The way we organise our free time can reveal a great deal about our identities and ideology. This book explores what our sports and leisure choices can tell us about the society in which we live. Comprehensive, cutting edge and packed with global examples it covers all the essentials for students of sports and leisure sociology.

This book looks back at the meaning and purpose of leisure in the past. But this is not a simple social history of leisure. It is not enough to write a history of leisure on its own in fact, it is impossible without engaging in the debate about what counts as leisure (in the present and in the past). Writing a history of leisure, then, entails writing a philosophy of leisure: and any history needs to be a philosophical history as well. That is the purpose of this book. It provides an account of leisure through historical time, how leisure was constructed and understood by historical actors,...

A critical and insightful text that explores the meaning and purpose of sports in society through an interdisciplinary lens, bringing together sports studies, sociology, philosophy and more, and drawing on a wide range of international examples, in order to provoke readers to question assumptions about the value of sports and physical culture.