Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com/ The Man from Leisure: An Interview with Chris Rojek

Tony Blackshaw Cultural Sociology 2012 6: 319 originally published online 3 August 2011 DOI: 10.1177/1749975511409996 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/3/319

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Article

The Man from Leisure: An Interview with Chris Rojek

Tony Blackshaw

Cultural Sociology 6(3) 319335 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1749975511409996 cus.sagepub.com

Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Abstract
This article is an interview with the eminent British sociologist, theorist of leisure and stardom, publisher and critic of cultural studies Chris Rojek. It begins with an introduction that outlines his career trajectory and key publications, and puts some flesh on his particular way of doing sociology. The interview itself falls into three broad parts. First, Rojek answers some questions about the source of his sociological imagination, his formative work on the sociology of leisure, and the relationship between his academic and publishing work. The second and third parts intersect one another. The second concentrates on Rojeks key ideas and how these relate to some important themes and issues in cultural sociology and the study of leisure. The third part of the interview explores some shifts in Rojeks work and how these are connected to major currents in cultural sociology and the demise of leisure studies. The interview concludes with reflections on the function and responsibilities of sociology today.

Keywords
abnormal leisure, cultural sociology, decentring leisure, decorative sociology, leisure, neat capitalism, Chris Rojek

Introduction
Chris Rojek is both a social theorist and an observant critic of the contemporary cultural scene, an imaginative sociologist of culture and a passionate publisher, a dissenter and a seeker of the new, whose writings cover a wide range of subjects, interests so various that anyone can find something of interest in his work. Rojek began his academic career at the University of Leicester, under the tutelage of Ilya Neustadt and Eric Dunning, where he also encountered Norbert Elias and process sociology. After completing his MPhil at Leicester on Convergence and the Problem of

Corresponding author: Tony Blackshaw, Department of Sport, Faculty of Health and Wellbeing, Sheffield Hallam University, Collegiate Hall, Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield S10 2BP, UK Email: t.blackshaw@shu.ac.uk

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Divergence in worker self-management, he became lecturer in sociology at the College of St Mark and St John in Plymouth, before taking up another sociology lectureship at The Queens College, Glasgow. In 1986 he put his teaching career on hold for eight years when he became senior editor for sociology with Routledge in London. During this time he also completed a PhD in sociology at Glasgow University, which was published as Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel (Rojek, 1993). In 1994 he became publisher in social science at SAGE Publications in London, and Professor of Sociology at Staffordshire University. In 1996 he moved to Nottingham Trent University, where he was Professor of Sociology and Culture for ten years. He is currently Professor of Sociology and Culture at Brunel University in West London. Rojeks first book, Capitalism and Leisure Theory (Rojek, 1985), helped to establish leisure as a serious area of academic study in sociology, while his Decentring Leisure (Rojek, 1995) provided a radical critique suggestive of a postmodern theory of leisure which recognizes that if today human lives are marked by their freedom from the hegemony of any one specific meaning, it is concepts such as risk, contingency, fragmentation, speed, change and de-differentiation which best reveal the complexity of leisure in those lives. Here was a dramatic irony: by the mid-1990s, postmodernism had lost its magnesium-flare fame, but at the very moment some in sociology were gleefully driving a stake through its heart, Rojek was using it to give the study of leisure a blood transfusion. The thesis developed in Decentring Leisure is also related to another key aspect of Rojeks work, which is that it operates with the assumption that if leisure cannot be separated from other aspects of peoples lives, then the study of leisure should better proceed as the sociology of culture and cultural sociology. As a result Rojeks scholarly interests have unsurprisingly expanded beyond the narrow vista of leisure studies. Although he intermittently returns to the topic of leisure every five or ten years or so it seems inviting us to rethink it anew, and always in extraordinarily different ways, he has made it known to all that he is more interested in the sociology of culture in the round, publishing a sequence of books on a number of diverse subjects, from social work to leisure, to celebrity, to national identity, from Norbert Elias to Jean Baudrillard, to Stuart Hall, to Frank Sinatra. What distinguishes Rojeks books, apart from their topicality and the first-rate writing, is his enthusiasm for his subjects. In his controversial book Stuart Hall (Rojek, 2003), for example, he does not just examine Halls contribution to cultural studies, he gets right into the core of that thinkers ideas, dissecting them with a vigour rare in academic writing. One can understand why Rojek approached his subject in this way: Hall is a genuinely iconic figure in cultural studies and he is a sociologist with an equally genuine disruptive consciousness. As that most perceptive interpreter of his work in leisure studies, Peter Bramham, observes, Rojek passionately believes that this kind of personal engagement is necessary, especially in a performative culture (Bramham, 2002: 233). Indeed, the point of his sociological imagination is to be both soberly detached and personally involved. The ability to hold two such contradictory forms of critical engagement without their clouding each other and the mind is obviously part of what makes Rojek a highly successful publisher of sociology.

