Key Concepts in Leisure Studies

David Harris

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446229392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Erwachsenenbildung

`This book confirms David Harris? status as a leading theorist in contemporary culture and leisure in the UK. He offers a distinctive, coherent and authoritative guide to the major concepts and debates that should engage leisure scholars and scholarship? - Dr Peter Bramham, Senior Lecturer in Leisure Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University

Written with the needs of today?s student in mind, the SAGE Key Concepts series provides accessible, authoritative and reliable coverage of the essential issues in a range of disciplines. Written in each case by experienced and respected experts in the subject area, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension.

Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages understanding without sacrificing the level of detail and critical evaluation essential to convey the complexity of the issues.

Key Concepts in Leisure Studies:

•Provides a student-friendly guide to the key debates in leisure studies

•Reflects recent developments in the field, encompassing related work in media studies, cultural studies, sports studies and sociology

•Cross-references each 1500 word exposition to other concepts in the field

•Offers definitions, section outlines and further reading guidance for independent learning

•Is supported by the author?s website http: /www.arasite.org/keyconc.html

•Is essential reading for undergraduates and NVQ students in leisure studies.

– Gramscianism –

Gramscianism is a rather clumsy word used to describe a particular approach, found most prominently in British Cultural Studies, and based on the work of Antonio Gramsci. Since Gramsci’s work was ambiguous and incomplete, it has had to be interpreted and applied to modern conditions. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham UK and, later, the Popular Culture Group at the UK Open University used selections from Gramsci’s work to radicalize and process certain themes and traditions in British social science.

Section Outline: Gramsci’s context and the development of British Cultural Studies. ‘Hegemony’ as an organizing concept. Revolutionary and cultural politics. A case study – gramscian analysis of the hegemonic representation of black sportsmen on (British) TV. Problems and criticisms: circularity and banality.

Antonio Gramsci was a marxist writer and militant active in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. His work took on particular significance for several reasons. He was working to develop marxism in the new era after the decline of classical marxism and the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia. Western versions of marxism had largely been discredited for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that during the First World War the working classes of the major European nations had fought each other instead of turning on their ruling classes to bring about socialism. Gramsci wanted to develop a view of marxism that might fit modern Europe, especially modern Italy, which offered a complex political and social situation (the urban industrialized North contrasting with the still largely agricultural and Catholic-dominated South, for example). He had decided to attempt to blend marxism with a range of other philosophical positions, and also to develop a suitable modern version of marxist politics: the Russian model that had been so successful in 1917 did not seem suitable for more stable Western European societies. Above all, Gramsci had a pressing and novel political problem on his hands in the rise of Italian fascism: he struggled desperately to organize the newly-formed Italian Communist Party to resist, but was himself arrested and jailed by a triumphant Mussolini.

In prison, Gramsci was denied the use of a library, had his work censored and had to smuggle it out in the form of notes on various topics. Gramsci’s academic legacy is one of highly promising and suggestive analyses of modern conditions, but one delivered in an ambiguous and unsystematic way, at least by modern scholarly standards.

I have given a fuller account of how this developed into a modern academic programme in Harris (1992). Briefly, Gramsci’s work became important in Britain in the 1970s, as part of a general attempt to revive marxist theory by examining the work of European theorists. Gramsci seemed particularly suitable as a starting point to analyse the position of modern politics, especially cultural politics, in Britain. His work seemed to reject orthodox marxist views that saw the economy as the main mechanism of change, and the industrial working class as its main agent. Gramsci seemed far more interested in the role and importance of cultural matters. He had also offered an analysis which suggested that modern European states did not simply represent the ruling class, but had to work to manage public opinion, to which they were periodically answerable, and thus to enlist support from a number of other important cultural and political groups. States had constructed an outer ring of defences in the form of state agencies and organizations of various kinds, that were semi-independent (the modern term for them would be quangos or NGOs), or even ‘private’.

This work seemed to offer a number of possibilities for those wishing to analyse cultural events in Britain in marxist terms, seeing them as partially but not fully independent of a wider political struggle for control, and also as a field or arena for competing definitions. I personally think that an academic agenda drove analysts to Gramsci as well, since the work seemed to offer a way of bringing together a number of options in conventional social sciences – between marxist and non-marxist analyses, and between subjective and objective forms of analysis. In the end, I think much of the political impetus of Gramsci’s work was lost as a result, so that gramscianism developed as a particularly safe, British, and academic form of cultural commentary.

We can see examples of gramscian analysis at work in other sections in this book – in the discussion of articulation, in the entry on ideology, in the work of Clarke and Critcher in the entry on social class, or in the work on youth subcultures. These feature particular concepts derived from the work of Gramsci, but much developed since. The major underlying themes are revealed by considering the concept of hegemony.

