C Rojek
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 50155 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | C Rojek |
| NOMBRES | C |
| APELLIDO | Rojek |
| FIRMA | ROJEK C |
| AFILIACIONES | City, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0196-8892 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 92 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 382 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 92 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1983 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Integrated Through Risk
Despite the emergence of multi-agency initiatives that seek to integrate actuarial and epidemiological approaches to urban violence reduction, little work has compared and contrasted these approaches and considered the associated implications for their integration. This article begins addressing this research gap with findings from the first academic analysis of an Integrated Gangs Team (IGT) in the United Kingdom. Drawing on interviews with IGT …
Fordism, McDonaldization and the virtues of Ritzer's disciplined eclecticism
This paper explores Ritzer's analytical innovation in offering McDonaldization as a concept that avoids the macro–micro divide. This dichotomy was ascendant for much of the post-war period. Ritzer's pioneering work on meta-theory did much to loosen its grip on sociological work. Meta-theory is the handmaiden of McDonaldization. The paper seeks to draw out some links because they have not generally been explored in the secondary literature. McDona…
A systematic review of figurational sociology within physical education research
The larceny of the last second
This paper submits that the hegemonic order in celebrity studies is fixated upon questions of utility, yield and economic asset value. These technical considerations support a technocratic engagement with celebrity that exaggerates the importance of technology and linearity. By the same token, it devalues philosophical perspectives that address questions of Transcendence and Ultimate Meaning. The term ‘Triangulation’ is introduced to describe the…
Leszek Kolakowski and moral integration
How are consent and the rule of law possible in post-Enlightenment societies? The rule of law is necessary. But a rule of law based upon secular principles exposes various problems of relativism that compromise its validity. Leszek Kolakowski is a neglected social theorist in the West. One of his striking arguments on the question of the integration of society is that no valid moral principles exist in experience or logic. It is a position founde…
Simple solutions to wicked problems
The pandemic has produced an abundance of medical misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Many of these narratives appear impervious to scientific evidence and indifferent to the authority of the state. This has resulted in ‘true believers’ being cast as paranoid and irrational. In this article, we take a different approach by exploring the cultural appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theori…
Peter Beilharz
John Locke, Private Property and the Birth of Achieved Celebrity
This article argues that John Locke’s defence of Natural Rights and private property are prerequisites in the rise of Achieved Celebrity. It addresses how the rights of private property are anterior to taking ‘the ordinary citizen’ as an object of attention capital
Hegel contra celebrity
Globalization, cosmopolitanism, and leisure rights
The Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 are widely held to signal the return of protectionism and isolationism in the Anglosphere. This ran counter to the Sao Paulo Declaration, issued by the World Leisure and Recreation Association (1998). For nearly 20 years, the Declaration has been at the axis of debates on the preferred trajectory of leisure relations in the West. The Brexit and Trump election campaigns seized upon the undes…
Dunning, Eric (1936–2019)
Eric Dunning has been celebrated as a pioneer in the sociology of sport. It is certainly true that he had been working on this subject two decades before the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASS) was formed in 1978. However, Dunning always regarded sport as a front of activity connected to a much bigger sociological project: the study of the civilizing process. As a student of Norbert Elias, he was committed to studying how and…
The Belle Gibson scandal
The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the 21st century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson's lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson's persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intima…
Designer notoriety
This article introduces the concept of designer notoriety to refer to calculated attempts to derail aspects of normative order so as to garner media attention. The objective is for otherwise unexceptional people to gain celebrity. The case of the alleged sabotage of Germanwings Airbus A320 Flight, by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, in 2015, is used as a case study. Drawing on the methods of content analysis from various media sources and historical…
Scp>K olakowski, L eszek (1927–2009)
Leszek Kolakowski's career illustrates the contradictions of modernity while being devoted to studying them. His experience under Marxist‐Leninism in postwar Poland exposed him to a model of government outwardly based upon socialist principles of management and development. Kolakowski grew to find it brutal, inflexible, and annihilating. Following sustained criticism of “presently existing socialism” he was expelled. His subsequent work examined …
Blasé and Neurasthenic Attitudes
The city is one of the most significant motifs of modernity. Its precincts contain all of the constant restlessness, differentiation, and de‐differentiation that categorically define modernity. With his account of blasé and neurasthenic attitudes, classical sociologist Georg Simmel provided an indispensable contribution to examining and understanding modern experience. The two were conceived as generic to the city. They are traceable to the condu…