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The Interview
[Tony Blackshaw] How and why did you decide to become a sociologist? [Chris Rojek] I became a sociologist because it was one of the few areas of university life where you did not really need to know too much. I went into university in 1973. Sociology was not like law or history, in the sense that there were clear establishments. It also seemed cutting-edge and relevant since it was talking about real things, whereas when the social was embraced by geography or history, they often came at it at an angle that didnt seem real to me. So sociology seemed to me to be about real things. My undergraduate degree was in social science at Leicester. I did economics, history, sociology, politics and psychology, and then specialized in sociology after year two. It was slightly odd in that I went to Leicester without really knowing the value of that department. I actually went there because it was one of only five or six sociology departments that did not require Latin as an entry requirement! What I didnt know about Leicester was that Elias was still there. The way in which he was presented to me was as the greatest sociologist of the 20th century, and what was good about that experience was that nobody had heard of him, really. The books that he had written had not yet been translated into English. I read The Civilizing Process in Eric Dunnings translation in about 1975, and that was my first contact with Eliass work.1 Did your time at Leicester provide the impetus for your interest in the sociology of leisure? The work of Elias and his colleagues was the source of my sociological imagination. So what I was taught then influences everything that I do. I was taught to look at social relations in terms of process, in terms of interdependence and the balance of power relationships, to aim to be detached in ones knowledge and not be involved, not to be frightened to use the word science to describe what we do, because that is one way of distinguishing between what we do in our work and what we talk about in everyday life. That influences my approach to things. The historical comparative method is another which is associated with my Leicester years. It is an approach that I use for social analysis to look at things historically and how they compare to other societies. However, how my interest in leisure developed was entirely Machiavellian. My second teaching job was in Glasgow at the Queens College, which was a fixed appointment for three years. I realized that I needed to build up my publications to make sure I had a job, so I looked around strategically at where there was a weakness in sociology. Even though the leisure society thesis had collapsed there was still the feeling that the working week would have to be shortened and that working life would have to be reduced. We were in the midst of the miners strike and the Ravenscraig steelworks closing down, and there was this feeling that industrial society could not go back and something else had to be invented. At the time people were not really thinking through a knowledge revolution; they were thinking more in terms of the state and the state reducing the working week by, for example, bringing the retirement age down. I realized leisure was a place where I could make a mark very quickly, because the competition was not intense and also it seemed to be something that society was identifying as really relevant for the future. That is how it came about that I started writing articles for Leisure Studies.

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In the course of that, Jill Davis, who was editor at Tavistock, sent me the manuscript for a book on leisure theory. I cant remember who wrote it, but I went through the manuscript and told Jill it wasnt very good. She wrote back and said, If you think youre so clever, why dont you write the book? That was how Capitalism and Leisure Theory developed. She encouraged me to write it; it wasnt something that I had wanted to do. It came out in 1985. In 1986 Jill wrote to me again to tell me that Tavistock had been bought by somebody called Associated Book Publishers and that various imprints such as Croom Helm and Routledge were coming together, and Peter Hopkins, the Routledge editor for sociology, was not staying with the company, that they needed a publisher in sociology, and would I be interested in applying for the position. At that time I had never been encouraged to think of myself as entrepreneurial, I never thought of myself as a manager who could handle markets and dream up products. So my initial response was anxiety, as I could not add up and take away, never mind think about running a list that was worth 1.5 million. But I got the job. After much soul searching I went down to London and began a career in publishing. You have been the leading developer of leisure theory over the last 20 years, as well as being a general sociologist of considerable merit and a publisher in social science. How do you reconcile these identities? What does being an academic mean to you? It was 1986 and I realized I had a lot to do. Id embarked on a PhD in leisure in Glasgow and this subsequently became Ways of Escape, which was published in 1993. I got in touch with David Frisby, who was at Glasgow, and he introduced me to the work of Simmel, which I had never really heard of before. That opened lots of doors that were eventually pursued in Decentring Leisure. I also thought it would be an advantage to me to keep reading and writing and thinking about sociology, because that meant that I could keep on top of the language and so on. Then there was a big thing happening, a massive debate was emerging between modernists and postmodernists. Suddenly sociology and social sciences were more relevant than they had been for a while, certainly more relevant than they are now. I was getting lots and lots of stimulation from people like David, whose book [Fragments of Modernity] came out which had chapters on Kracauer, Simmel and Walter Benjamin. I was scratching my head thinking why hadnt anybody told me about this at Leicester? Elias was German but we hadnt been taught about Adorno or Benjamin. So intellectually it was a very fruitful time, the result being that in 1993 I got my PhD as a part-time student at Glasgow, and published the thesis as a book at the same time. In terms of reconciling those two roles, people often ask me how I do it. But when you think about it, when you are reading and writing books you are thinking: Why hasnt anybody written a book about this and articles on that? From 1986 I had been in a position not just to dream that, but to ask people to write books. It seems to me to be a natural marriage between writing, thinking and reading, and then trying to fill gaps in the field and identify areas which you can approach people to write on. The other thing for someone who didnt have much confidence, I suddenly found that every sociologist in the world was ready to see me. I could write to Harold Garfinkel in the USA and say, I am going to be in Los Angeles could you meet me for lunch? At the time, Harold

