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We often think of leisure education as focused on the person, but what about the environments in which people experience leisure? Can leisure education be extended to include the education of organ...

Over the last two decades, some of our scholarly work and teaching has included a focus on leisure education (e.g. Hutchinson & Robertson, 2012; Shannon, 2012). In recent years, the two of us, toge...

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how engaging youth at risk through a youth-led approach to recreation and leisure programming can contribute to leisure-induced meaning-mak...

What do umbrellas have to do with leisure research? Why do they need to be troubled? Throughout the course of this manuscript, we will unpack understandings of umbrella categories – specifi...

The purpose of this study was to identify and summarize to what extent articles in leisure journals have focused on and critically examined the relationship between leisure and sustainability. The study was conducted using content analysis of articles in leisure journals over the past decade (2005–2015) including: Leisure/Loisir, Journal of Leisure Research, Leisure Studies, Leisure Sciences, World Leisure, Journal of Park and Recreation Administration, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Journal of Travel Research, Tourism Management and Journal of Ecotourism. The results indicate that while some contributions to advance sustainability are emerging in leisure journals, there is a need for more explicit links between leisure and sustainability in the literature. The paper highlights areas where leisure research could be making stronger contributions to advance sustainability moving forward including questioning the relationship between leisure and sustainability, determinin...

Stereotyping based on age is one of the most tolerated forms of social prejudice in Canada. These discriminatory attitudes and assumptions have negative consequences on many aspects of life, including participation in leisure, particularly if these assumptions are internalized and accepted as reality. We consider the contributions of therapeutic recreation (TR) and TR practitioners in challenging ageism by advocating for a return to the roots of leisure, focusing on leisure’s potential to draw out individual strengths and abilities thereby resisting various forms of ageism through agency and action. We examine the field’s focus on biomedical outcomes and highlight how this paradigm serves to undermine opportunities for meaningful leisure experiences. We suggest ways by which a return to meaningful leisure in later life may enable older adults to resist discriminatory practices. We conclude by presenting a blueprint for TR practitioners that encompasses a broader, socially relevant scope of practic...

As an introduction to this special issue of Leisure/Loisir on re-imagining and transforming therapeutic recreation, I reach into philosopher and historian Michel Foucault’s “toolbox” to discuss a critical theory and practice of therapeutic recreation. The true identity of therapeutic recreation can never be settled once and for all, because therapeutic recreation is a social construction, not an objective necessity, leaving it open to being something different than it presently is. Because there are different ways of telling the truth about therapeutic recreation, knowledge is not an inevitably enlightened path, but rather a creative and controlling power that can produce positive and negative effects in the lives of people. Disciplines like therapeutic recreation attempt to control practices and practitioners through the production of knowledge (discourses), which can constrain other perspectives on truth and ways of living. Dominant discourses of therapeutic recreation can be understood, challen...

Transgender individuals are more likely to have lower social support and a more negative self-image than their cisgender (i.e., non-transgender) counterparts. While emerging research has demonstrated a potential association between these factors and physical activity behaviour, no studies have examined this relationship in transgender individuals. Eighty (n = 33 transgender, 47 cisgender) adults completed validated questionnaires assessing leisure-time physical activity, social support and physical self-perception. Transgender individuals were less physically active and reported lower social support and physical self-perception than their cisgender peers. Social support and self-perception emerged as mediators of the difference in physical activity between transgender and cisgender individuals. Results highlight the need for inclusive leisure settings and programs as well as increased social support for transgender individuals to maximize leisure-time physical activity.

Research has shown that leisure can be an effective tool in reducing disaffiliation for those who live on the streets; however, there is little research that incorporates input from street-involved persons themselves, especially from street-involved youth. In the study described herein, we sought to examine the role of unstructured leisure activities in forming social connections between street-involved youth as well as between these youth and members of the mainstream community. We conducted eight interviews with street-involved youth in Ottawa, Ontario. Our findings reveal that the youth used unstructured leisure to form social connections with others. Further, in contrast to popular assumptions, our findings suggest that street-involved youth participate in a range of conventional unstructured leisure activities within the mainstream. Nevertheless, although the youth engaged in conventional leisure within the mainstream, most did not result in the generation of feelings of connections to the broader co...

