Karaoke’s coming home: Japan’s empty orchestras in the United Kingdom

This paper examines the introduction, adaptation and popularisation of karaoke singing in the UK. Based on ethnographic field research and interviews conducted in both Japan and the UK, the paper traces the various pathways through which karaoke hardware and software were first introduced and marketed in the UK and the social contexts and entertainment venues within which karaoke has been popularised. The ‘domestication’ of karaoke in the UK is treated as a complex and multifaceted process involving both ‘cultural’ factors related to existing traditions of singing and amateur performance, notions of individual public ‘display’ and musical preferences, for example, and the ‘local’ economic and regulatory environment into which karaoke had been adapted. As a contribution to the discourse on the relationship between ‘global’ and ‘local’ forces in cultural flows, it is argued that although Japanese karaoke producers may have been successful in globalising the karaoke concept, its popularisation as a leisure activity in the UK has involved the localisation of the production, distribution and uses of karaoke hardware and software.     

‘Time-out’ with the family: the shaping of family leisure in the new urban consumption spaces of cafes,bars and restaurants

In many north-western European countries, the family practices of drinking and eating used to be largely located in the private domain of the home. This situation has recently begun to change, particularly in gentrified urban areas where middle-class families are growing in number and family outings in bars and restaurants are becoming more widespread. This paper examines the new practices of family consumption from two perspectives: the providers and the consumers. Entrepreneurs shape family-friendly spaces by reducing boundaries between eating, drinking and playing and by offering out-of-home pleasures in home-like environments for both parents and children. They balance between accommodating the families and retaining their childless clients. Families that consume in the food and drink spaces are primarily local middle-class families, and fathers and mothers equally participate. This study further reveals that leisure time spent with the family cannot always be classified as leisure time as a family. Parental involvement with the children differs. We distinguish leisured caring time with high parental involvement, own leisure time mainly directed at parents’ personal activities and social leisure time mainly directed at maintaining social relationships beyond the family. We discuss earlier research on the complicated character of family leisure related to the caring duties of parents. Empirical evidence comes from an exploratory study of ten consumption spaces in the inner city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.     

Youth leisure careers during post‐communist transitions in the South Caucasus

This paper reports findings from interview surveys with 1215 respondents, split between the capital cities (Yerevan, Baku and Tbilisi) and one non‐capital region (Kotayk, Aran‐Mugan and Shida Kartli) in each of the three South Caucasus countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The respondents, who were drawn from households in larger representative household social surveys, were all born between 1970 and 1976 and were aged 31–37 at the time of the fieldwork in 2007. Their life stage transitions from childhood to adulthood had roughly coincided with their countries’ transitions from communism to post‐communism. Data was collected on the samples’ participation in selected leisure activities from age 16 to 30. Similar data was collected on the samples’ careers in education, the labour market, housing and family relationships. This information enables us to identify typical leisure careers and how their development was affected by events in other life domains, all in the context of the macro‐changes that were in process in each of the research locations. The evidence enables both personal leisure careers and aggregate leisure trends in different socio‐demographic groups to be identified This shows that changes in leisure behaviour between age 16 and 30 were neither widening nor narrowing the differences between the leisure of males and females, or those who married and became parents on the one hand, then, on the other, those who were still single and childless at age 30. In contrast, differences by place, and by social class, grew progressively wider, thus raising the social costs of geographical and social mobility. Changes in leisure behaviour between age 16 and 30 were separating young adults into those who participated in little, if any, structured out‐of‐home leisure, whose main leisure spending, if any, was on alcohol and tobacco (typically consumed in homes and neighbourhoods), and those whose leisure was characterised by relatively high and sustained participation in sport, consumption of high culture, and going out to bars, cafes, cinema, discos, etc.     