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had about six books for Routledge which he had not completed still hasnt completed them! That was a huge kick for me, to meet John Urry, whom I read as a student, Bryan Turner and Zygmunt Bauman. A lot of those people, Bryan Turner in particular, were very open with me and very responsive to someone who was engaging with ideas rather than just talking about the terms of their contract. Although I hadnt published much, I was talking to Bryan about ideas on body and society, saying, why dont you do this and why dont you do that. As a result of my position at Routledge I had access to minds that I would not otherwise have had. I was publishing 30 to 40 books a year, and thats a lot of people to meet. I was going to conferences in Europe and further afield, which I had not done before, either. I had not travelled. The first time I went to America was through publishing. So I was getting lots and lots of information flows from various sources that made me realize that British sociology was very introspective and very indulgent and had its own agenda, which was quite insular. This was an island agenda which was very much organized around the start of cultural sociology, but seen through the lens of the Birmingham school. The Birmingham school did some very good things, but it was also quite narrow. It had a rather narrow perspective of culture in the round, and although it engaged with continental philosophy and Marxism, it wasnt looking very much at studies by Goffman and ethnographic studies of the kind developed by Ned Polsky in his book on beats and hustlers (Polsky, 1969). Indeed, ethnographic sociology was something that it did not seem to engage in Paul Willis was the exception. As a result of my job, I was at a crossroads that many people werent at. I was seeing things, getting a lot of traffic as a result of meeting people who were actually the most advanced thinkers in the discipline. I was getting a lot of stimulation and that led me to file things away to keep in mind for different projects in the future. And then what happened in terms of career progress, in 1994 I was up for head of group in social science at Routledge and didnt get the job. Disappointed, I started going through the academic jobs lists. By that time, I had written two books and lots of articles. A chair came up at Staffordshire University; I put in an application, and got it. I was then faced with leaving Routledge. But within the month of leaving, SAGE approached me and asked me whether I would be interested in working for them in a part-time capacity, running their sociology list. So thats how I ended up at SAGE. Has the publishing job changed much? The job is basically me contacting people to write books. We do get unsolicited proposals coming through, but of those in the course of the year we perhaps only publish one, if we are lucky. Very few PhDs are published now. The job has changed a lot. When I started at Routledge we would do a print run of around 2,000 books. Books were aimed at undergraduates, but also people interested in ideas. One of the best books I published at Routledge was The Most Radical Gesture by Sadie Plant (1992), which was a book on the Situationists. Now if I took that book to a publishing company today, as an editor, the first thing they would say is Where are the courses? If there are no courses, we cant publish it. So what has happened in my career in publishing, which is over 20 years now, is there has been a much bigger emphasis on how lecturers and their students will use books in class. With the expansion of higher education, key concepts books are really