This study highlights the importance of social bonds for Chinese Canadians and the critical role they play in engaging volunteers. The discussion examines the impact of using strong ties in a community development project, and culturally based leisure is presented as a context that can be used to develop and mobilize Chinese Canadian communities. More specifically, the findings of this study suggest that culturally based leisure contributes to community capacity at three levels of social agency (network, organizational and individual) by (1) offering a context for bonding and building solidarity among members of a minority population, (2) providing a framework for integration and adaptation by fostering a sense of belonging and sense of community and (3) acting as a bridge to mainstream society.

In this article, we explore and expand theorizing about serious leisure examining its complexities and contradictions and its potential for the social sphere, applying particularly the critical lens of feminist communitarianism. Beginning with a critique of the reliance on activity-based definitions of serious leisure in empirical research and conceptualizations of serious leisure as embedded in a series of dualisms such as positive–negative, work–leisure and serious–casual, we suggest serious leisure be re-envisioned as a complex experience influencing and influenced by the sociopolitical context. We also explore the functional, normative nature of previous literature on serious leisure and the possibility of re-envisioning serious leisure as an expressive and creative experience that nurtures diversity. Advocating for increased attention to the sociopolitical context and the adoption of a critical lens, we suggest that serious leisure experiences may be gendered, commodified and stratified. We advocate ...

Although leisure involvement can be a resource for coping with stigmatization, some forms of leisure are themselves stigmatized. One such stigmatized leisure context is the furry fandom, a diverse group of people that create anthropomorphic animal identities. Drawing on the minority stress model and symbolic self-completion theory, we examined survey responses of 3473 members of online furry communities. Greater involvement in the furry community was associated with higher levels of well-being. This association was statistically explained by greater disclosure of furry identity and an indirect path through feelings of self-acceptance and affiliation with the furry fandom linked to greater disclosure of furry identity. Results suggest how deeper leisure involvement helps to counteract minority stress and cope with a stigmatized leisure identity.

Current research on women in sororities in the US offers only a myopic picture of the culture. The purpose of this post-structural feminist ethnography was to explore American sorority culture as one way to expose the complicated relationships between discourse and gendered performances of self. Using the representational strategy of an ethnographic screenplay, we illustrate how sorority women are constituted in relation to performances of femininity and expectations of appropriate “ladylike” behaviours. In doing so, we highlight the processes of gendered subjectivity and illustrate the ways that women are constituted within discourse within their lived leisure experience.

This article considers the production and consumption of visual art as an everyday dimension of human activity that necessarily occurs in relation to authoritative discourses, spaces and institutions. Because making art offers a unique and broad scope for generating creative messages and representations, the activity has particularly emancipatory implications. Studies of making and sharing works of art can contribute to an understanding of leisure activity in terms of relationships of power that shape the significance of cultural phenomena, including those often marginalized under conditions of capitalism. Perspectives drawn from leisure studies and critical theory in the first section of the article provide a framework to discuss illustrative events and practices, including an exhibition of amateur art at the Art Gallery of Alberta that demonstrated a powerful local interest in participatory culture. The growing phenomenon of traditional “pencil and paper” sketching groups coordinated through online exhi...

Associations made between serious leisure and flow have until now remained theoretical, conceptually linking the two. Returning to the experiences themselves, to the actual experiencing of flow, this article draws upon an exploratory study into the intricacies of flow-based serious leisure experience (Elkington, S. (2006). Exploring the nature of pre- and post-flow in serious leisure. In S. Elkington, I. Jones, & L. Lawrence (Eds.), Serious leisure: Extensions and applications (pp. 145–159). Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association; Elkington, S. (2008). The need for theoretical originality when taking the flow of leisure seriously. In P. Gilchrist & B. Wheaton (Eds.), Whatever happened to the leisure society? Theory, debate and policy (pp. 135–164). Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association; Elkington, S. (2010). Articulating a systematic phenomenology of flow: An experience-process perspective. Leisure/Loisir, 34, 327–260) of participants from one activity characteristic of Stebbins's amateur, hobbyist and...

