This thesis makes an empirical examination of the Serious Leisure framework using psychological contract theory, applying this to volunteers within Riding for the Disabled Association (RDA). Serious Leisure is a widely utilised way of understanding the behaviour of hobbyists, leisure participants and volunteers, and yet its conceptual limitations to date have not been significantly considered or challenged in the literature. By analysing the interaction between Serious Leisure and the psychological contract, this study extends the existing framework of Serious Leisure as applied to volunteers. An inductive, constructivist approach was used, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-five volunteers in a long-established UK voluntary sport organisation. These exhibited varying lengths of service in a number of roles within RDA. Data generated were analysed using an ethnographic content approach, together with information from the organisation itself and academic literature, to address the aims of the study. The study establishes that the volunteers interviewed may be classified as serious leisure volunteers in Stebbins’ terms. It supports the hypothesis that Serious Leisure does influence the psychological contract. It explores the formative influences on the psychological content and maps the content of that contract from the perspective of the volunteer. It introduces the concept of ‘intentionality’, a pattern whereby the new volunteer exhibits characteristics of seriousness from the beginning. It is proposed that the volunteer’s acceptance of Serious Leisure characteristics sits alongside ideological factors in their psychological contract to create a high level of resilience and commitment to the activity. Finally, it proposes that volunteers are able to hold multiple psychological contracts with an organisation, simultaneously. These findings address significant gaps in the literature of volunteering and also have implications for psychological contract theory. The study suggests a number of areas for further work to develop its findings.

This study provides an analysis of the growth of corporate art intervention in America and Britain during the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s. The premise is that the factors governing business intervention into the art world are inseparable from the free-market enterprise culture and the government-specific policies deployed to promote it. After a general introduction, Chapter 2 investigates the concept of the state and its role in relation to the arts. The public perception of differences between the American and British arts funding systems is further explored in terms of the financing of American art museums, and the arts provision provided by the state before the 1980s is examined in the practices of the Arts Council of Great Britain and the National Endowment for the Arts. The public arts policies of the New Right, and in particular the use of tax deduction incentives, are analysed in Chapter 3. It also examine the host of measures implemented by the two governments to inject the principles and ethos of the free market into these public arts agencies, and to transform them into paragons of arts privatisation. The corporate takeover of art museums is the subject of Chapter 4. The crucial role played by the corporate elites who served on the boards of trustees of these institutions is investigated, together with the great influx of corporate capital into them. Chapter 5 gives an account of how corporations integrated themselves into the arts support system, by holding art exhibitions themselves, and by establishing branches of public art museums within corporate premises. Chapter 6, which concentrates on corporate art collections themselves, shows how these came to fulfil the dual function of private investment and public image-enhancing, how they sought and achieved validation and legitimation, how artists reacted to them, and how they succeeded in re-defining the meaning of cultural production. A conclusion summarises the various developments of corporate art intervention under the "casino economy" of the Reagan-Thatcher decade, and looks forward to possible directions for the future.

No description available.

This thesis tackles the issue of how gamblers can profit from betting on the outcome of sporting events. In particular, it addresses issues which have arisen in recent years concerning both the inception of betting exchanges, and the technique of building complex statistical models to accurately predict the sporting outcomes. This thesis shows that bias in predictive models can be quantified from a collection of model outputs. It is shown that a Bayesian method can be constructed to derive accurate bias estimates, even when the model outputs are merely a collection of independent Bernoulli trials. In addition, the method is expanded, to allow the quantification of a time-varying bias, as long as it changes in a known, deterministic setting. The utility of this method is demonstrated via the correction of a simple football prediction model. The movements seen in betting markets before the event in question occurs are investigated. It is conjectured that the rate of increase of the amount of capital invested in the betting market is central to understanding other market movements. With this in mind, two approaches are derived, which both use a collection of historic market movements for past events for their predictions. It is shown that in many cases, some mix of the two approaches achieves the most accurate forecasts. A new gambling strategy, dubbed consolidated wagering is introduced. It is demonstrated that consolidated wagering outperforms all other candidate methods when considering string bets (multiple bets on the same event, at different odds). The application of these methods to investing in restricted markets in betting exchanges is demonstrated. Finally, the problem of string wagers under uncertainty is explored.