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what publishers are focusing on now, whereas when I started it was a much higher level of publishing. You werent publishing Habermas, but you were publishing secondary interpretations of Habermas, of which we were selling 1,500. But not now. So it has changed. Yes. Books are much more direct and user-friendly; whether thats expanding knowledge and good for education is a separate question. Do you think that engaging with classical sociology still has any value for leisure studies and cultural sociology? Any balance sheet of sociology in 2010 would have to say we are following the classical agenda; it is still all there. For example, George Ritzers concept of McDonaldization seems to me a more user-friendly version of rationalization. Not so long ago people were saying Marxs ideas are dead, but Das Kapital is one of the current best sellers. It seems to me that, without being trapped by the classical tradition, it is a living heritage of great value to us. One of the difficulties, I think, is making students realize that. The classical sociologists expressed themselves in a language that was very precise, very involved, which is daunting to younger people today. If you agree with the idea that people are moving from a text-based culture to a visual culture you have got to recognize that it is difficult for them to read Weber at his most involved, or Marx, and yet from my own experience those are ideas that I carry around in order to make sense of everyday life, in all its manifestations. So for me classical sociology still works. When I say that it is important to maintain the balance sheet and use the ideas of the classical sociologists, I am not sure how much sociology has moved on from those ideas. Figures like Goffman are for me working in the Simmel tradition. Likewise Marx carries on in different guises. Jeff Alexander is very Durkheimian still. Bryan Turner is Weberian. It seems to me that the tradition is still very much alive and well. Postmodernism came along and was meant to be taking things into a new position, meant to be recognizing that sociology had moved into a new phase. But now I look at postmodernism not so much as a new social movement, but as a ground-clearing exercise. Postmodernism was about sweeping aside some positions that had got very ossified a certain kind of Marxism, a certain kind of functionalism, a certain kind of feminism basically saying that those positions are naked now, that they dont have any clothes. So I think it was very useful to clear the decks. Not so long ago I interviewed Zygmunt Bauman and was intrigued when he said that he personally had learnt more about the society we live in from literary greats such as Balzac, Zola, Kafka, Musil, Frisch, Perec, Kundera, Beckett than he had from sociology. What place if any - would you say literature has in your work? I have always thought of Bauman as sociologys Nabokov: the way he expresses himself seems to have a distinctive sociological style. Nobody writes quite like him. In my own case the interest in writing preceded interests in sociology. All the early stuff I read was literature, when I was younger. The kind of literary figures that still mean something to me are Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Dickens. I still get quite excited by a good turn of phrase and feel it can be much more stimulating than some arguments. So I am consciously trying to write well, or write well in relation to my own limited talents. The writing process is for me what sociology is all about; I havent done much empirical research. Most of my sociological research occurs in my study and it involves engaging with other
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positions. I would say that Bauman is very much like this: he actually hasnt done much research. Bryan Turner has done research, but essentially he writes. So there are a lot of these figures out there who see themselves working in a kind of literary tradition. It just happens to be inflected in sociological questions and sociological issues. I dont like this civil-service speak in which a lot of sociological books are written, the kind of grey, administrative language, because it doesnt engage students. Again when you think of the classic writers, they verge on the poetic. Think of Marxs key terms everything solid melts into air and Webers disenchantment of the world and the iron cage. These are phrases which are almost like poetry, and within our field linger as a sort of poetic imagination. I still think that is an important thing to do because one of the problems with sociology is that it has lost its public: sociologists today really only write for themselves. There are no public intellectuals in this country. I cant think of somebody who is an Edward Said, or somebody the press would think of as the sociologist to go to. Giddens maybe, but Giddens is so closely identified with the Blair project and the Third Way that he is not sufficiently broad to be a public intellectual. There are no Raymond Williamses anymore. Eric Hobsbawm is still alive, but is very old. There is no Edward Thompson. There is no figure like that today. In my youth the situation was completely different. There were a number of figures like that, and they were writing for the public. An ordinary person could read The Making of the English Working Class and get something from it. Now it is very hard to read somebody like Scott Lash. It is very hard to read and understand his work; even if you have had an education in the subject, you cant. So how is the ordinary member of the public meant to get it? I think that is a big defect. Sociologists have also been very poor at adapting to the new televisual skills. They havent developed a television presence. Perhaps the best-known sociologist in the media is Laurie Taylor, who trained as an actor before he became a sociologist. Laurie presents in a very actory way and also a very literary way, always with a nice turn of phrase in his writing in the Times Higher and in his Thinking Allowed programme. But when Laurie goes to a better place, there is nobody in place to take over. No figure coming up. So thats what I mean by sociologists having lost their public. If you go to BSA [British Sociological Association] meetings it is really people preaching to the converted. There are usually around 300 people there from British sociology, and they are really fielding and asking questions for themselves, rather than taking the next stage and addressing the public. I think once a subject that deals with social reality is in that state, it is really hard to say it is relevant, that it still has a role to play. Sadly Western sociology has got into that position. Bryan Turner always says sociology arises from adversity and he tells me that there is some good sociology in China, because there are real social issues in that country. For example, families are limited by the children they can have, the party still controls things and stops people saying things, and there are environmental issues as China expands its global reach, because it is mineral poor and it tries to get minerals from Africa essentially it is behaving like an empire. In the West we dont really have that kind of crisis; even the credit crunch is likely to be solved before long. This hasnt really produced ideas that we need to look at, a social transformation in a thoroughgoing manner. It is much more a question of we are in a bad situation so lets live through it and get back to normal. So in a sense [J.K.] Galbraith was right when he called our
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society the affluent society: he allowed for relative deprivation and suggested we are still affluent in a way that our parents didnt know. Thinking about what you said about sociologists not engaging with current issues, could it be that, in the aftermath of postmodernism, sociologists have lost their confidence? Moreover, are they drawn from too narrow a constituency these days? For radical sociology 1968 did mean a great loss of confidence. Sociologists had been writing about revolution for a couple of decades, and in 1968 in France it looked as though it was going to happen, but as we all know it didnt. So after that you have poststructuralism and a growing interest in textuality, rather than the answers of social movements. There was now much less faith in social movements as agents of change. Sociologists then began to develop a language which was very forbidding for the man in the street. It was a language extremely difficult to read. The second thing that has happened to sociology since the 1970s is that in one sense it was too successful. It energized people to thinking in sociological terms. For example, when you listen to John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4 in the morning, hes using words like alienation, bureaucracy, ideology, estrangement, class and so on. Sociology in the 1960s was beginning to make people aware of those things in a coherent manner. For example, people were aware of things like class, even if they werent aware of the structural thought that sociologists were using. And in sociologizing populations there wasnt much left for sociologists to say. Sociology began as a critical enterprise and it still finds it difficult being constructive. The third thing that happened to sociology was that there was this internal fragmentation within the subject. You have sociology influencing a whole range of subjects, and fathering new disciplines, so sociologists interested in health migrated to health and illness departments, those interested in exercise to sport departments, and so on. These were all sociologists who had had a classical sociological education, but were becoming fragmented, and what was left in universities under the rubric of sociology was theory and method and some applied areas. So you lost that vitality of having 20 sociologists doing cutting-edge work in health, leisure and sport and so on in the same department. That changed and you got a divided sociology, a sociology where people were still doing their work, but doing it in hinterlands; they werent doing it in the same place. Sociology still hasnt got over that, and by now it is a subject that has been deserted by its practitioners, who are doing sociology, but not in sociology departments. What are left are theory and research methods: the two things students least like doing. In Capitalism and Leisure Theory (Rojek, 1985: 1801) you concluded that there are four basic rules to understanding leisure: leisure activity is an adult phenomenon which is defined in opposition to the play world of children; leisure practice is an accomplishment of skilled actors; the structure and development of leisure relations is an effect of legitimating rules of pleasure and unpleasure; [and] leisure relations must be sociologically examined as a dynamic, relatively open-ended process. How do these conclusions stack up in the light of the thesis you developed in Decentring Leisure? The book begins with the proposition that the sociology of leisure has, to date, been marooned on a narrow reef of theoretical interests, one of the main problems being that leisure theorists produce models of leisure without society. I have not thought about it