Scp>S pengler, O swald (1880–1936)
Spengler's The Decline of the West was a cause célèbre when it was published after World War I. The study purported to offer a scientific explanation of the rise and fall of all civilizations. During the belle époque the west fashioned a self‐image of itself as eternal and invincible. World War I exposed this image as complacent. Using resources from history, psychology, economics, politics, and many other disciplines, Spengler presented a ration…
The longue durée of Spengler's thesis of the decline of the West
Spengler's The Decline of the West was a major publishing success in Weimar Germany. The study presents the end of Western civilization as an inevitable process of birth, maturity and death. Civilization is conceived as an inflexible 'morphology'. Spengler's thinking was influenced by a profound distaste with the optimism of the Belle Epoque, which he found to be complacent. The argument had a good deal of attraction to readers, especially German…
The case of Belle Gibson, social media, and what it means for understanding leisure under digital praxis
Social media fosters the rise of lifestyle gurus who provide followers with tips on grooming, lifestyle values, emotional labour and personality skills. The popularity of ‘blogshops’ that combine c
F.J. Turner’s ‘frontier thesis
American society was transformed by the expansion of capital Westward and the explosion in opportunities for land-grabbing and agricultural and industrial investment. F.J. Turner’s ([1893] 1961) frontier thesis portrays this transformation as the fulfilment of American character. The tensions between character and personality are examined following the ideas of Carl Schmitt on the significance of ‘the occasion’ in acquiring competitive advantage.…
Intellectual Property
Any form of literature, science, music, film, or computer program can be protected by copyright to prevent third parties from making copies without written permission. Copyright is the law of authorship and dates back to the Statute of Anne (1709) passed in England to protect the rights of authors and publishers from piracy. The law has been progressively elaborated in Europe and North America to grant copyright for a fixed term to the estate of …
Popular Culture Forms
Sociologists have addressed a wide range of topics under the heading of popular culture. In fact, there are far too many to cover adequately in this encyclopedia. Thus, a decision was made to give at least a sense of this literature by sampling some of the key topics examined by sociologists and offering an indication of the way in which they have been covered. A variety of forms of popular culture are considered: the beach, hip‐hop, jazz, P2P, r…
Paris, Wall Street
This article examines the political crowd as a World Historical Event (WHE). Historians define the latter as an episode, incident or emergency that transforms the course of history. The article analyses Hayden White's discussion of the WHE and the grounds he submits for separating it from pseudo-events: namely, the identification of collective trauma and the attribution of the episode as the fulfilment or 'filling out' of an historical sequence. …
Counterfeit Commerce
Study of the consumption of counterfeit products casts consumers as reflexive agents who knowingly break the law (through the consumption of illegal commodities). Because this analysis is pitched at the level of meaning rather than structural constraints, it produces a misleading view of reflexive counterfeit consumption as being motivated by resistance or the wish to escape from normative coercion. This article contrasts this with approaches tha…
There is only one Zygmunt Bauman
Global Event Management
Within the professional Event Management literature considerable claims have been made for Event Management. Investment in the area and student enrolments has risen dramatically. In some circles, Event Management is portrayed as challenging Leisure Studies and even undermining it. However, if one examines the professional literature, one quickly finds that it is overwhelmingly uncritical and self-congratulatory. The relationship between Events, m…
Decorative Sociology
In this paper we outline a critique of 'decorative sociology' as a trend in contemporary sociology where 'culture' has eclipsed the 'social' and where literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. By the term 'decorative sociology' we mean a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a politicized, textual reading of society and culture. Although we acknowledge slippage between the textual and material levels of cultural …
Capitalism and Leisure Theory (Routledge Revivals)
First published in 1985, this title explores theories of leisure in a capitalist society. Basing his argument on a refutation of the conventional association of leisure with freedom and free time, Chris Rojek examines the four main structural characteristics of modern leisure practice: privatisation, individuation, commercialisation and pacification. The writings of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud are used to locate the question of leisure in mo…
Abnormal Leisure
Twinning leisure with positive experience is the field orthodoxy. There are good reasons for this. In bidding for scarce resources, leisure professionals need to emphasize the social benefits of leisure investment. The cost is that our understanding of leisure is distorted by accentuating the positive side of experience. This paper argues that leisure studies have allowed the parameters of leisure to be defined by a medical model of social practi…
Leisure Theory
The two main questions examined in this paper are: 1) What are the achievements of leisure theory at century's end?; and 2) What are the prospects for theoretical developments in the future? The first half of the paper argues that theoretical discussion has been dominated by three positions: functionalism/post industrial society theory; structuralism; and postructuralism/postmodernism. Within this framework the specialized theory and research tra…
