAS listing, and its profile and quality of output questioned by the 2001 (69) RAE panel.

Second, consider in general where the future of leisure studies lies – what are its constituencies thirty years on from the founding of the LSA, a quarter of a century into the journal’s history? Has cultural studies stolen its thunder? Have ESRC (3) programmes in consumption and identity handed much of its potential over to the sociology, revived geography, economics, and cultural studies departments? Do programmes like Liverpool University and Warwick’s third-year options in leisure and sport (the sociology and politics thereof) pull a recruitment carpet from under leisure studies itself? Where are the policy-makers and educationalists of 2006 for whom leisure is a professional concern and an intellectual challenge?

Third, draw up a research agenda – rather like the late 1970s SSRC/Sports Council joint programme, stimulated by Mike Collins. Would a comparable agenda look credible today? Or has UK leisure studies been trumped by the specialisms of sport studies and tourism studies, pushed back to the margins by the sweeping generalities of cultural studies and (in our increasingly mediated cultural landscapes) media studies? Has leisure, as a topic, been downgraded in the schools, into some mix of geography and business, going nowhere as far as the HE curriculum is concerned (or perhaps into hospitality and tourism)?

Fourth, and finally, review the professional profile of leisure studies, the relation between the LSA and its journal. There have been fall-outs between these two flagships of the field, and many of us regret that the original LSA signatories to the deal establishing the journal did not keep a controlling interest for the association in the journal. I do not want to raise ugly family history at an anniversary event, and it is an unusual situation to which I refer: I know of no comparable one in sociology or sport history. But do we make the most of our main accomplishments here? For instance, do we profile the publications list sufficiently in the journal?

My plea then is to take up these four points more explicitly. We may conclude, with the founders of the Association and the planners of the journal, that leisure studies is at heart an interdisciplinary research field. ‘Nothing lasts forever’, as Brian Ferry warbled. Where today is industrial relations as a field? Where are the postgraduate programmes in trades union studies? But if we look about at some of the recurrent public issues of the day in the UK – the culture of childhood, ASBOS, healthy eating, exercise and the moral panic relating to obesity, corruption in sport institutions and practices, travel and the environment, creative industries and consumption, work and the knowledge economy, cyberculture and communication, community regeneration, sustainable anything – I can’t think of a better academic and intellectual space to occupy than leisure studies, from which to stake a claim to undertake relevant, rigorous and challenging teaching and research. I sincerely hope that at the 50th anniversary of the journal a (currently) young colleague will be able to repeat this sentiment.

Notes
(1) BASES stands for the British Association for Sport and Exercise Sciences (formerly the British Association of Sport Sciences).
(2) BSA stands for the British Sociological Association.
(3) ESRC stands for the Economic and Social Research Council.
(4) SSRC stands for the Social Science Research Council, forerunner of the ESRC (see note 3 above).

© Alan Tomlinson

Alan Tomlinson
Professor of Leisure Studies
Sport and Leisure Cultures
Chelsea School
University of Brighton UK

September 21/October 10 2006

Studying Leisure

In September 2006 the journal Leisure Studies celebrated its 25th anniversary. As one of its former editors, and a long-standing member and erstwhile Publications Officer of the Leisure Studies Association (LSA), I was interviewed, for the journal, about the growth of Leisure Studies in the UK, and delivered the opening presentation on this theme at the symposium to mark this landmark at Loughborough University on September 21.
US social scientist David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950), wrote in 1957 that 'there has been some tendency to regard leisure as not quite a serious topic'. But, he wrote, there are good reasons why this is an unfortunate tendency. Two of these are, first, that it is in leisure that people find meanings, satisfactions and challenges that are no longer available in work; and more 'widely shared roles as consumers' affect people's outlook 'as much as their segregated roles as producers'.

Leisure Studies, and the annual conferences and publications list of the LSA, have confirmed the seriousness of leisure as a topic for researchers. For my own reflections on more than a quarter of a century of work in this field, see Leisure Studies Volume 25 Number 3 (July 2006).

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