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before, but you have made me think Capitalism and Leisure Theory is very much about using the classical tradition and saying that it does have something to say about leisure, and tacked onto that are some contemporary theories of the day Adorno, Barthes, Foucault and so forth, and Elias all of which I thought were also illuminating leisure. Decentring Leisure was much more about opening up the meaning of leisure, not just what people had written about leisure, but asking: What does leisure mean? What I found was leisure was so heavily conditioned by ideological connotations that it wasnt a very useful concept. What leisure meant in the academic discipline in the 1990s was freedom, choice and self-determination. Stan Parker wrote an article called Freedom, Choice, Determination and Flexibility. This seemed to be what everyone was thinking about in terms of leisure. There wasnt very much work at that time into how leisure was represented and coded, how it actually comes across in terms of modes of signification. To look at that kind of stuff, you needed to go to Roland Barthes. Barthes did not write about leisure, but if you looked at his work from a leisure perspective, you could see that he was talking about the sign and the signifier, which had a very great relevance to leisure, for example, with Nike shoes and leisure practices of one sort or another. So Decentring Leisure was trying to really push back the boundaries, which I saw as rather too narrow in the sociology of leisure and leisure studies. I still find leisure studies as a field of study presumes that leisure is inherently good, which is why one aspect of what I have done since 1995 is to look at the darker side of leisure, the abnormal forms of leisure. Leisure which revolves around people not having enough money, not having enough education, and people who are in one way or another psychologically disturbed and who can turn their free time into variously negative social outcomes, whether its violence to themselves or to other people what I call in another book, Leisure and Culture (Rojek, 2000), mephitic or invasive forms of leisure. This has largely been neglected in the field, yet it seems to me real, what people go through. So in retrospect Decentring Leisure was very much trying to push back boundaries, whereas Capitalism and Leisure Theory was trying to say that there was this block of knowledge which leisure studies people knew very little about. Nobody was really writing about Marx and leisure or Weber and leisure. If you take Marxs theory of alienation and apply it to free-time use, it seems very relevant. Webers work on bureaucracy and rationalization equally seem relevant. So in response to your question and I havent thought about this before Capitalism and Leisure Theory seemed to be about bringing in one chunk of a history of ideas, applying it to leisure, and saying this is relevant stuff. By the time I got to writing Decentring Leisure 10 years later, I knew more, I had read more; I was older, more confident, and I became much more interested in pushing back the boundaries of what we mean by leisure, particularly exploring its ideological connotations and its uses to the powerful, as well as the aspirations it holds for the powerless. That wasnt developed much in an empirical sense, i.e. what powerless people think about leisure, but by looking at various ideas about leisure. Have your views about postmodernism changed since you wrote Decentring Leisure? I am sometimes called a postmodernist, but I have never thought of myself as a postmodernist. That would suggest that I am in favour of a particular set of changes, and postmodernism wasnt really about a set of deliberate changes, it was more about
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existing theories modernism had produced and how these were incapable of making sense of the times. So it was much more about a hermeneutic exercise, an interpretive exercise, an innovative exercise. Why I was interested in the relationship between modernism and postmodernism was that it really symbolized to me the exhaustion of a certain kind of leftist politics that was inflected through Marxism or a certain kind of feminism. It seemed to me that kind of politics was now over. When postmodernism arose, it was very striking that those positions were collapsed totally within three or four years of Lyotard and Baudrillard and all the rest of it. Nobody was reading the kind of hermetically sealed theses that some feminists were producing about leisure and society or what Marxists were writing about the leisure of the day. These positions were instantly surpassed. Even though postmodernism had been around for a decade or so, it had hitherto not been critically applied in the fields of leisure studies and cultural studies, yet it seemed to me quite liberating. The postmodern moment seemed to say there are things that you can discuss that you simply couldnt before. What faults do you now detect in Decentring Leisure? Too difficult. The book is too difficult now for many readers. Moreover, it didnt develop an agenda of research and political engagement. Capitalism and Leisure Theory had been much more politically engaged; it had begun to map out a number of political agendas that leisure studies had to engage with, like environmental change and Third World debt, world inequality, issues of the body and so on. I think that it was too intellectual a book. It was very much at the level of ideas. Even if I say so myself, the mix of those ideas was pretty rich. But in a sense the richness turned off some readers, because it was going in too many directions at once and that was a reflection of the moment that I was sitting in, thats what was happening with postmodernism. It was going in too many directions at once; it wasnt clear where it was going. What is neat capitalism? How does it follow from your work in Decentring Leisure? I am glad youve fished out that particular concept from my more recent work. Neat capitalism came about from having a discussion with my friend Jim McGuigan at Loughborough. Jim was talking to me about Thomas Franks book The Conquest of Cool (Frank, 1997). That book is all about the way in which American counterculture in the 1960s was trying to move away from capitalism. This culture was trying to say that 1950s capitalism was produced by organization men who were directing their products at white middle-class families, all of whom were living in the suburbs and in good jobs. The counterculture was saying this isnt what society is really like and that we need a new kind of society which isnt based on exploitation, which is instead based on relevance, which recognizes diversity and difference. Well out of that youve got Richard Branson, Anita Roddick and Steve Jobs. That is what they do, they recognize diversity, difference and the need to be innovative though they are still capitalists and still generate large amounts of money for the corporations that they represent. So neat capitalism started to develop as a kind of label for a form of capitalism which emphasizes the value of relevant branding. For Richard Branson, the brand is all. If you sell people a brand, you can get them interested in a product, and also the idea that capitalism should not just be about offering people commodities, it should be about making statements to solutions.

