Moving beyond individualism in leisure theory: a critical analysis of concepts of community and social engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the latter years of the twentieth century, the social relevance of the leisure field diminished as consumption and individualism came to dominate leisure and recreation research and praxis across modern democratic nations. A consequence of this focus in leisure studies has been a neglect of community and the common good. Now, at the commencement of the twenty-first century, three interrelated crises become increasingly apparent - the crisis of identity or self, a social crisis, and a political crisis. If leisure studies is to contribute to an attempt to address these crises and rebuild community, how might this happen without returning to the norms, duties and traditional structures that have oppressed and marginalized citizens? In this paper the notion of social capital is used to examine community structures and their potential contribution to social cohesion, trust, mutuality, co-operation and openness. The challenge is to develop a concept of community that can provide spaces for the social self and civic engagement to emerge. The paper explores the role of leisure practices in this pursuit. Central to the discussion is Borgmann's notion of focal practices - those pursuits which bring an engagement of mind and body and a centring power - and the way in which such practices create shared meaning and communities of celebration. Participation in communities of celebration entails people coming together in sports, festivals, hobbies, volunteering, and the arts, and finding in these leisure activities common and public goods. This communitarian conceptualization of leisure stands in stark contrast to the privatization of leisure that has become commonplace in recent decades.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".