Tony Blackshaw

What’s the Big Idea? A Critical Exploration of the Concept of Social Capital and its Incorporation into Leisure Policy Discourse

Abstract Starting from the overwhelming welcome that Putnam’s (2000) treatise on social capital has received in government circles, we consider its relative merits for examining and understanding the role for leisure in policy strategies. To perform this critique we identify some of the key points from Putnam’s work and also illustrate how it has been incorporated into a body of leisure studies literature. This is then extended to a discussion of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of his approach and its link to civic communitarianism. We suggest that the seduction of the ‘niceness’ of Putnam’s formulation of social capital not only misses the point of the grimness of some people’s lives but it also pays little attention to Bourdieu’s point that poorer community groups tend to be at the mercy of forces over which they have little control. We argue that if the poor have become a silent emblem of the ways in which the state has more and more individualised its relationship with its citizens, it is they who also tend to be blamed for their own poverty because it is presumed that they lack social capital. This in turn encourages ‘us’ to determine what is appropriate for ‘them’. As a critical response to this situation, we propose that Bourdieu’s take on different forms of ‘capital’ offers more productive lines for analysis. From there we go on to suggest that it might be profitable to combine Bourdieu’s sociology with Sennett’s recent interpretation of ‘respect’ to formulate a central interpretive role for community leisure practitioners – recast as cultural intermediaries – if poorer community groups are to be better included.

Contemporary community theory and football

This essay discusses contemporary community theory and football. After problematizing the idea of community, it traces the career progress of contemporary community theory in the work of various authors, paying particular attention to the ways it has been applied to football. It is suggested that community went from being a stock sociological concept to something much more elusive, which while providing the wellspring of a number of inspired uses is always running the risk of conceptual incoherence. Here the esay demonstrates that community in football draws on two sources of the imagination: the symbolic construction of community and imagined communities. In the light of the critique emanating from the discussion of these two kinds of imagination the essay suggests that community in football must be understood in the context of the shift from a solid modern society to a liquid modern sociality. Here the author offers a critical discussion of Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of liquid modern community, while in the process anticipating its critics. Drawing on empirical research on community‐based anti‐racist work in football, the final part of the essay demonstrates that in the public policy domain community has become to all intents and purposes just a word, rather than a mobilizing tool for creating in football some democratic operating principles that might make something like a community in the people’s game actually possible.

A critical examination of the advantages of investigating community and leisure from a social network perspective

In an attempt to appreciate the contribution that social network analysis might offer to the study of leisure, four distinctive, though not mutually exclusive, approaches to social network analysis are considered and an overall critique of the approach offered, paying special attention to the work of Wellman. Within this critique is a discussion of the ontological, epistemological and methodological problems confronting the social network perspective, particularly the works of those analysts, such as Stokowski (1994), who have attempted to merge structural analysis with more action-based perspectives. Some comparisons are made with figurational sociology and structuration theory, and attention is drawn to three central explanatory tools deployed within network analysis: the strength of weak ties, sociometry, and network density.

Leeds on trial: soap opera, performativity and the racialization of sports-related violence

ABSTRACT Several recent court cases involving the ‘off-field’ activities of professional sportsmen have revealed the ways in which the public performance, media representation and regulation of ‘crime’ is played out in the public imagination. Blackshaw and Crabbe explore how notions of ‘race’ are performatively staged and consumed through the spectacles of celebrity, and discuss the significance of the CCTV evidence used in such cases. In doing so they highlight the ways in which ‘race’ operates discursively to undermine the position of the racialized Other.

The Man from Leisure : an interview with Chris Rojek

This article is an interview with the eminent British sociologist, theorist of leisure and stardom, publisher and critic of cultural studies Chris Rojek. It begins with an introduction that outlines his career trajectory and key publications, and puts some flesh on his particular way of doing sociology. The interview itself falls into three broad parts. First, Rojek answers some questions about the source of his sociological imagination, his formative work on the sociology of leisure, and the relationship between his academic and publishing work. The second and third parts intersect one another. The second concentrates on Rojek’s key ideas and how these relate to some important themes and issues in cultural sociology and the study of leisure. The third part of the interview explores some shifts in Rojek’s work and how these are connected to major currents in cultural sociology and the demise of leisure studies. The interview concludes with reflections on the function and responsibilities of sociology today.

The crisis in sociological leisure studies and what to do about it

In recent years, social philosophers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Agnes Heller, Jacques Rancière, Richard Rorty and Peter Sloterdijk have generated tremendous excitement by offering some revolutionary and radical ways of thinking about human life in the twenty-first century that present some fundamental challenges to sociology as it is normally conducted. Responding to this trend, this article argues that we need to not only fundamentally re-think what we mean by theory in the sociology of leisure but also how we carry out research in leisure studies. The first part of the article argues that orthodox sociological ‘Theory’ is dead and it offers some good reasons why this is so. It is subsequently argued that there is a crisis in leisure theory which has its roots in the central tenets of sociology. Taking its cue from Jacques Rancières classic study The Philosopher and His Poor, the article develops the argument that if social inequality was once upon a time the fundamental issue in the discursive formation known as the sociology of leisure, today it urgently needs an alternative cognitive framework for thinking outside this paradigm. In order to substantiate this critique the discussion considers two leading theoretical perspectives in leisure studies: the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and feminist sociology, and in particular, the emphasis currently placed on the idea of intersectionality. It is argued thereafter that sociologists of leisure, and others who carry out research in leisure studies, generally have a particular activity in view: methodological uniformity of both the employment of research methods and the philosophical study of how, in practice, researchers go about their business. But there are some different ‘rules of method’ when we engage in thinking sociologically after ‘Theory’. As will be demonstrated in the final part of the article, analysis of this second kind of activity does not rely on the tools, epistemological frameworks and ontological assumptions generally used to make sense of leisure. Instead it develops its own new ‘rules of method’ which turn out to be radical, because they are not ‘rules of method’ at all.