Problems of Involvement and Detachment in the Writings of Norbert Elias
An outline of the action approach to leisure studies
This paper is a position paper. It seeks to set a new and distinctive approach to the study of leisure that combines theory, practice and ethics. It stands on the shoulders of ‘action sociology’, as represented in the Weberian tradition, and symbolic interactionism. But it offers a radical renewal of this perspective by relating action to ‘embodiment’, ‘emplacement’, ‘location’ and ‘context’, and repositioning leisure studies in relation to ‘care…
The Consumerist Syndrome in Contemporary Society
This interview examines the relations between production and consumption and the significance of what Bauman calls ‘the consumerist syndrome’. The latter is defined by the desire for instant satisfaction. The article distinguishes the consumerist syndrome from Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption. It breaks with the 20th century practice of regarding consumer preoccupations and activities as derivative of needs and suggests that consumptio…
Global Event Management
Within the professional Event Management literature considerable claims have been made for Event Management. Investment in the area and student enrolments has risen dramatically. In some circles, Event Management is portrayed as challenging Leisure Studies and even undermining it. However, if one examines the professional literature, one quickly finds that it is overwhelmingly uncritical and self-congratulatory. The relationship between Events, m…
Big Citizen’ celanthropy and its discontents
Cultural Studies has not devoted much notice to one of the keynote developments in modern culture over the last 30 years: namely, the rise of various charity projects fronted and, in the public mind, defined by celebrities. Celanthropy – the transformation of causes into cause celebres via the public involvement of celebrities – is striking for the subtle shift in devolving the responsibilities of the state onto the shoulders of the citizens. It …
Leisure and Life Politics
From the debate on the transformation of society, two theses have emerged which are of central relevance to social thought regarding leisure. First, the post work thesis argues that society is moving into a condition in which the cybernation of labor dramatically reduces the working week and the concomitant notion of the work career. One task of social theory is therefore the review of resource distribution, notably time allocation, in the light …
An Anatomy of the Leicester School of Sociology
Eric Dunning studied under Elias and Neustadt and was appointed by the latter to lecture in sociology. He remained in Leicester throughout his academic career, eventually attaining a Chair in Sociology. He is a prominent figure in the sociology of sport and has lectured widely throughout the world. This interview sheds light on an important chapter in the development of British sociology and the unique working relationship between Elias and Neust…
Capitalism and Leisure Theory
The Belle Gibson scandal
The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the 21st century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson's lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson's persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intima…
Niccolo Machiavelli, cultural intermediaries and the category of achieved celebrity
The escalating interest in celebrity studies has not translated into a serious enquiry into the origins of the subject in social and political theory. Instead, celebrity has been usually explained as either the reflection of industrialisation or the expression of timeless, unchanging fate. The result is a distorted, compressed time frame in which the phenomenon is located in unsatisfactory, metaphysical accounts of the position of celebrity in th…
Leisure and emotional intelligence
This paper examines the concepts of emotional intelligence and emotional labour in order to propose that leisure practice is not time off or free time, but a specific form of informal labour. Leisure is the paramount setting for developing the people skills that translate into the prized cultural capital needed for the labour market and social networks. In leisure we acquire the coaching skills that translate into the two ethical principles that …
Baudrillard and leisure
Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the leading lights of post-modernist theory. Yet students of leisure appear to be either unaware or oddly impervious to the significance of his ideas for their work. This is surprising for Baudrillard's ideas are both relevant and challenging to the theoretical and applied sides of leisure studies. This paper attempts to pinpoint the relevance of Baudrillard's ideas and present a critical evaluation…
P2P Leisure Exchange
This paper examines P2P (file sharing) culture as a novel leisure form. P2P raises significant issues about the ownership and control of intellectual and artistic property, access and the regulation of leisure choice. The paper examines the efforts of the recording industry to suppress file‐sharing technology. It examines the limitations on this strategy associated with globalized leisure culture. Following the World Leisure and Recreation Associ…
Leisure and the rich today
This paper calls for a revisionist reading of the thesis of the leisure class. Veblen's great work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) argued that society is ruled by a leisure class. The primary identifying characteristics of this class are prodigious wealth, voluntary abnegation from pecuniary labour and conspicuous consumption. Veblen's argument suggested the decomposition of the work ethic because the characteristics cultivated by the rich…
Veblen, leisure and human need
