Lindsay Findlay-King

Localism and the Big Society: the asset transfer of leisure centres and libraries – fighting closures or empowering communities?

Abstract This paper critically examines the ‘asset transfer’ of leisure services from the public to the voluntary sector. Asset transfer might be theorised as ‘austerity localism’, in which volunteers are obliged to fill the gaps left by retreating public provision, or as ‘progressive localism’, which represents new opportunities through the localism and Big Society agendas to develop more locally responsive, cooperative and mutualist visions. In this way, asset transfer might overcome the limitations of the United Kingdom policies in which ‘Big Government’ is replaced by civic society. Drawing on qualitative interviews with key personnel (volunteers, managers and local authority officers) at 12 leisure facilities, a grounded assessment of the nuanced balance between ‘austerity localism’ and ‘progressive localism’ is provided, including three observations. First, the main impetus for transfer was cuts in local authority budgets which stimulated the emergence of local groups of volunteers. Secondly, the transfers themselves required interaction between local government and the volunteer groups; however, the nature of the relationship and support given varied and support was limited by austerity measures. Thirdly, volunteers do not automatically fill a gap left by the state: without support transfer viability relies on the financial and social capital among volunteer groups, and this is unevenly distributed. These findings suggest that the capacity for a ‘progressive localism’ to emerge through asset transfer is limited. However, where transfer has occurred, there are some progressive benefits of volunteer empowerment and a more flexible service.

Fathering Through Sport and Leisure

Chris Rojek is one of a handful of social theorists on leisure who has consistently produced provocative and intellectually stimulating work. In The Labour of Leisure, Rojek continues the two related themes of his previous book Leisure Theory (Rojek, 2005). The first theme is that academic work on the meaning and purpose of leisure has been undertaken on a false promise that leisure is something simplistically associated with freedoms of choice and time. That is an overly confident sleight-ofhand. There is no reason to doubt that there are still very important and influential leisure researchers – especially in the USA – who see leisure as something merely voluntary, something merely associated with what we do when we clock off work. But most researchers and theorists of leisure would refute Rojek’s argument that their work on leisure is a naı̈ve hangover from some positivist, utopian paradigm. The second theme is that Rojek is offering a way of reconciling the concerns about leisure raised by the structuralists in the 1980s and 1990s with the poststructural turn to identity expressed in postmodernist accounts of leisure. In the 1990s, of course, Rojek himself was one of the first theorists of leisure to critique structural theories of leisure through the lens of postmodernism (Rojek, 1995). In this new book, as in Leisure Theory from 2005, Rojek provides a way forward for leisure researchers and students. It was the snappy and energetic Action Theory in 2005; in 2010, he presented us with the woefully expressed SCCASMIL framework, an improvement on the previous leisure research paradigm of SCCA (StateCorporate-Consumer-Academic) taking into account Social Movements and Illegal Leisure (hence the ASMIL). The SCCASMIL framework is a necessary consequence of Rojek’s novel embrace of emotional intelligence and intentionality as the key to understanding leisure (Rojek is quite dismissive of simplistic models from social psychology, with the exception of emotional intelligence, which he introduces without any critique or any recognition of the strong arguments against the concept). Rojek argues that SCCA is a weak framework for leisure studies, but with added SMIL the framework becomes a kind of power-assisted exo-skeleton that moves our focus of study ‘from simple causal models of leisure choices and trajectories of behaviour to more complex perspectives that approach leisure experience as the product of relations between multiple equilibria’ (p. 188). Such opaque writing, combined with the pomposity of the claims about SCCASMIL’s uniqueness (as if no leisure researcher has ever considered social movements and illegal leisure before!), does not make for a clear and reasoned contribution to leisure theory, which leads to another major problem with this book: its intended audience. Rojek refers to students throughout the book, and he even writes Wiki-style definitions in separate text boxes for learners whenever a big word like ‘paradigm’ is first mentioned. Very good, for a book aimed at students. But if the book is for students, then the jargon-heavy nature of the writing