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A good example of that is big businesss response to the tsunami in 2004. Richard Branson was quickly on television making available part of the Virgin air fleet to deliver relief. What came through in those interviews I was in America at the time was that first of all it is Richard Branson who is the face of Virgin, which is connected with what he was doing with Virgin. Secondly, he kept saying Virgin Airlines was going to carry out Virgin relief using Virgin staff and so on. So Virgin was being hit all the time as the main message; it was effectively free advertising. It struck me that there are very many companies who do this. They try to make people feel that what they are engaged in is relevant, that they are making a difference, that they are changing the world. But at the end of the day those companies are still for the main interested in making money. You have always focused on the difficult questions facing leisure scholars and so have sometimes cut a rather controversial figure in leisure studies. For example, some questions of a moral and ethical kind have been raised in leisure studies regarding your work on abnormal leisure. Could you spell out what these are and your response to them? Given that I am interested in leisure because it is that area in life where you can be most free, if that freedom is expressed in sociologically and psychologically negative ways, it seems to me to be a legitimate area of enquiry. Much of this controversy derives from a paper I gave in Holland in the 1990s on leisure and serial killing, very soon after the Thomas Hamilton episode in Dunblane [Scotland] in 1996 where he killed 16 children and an adult, before turning a gun on himself. Now because I raised the issue at that conference, it was in some quarters interpreted that I was in favour of serial killing. My point was that you go into WH Smiths or any other newsagents store and see shelf after shelf of real-life criminal histories, all dealing with mutilation, murder and child rape, etc. You see no books on leisure. So what does this tell us about the ordinary public what are they thinking about? What are they fantasizing about, what are they buying, where are they getting their kicks? Its not reading Capitalism and Leisure Theory, its reading real-life biographies about Fred and Rosemary West.2 If you take it to the next stage and look at another major leisure form, cinema, a lot of film is about serial killing, mutilation, murder, mindless violence and so on. This seems to be the reality of our leisure practice. On the one hand you can argue the case as to whether thats either good or bad; on the other you can argue the case about whether its influential or just superficially influential. My point is that it is there, and leisure studies is not talking about it very much; it is not really addressing these hugely commercial areas of life which intoxicate lots of people. One example is the case of Barry George, who has been released recently after wrongly being charged with the murder of Jill Dando.3 Barry George was infatuated with Dando. When she died the police were narrowing down the first stages of their investigations to 200 known people who had an unhealthy fascination with her celebrity. These people had shrines in their houses, had mementos, or had harassed her in various ways. If there are 200 people infatuated with her there is always a dark figure, a larger number it seems to me that that interest in the dark side of leisure, absolute freedom involving punishment, involving hurting people and hurting themselves, is a substantive area of leisure practice. It is one that we have allowed to become medicalized by psychologists and psychiatrists and medical practitioners. In doing so, we have surrendered the right to speak about it. My interest in abnormal leisure was trying to win back that right to be

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interested in those kinds of issues. I do think there is something about the culture of leisure, the culture of having free choice, which leads some people to make choices in a direction that is morally reprehensible. I do think it is a totally legitimate area of knowledge for us to look at in leisure studies, to look at such behaviours not so much as deviance but another form of leisure. If that is controversial, then so be it. I think that if the discipline wants to be regarded as a mature discipline, then it has to take on everything rather than just areas of enquiry that confirm the ideological dogma that reinforces what the discipline is constituted under. The German philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote that culture depends for its very existence on leisure. Do you think it is ironic that since sociology made the cultural turn, it no longer needs leisure? Or to put it another way: the demise of leisure in the academy can be seen to a large extent as attributable to the rise of cultural studies and cultural sociology. What is your view on this? Culture, for me, precedes leisure. I would disagree with Pieper. I think that an engagement with the social and natural world is always cultural. He means by leisure a state of mind, which to me is a cultural expression rather than a natural expression. You might have free time, but it is not a particular state of mind until you develop a particular kind of culture which enables you to see it as such. It is true that cultural sociology treats leisure as a kind of non-issue. It looks at peoples interests in pop music, sport, film, television, but it doesnt call these leisure, which to my mind does illustrate what you are saying. Cultural sociology and the cultural turn have created a kind of political investment in peoples non-work activity which has erased leisure; instead people have been talking about the use of free time in relation to identity, in relation to narratives of belonging, rather than just looking at what it means to have free time and use it a particular way. I am not sure whether that answers your question really, but cultural sociology increasingly seems to me to be about people writing about their own enthusiasms, rather than writing about things that have a resonance in culture. It seems to me that it is losing, or has lost, its momentum by being too diverse, too fragmented, and not really having a clear politics. I have written on Stuart Hall. It seems to me that he is a major figure in cultural sociology, right throughout the world, but what the most radical politics ultimately seem to rely on, according to Hall, is finding solidarity through difference. Thats a conundrum. He has this view he doesnt use this term but he seems to think there will be this rainbow coalition of the animal rights people, gay and lesbian groups, save the whale, etc. that will come together in some sort of mass movement. I see the prospect of that as being so remote as to be hardly worthy of discussion. It seems to me that isnt going to happen, because in cultural life people are too busy burrowing into their own interest groups, rather than developing a united front. To use a term from Mertonian sociology, people have become retreatists from major fundamental change, and are instead more likely to be involved in piecemeal social change. In a sense that is entirely pragmatic and entirely logical, because you can see an effect of your actions. For example, if you try to change the [local] councils practice of refuse disposal in terms of productive recycling practices, and the council changes its policy, you can see an immediate effect. But that is not a victory against major social

