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Policymakers strongly stimulate young people's participation in organised leisure activities because it is believed to provide young people with important 'work' skills and attitudes. Special attention is paid to the underrepresented working-class youth. To stimulate (especially working-class) parents to play an active 'guiding' role, policymakers often assume that they have to be made aware of the educational benefits of engagement in leisure activities. The empirical basis of this assumption is, however, thin. Therefore, this study examined the educational goals middle- and working-class parents attach to their adolescents' leisure activities on the basis of 32 interviews conducted in a small city in Belgium. Although there were subtle socio-economic differences in some goals parents pursued through their children's leisure activities (i.e. teaching skills and societal values and norms, belonging to a peer group, independent thinking and relaxation), these were not of a magnitude that they could contribute to our understanding of socio-economic differences in parents' role and in turn, in young people's leisure use. We argue that further research needs to focus on socio-economic differences in available resources from which parents construct particular strategies to shape their young people's leisure spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although an increasing number of people are identifying as single in western society, gendered ideologies continue to influence women's lives, emphasising the importance of heterosexual couplehood, marriage, family, and biological parenthood. Utilising third wave feminism as our theoretical framework, this paper explores how gendered ideologies can work together to influence adult women's experiences with singlehood. Findings from qualitative interviews with 12 single, adult women, conducted in Ontario, Canada, reveal the ways women can face marginalisation and stigmatisation in certain leisure contexts because of their single status and how the ideology of couplehood can reinforce expectations related to familism and pronatalism for single women. Yet, the findings also illustrate the ways single women can resist these expectations through their leisure. This paper provides an important contribution to the literature, bringing attention to the complex ties between gendered ideologies and leisure for adult women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through autoethnography, queer theory and edgework, I examine Wild Ginger Witchcamp, an annual five-day event where one hundred or so people gather to celebrate shared politics, spirituality and environmental concerns. I include narratives of lived experience, woven and layered into the text to illuminate the complex realities of leisure that extends beyond resisting the normative to one of the nurturing alternatives. The social health of a community depends on the community's ability to publicly affirm itself, and it is critical that a community find a way to transmit and transform its culture. Queer theory, the related constructs of heteronormativity and counterpublics, along with edgework, can help us understand the importance of communal and culturally relevant leisure particularly for individuals and communities that do not see themselves reflected in the dominant culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which climbers negotiate their leisure activity within a social context. It is suggested that the wider social context is one of rationalized society, whereby efficiency and growth have become ends in themselves. Although climbing is depicted as a 'free area' in which climbers attempt to achieve a relative freedom from this society, the encroachment of rationalized society into the activity means that climbers find themselves both divided and besieged. The response of a group of traditional climbers in Australia has been to develop some symbolic behaviours that signify resistance to mainstream society. However, these behaviours have themselves become rigid and oppressive, and their chief protagonists as alienating as the rationalized society that they wish to resist. Whether this society emerges as a 'metaphor of resistance' or as a 'metanarrative of oppression' is dependant upon its members retaining their capacity as moral subjects, rather than existing in unquestioning obedience to these rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this paper is the emotions which are aroused in sport and leisure and their significance for a full sociological understanding of sport and leisure behaviour and sport and leisure institutions. The paper deals more with sport than leisure in general and is primarily conceptual and theoretical in its focus. It advances the claim that a 'figurational' (or 'process-sociological') approach, above all Elias's theory of 'civilizing processes' (Elias, 1939; l994a), whilst by no means representing a panacea for all of sociology's current problems, does represent a means of circumventing and hopefully overcoming some of the dilemmas on the horns of which practitioners of our subject recurrently become impaled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]