Leisure research has a long history of exploring relationships between leisure and gender, typically using feminist approaches. However, the vast majority of this literature depends on dichotomous distinctions of male and female with little regard to more diverse expressions and embodiments of gender. In this article, authors blend narratives of self to situate their subjectivities with those created with “Amy,” a self-identified transgender woman, to explore more diverse notions of gender, leisure space and social justice. Five themes were identified: creating safe leisure space for self via masculine leisure performance; creating comfortable space for others by performing social drag; negotiating safe leisure spaces for self and others during preferred gender expression; leisure space as a site for (trans)gender affirmation and transformation; and constructing inclusive leisure community space. A critical gender approach is recommended to more safely position diversely gendered voices.

The role of farms and agricultural spaces is shifting and expanding. What was once primarily a space for work and production is now a de facto locus of rural and urban social change, illustrated by activities such as farm-based agritourism, home-based hobby farming, rural/urban farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture. In addition, agricultural spaces are seen by some as family-friendly places for recreation, education, small-scale production and personal growth. Much has been said to describe the importance of farming and local food as social movements, but in terms of leisure studies, current thinking leaves off after farm tourism. This suggests the need for a conceptual framework that addresses those who engage both the supply and demand sides of agriculture for the purposes of leisure and recreation. To this end, we present “Agrileisure” – an introductory framework with theoretical roots in leisure studies, ecology, sociology, psychology, social justice and geography.

In the summer of 2007, Bollywood (and the International Indian Film Academy Awards) came to Yorkshire in the north of England and public spaces in cities such as Leeds were used to host various events relating to South Asian culture. The focus here is on the South Asian Festival at Roundhay Park and shifting uses and perceptions of public leisure spaces. We argue that a conceptualization of space for leisure can be effectively utilized to acknowledge how leisure spaces are constructed across racialized, classed and gendered social relations. We consider how thinking intersectionally can inform our understanding of the ways in which leisure and space are intertwined and indicate the salience of further, future work for leisure scholars engaging with critical issues of difference.

In this article, we critically examine an alternative to the theoretical concepts of dividing practices (Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8, 777–795) and total institutions (Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books) by exploring the communitizing potential of long-term care facilities and prisons. In doing so, we highlight the possibility for meaningful leisure experiences to open these institutions to the broader community and foster a more inclusive vision of community. We believe that opportunities for leisure involvement can provide community members and those residing in institutions with the chance to come together in ways that are mutually enhancing; however, these opportunities have not yet been realized to an extent that will truly bring about authentic social change. We argue that a re-imagining of these spaces as sites for inclusive leisure experiences can foster much needed socia...

This study explored: (1) whether Latino residents of two highly segregated neighbourhoods in Chicago, IL, USA, experienced or witnessed any discriminatory incidents in leisure settings; (2) what were the most frequent places and types of discrimination they encountered; (3) who were the perpetrators of discriminatory acts and (4) how people responded to discrimination. Moreover, Latinos own interracial/inter-ethnic attitudes toward members of other ethnic/racial groups were examined. Data were collected with the use of surveys and focus groups. The results suggest perceived discrimination is an important constraint on recreation behaviour among Latino urban residents. The findings revealed that Latinos most often experienced discrimination from African Americans and Whites visiting the parks, as well as from law enforcement officers. Verbal harassment from other recreationists, being stopped and searched by police and being denied a service or being given substandard service were named most often as the types of discrimination. Survey respondents indicated that they responded to discrimination by visiting the locations with a group of people or by notifying the police, whereas focus groups participants suggested withdrawal was the most often employed tactic. The findings also suggested a disconnect between Latinos’ interracial/inter-ethnic attitudes at the individual and group levels. Although the interviewees reported having positive to neutral interracial/inter-ethnic attitudes, they were willing to acknowledge the existence of prejudicial attitudes among Latinos at the group level.

Twenty-eight care partners and 27 persons living with dementia in the community participated in qualitative active interviews to provide their perspectives on the meaning and experience of eating out. Using grounded theory methodology, a substantive theory on eating out as a way of balancing life was developed. Two types of balance were identified: (1) environmental balance through spicing up life and minimizing demands and (2) social balance through binding glue and being part of a peer group. The many changes noted around dementia required families to adopt strategies to help achieve balance and support successful experiences eating away from home.

