Leisure and Elite Formation


Book Description

This volume investigates places where old and new elites came together, where these groups met and interacted but also where the rules and conventions for new elites were forged. The book focusses arenas of encounter and (self)representation belonging to the world of leisure and embraces also the organizations and associations which established and ran these spaces and events.




The Sum of Small Things


Book Description

How the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us all In today’s world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society “the aspirational class” and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class reproduces wealth and upward mobility, deepening the ever-wider class divide. Exploring the rise of the aspirational class, Currid-Halkett considers how much has changed since the 1899 publication of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. In that inflammatory classic, which coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen described upper-class frivolities: men who used walking sticks for show, and women who bought silver flatware despite the effectiveness of cheaper aluminum utensils. Now, Currid-Halkett argues, the power of material goods as symbols of social position has diminished due to their accessibility. As a result, the aspirational class has altered its consumer habits away from overt materialism to more subtle expenditures that reveal status and knowledge. And these transformations influence how we all make choices. With a rich narrative and extensive interviews and research, The Sum of Small Things illustrates how cultural capital leads to lifestyle shifts and what this forecasts, not just for the aspirational class but for everyone.




A Handbook of Leisure Studies


Book Description

A unique, international resource for Leisure Studies: in one volume the history, organization and central debates in the field of Leisure Studies are defined, providing a one-stop-shop for students and an agenda for future debate and research academics.




Staging Authority


Book Description

Staging Authority: Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a comprehensive handbook on how the presentation, embodiment, and performance of authority changed in the long nineteenth century. It focuses on the diversification of authority: what new forms and expressions of authority arose in that critical century, how traditional authority figures responded and adapted to those changes, and how the public increasingly participated in constructing and validating authority. It pays particular attention to how spaces were transformed to offer new possibilities for the presentation of authority, and how the mediatization of presence affected traditional authority. The handbook’s fourteen chapters draw on innovative methodologies in cultural history and the aligned fields of the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies.




Leisure and Consumption


Book Description

The study of consumption has never seriously examined the role of leisure. This ambitious, agenda-setting study, provides the most in-depth examination of the relationship between the two to date, drawing on the serious leisure perspective and outlining a new conceptual framework for analyzing consumption for leisure.




Gentlewomen and Learned Ladies


Book Description

"This book reveals the central role that women played in creating and perpetuating an elite class in the foremost city of colonial British America Early in the eighteenth century, as the city's major merchant families sought to reinforce their power over both newcomer immigrants and upwardly mobile middling sorts, they endeavored to remake themselves into a colonial version of the English gentry." "This book highlights how the intersection of gender and class identities powerfully shaped the lives of privileged women in colonial Philadelphia. This account is based on extensive archival research that includes women's letters and diaries, materials from cultural organizations, British prescriptive literature, Anglican and Quaker religious records, and newspapers. This important study offers fresh insights into colonial America, women's history, urban history, and the British Atlantic world."--BOOK JACKET.




Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society


Book Description

This book examines the process by which a capitalist society emerged in Bradford. Although Bradford represents an unusual social environment where industrial development began very early and proceeded very fast, its history discloses with unusual force and clarity a process that was more gradually transforming the wider society of nineteenth-century Britain and that subsequently spread throughout the world.







Leisure and Feminist Theory


Book Description

Wide-ranging and challenging, this book offers a host of new insights into how leisure theory has handled the question of gender difference and inequality. Providing a critical introduction to the leading positions in leisure theory, Betsy Wearing guides the reader through their strengths and weaknesses from a feminist perspective. This book draws attention to the various leisure experiences that women encounter and construct in their everyday lives and the meanings that these experiences have for them. Her perspective takes into account such poststructuralist ideas as multiple subjectivities of women and multiple femininities; the possibilities of resistance to male dominance in leisure; the potential through leisure of rewriting masculine and feminine scripts; and leisure as a site of struggle to challenge hegemonic masculinity.




Sport and Recreation in Canadian History


Book Description

"Sport and Recreation in Canadian History is a comprehensive textbook which provides an examination of events, documents, and pivotal moments that contributed to the development of sport in Canada. Content ranges from indigenous recreation, and the integration of British culture. It moves to the emergence of organized sport and national sport organizations, and their impact on how sport is viewed across the country. Amateur and professional sport is covered in detail and finally the globalization of Canadian sport and its expansion and position on the international stage"--