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inequalities, injustice and capitalism. Thats just a pyrrhic victory, a small victory. So I find it very disturbing that cultural studies have not generated a vibrant politics. It seems to me, and although I disagree with a lot of what Giddens (1998) says in The Third Way, that it is more realistic about people who are dissatisfied with the current times. They are not thinking in terms of a massive systems transformation which will bring together the dispossessed and the decomposed into one united front and change everything; they are much more interested in engaging with the state and the corporation to try and produce rational solutions to whatever they are addressing. A definite theme in your work is the interplay between leisure studies and cultural sociology. You are Professor of Sociology and Culture at Brunel University. Does this choice of designation say anything about the way that you see leisure studies and cultural sociology? Yes. I think that I have always been happiest on borders. I have never really felt part of clubs, which is why I have never joined a tradition voluntarily, whether it was figurationalism, Marxism or whatever. I can always see the limitations of those positions. For me, it has always been that the more interesting questions are on the borderlines of culture and sociology. I see culture as being interpretive and trying to make sense of the meaning of the world, whereas sociology seems to me, a word Ive used several times, much more holistic in trying to get a detached view going back over several centuries about how things are in society. Why do we do this? Why is that done? Who does this? Why does X respond to what Y does in that particular way? So combining those two areas of interest is the borderline which interests me the most. It was a deliberate choice on my part to become Professor of Sociology and Culture. It wasnt in the job description. What do you mean when you say that decorative sociology is a trend in contemporary sociology? Is there any sense that cultural sociology is decorative? I do think that 1968 spelt the end of something of radical collective politics. The workers did not revolt in Paris and this resulted in a compromise. I think the left agenda was thoroughly weakened, although it took another 15 years or so to recognize it. The other thing that struck me at that time about working-class life, which was given a very sentimental picture in books like Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy and many other studies in sociology in the 1960s, was how good it was to be in the working class. Actually, everybody I knew in the working class wanted to get out of it. I was from the working class and it was leading nowhere; it was leading to dead-end jobs, it was leading to low pay, it was leading to no recognition. By saying you wanted to get out of it wasnt saying that you wanted to throw away all youd learnt, but you didnt actually want to follow in your fathers footsteps. That is what the whole welfare state was about: it was about a way out of going down the mine, working in the car factory, or whatever manual occupation your father was in. So that sentimentality about working-class life, I never bought into that. This was more evident in London and the big cities. It was clear that Britain was becoming multi-ethnic very rapidly and it had changed from the Rovers Return4 view to Bob Marley and Asian music, Asian cuisine and Asian dress. In the university where I work now it is very clear that the multi-ethnic community is vast; the white students are almost a minority. That is the real Britain that we live in

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today. When I teach multi-ethnic students, they dont want to stay in their communities long term: they are going to university in order to help them get out of their communities, not necessarily reject them, but to move on. I do think in 1968 a clear vision about an alternative vision about a different society died, [one] based on Marxs maxim [from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs]. You got a much more fragmented society, which is one of the things that postmodernists talk about. The way that that expressed itself in sociology was professional sociologists became very concerned not to leave any one group out: no group should be left out of any account of anything. In doing that, they made the periphery the centre; they ceased to address the centre. The ordinary person ceased to be what they talked about: what they now talked about was the marginalized, the people on the edges, and so on and so forth. That somehow became the centre of sociological concerns, and what that left out of the picture was the mass of ordinary people who are not being talked about or addressed. Sociology then had to pay lip service, take its hat off to all these groups, the disabled, the multi-ethnic minorities, gay and lesbian groups. All of which of course deserve recognition, but recognizing them in terms of the public view of sociology, it became tipped into irrelevance really. It ceased to address everyday issues of how people were getting on in society. What does work mean? How am I getting on in school? Instead sociology became interested in the hinterlands of everyday life. In fact, the periphery became the centre and in a sense now the periphery is so central, it is beginning to turn back and questions are being asked about what it is to be British. One of my latest books, Brit Myth (Rojek, 2007), asks what it means to be British when a high percentage of the population is not white. You asked right at the start of the interview why I went into sociology. It was because sociology is concerned with real things. But one of the things that dismays me about sociology in the last 20 years is that it now has developed a big lag between what goes into society and what it talks about. It talks about things which are from the street level not relevant; it talks about issues which the street doesnt recognize. It is not catching up with or responsive enough to issues that are developing in the street. There are some sociologists who work in the area of everyday life who do that, but the profession at large is always one step behind. That is a tremendously destructive state of affairs, because sociology should be about relevance, it should be about what is going on, how people are changing and whats on their minds. It is very noticeable when you go to international congresses that most of the time their agendas are of no interest to the public. The public have the right to come along to lectures, but they dont. Why should they? They are not being addressed, the language sociologists are using is not a language they can connect with; there is this disconnect in the subject. Your most recent work on leisure, particularly The Labour of Leisure (Rojek, 2010), seems to rest on a social psychology of leisure rather than a sociology of leisure per se. Could you explain this shift in your work? Giddens, at about my age, began to get interested in social psychology: the self, intimacy and sexuality. I wasnt following Giddens in looking at these subjects, but in a sense my journey was like his, in that I have turned away from writing quite abstract books. The Labour of Leisure really began with social observation: I began to see

