Monday, November 06, 2006
More late news
Monday, September 25, 2006
A nice new handbook for Leisure Studies has just been published ( well -- in July). Much of it is relevant for Sports Studies too. I have a chapter in it on 'articulation', a particular way of trying to see how leisure is joined together with/influenced by/determined by other important social, economic and political activities: this particular approach is associated with British Cultural Studies (Hall and his mates). I am pretty critical.
The handbook is an interesting genre which Mila Steele talked about at our Research Day.This one took over 3 years to assemble and nearly drove to distraction the commissioning editors at Palgrave. This is one reason publishers are not that keen on edited collections -- it takes ages to collect them all together, and impose some sort of style on the different contributions etc. With this one, the 'style' is still pretty ragged, with chapters probably written for quite different audiences and with quite different 'levels'. The most eccentric contribution, for example, is Critcher's chapter on social class, which is very basic indeed, pretty nonchalant, and has a footnote apologising for simply ignoring the comments of his reviewer! What can you do with prima donnas?
The full reference is: Rojek, C., Shaw, S. and Veal, T. (eds) Handbook of Leisure Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. A copy (hardback only for now) will cost you £80. I got a free copy and the thanks of the publishers.
Dave Harris
