Social Work and Received Ideas examines the language of both traditional and radical social work as forms of power, arguing that the will to help and care for people unintentionally results in new types of dependency, control and domination.

Offering readers the most complete and authoritative critical introduction to Leisure Theory and written by one of the major figures in the field, the book provides an exciting and reliable guide to leisure forms, leisure practice and the representation of leisure. It demonstrates how power relations influence leisure choices and introduces students to the primary functions and regulative mechanisms of leisure, providing a thought provoking account of the central problems confronting students of leisure today. Written with the needs of students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in...

A book to get you thinking. It has proved impossible to convey accurately the exciting, wide-ranging, seemingly effortless trawl across a wide variety of schools, disciplines and thinkers which Rojek employs to support his argument. He uses a direct personal style which shines through the closely argued material and keeps you turning the pages to the very end. Students brought up in the modernist traditions of sociologies of leisure may find this book challenging and ultimately even frustrating, but it is an essential text which I hope will appear on recommended reading lists everywhere...

In his compelling new book, Chris Rojek turns this shibboleth on its head to demonstrate how leisure has become a form of labor. Ranging widely from an analysis of the inflated aspirations of the leisure society thesis to the culture of deception that permeates leisure choice, the author shows how leisure is inextricably linked to emotional labor and intelligence. It is now a school for life. In challenging the orthodox understandings of freedom and free time, The Labour of Leisure sets out an indispensable new approach to the meaning of leisure.

Research in and around popular culture continues to flourish. And its study is, more than ever, a key component of Media and Communications Studies courses, and a vital part of Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology curricula. The sheer scale of the available research exploring popular culture--and the breadth and complexity of the canon on which it draws--makes this new four-volume Routledge collection especially timely. It answers the urgent need for a wide-ranging collection which provides ready access to the key items of scholarly literature, material that is often inaccessible or...

This collection focuses on social science perspectives on popular music since the late 1970s when the drift away from Musicology started. The latter focuses upon music as a sequence of notes and silence, rather than the social, economic, cultural and political contexts in which popular music is produced, exchanged and consumed. Since the 1970s, social scientists like Simon Frith, Larry Grossberg, Will Straw, Paul Willis, Andy Bennett, Keith Negus, Howard Becker and Sarah Thornton have intensively examined the phenomenon of popular music from a social science and cultural studies perspective....

"Rojek's argument is a psychological one, although his message is political: global events build on people's needs to feel empowered and jointly engaged in the pursuit of a higher purpose; they allow a break from daily routines, provide an illusion of intimacy and social membership, and create a sense of self-validation and personal gratification. In short, participation in such events makes us feel good.

At the same time, the real effect of global events seems to be the maintenance of global inequality and social injustice, as well as huge profits for the organizations involved...

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, this new title from Routledge's Critical Perspectives on Business and Management series is a four-volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge research in Event Management.

The origins of the serious study of Event Management are comparatively recent, but the subject has evolved rapidly, often drawing on scholarship, research, and practice from a number of other disciplines and cognate areas--primarily, Sports Studies, Leisure Studies, and Hospitality Studies, but also Business Studies, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Political...

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 more mainstream social theory. This interesting reissue will be of particular value to students of sociology and leisure studies, and those with an...

Jean-Francois Lyotard is still considered to be the father of postmodernism. An international range of contributors in the field of cultural and philosophical studies, including Barry Smart, John O' Neill and Victor J. Seidler consider Lyotard's writings on justice and politics of difference, feminism, youth and Judaism.