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students, in particular, who wanted to be competent, credible and relevant, and they wanted that instantly. It seemed to me that to be competent, credible and relevant is not simply produced by a curriculum. It requires you to know how the contemporary personality should be presented. The kind of things you should know about the environment, the kind of things you should know about embodiment, the kind of things you should know about politics, which you simply dont get on courses. You actually get them from general social interaction, and much of that general social interaction is focused on the leisure sphere. By listening to the radio, you become a broader personality. By watching television programmes you can discover I can do this, that this is the wrong way to behave, this is the right way to behave. This led me to think that leisure, without anybody planning it, had become a form of life coaching, really. Leisure is an area where one begins to educate oneself. For example, whatever level of social interaction one chooses to specify, you can be competent, credible and relevant in goth culture. It takes a lot of work to be accepted fully in goth culture. But where that work occurs is in leisure it is not in reading books or going onto courses; you dont get it from the workplace, you do it in your leisure. If you accept that, it raises huge problems about time off, freedom and what we actually do when we are not being paid to earn a living, e.g. when we are looking at the television. Is that a form of life coaching? That is the kind of question that came to me. Is it is a form of preparation to be seen as a better citizen? This new interest led me to read Arlie Hochschilds work about emotional labour and emotional intelligence.5 If you think about the modern personality needing to be competent, credible and relevant, that requires considerable emotional labour and emotional intelligence. Emotional labour and emotional intelligence are things that dont come from study, but from what Simmel calls sociability: chatting to people, taking notice of things, looking around, keeping your eyes and ears open, all of which go on in the leisure sphere. So really the book has gone right back to what the Greeks called skhol basically leisure as a school for life. Leisure is a form of personality education more than technical education; it is about developing the personality, not necessarily enriching the personality, because a lot of the work done around competence, relevance and credibility is not personality enriching, it is simply making you appear to be more acceptable to employers, friends or the person you live with. What is really new and interesting in leisure studies and cultural sociology today? After postmodernism settled down, people began to talk about some kind of politics, some kind of collective politics that was translated to the global level, and I find that that work is the most interesting to read now. The kind of work that talks about what corporations do: why we should protect the good things that we do and curtail the bad things that they do. What does it mean to have leisure in the advanced world, when much of the leisure commodities we consume are outsourced from the developing world? How can we enjoy leisure when children are dying from malnutrition in Africa, while we are drinking our wine or buying iPods? How can we morally reconcile that daily practice, as educated people? Im speaking about people in the academic world actually. How can we do that? How can we do that with the recognition that the Third World exists and is in some cases getting worse? What do we do in leisure and culture about forms of free-time

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practice that are impacting on climate change, such as driving sport utility vehicles, what action can you take? What policies can we put into place? Curtail peoples freedom to drive SUVs? Is it right to say that they should be taxed to the hilt? These kinds of questions are orientating and pointing societies into better directions. I really feel that the best sociology still reflects the Enlightenment tradition, which is trying to improve the common lot and trying to take account of those voices that have been excluded from the discussion. Leaving aside all the legitimate criticisms that have been raised about the Enlightenment, I still think that those two things, thinking about productive progressive policies and addressing the voices that have not been addressed, seem to be worth doing. The point Id like to make, and Ill just finish, is from a conversation I had with Abram de Swaan in Amsterdam about 15 years ago. He simply said: sociology is just a collection of platitudes, but the platitudes are important because unless you keep addressing them, policy makers will forget them. So it is platitudinous to say that inequality exists, it is platitudinous that there is a difference in power between men and women, whites and non-whites; if you do not continue to gnaw away at that they just become part of the background. That is the background noise of everyday life that policy makers do not address. So I think that although we do talk in platitudes, they are platitudes worth discussing and developing, and even though they lead Bryan Turner and me to say that if what we do is often merely decorative, the sociological enterprise is still worth pursuing. Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my thanks to my friend Keith Tester, whose idea it was to do this interview, and to the editors of Cultural Sociology, who agreed to run with it.

Notes
1. The Civilizing Process was originally published in English in two volumes as The History of Manners (1969) and State-Formation and Civilization (1982), but is now available in a single integrated edition (Elias, 1994). 2. Fred and Rosemary West were a British serial-killer couple who in 1994 were convicted of torturing, raping and murdering at least 12 young women. 3. Jill Dando was a British television presenter who was murdered in 1999. Barry George was convicted for her murder in July 2001, but the original guilty verdict was quashed on appeal in August 2008. 4. The pub that features in the long-running British television soap opera Coronation Street. 5. See for example Hochschild (1983).

References
Bramham P. (2002) Rojek, the Sociological Imagination and Leisure, Leisure Studies 21 (3/4): 22134. Elias N. (1994) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, and State-Formation and Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell. Frank T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giddens A. (1998) The Third Way. Cambridge: Polity.

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Hochschild A.R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Plant S. (1992) The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge. Polsky N. (1969) Hustlers, Beats, and Others. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rojek C. (1985) Capitalism and Leisure Theory. London: Tavistock. Rojek C. (1993) Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel. London: Macmillan. Rojek C. (1995) Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory. London: SAGE. Rojek C. (2000) Leisure and Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rojek C. (2003) Stuart Hall. Cambridge: Polity. Rojek C. (2007) Brit Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? London: Reaktion. Rojek C. (2010) The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time. London: SAGE. Tony Blackshaw works at Sheffield Hallam University. His publications include the books Key Concepts in Community Studies (SAGE, 2010) and Leisure (Routledge, 2010).

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