What does leisure mean to people? Has the essence of leisure been changed? The individuals may feel controlled by a system that values material possessions more than emotional and spiritual wealth. In the present context, it seems that people respond to the pressures of being productive and of consumption by measuring what they are and how much they have rather than analyzing the quality of who they are and what they have. These extrinsic motivators tend to govern people's lives and behaviours influencing how they relate to others. These motivators have also impacted the spiritual and emotional elements of quality of life. Leisure is no longer a disposition of the mind, spontaneous and genuine; it has become a disposition of the society. Thus, the historical sense of freedom in leisure has been lost to consumerism. This paper analyzes the elements that have transformed leisure behaviour and explores alternatives to help regain the philosophical essence of leisure.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between the Christian religion and the meanings of leisure in contemporary Australia. Data were collected via a self‐administered questionnaire from a sample of 475 residents of Brisbane, Australia. Three main findings concerning leisure and the Christian religion were established. Firstly, the meanings that religious people associated with leisure were largely no different from other members of the population. Secondly, there was evidence to suggest that specific Christian denominations were linked to particular meanings. Thirdly, when leisure was focused towards either recuperating or finding fulfillment, leisure and religion were significantly related. For example, some people may use leisure to express their religion.

This article looks at the phenomenon of eco‐leisure, both in theory and in practice. A distinction is made between eco‐leisure and ecotourism, and it is suggested that the academia needs to pay more attention to ecologically oriented leisure activities. The paper presents examples of eco‐leisure practice and suggests a working definition of this new term. An explanation of the term is provided by elaborating on three of the pivotal aspects of this phenomenon: the urban‐rural context, the sociological aspects, and the environmental aspects. The review of these aspects illustrates how eco‐leisure can contribute to the understanding of modern urban life and its leisure component. In addition to the theoretical contribution of introducing the term, and its meanings, eco‐leisure has a high potential for managerial and practical implications, especially the improvement of life quality in the urban environment including the reduction of the tensions and stress of contemporary urban reality.

This paper explores how the grocery shopping trip has the potential to offer opportunities for leisure. Whilst previous work on consumption has focused on more public sites of consumption, we focus on the mundane, day‐to‐day reality of supermarket shopping and leisure within family relationships. This paper argues that any leisure gained through shopping is devalued, as it is subject to gendered power relations in the household. The data from 13 heterosexual couples illustrates how these negotiations are played out in the shopping activity. We found that gendered social relationships determined the experiences and opportunities for leisure for the women in the study. Our findings further demonstrate that rather than providing an empowering space for leisure, grocery shopping actually reproduced and positioned these women within traditional discourses of housewife and mother, thus restricting and reducing their access to clearly defined and valued leisure time.

Crafts are often understood as conservative and solitary pursuits of the elderly but crafts have long been used for mutual aid and political expression. This project examines two cases where crafts are used as instruments of political resistance. Started in 1987, the AIDS quilt was to remember those lost to the pandemic but its purpose was not limited to honouring the dead but was also a powerful tool for prevention, awareness and to highlight governmental inaction; The second case examines contemporary “craftivists,” activists that use crafts in subversive, political ways. This project is informed by de Certeau's work on the tactical nature of everyday life, where people subvert the structure of “culture” in order to make it their own. These two cases explore where craft (as art) and crafty (cunning) intersect and become a meaningful tool for political action.

We eat every day; it is both leisure and work for all of us. And yet, dramatically few of us have examined food practices with a leisure studies lens. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a deeply political practice embedded in popular culture. Three cases are used to highlight the politics of leisure and food: the Slow Food Movement, the food justice movement, and the organic farming movement. Each case represents a particular dimension—pleasure, activism, and empowerment—of a political practice that is grounded in reflection, resistance, and alternative visions. Together they constitute a form of critically reflexive leisure that broadens our understanding of the field, builds interdisciplinary relationships between leisure studies and other disciplines, and helps us to better take into account vital issues such as sustainability, health, and climate change.

Although stories of mythological vampires in the media (i.e., books, movies, television) have captivated audiences for years, there exist a large number of contemporary human vampires within an active underground subculture sometimes referred to as the Sanguinarium. This paper describes vastly different types of human vampires and includes an autoethnographic approach to help understand complexities of this form of deviance. Although vampirism generally is considered deviant and may be roughly divided into different types, such deviance calls into question what typically is considered “normal” in many ways. Real vampires are often perceived as psychopathological and perhaps criminal compared to normal members of society. Such perceptions and descriptions are not necessarily valid, but remain social constructions that are situated within broader cultural discourses and interpretations. Upon closer examination, many self‐identified vampires and their rituals and practices can be understood as artis...