Since the early 1990s, fan studies has sought to counter perceptions of the ‘pathology of fandom’ and the devaluation of fans as feminine and infantile. In recent years, some scholars have claimed that fans are newly normalised in popular culture, and it is no longer necessary to contest problematic or pathologising stereotypes of fans. However, the near-exclusive stereotyped representation of ‘hysterical’ crowds of adolescent female fans, and the routine dismissal of ‘fangirls’ in mainstream media and fandom itself, would indicate that not all fans have escaped pathologisation. It is also the case that not all fans have enjoyed equal levels of academic attention. By virtue of their age and gender, girl fans arguably carry the greatest burden of negative stereotyping. Yet they have been notably marginalised in fan studies scholarship and their stereotyped construction has remained largely unchallenged. This thesis seeks to address this imbalance as it offers a timely examination of the cultural construction, circulation and pleasures of fangirl fandom, seeking to challenge and expose the tenacity of what I refer to as, ‘fangirl as pathology’. Using iCarly (2007-2012) fans across three online fan spaces (LiveJournal, Blogspot, and Tumblr) as a case study, it presents an empirical, observational study that aims to further understand the implications of the cultural construction and negative stereotypes of girl fans, and the extent to which they come to shape the landscape of tween TV fandom, or ‘tweendom’. Combining fan studies and girls’ studies, and analysing girls’ fan culture from an intersectional, gender/age perspective, this thesis examines the ways in which fangirl identities are performed and the ‘fangirl’ label is negotiated, and how fans identify with iCarly in relation to their own gendered/generational subjectivities. Strategies of defence and legitimisation are considered within the contexts of hierarchical distinctions in inter-/intra-fandom, how fans are textually represented within the show, and online interactions with the series’ creator-producer. This thesis argues that fandom performs important functions for these young women. As active producers, consumers, and negotiators of media, girl fans’ reproduction of negative and pathologising discourses of fangirls demand reconsideration outside resistance/conformist binaries, and specifically in the context of their stigmatisation and structural age/gender inequalities.

The available literature on so-called hooliganism in Europe has been predominantly concerned with explanations in which football violence is assumed to be a manifestation of violent subcultures and with socially-orientated methods of prevention. Unlike the hegemonic theoretical approach in the field, this thesis is concerned with the formation of football-related crime, which it treats as a situated event, rather than criminality, which historically has been regarded as a social, biological or psychological phenomenon. By explicitly favouring the situational approach to crime prevention, the thesis provides an informative insight into how football-related crime prevention strategies are perceived and interpreted by intended targets, namely football fans, in Turkey. Symbolic interaction theory is employed as the assistant theoretical framework when making sense fans’ attitudes towards different situational crime prevention (SCP) techniques. The perspectives of the intended targets in relation to the relevant techniques are revealed through semi-structured interviews conducted with the representatives of the fan groups of Fenerbahge, one of the major football teams in Turkey. Using Fenerbahge as a single-case, the multiple and complex social realities underlying the reactions against and the attitudes towards football-related crime control in Turkey are explained and the core principles of the latest SCP model which are likely to improve fans’ perceptions are outlined. The interactionist approach also explains individual differences in provocation which is acknowledged as an important situational precipitator in relation to violent crime. The value of precipitator-control within the Turkish football context is accordingly revealed.

No description available.

