The International Journal of Urban Labour and Leisure

Volume 4, Issue 1

This edition of the International Journal of Urban Labour and Leisure covers a number of areas. Firstly Owen Knight takes a researchers eye to look at the area of gambling. His ethnographic piece focuses on gambling and specifically the process of betting as taking place within the confines of a betting shop. Within this he focuses on the roles individuals take to decide upon a bet and how this ineracts with their individual and group identites.

Out second article by Chiung-Tzu Lucetta Tsai examines feminist arguments that a ‘common-sense’ approach to defining leisure as an opposition to work is far too simplistic and ignores the dimension of gender in social relations. People are ‘gendered’ individuals and the fundamental sexual division between males and females permeates life. Hence, human sexuality is a crucial factor in social relations and, in many studies, is the determinant of opportunities and constraints in leisure. In other words, the inequality brought about by the sexual division of labour is the fundamental ground of the difference of leisure activities for men and for women. 

Contents Volume 4 Issue 1:

Owen Knight Gambling and Social Setting within Licensed Betting Offices: An Ethnographic Examination of the Effect of Social Environment upon the Gambling Behaviour of Regular Gamblers.

Chiung-Tzu Lucetta Tsai Feminist Perspectives on Leisure Policies for Women.

Helen Makay Critically discuss the ways in which music technology is set to alter the face of the music industry in the twenty first century.

Barbara M. Walker What About the Boys?

Most research into leisure reflects men’s experience of leisure forms and activities. Essentially, leisure became defined as non-work, significant only because of its connection with work. At the risk of over-generalisation, life was seen to be readily compartmentalised between work and leisure and men were seen to earn leisure through paid work. Thus, the focus of leisure studies is at present upon the relationship between paid work and leisure.

Chiung-Tzu Lucetta Tsai analyses the factors that constrain and confine leisure for women and shows how women’s leisure has been marginalised in a contemporary patriarchal society. She attempts to use the perspectives of feminism to look at leisure experiences of women. She focuses on women’s own perceptions and experiences which too often have been ignored in leisure studies. This research deals with leisure policy and provision for women from the perspectives of feminism. Moreover, it tries to come up with new resolutions providing more leisure opportunities for women.

Helen Mackay takes a novel approach to a paper and treats it as an essay in an attempt to uncover the extent to which new technology is set to take over, or more pertinently, overhaul the music industry. In doing so she uncovers different types of technology and analyses how they relate to the latest software and hardware releases.

Our final paper by Barbara M. Walker, is an attempt to explain an empirically-based theoretical model which grew out of a small qualitative study centring around in-depth interviews with 39 boys aged between 11 and 21, and based in East Anglia. (The term ‘boys’ is used throughout – even when talking about the older age group – because this is the term they used themselves.) The full title of the project, funded by the ESRC, is Understanding Boys’ Sexual Health Education and its Implications for Attitude Change. The study’s aims were to investigate the experience and education of boys in relation to matters of sexual health and masculinity, and it is the experience of the construction of masculinity that is the focus of this paper. Walker did not embark on the study with any theories of adolescence in mind. She merely went out and talked to people about their experience, about how it felt to be growing up in the present day. The study generated a collection of varied and often vivid personal stories, as well as a sense of group culture.

We hope you enjoy this issue of the International Journal of Urban Labour and Leisure.

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