The Politics of Leisure and Policy

Abstract

A major contrast between the leisure studies literature of the 1980s and that of the previous decade was the burgeoning of the literature on the politics of leisure. Socialist policy programmes (Whannel 1983), neo-Marxist analyses (Clarke and Critcher 1985; John Hargreaves 1986), and feminist accounts (Deem 1986; Wimbush and Talbot 1988) emerged to challenge what had come to be seen as the pluralist orthodoxy, argued perhaps most articulately by Ken Roberts (1978). Even a mainstream politics text, such as Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism devotes attention to the role of the state in leisure (Scruton 1980, Chapter 7). By the beginning of the 1990s, leisure politics were clearly on the agenda for both theory-led and practical policy analysis. It is the aim of this text, therefore, to articulate the nature of the relationships between politics, policy and leisure. The book will focus on the politics of government and leisure policy. This is not to deny that political activity, `the exercise of cooperation and control in the distribution of resources’ (Leftwich 1983), takes place in areas of social life other than government (e.g., sexual politics, the politics of the family, organisational politics), but rather defines the starting point of this book and the rationale for its selective focus.