Back to literacy

One of the seminal works in the development of British cultural studies was Richard Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy , in which he presents a vision of working class communities in the 40 years since the First World War. To do this he drew particularly on his experiences of Hunslet in South Leeds. In this paper we revisit South Leeds 40 years on to examine continuities and changes in the community as evidenced through peoples leisure and compare this with Hoggarts analysis. To do this we have drawn on census and other official statistics and our own observation and interviews in the field. In order to interpret todays communities in South Leeds we make use of theoretical developments in the interim. We suggest that in what Bauman (1997) refers to as ‘two nations society mark two’ people try to reinvent community and it is through leisure in particular that this is evidenced. We therefore conclude that any attempt to understand ‘community’ at the millennium must place leisure centre stage.

Leisure and emotional labour: A commentary on Rojek's “Leisure and emotional intelligence”

Some scholars are inexhaustible wells, forever nourishing the fruits of their past labour. Such an individual is Chris Rojek. When, in 1985, Capitalism and Leisure Theory detonated in a starbunt of sociological innovation and ingenuity, not only offering a penetrating critique of the dominant tradition of social formalism that had hitherto dominated the study of leisure, but also outlining some new rules of method for leisure studies, its young author fast became the name to consult when the discussion turned to what we do in our free time.

Bauman’s Challenge to Sociology

One of the most striking characteristics of sociology in recent years is the speed with which sociologists in the English-speaking world — including while we’re on the subject Bauman — have jettisoned post-modernism. It is hard to believe that in a period of less than 20 years postmodernism went from being a revolutionary practice to an art form, from an art form to a sociological sensibility, from a sociological sensibility to a domesticated sociological perspective and finally became a form of contempt. Indeed, if postmodernism began as a programme of disruption in sociology, it is today a way of thinking that is largely derided. No less interesting is the concurrent revival of the ideas of the ‘founding fathers’ in sociology. One need only mention the emergence over the last ten years or so of publications such as Classical Social Theory (Craib, 1997), Classical Sociology (Turner, 1999), Theorizing Classical Sociology (Ray, 1999), Classical Sociological Theory (Calhoun et al., 2002) and Understanding Classical Sociology: Marx, Weber, Durkheim (Hughes, Sharrock and Martin, 2003) (reprinted six times since 1995 and now its second edition) and the Journal of Classical Sociology (2001) to make the point. A further parallel is suggested by the fact that a revival in empirical studies has taken place in sociology, which has also had a substantial impact on recent developments in sociological thought.

Some notes on the language game of dark leisure

As T.S. Eliot pithily told us in his famous poem, The Naming of Cats, naming is a difficult matter, absolutely not a holiday game. In leisure studies, as in sociology and the other social sciences, naming is a language game of primary importance. It not only conjures a term (or a combination of terms) by which an activity, category of experience, group of people, phenomenon, trend, or any other subject or object of thought associated with leisure (past and present) is known, but it also signifies a method of description, of conceptualization, of classification, and, obviously, of labelling. In this critical commentary, I am interested in the naming of the phenomenon of ‘dark leisure’, not just as an academic subject matter in leisure studies, but as a particular impulse of twenty first century freedom. As this special issue attests, of all recent developments in leisure studies, perhaps no event has registered a more widespread impact than the growth of interest in this phenomenon. There are articles and book chapters aplenty about its many manifestations but none of these attempt to spell out in any precise detail what it amounts to. This article should be read as an attempt to spell out what this something might be. As far as I know, it is the first attempt to do so. I have searched the literature for something of its kind and found nothing, except a number of general representations that have emerged from research on dark leisure which suggest that this phenomenon constitutes a body of theory and concepts that rest on four core assumptions (see for example Spracklen and Spracklen (2012) and Stone and Sharpley (2014)). First, it arises in connection with leisure that is perceived as ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’. Second, it tends to take place in ‘new communicative (dark) spaces’ and/or liminal settings of social ambiguity which reach out towards alternative communitas-type realities. Third, it is appealing to those individuals and groups fascinated with death and/or are bound together through their interest in dark (often gothic) popular culture, whether focused on fashion, decoration, travel, film, music etc. And fourth, certain moral implications often arise as a result of dark leisure activities. Given these varied understandings, it is important to explore the theories and concepts used in more detail. I am not talking about offering anything so bold as a definitive interpretation, but something more modest: a guide to what it is about dark leisure that makes it attractive to certain academics and ordinary people alike. I shall argue that a number of themes can be identified as recurring elements surrounding the phenomenon of dark leisure. The similarities that the reader will find here are in the pattern of what Wittgenstein