Hegemony is used in a number of historical and political analyses to refer to a form of control exercised over a group, usually a nation-state. This control is not exercised just by the use of military force, but by the use of culture as well. For example, when Britain colonized India, she introduced a whole system of law, commerce, taxes, regulation, religious beliefs, customs and ways of behaving that derived from Britain and represented Britain as the source of cultural and legal dominance as well; English became the language used by dominant groups too. Successful colonization installs or institutionalizes these practices and organizations, so that they become naturalized, a way of life, the obvious way to do things. Of course, considerable cultural work has to be done in order to maintain this view of the social order. New events, political movements, or cultural developments may arise and these have to be interpreted in the light of the overall hegemonic system. There was, for example, a considerable struggle by the British to reinterpret the rise of Indian liberation movements such as the one led by Gandhi. British hegemony attempted to represent those movements as misguided, following special interests, backward and religious, criminal, and so on. One final point to notice is that it is not just the agents of the British State who are involved in such political and cultural, or even legal work – a number of other organizations and individuals also take part, exercising their full independence and autonomy from the State, and yet working in concert with it, upholding shared beliefs and frameworks. A major role is played by the mass media, for example.

This is the way in which modern European states were thought to work in dealing with class struggle and the tensions of capitalism as well. The resistance of oppressed groups, inside or outside the nation, could not be dealt with simply by banning them and trying to crush them with military force. People had to be persuaded and opinion formed by a number of agents as well as just the government. The force of those class resistance movements could even be incorporated or deflected, as the example of rational recreation indicates (see social class) – the genuine interest in sporting contests could be preserved but rendered safe and respectable by making the working classes play organized football and not mob football. This could never be entirely successful, both because societies were so dynamic and changing, and because marxist analysts always had to believe that there was resistance and countervailing force somewhere. The very experience of oppression, the long-established cultures of resistance, and the occasional need to revert to forcible oppression guaranteed resistance. Thus, hegemony was seen in gramscian work as much more dynamic, never completed, always showing an active process of negotiation, settlement, the outbreak of new tensions and contradictions, and so on. As we have indicated already, struggles over popular culture feature in this wider struggle for hegemony: a new youth culture seems to threaten the central values of the old order, so it has to be regulated, public opinion has to be marshalled against it, and commercial versions attempt to incorporate it back into the mainstream, and so on.

Perhaps Britain seems rather an unpromising example to choose for this kind of marxist analysis. One common view is that it is a particularly conservative country, for example, with no real tradition of revolutionary politics. In fact, that view of history is highly debatable, as a founding father of British Cultural Studies argued (Thompson, 1968). Nor had large tracts of the urban working class simply absorbed middle-class values, as a number of studies of working-class culture argued, including a piece by another founding father (Hoggart, 1981). In the 1960s, considerable cultural upheaval was apparent, especially when expressed in the so-called ‘student revolt’ (large anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, strikes, protests and civil disorder in a number of European capitals, including London, allegedly led by students). In the 1970s, there had seemed to be a growing wave of industrial militancy taking the form of strikes and walk-outs, often unofficial ones led by members on the shop floor themselves. Amidst all this promise, however, one striking fact about Britain remained – it lacked a large and well-organized Communist Party. Gramsci had helped to found the Communist Party in Italy after some years of dispute inside the Socialist Party, and his agitational work included an intriguing experiment to run seminars and workshops for factory workers in order to encourage socialist theory and practice. In Britain, there was the much less militant Labour Party, and a significantly different tradition of socialist intellectuals contacting workers through the more restricted medium of adult education courses.

It is perhaps not that surprising that gramscian analysis took the form of an intellectualized interest in popular culture rather than in popular politics directly. Indeed, the belief in the urban working class as the vanguard of the revolution soon declined, especially with the onset of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1980s, and the gramscians searched instead for vanguards among other political protest movements – feminists, black activists, ecologists, anti-racists, and, finally, even in the crowd who had gathered to mourn Princess Diana. Cultural politics became the only focus of revolutionary politics. Cultural vanguards were to be contacted through the publication of the politicized lifestyle magazine Marxism Today.

The old route of contact with ordinary members of the population survived only in the highly flawed radicalism of the UK Open University and its courses. The OU Popular Culture Group constructed an excellent Open University course (code-named U203 – Open University, 1982) which systematized, codified, and academicized popular culture in Britain in a highly influential way, but never really illuminated wider struggles. That course has been much echoed since in a variety of similar ones in many universities in the UK. The colonizing tendencies of this version of cultural studies are also well known, and the approach has deeply penetrated sociology and media studies. At one time it looked as if it would colonize leisure studies too (see Tomlinson, 1989).

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) had been established earlier at Birmingham University, and it had produced a number of highly successful books and also cheaply produced ‘working papers’. These focused on a very wide range of topics such as working-class culture, social theory and, famously, youth subcultures. The position of women and black people were studied extensively in special collections (Women’s Study Group, 1978; CCCS, 1982). Influential books included one analysing the ‘moral panic’ that had arisen in the 1970s about criminal black youth, and the authors studied the ways in which the press had managed and discussed this issue (Hall et al., 1978). In the spirit of the concept of hegemony, the press were seen to be following their own professional values of neutrality and objectivity, but also supporting the wider social and political system which saw black people as a threat to British values, as representing unwelcome social change, and so on.