To bee or not to bee: whether ‘tis nobler to revere or to revile those six-legged creatures during one’s leisure

By incorporating the concept of speciesism into a multi-disciplinary critical approach to animal–human studies in leisure, I provide an overview of anthropomorphism and entomophobia and suggest how these concepts limit our understanding of human–insect encounters. The concentric circles of leisure illustrate how human–insect encounters in rural and urban areas are often influenced by our senses, spatial cues, socio-cultural forces and our perceived need for safety and comfort. In his study of the pluralistic aspects of environmental values, Norton (2000 Norton, B.G. 2000. Biodiversity and environmental values: In search of a universal earth ethic. Biodiversity and Conservation, 9(8): 1029–1044. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggested that we should be cautious in the dichotomy of the opposites and seek to find new approaches that consider the multitude of perspectives, the nuances and inconsistencies that make up human values of nature. Such an approach requires challenging the institutionalised speciesism woven into many aspects of our recreational activities, critiquing the philosophical underpinnings of anthropomorphism and entomophobia, and addressing inter and intra species dynamics throughout various leisure terrains (i.e. indoor/outdoor, urban/rural and local/global) and illustrating how such movements creates interactions that are fluid, complex, unsettling and rewarding. The potential contributions of leisure to this emerging field are outlined in the conclusion.     

Towards new tourism policies: The importance of environmental and sociocultural factors

Unrestricted tourism growth could lead to the positive economic effects of tourism being outweighed by significant social and environmental disadvantages, which could in turn translate the economic benefits into disadvantages. This process derives not only from tourism effects per se, but also from changes in the social structure. This article calls for not merely economic and technical adjustments in policies, but for a fundamental political transformation in the conception of tourism and recreation.     

Managing the environmental and cultural impacts of tourism and leisure development

It is claimed that the state of development of tourism management as a discipline may be related to the claims of the tourist industry as a pressure group and the lack of adequate academic attention to the economic disbenefits and the environmental and sociocultural costs-benefits of tourism. This article sets out to redress the balance by proposing a social-theory base for tourism.     

Cycles and capacity: Incipient theory or conceptual contradiction?

The concept of tourism cycles is one that has evolved from within the discipline of tourism research, whereas that of carrying capacity has been well developed in other fields and then come to be applied within tourism studies. This article describes and evaluates these two concepts and examines underlying assumptions of them which may be in conflict and may make it difficult to reconcile the two in tourism research.     

Fragility of leisure ties between ethnic minority and majority youth – an empirical case from Finland

This paper explores social integration of ethnic minority youth in the context of micro-level leisure interaction in Finland. The aim of the study is to disentangle the types of ties that are formed between ethnic minority and majority youth. Moreover, the article will examine how these ties build bridges across group boundaries in the form of providing new leisure resources for ethnic minority youth. The qualitative data of the study consists of multi-sited ethnography conducted in the context of youth work and distinct interview data of ethnic minority youth (n = 38). Strong interethnic ties in the form of close friendships are rare in the data. Instead, many weak ties in the form of distant acquaintances are maintained. However, because of manifold micro-level elements, these weak ties are often too fragile to function as bridges accumulating the leisure resources of ethnic minority youth. Strong interethnic ties seem to have more bridging qualities. Thus, the conceptual distinction of weak/bridging and strong/bonding ties originally formulated in the framework of the labour market may not be applicable in the fields of youth leisure.     

Health matters: the social impacts of street-involved youth’s participation in a structured leisure programme

In this ethnographically informed study, we used a Foucauldian approach to examine the social impacts of street-involved youth’s participation in a structured leisure programme. Our findings suggest that structured leisure activities help to facilitate social ties between the youth participants as well as the youth and programme staff/volunteers. Nevertheless, we found that structured leisure does not necessarily assist in the formation of relationships between street-involved youth and members of the mainstream community outside of the programme. We show how the ways the youth took up dominant discourses concerning street-involved youth and engaged with technologies of the self-influenced their social relationships and their ties to the community. These findings complicate our understanding of structured leisure’s potential benefits for street-involved youth.     

旅游城市休闲服务业协调发展研究

本文通过明晰休闲与旅游的关系,着重探讨了旅游城市经济产业中休闲服务部门的概念与内涵,并从时空角度追索了休闲活动的演化进程,分析了休闲服务业的部门构成和国内外发展现状,探讨了我国旅游城市休闲服务业协调发展的初步构想.