Coming to Terms with Leisure and Globalization

Abstract

This article is concerned with the engagement of leisure studies as an academic field and as organized, professional intervention with the phenomenon of globalization, using the exemplificatory case of the World Leisure and Recreation Association's (now World Leisure's) Sao Paulo Declaration on Leisure and Globalization as a point of reference. Deploying a combination of globalization theory and 'autoethnographic' research in relation to instances of mediated leisure culture, it reflects on conceptual imprecision and potential contradictions in the Declaration as indicative of wider problems in the disciplinary field. Leisure studies researchers are enjoined to avoid complicity in promoting both dystopian and utopian versions of globalization theory, and sceptically to assess the complex interaction of globalizing and other macro/micro processes. The article concludes by arguing for a wide-ranging, critically reflexive leisure studies research agenda supported by principled strategic interventions in leisure power relations.

Leisure activity preferences and constraints: perspectives from Turkey

“…Presumably as attitudes continue to evolve towards the value of leisure for Turkish people (Gürbüz et al, 2010;Hacıoğlu et al, 2005), they will be seeking and advocating for easier access to opportunities. The interest in various activities may also relate to emerging learned perceptions about the availability of opportunities that are observed due to cultural changes and globalization (Rowe, 2006).…”

The São Paulo Declaration (1998): Nothing Dates More Rapidly than the Present

“…commercializing local pastimes and traditions, and extracting maximum surplus value from participation in the profit-driven leisure bonanza. Given all of this, it is hard to disagree with Rowe's 25 that the Declaration suffers from operating with 'under-theorized, totalizing constructions of global processes and effects.' Moreover, his supplementary point that world leisure organizations need to be more reflexive about how and why they are 'implicated in the very processes that they are critiquing' 26 .…”

Reflexive Methodologies: An autoethnography of the gendered performance of sport/management

“…Autoethnography has emerged as a relatively new methodological approach within sport and leisure research and more broadly within the social sciences (Denzin, 1997;Ellis and Bochner, 1992). Debates surrounding the crisis of representation in social theory and research have contributed to the textual turn within leisure studies that is now evident within a range of qualitative methods and forms of theoretical analysis (Fullagar, 2002;Markula and Pringle, 2006;Parry and Johnson, 2007;Rinehart, 2005;Rowe, 2006;Sparkes, 2002). As an autobiographical genre of writing, autoethnographies are usually written in a first-person voice that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural (Ellis, 2004).…”