The products of popular culture not only provide pleasure but also impart information about our gendered and racial identities. In line with feminist and critical race theories, we used collective memory work to encourage young men to recall, examine, and analyze their earliest memories of media to connect their individual experiences to shared experiences of similar and/or different groups in society. We present the men's memories interwoven with analysis and interpretations focusing on four major themes: (a) media perpetuates violent/aggressive expectations of men and women as objects; (b) men's leisure is marked by racial stereotypes; (c) men use media to construct racial identity; (d) media can be used as a catalyst for understanding White male privilege. The process also gave participants an opportunity to engage the “crisis of representation” as they solidified and challenged their own hegemonic thinking in relation to what it means to be men of different races.

The recent addition of a Junior Girls’ category to the Dene Games component of the Arctic Winter Games raises important questions about the ways in which popular physical practices are developed. In this paper, I examine efforts aimed at the “development” of physical practices and attempts at gender equity in Dene games in the Northwest Territories (NWT) and at the Arctic Winter Games. In so doing, I highlight the links between these popular physical practices in the NWT, politics, Western feminisms, and cultural self‐determination, while also suggesting possible future directions for women's involvement in Dene games.

This paper studies the leisure activity of anime fansubbing, where fans of Japanese animation subtitle these shows for distribution to other fans in their own native languages. This activity is studied within the framework of cultural politics whereby it will be shown that fansubbers, as “lead‐producers,” hold perceptions of cultural differences and how these differences should be (re)presented. Illustrated empirically using the themes of male/female, fictive kinship and human emotive discourse, fansubbers understand and promote the dichotomy of East/West by conceptualizing “Other” cultures as “Another,” in that they imply that “Other” cultures are “different” but must be accommodated in order for consumption to take place. In this regard, fansubbers actively engage in a constant negotiation of “familiarity” and “foreignness” within an imaginary and normative framework.

This paper reports on an effort by the authors to engender debate about the state of leisure research. We seek to respond to those in the field who have challenged us to think about whether our research and practice is actively engaging issues of social change. To do this, we developed an analytical framework based upon the major tenets of critical theory and used it to evaluate the abstracts from four leisure research journals from 2000–2004. By presenting our framework and evaluation criteria, we are in no way judging the quality of these articles or their respective journals. We are, however, seeking to provoke discussion about the direction of the field as we present the results of our assessment and offer suggestions for further evaluations and possible directions for future research.

This research uses the relational benefits framework to investigate the relative utility of confidence (i.e., trust, consistency of service), social (i.e., friendships, personal recognition), and special treatment (i.e., priority service, price breaks) benefits in predicting recreation participants’ self‐reported relationship strength with service providers in the public, not‐for‐profit, and private sectors. Fitness class participants (N=255) completed a questionnaire asking about the extent to which they received each type of benefit in their interactions with the organization. The three relational benefits were found to explain significant variance in relationship strength scores above and beyond behavioural variables such as length or frequency of participation. Only social and confidence benefits were significant predictors of relationship strength, with social benefits being approximately twice as important across the entire sample and the only type of benefit that was significant in all thr...

The goal of this study was to investigate the meanings behind leisure constraints experienced by Chinese international graduate students and the negotiation efforts that they had adopted. The study was based on 16 semi‐structured conversational interviews with Chinese graduate students attending the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign in the academic year of 2003/2004. The constraints negotiation framework proposed by Jackson et al. (1993) was employed in this study to analyze negotiation of constraints in leisure and non‐leisure aspects of life and on behavioural and cognitive levels. The interviews revealed that participants experienced a number of constraints on leisure, including lack of time, language barrier and cultural differences, lack of friends, and feelings of lack of entitlement to leisure. Their constraints negotiation strategies were mostly of cognitive nature and involved devaluing the importance of leisure and, at the same time, highlighting the importance of work and stud...

Leisure services are often seen as a potential source for creating social capital. However, systemic impediments (e.g., racism) must be taken into account. A community‐based study on race relations in a Canadian city is applied to leisure services, and considered in light of a social capital perspective. The study shows that racism must be addressed for social capital, and social cohesion, to be fostered. Suggestions are made for leisure professionals to be engaged in critical analysis of such impediments and social structures that may maintain marginalization. In contrast to other conceptualizations, Bourdieu's version of social capital—mediated by symbolic violence such that marginalized people's resources are unrecognized—is suggested as more useful for community development through leisure services.