Although Veblen's theory of leisure is widely referenced today it is rarely discussed at length. This paper explores the continuing relevance of the theory. In particular it concentrates on the relation of the theory to consumer culture and the concept of leisure as a basic human need. The evolutionary aspects of Veblen's discussion, which are often neglected in secondary accounts, are given prominence. Veblen's theory is described as a contribut…
After popular culture
For at least the last ten years social theory and philosophy has been dominated by the debate on modernity and postmodernity. However, the influence of this debate in leisure studies has been uneven. Postmodern arguments have exerted an influence but they have often been misrepresented by the rhetoric of traditions of collectivist thought. This paper argues that postmodernism should be regarded as one of three ‘moments’ in the development of leis…
Tourism and citizenship
(1998). Tourism and citizenship. International Journal of Cultural Policy: Vol. 4, Cultural analysis and cultural policy, pp. 291-310
Leisure’ in the writings of Walter Benjamin
The work of Walter Benjamin has achieved belated recognition in the social sciences as one of the most prescient accounts of modernity. However, it is not generally recognized that Benjamin also provides the first theory of leisure as an inevitably politicized type of activity. By tying the expansion of leisure to the rise of consumer culture and the development of modernity, Benjamin showed why leisure is fated to become beset with conflict. At …
The convoy of pollution
This paper argues that society is saturated with ideas of 'normal' 'healthy' leisure practice. These ideas reflect an historically specific distribution of power. The case of the hippy convoy and the controversy over the use value of Stonehenge as a leisure resource is examined to illustrate the official ordering of leisure in society and the social reaction to it. The paper concentrates on the events of 1986 leading to the Stoney Cross clearance…
Disney culture
In this paper the Disney animation films and the Disney parks are examined as examples of rational recreation. The themes featured and marginalized in the Disney films are examined as well as the lay-out of the Disney leisure parks. It is argued that the films and parks support a specific moral order which is heavily moralistic and which presents ‘The American Way’ in idealized terms. The rational recreation of the Disney culture is compared with…
The longue durée of Spengler's thesis of the decline of the West
Spengler's The Decline of the West was a major publishing success in Weimar Germany. The study presents the end of Western civilization as an inevitable process of birth, maturity and death. Civilization is conceived as an inflexible 'morphology'. Spengler's thinking was influenced by a profound distaste with the optimism of the Belle Epoque, which he found to be complacent. The argument had a good deal of attraction to readers, especially German…
Emancipation and demoralization
This paper reviews two contrasting approaches underlying leisure studies, namely emancipation and demoralization. Emancipation implies that leisure will enable people to become free; demoralization implies that leisure creates and satisfies false needs in a demoralized society. Each approach is found wanting. A third approach is identified which studies leisure in its own right and not as a dependent subset of other areas, such as work. The empha…
Shorter Notices
Did Marx have a theory of leisure
Marxist approaches are exerting a growing influence in the field of leisure study, yet the basis for these ventures in Marx's own writings is not always made clear. This paper examines Marx's work and submits that it does contain a theory of leisure. Marx's view of leisure in capitalist society derives from his examination of the class struggle, damaged sociability, commodity fetishism and reification. It also includes a provisional outline of le…
Time and Socialist Construction
Let us submit the following proposition for consideration: the essence of socialist construction lies in the bid to appropriate the future and is therefore expressed politically, in the organised manipulation of time. What we ordinarily take to be the sine qua non of socialist relations, namely central planning, totalitarian rule and the abolition of private property are, in fact, epiphenomena. They exist as real influences on people's lives in t…
Typologies of Education and the Capitalist World System
Ideology is the central principle of classification in the dominant sociology of comparative education. It occupies an unchallenged a priori status in thought and research. This exaggerates the differences between capitalist and socialist education systems. The two systems do not exist and develop self‐referentially. The faults of analysis which treats the two education systems as polarised types are illustrated by juxtaposing it with a world sys…
Capitalism and Leisure Theory
Problems of Involvement and Detachment in the Writings of Norbert Elias
Workers' Self-Management in the World System
This paper attempts to show that whilst the concept of self management was reasonable in the light of Yugoslavia's break from the Soviet bloc, its practice has proved problematic. It is argued that there are two inter-related reasons for this. First, self-management becomes largely a myth in a country which is interdependent with a dominantly capitalist worldwide market system and, second, it becomes difficult to sustain self-management in the li…
Freedom, Power and Leisure
The formalist and neo-Marxist traditions represent two dominant positions in the field of leisure studies. The author acknowledges the fact and illustrates his thought by proposing a brief analysis of the writings of a few well-known authors, including Parker, Roberts, Clarke and Critcher. The article centres around a discussion whose aim is to introduce an “adequate theoretical approach to leisure and recreation”. This alternative approach, base…
Capitalism and Leisure Theory