The famous Open University course applied the same kind of analysis, sometimes with rather ambiguous interpretations of the concept of hegemony, however, to a range of cultural objects and practices, including film, radio and television output (especially the James Bond film, for example, or the coverage of football on television), popular music, music hall, seaside holidays and other Victorian pastimes, and popular public rituals such as the celebration of Christmas (see Harris, 1992). All alike were analysed as a kind of symbolic or coded politics, as offering not only entertainment and pleasure but signs of hegemonic struggle as well.

The main writers associated with the Popular Culture Group went on to produce a rich collection of other publications, including an analysis of ‘Thatcherism’ (Hall, 1988). The public appeal of Conservative politics offered an obvious puzzle to marxist theorists, which was resolved by understanding Thatcherism as an attempt to articulate a number of specific concerns, some of them genuinely popular, such as resentment of the bureaucratic state, with a number of classic Conservative values, including nationalism, anti-modernism and racism. This offered a classic modern example of how hegemonic blocs were built from a number of highly diverse cultural and political currents.

The Birmingham Centre and the OU Popular Culture Group also had a firm academic agenda as well. They wanted to operate with a kind of academic hegemony of their own, reading and appreciating a number of alternative theoretical resources, yet quietly weaving them into preferred systems. Gramsci, or rather the particular interpretation of Gramsci adopted at the time, turned out to be the master discourse, superior to all the others. Thus, the particular approach of academic historians towards popular culture had to be radicalized and placed in the context of wider class struggle. Conversely, abstract marxism of the kind Althusser and his followers embraced had to be made more concrete and specific. Some traditions in sociology could be borrowed, especially ethnographic research, while others had to be rejected for being insufficiently deep in their perception (the opening chapters by Clarke and Critcher (1985) criticizing functionalist and pluralist work in leisure studies offer an excellent example). In my view, this ‘theoretical mapping’ took precedence over the more specific political analyses, especially since the great success of the academic endeavours to systematize work on popular culture became apparent in the form of research programmes, publications, university courses and academic positions, while that on political radicalism seemed to be decreasing.

As an example of the kind of analysis that still persists based on this tradition, I have chosen a fairly recent piece analysing the ways in which black people are represented in television programmes about football (McCarthy et al., 2003). In order to make my criticisms clear I have been rather scathing about this piece, although I bear it no particular ill will. I even commend it in the entry on the gazes and ‘race’ and leisure. I hope I can use it to offer a brief account of the strengths and weaknesses of gramscian approaches.

McCarthy et al. (2003) set out to analyse football commentaries made as part of the broadcasting of soccer on British TV. Their argument involves a substantial empirical study in which they recorded, then analysed, a large amount of television commentary. Commentaries were coded in terms of being supportive of performance, referring to physical characteristics, and making statements about the ‘inner emotional state or personality characteristics of players’ (ibid.: 222). The authors tried to see if these statements were allocated differently to players of different ‘races’. Then three black and three white focus groups were convened, each consisting of three members, made up of male students who were interested in soccer. All members self-identified as either white or black, and the fact that they knew each other (they were all students on the same Sports Studies courses) helped put them at their ease. The moderators of each group were from the same ‘race’ as the participants, and followed a semi-structured interview approach. Actual interactions were analysed from the video tapes taken at each group discussion, and views were recorded and their content analysed.

However, this was by no means a straightforward empirical study and not all the empirical data were used in this particular article. Furthermore, those data that were used had to be interpreted, and placed in the context of more general accounts of the politics of television representation. The team is interested in seeing the media as having ‘the capacity to mould and create the “pictures in our heads”, with all the resultant implications’ (ibid.: 219). Sports are seen as a particularly powerful ‘agency in the depiction of racial groups, and the consequent creation and reaffirmation of stereotypes’ (ibid.: 219), and the key to these stereotypes lies in assumptions that black people are somehow naturally more physical, and thus biologically different from white people. Recent studies of ‘race’ in Cultural Studies have also emphasized the role of language and representations of the ‘non-European “other”’ (ibid.: 220). In order to address this issue, McCarthy et al. used some classic work in gramscian Cultural Studies – a discussion of coding and encoding (see Hall, in Hall et al., 1980), the need for active interpretation by readers, tracing the effect of cultural contexts which viewers occupy, and so on.

To be brief and partial, this work represents a characteristic gramscian borrowing from semiotics, in this case, the work of Barthes. Political values from dominant groups have to be coded, and this takes place through the apparently neutral conventions of television. In this way, culture is politicized, and the hegemonic project goes its cunning way. However, there must also be resistance, for political as much as theoretical reasons, and so some viewers at least must be able to decode television in a way which does not reflect the dominant or preferred reading. Apart from anything else, it would be a deep insult to suggest that oppressed groups cannot recognize the ways in which they are being adversely represented. I think these political preferences are easily detected in the analysis which appears in McCarthy et al.

For example, the original analysis of television commentary failed to supply very much conclusive evidence of racism. The authors themselves suggest that television commentary has become much more ‘guarded’ these days (it cannot be a genuine rejection of racism that is being witnessed, since television must be part of a general hegemonic project to oppress people)...