Social science researchers who study natural resource based rural communities are increasingly interested in the attachments people form with natural landscapes and the actions that result from those relationships. Recreation, encompassing outdoor leisure activities engaged in by tourists, seasonal and year‐round residents, involves a relationship with the land where the activity takes place. This paper highlights trends resulting in increased recreation participation and presents an overview of literature on place, community, and the phenomenon of amenity migration. The paper closes with a socioculturel conception of place that informs our understanding of place making and community building.

Shopping may occur as leisure, obligation, or as a combination of the two. Shopping that, to be done effectively, requires substantial knowledge of the product and its market, whether as obligation or leisure, may be a source of pride. It has been argued that this acquired knowledge is a special attribute of the modern woman, while other observations suggest that both men and women have such knowledge and are proud of it. Window‐shopping is examined, as is the context within which obligatory shopping takes place. Shopping as project‐based leisure is considered along with the implications of shopping for the community. Party shopping is examined as an event capable of generating social capital.

Place meanings provide visions for land‐use planning, are references to evaluate land‐uses, and act as baselines to assess environmental degradation. Roles for social science in park planning are becoming directed at understanding community‐based place meanings of stakeholders. Place meanings characterize reasons that an environment is valued and describe the uniqueness of a locale. Place meanings are characterized as being complex and difficult for people to know. The representation of place meanings are often embedded in stories of lived experiences, and the telling of these stories is audience sensitive. The lack of adequate venues to negotiate place meanings is a crisis in need of response by the park planning and leisure research community.

Increasingly, place is being considered in the leisure studies literature as an important contextual factor influencing behaviour, shaping perceptions, and defining experiences. Such considerations, however, have largely neglected the literature in humanistic geography where many of the basic definitions, perspectives, and issues concerning place are rooted and continue to be debated. In this paper, some classic sources, in particular Relph (1976), as well as some contemporary contributions are briefly described to uncover where many of the perspectives on place have emerged and evolved. In addition, some cautionary notes are offered to remind leisure researchers that continuing to romanticize place will fail to acknowledge its negative implications for many groups, especially those who are marginalized by place. Finally, some observations are offered on where we, as leisure researchers, might take our inquiries in an effort to understand the impact of place.

Despite earlier pronunciations of the death of the sociology of deviance (Sumner, 1994), it would seem that its ghost lives on in the realms of leisure and popular culture. Leisure has always been an ambivalent sphere of social life: an expedient of both freedom and liberation and an instrument of repression. Whatever its public and moral hegemony then, leisure activities have always offered spaces for the pursuit of the “deviant,” from ritualised rule‐breaking to the more abhorrent forms of crime against the vulnerable. As such, while this paper does not suggest a return to a general concept to encompass the myriad practices that might be considered “deviant” within the realm of leisure today, it does seek to reinvent the concept as a beginning enterprise on the basis of a determination to refuse the more comfortable role of bystander. Through a critical theoretical appraisal and application to the practices surrounding city centre “binge drinking” it introduces the potential for considering con...

Our paper explores the points of contrast and intersection between two theories that have been used to understand the relationships between people and locales: sense of place and community theory. We distil crucial elements from each approach: for sense of place we include setting characteristics, behaviours, symbolic meanings, and evaluations such as attachment and identity. We use the interactional approach to represent community theory, and thus include ecology, society, and action components. We create and introduce a matrix that intersects these elements and find that much common ground exists: there is significant potential for cross fertilization between the approaches. The utility of the approach is illustrated using public participation as an example topic of interest to resource and recreation managers.

Initial enthusiasm over social capital—since the mid‐1990s among the most widely debated concepts in social science—is being tempered by increasing criticism. With some exceptions, this development is not reflected in discussions of leisure and social capital, which remain dominated by Putnam's early formulation of social capital as a combination of cultural norms, generalized trust, social networks. After what may be called the psychological and cultural turns in leisure research, it is not surprising that leisure researchers found Putnam's early formulation attractive. Their continued reliance on it is problematic, however, especially since criticism of its conceptual weaknesses has led Putnam to shift his ground. He now locates the sources of social capital in social networks, not cultural norms. Putnam's shifts reflect central themes in the wider transdisciplinary social capital debate, little awareness of which appears in leisure research. These themes require attention if the relationships ...