This thesis explores the processes through which tourist souvenirs forge connections between people and place, in order to offer a renewed geographical encounter with theories of cultural materiality. It adopts the concept of the ‘souvenir-object' to prioritise the capacities objects have to relate to and represent place, thereby offering a dynamic approach to understanding the significance of tourist souvenirs in tourists' and producers' lives. The thesis is based upon multi-locale ethnographic research in Swaziland (Southern Africa) and the UK. It adapts an innovative ‘following' approach to research how souvenir objects are produced, designed, sold and purchased, taken home, displayed, given away and forgotten about. Each chapter explores different facets of the relations between people and objects, or objects and places, through the sites of souvenir production and consumption. In summary, this thesis offers an in-depth analysis of the souvenir industry in Swaziland and discusses how souvenir-objects are central to tourism practices. Theoretically and empirically, the thesis engages with affectivity and object presence, using the tourist souvenir as a vehicle to develop theories of relational materiality within social and cultural geography more broadly. I explore how tourist souvenirs have the potential to negotiate and re-work how they relate to their surrounding geographical imaginaries. The project also considers how tourist souvenirs fit awkwardly into tourists' homes and it explains how the dynamics of appropriation surrounding this are always in process. Finally it examines how meaningful materialities of tourist souvenirs also emerge out of their multi faceted and enduring presence in producers lives. Overall, this thesis demonstrates how the tourist souvenir creates connections between people and places which are necessarily partial and fragmentary. The capacities objects have to inhabit multiple spaces poses a challenge to studies of tourism, material culture and consumption that are often underpinned by taken for granted notions of connectivity.

This thesis questions dominant representations of women hard rock and metal fans, and contributes to the undeveloped area of scholarship on women’s pleasure in music. I address the questions: how does the metal media represent women fans?; what is the impact of that representation?; and what can a consideration of women’s musical pleasure tell us? I work within the fields of popular music, subcultures, gender and metal studies and build upon feminist studies of rock music (e.g., Schippers 2002, Fast 1999 and Wise 1984). The research sits alongside feminist work exploring the pleasures of metal (Overell 2010, Riches 2011), and Brown’s work on metal media (2007, 2009). A new framework, the imaginary community, allows a consideration of the gendered ideology of the genre and takes into account private modes of fandom. To establish the ideology I examined letters pages in a key hard rock and metal medium, Kerrang! magazine, between 2000-8. Drawing on Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), I employed a semiotic analysis to expose the representation of women through myths. Using this representation as a comparative tool, I conducted interviews with women fans who liked bands featured in Kerrang!. I analysed the discourses mobilised in their responses to questions about their participation in communal and private activities (e.g. magazine reading, concert attendance); their interpretations of the groupie stereotype; and their preferences for particular bands. I argue that women fans are misrepresented as groupies and this impacts upon women’s ability to express their fandom. Considering women’s pleasure in the music draws out the ways in which women’s fandom challenges both the myth of the woman fan as groupie, and the reading of metal as a masculine genre. I conclude that exploring women’s fandom can provide fresh perspectives on hard rock and metal: we must be prepared to take women’s fandom seriously.

This thesis seeks to address an acknowledged gap in the historiography of leisure – that of rural working class leisure activities. The first objective of this thesis is therefore to investigate different types of rural leisure, including ‘rational recreation’, traditional and innovative, and gender-specific pastimes. Using Norfolk as a case study, I examined a range of different leisure opportunities. The second objective is to question the changing nature of leisure provision and the impact that this had on rural lives, and it was found that opportunities for leisure increased considerably throughout the period 1840-1940. This was brought about by better working conditions, including fewer working hours and higher wages. Technology also played a key role, providing increased availability of transport, both public and personal, and this allowed access to urban recreations, unavailable in the countryside. Some traditional pastimes endured, while others were replaced by new forms of entertainment, such as the cinema and modernised fairground attractions. Other innovations included the rise of local sports, for instance cricket and football, and alternatives to the public house – reading rooms and village halls, the latter being open to all sections of society and not solely men. Arguably, rural women benefited most from these remarkable transformations. The introduction of new societies, such as the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute led to considerably enhanced lives for their members. There is clear evidence of the gradual adjustment from widespread philanthropy to self-determination among working people, and together with the remarkable alteration in outlook produced by the First World War, this increasingly caused local communities to take control of their own leisure provision. This is consistent with the social changes occurring in all spheres of rural life.