Karl Spracklen

Managing and monitoring equality and diversity in UK sport: an evaluation of the sporting equals Racial Equality Standard and its impact on organizational change.

Despite greater attention to racial equality in sport in recent years, the progress of national sports organizations toward creating equality of outcomes has been limited in the United Kingdom. The collaboration of the national sports agencies, equity organizations and national sports organizations (including national governing bodies of sport) has focused on Equality Standards. The authors revisit an earlier impact study of the Racial Equality Standard in sport and supplement it with another round of interview material to assess changing strategies to manage diversity in British sport. In particular, it tracks the impact on organizational commitment to diversity through the period of the establishment of the Racial Equality Standard and its replacement by an Equality Standard that deals with other diversity issues alongside race and ethnicity. As a result, the authors question whether the new, generic Equality Standard is capable of addressing racial diversity and promoting equality of outcomes.

Promoting Racial Equality within Sports Organizations

In an attempt to promote racial equality policies in national sports organizations in England, the Racial Equality Charter for Sport was introduced in 2000. This article reports on progress in achieving the associated Standard in different sports and different levels of sport. Questionnaires and interviews suggest that there has been some measure of success but that this has been slow and is vulnerable to personnel change and competing demands on resources. The article also adopts a critical sociological approach to the structures of sport to examine the limitations on the success of those interventions to conclude that more than organizational change is required—cultures need to change to become more inclusive.

Dreaming of drams: authenticity in Scottish whisky tourism as an expression of unresolved Habermasian rationalities

In this paper, the production of whisky tourism at both independently owned and corporately owned distilleries in Scotland is explored by focusing on four examples (Arran, Glengoyne, Glenturret and Bruichladdich). In particular, claims of authenticity and Scottishness of Scottish whiskies through commercial materials, case studies, website‐forum discussions and ‘independent’ writing about such whisky are analysed. It is argued that the globalisation and commodification of whisky and whisky tourism, and the communicative backlash to these trends typified by the search for authenticity, is representative of a Habermasian struggle between two irreconcilable rationalities. This paper will demonstrate that the meaning and purpose of leisure can be understood through such explorations of the tension between the instrumentality of commodification and the freedom of individuals to locate their own leisure lives in the lifeworld that remains.

Sport and Austerity in the UK: An insight into Liverpool 2014

The UK’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in 2010, outlined £81 billion of cuts across government departments by 2014/15 was delivered. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat reform was premised on the ‘Big Society’ making up for their austere cuts to the state. In this piece, we discuss the impact of this we debate the impact of this on sports development, taking the case study of inner city Liverpool. This example is marked because, on the one hand, it presents cuts to municipal sports facilities which are threatened with closure as a result of shrinking local authority budgets, and on the other this role is partially taken on by an offshoot of Everton Football Club (EFC). The points we debate are: 1) Is the change in responsibility from the Local Authority to a Private Enterprise, staffed by volunteers a new turn in sport policy? and 2) What are the consequences of this on grassroots sport participation?

Grim Up North: Northern England, Northern Europe and Black Metal

In this article, the authors examine the tensions that surround the commercial success of black metal as a global music commodity and the identification of the genre with the conscious revival of myths and ideologies of an ancient northern European history and nationalist culture, via the ways in which an “imagined community” of Nordicness, identified with the original Norwegian scene, has been embraced and adapted by participants in the local extreme metal scene in northern England.

‘Mine’s a Pint of Bitter’: Performativity, gender, class and representations of authenticity in real-ale tourism

Leisure choices are expressive of individual agency around the maintenance of taste, boundaries, identity and community. This research article is part of a wider project designed to assess the social and cultural value of real-ale to tourism in the north of England. This article explores the performativity of real-ale tourism and debates about belonging in northern English real-ale communities. The research combines an ethnographic case study of a real-ale festival with semi-structured interviews with organisers and volunteers, northern English real-ale brewers and real-ale tourists visiting the festival. It is argued that real-ale tourism, despite its origins in the logic of capitalism, becomes a space where people can perform Habermasian, communicative leisure, and despite the contradictions of preferring some capitalist industries over others on the basis of their perceived smaller size and older age, real-ale fans demonstrate agency in their performativity.

Whiteness, Blackness and Settlement: Leisure and the Integration of New Migrants

At times of economic uncertainty the position of new migrants is subject to ever closer scrutiny. While the main focus of attention tends to be on the world of employment the research on which this paper is based started from the proposition that leisure and sport spaces can support processes of social inclusion yet may also serve to exclude certain groups. As such, these spaces may be seen as contested and racialised places that shape behaviour. The paper draws on interviews with White migrants from Poland and Black migrants from Africa to examine the normalising of whiteness. We use this paper not just to explore how leisure and sport spaces are encoded by new migrants, but how struggles over those spaces and the use of social and cultural capital are racialised.

Pagans and Satan and Goths, oh my: dark leisure as communicative agency and communal identity on the fringes of the modern Goth scene

Goth musics cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first decade of this century. Through a dark leisure framework, the present article examines the way in which parts of the Goth scene embraced paganism and, latterly, Satanism, as actual practices and ontologies of belief. Ethnographic research and case studies on paganism and Satanism in Goth subcultures are used. This paper argues that being a pagan or Satanist in the fringes of the Goth scene is a way of using dark leisure to resist, usefully and meaningfully, the fashionable but instrumental globalised choice of mainstream popular culture.

Leisure opportunities and new migrant communities: challenging the contribution of sport

This paper offers a critique of the much-vaunted claims of sports ability to integrate new migrants by generating social capital. By examining a growing literature base alongside new empirical evidence, we explore whether the experiences of new migrants actually reflect the hypothetical claims made by some policy-makers and scholars about the role of sport in tackling exclusion, promoting inclusion and constructing interculturalism. We demonstrate that the claims made about the value of sport are not found in the experiences of most of our respondents from new migrant communities living in Leeds, UK. We question whether sport truly is communicative in the Habermasian sense, contributing to identity projects, and so counsel caution in using it as a panacea to promote belonging and cohesion. This was a purpose for which leisure opportunities seemed more suited (at least for participants) in our research.

Introduction to the special issue: Music and Tourism

Music, in various styles and permutations – instrumental and vocal, solo or group, amplified or acoustic, formats – live and recorded, performances and venues, is a near universal and ubiquitous cultural expression. Musical genres are a product of human culture, something cherished for their aesthetic value, and yet also something that is the site of contestations of meaning and purpose across history, social and geographical spaces. In many ‘pre-modern’ cultures, music is bound tightly with rituality and sociality, the performance of belonging and power. In modernity, music has become part of the everyday spaces of leisure, a source of artistic expression and audience pleasure – but also a cultural product that is capable of being sanitised and commodified. Music articulates identities, rebellion, conformity, performance, status, product, community, subculture, high culture, distinction, place, space and more. In the construction of distinctive spaces, styles and genres, music reproduces the inequalities and struggles of the late modern world. The social and artistic status of musical genres, composers and performers ranges from the historical, canonical and ‘great’ such as Beethoven and the Beatles to contemporary forms that may be deemed by some to be tasteless ‘muzak’, subversive and socially divisive, for example, punk and ‘death metal’ from which we need to be