This article discusses the importance of Community Development (CD) to both leisure studies and the practice of recreation. It is argued that the CD approach to research and practice will be empowering to the researched and participants in leisure activity. CD focuses its effort on the identification of individual and community needs rather than treating the citizen simply as a study subject. CD promotes a partnership between the community and the research effort.

This paper addresses concerns that stem from the shift toward third way politics by governments in the name of fostering community development and social capital. In this context, voluntarism is something of a double‐edged sword for recreation and leisure studies. The volunteer plays a critical role in community recreation, but may also serve to sanction government abdication of responsibility for equitable and sustainable developments in aspects of community life, including recreation. It is suggested that both citizen and government action is necessary to encourage equality and flourishing of the community as a whole in recreation and leisure.

With free time and disposable income becoming more widespread in the affluent countries of the world, “lifestyle” choices are becoming increasingly important in the definition of personal and collective identities. The first part of this paper discusses the consumption of rural places, and the development (often by private developers) of a standard rural “infrastructure of play,” aimed at upscale consumers. This typically includes golf, either skiing or a marina, and recreational property development. The second section discusses the transformations that follow from rural gentrification, and considers some of the effects of such developments on what were formerly resource communities. The paper draws on Bauman,s work on “community” to argue that the “secession of the successful” into exclusive lifestyle enclaves has been good for the property industry, and has dramatically increased land values in communities with the right kinds of recreational resources; however, it has also led to displacement...

This paper considers the potential for community development to be a vehicle for politics, resistance, and social change. From community‐led initiatives seeking to limit the encroachment of so‐called big box stores to community supported agriculture and new forms of media, efforts to affect change provide important opportunities for public dialogue about, and expressions of, power, equality and democracy. The paper explores the potential for re‐considering the spaces where politically oriented leisure activities take place as they engage notions of deep democracy, social learning, empowerment and resistance. I argue that investigating these community‐led struggles helps not only to counter the notion that leisure is increasingly bound‐up in individualized, primarily consumption‐oriented endeavours, but, following Shaw (2000), it offers potential to enhance the study of leisure by recognizing, understanding and validating its political nature.

Leisure, community and consumption share a common intellectual standing in leisure studies. There has been a tendency of many scholars to imbue these categories of social life with fundamental, pre‐existing characteristics and thus to see them as having something of an a priori essence. The essentialist posture in this regard finds its most common expression as absolute, normative valuations about the goodness and badness and the rightness or wrongness of leisure, community and consumption. This paper unpacks these notions, strips them of their essentialist garb, and makes them useful for research and analysis.

Leisure studies has held to a traditional understanding of leisure activities as inherently and unquestionably “good,” a view that leaves little room to consider deviance within the purview of leisure behaviour and its study within the discipline. Stebbins’ theoretical framework of serious leisure provides a context through which conventional understandings of deviant behaviour may be challenged and the limiting doxic1 perspective lifted. Qualities of serious leisure are manifest in deviant leisure activities, specifically “sadomasochism.”2 This conceptual paper offers an introductory evaluation of participation in the leisure spaces of BDSM culture subsequent to an exploratory auto‐ethnographic study. The three primary goals are to: (1) lay out conventional definitions of [deviant]3 leisure; (2) outline qualities of BDSM consistent with serious leisure in order to problematize [deviant] leisure; and (3) discuss the implications of this analysis and recommend future directions for research.

In our introductory essay to this special issue of Leisure/Loisir, we establish the need to rethink leisure and community research. In so doing, we encourage a deliberate shift away from the study of community recreation to the study of community recreation. Community recreation, we argue, dominates leisure research insofar as it has tended to focus on the actual management of recreation services delivered within specific geographic boundaries. The basis for research under this approach is neither about community nor its connections to recreation, but reflects a corporate turn centred on users and aspects of their recreation. Along these lines, researchers have seemingly abandoned the notion of community altogether to focus, either directly or indirectly, on matters related to finance. The implied value orientation of this dominant discourse is to advocate for management, assuming that if a policy is good for recreation management, then it must be good for the community. As such, the moniker “rec...