Capitalism and Leisure Theory
The convoy of pollution
This paper argues that society is saturated with ideas of 'normal' 'healthy' leisure practice. These ideas reflect an historically specific distribution of power. The case of the hippy convoy and the controversy over the use value of Stonehenge as a leisure resource is examined to illustrate the official ordering of leisure in society and the social reaction to it. The paper concentrates on the events of 1986 leading to the Stoney Cross clearance…
Baudrillard and leisure
Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the leading lights of post-modernist theory. Yet students of leisure appear to be either unaware or oddly impervious to the significance of his ideas for their work. This is surprising for Baudrillard's ideas are both relevant and challenging to the theoretical and applied sides of leisure studies. This paper attempts to pinpoint the relevance of Baudrillard's ideas and present a critical evaluation…
Leisure for Leisure
Part 1 Theoretical perspectives on leisure: models of work, models of leisure, H.F.Moorhouse figurational approach to leisure and sport, E.Dunning Sigmund Freud and pursuit of pleasure, H.Ferguson Simmel and leisure, D. Frisby leisure and the ruins of bourgeois world, C.Rojek. Part 2 Leisure, power and planning: leisure policy - an unresolvable dualism?, F.Coalter promise and problems of women's leisure and sport, J.Hargreaves leisure and informa…
The Eye of Power”
This essay in historical sociology explores how the notion of “normality” in leisure conduct emerged in the nineteenth century. It relates leisure to the programme of self-realization which was at the heart of bourgois culture. Following Foucault, the essay argues that moral regulation was achieved not by denying pleasures but by identifying them and rousing them. The empirical focus for the essay is Britain, however parallels are drawn with US e…
Introduction
Greenfield Village. Yes, Mister, Madam: Green Field Village . What a beautiful idea for the heritage merchants, the purveyors of escape, the dream-dealers in leisure and travel experience. The green field, like the legendary greenwood, is a place beyond the reach of the mundane world. It is ‘natural’, whereas so much that surrounds us in the metropolis is obviously fake. It is also a village — a cosy concept which immediately suggests images of c…
Ways of Escape
Modern life is often described as an iron cage from which there is no escape. But popular culture venerates leisure and travel as authentic escape routes from routine and monotony. However what kind o
De-differentiation and Leisure
This paper takes the orthodox associations of freedom, choice, flexibility and self-determination with leisure and treats them as part of the dreamworld of Modernity. The concept of de-differentiation is exploited and developed to support this proposition. The paper explores the organization of the self and demonstrates that this means that the leisure self is a disciplined self. The relation of leisure to the dreamworld of Modernity is described…
After popular culture
For at least the last ten years social theory and philosophy has been dominated by the debate on modernity and postmodernity. However, the influence of this debate in leisure studies has been uneven. Postmodern arguments have exerted an influence but they have often been misrepresented by the rhetoric of traditions of collectivist thought. This paper argues that postmodernism should be regarded as one of three ‘moments’ in the development of leis…
Disney culture
In this paper the Disney animation films and the Disney parks are examined as examples of rational recreation. The themes featured and marginalized in the Disney films are examined as well as the lay-out of the Disney leisure parks. It is argued that the films and parks support a specific moral order which is heavily moralistic and which presents ‘The American Way’ in idealized terms. The rational recreation of the Disney culture is compared with…
Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process
Figurational sociology is associated with the writings of Norbert Elias. In his theory of 'the civilizing process' and his work on the activity of sociology, Elias devised an approach to the study of human life which is now recognized as one of the major contributions to twentieth-century social science.Working in collaboration with Eric Dunning, Elias developed a series of writings on sport and leisure. These have been so influential that in som…
Veblen, leisure and human need
Although Veblen's theory of leisure is widely referenced today it is rarely discussed at length. This paper explores the continuing relevance of the theory. In particular it concentrates on the relation of the theory to consumer culture and the concept of leisure as a basic human need. The evolutionary aspects of Veblen's discussion, which are often neglected in secondary accounts, are given prominence. Veblen's theory is described as a contribut…
Ways of Escape
Leisure Theory
The two main questions examined in this paper are: 1) What are the achievements of leisure theory at century's end?; and 2) What are the prospects for theoretical developments in the future? The first half of the paper argues that theoretical discussion has been dominated by three positions: functionalism/post industrial society theory; structuralism; and postructuralism/postmodernism. Within this framework the specialized theory and research tra…
Leisure’ in the writings of Walter Benjamin
The work of Walter Benjamin has achieved belated recognition in the social sciences as one of the most prescient accounts of modernity. However, it is not generally recognized that Benjamin also provides the first theory of leisure as an inevitably politicized type of activity. By tying the expansion of leisure to the rise of consumer culture and the development of modernity, Benjamin showed why leisure is fated to become beset with conflict. At …
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