The Negotiation of Leisure Citizenship: Leisure Constraints, Moral Regulation and the Mediation of Rural Place

Abstract

This paper extends the constraints of leisure literature by demonstrating how materials are circulated to regulate and constrain leisure behaviour in the countryside. It is argued that constraints in the form of moral regulation should be recognised as part of the constraints literature. The development of the Country Code in England ¹ is regarded as part of a long‐term and ongoing effort to extend governance and control by means of informal and semi‐formal codes of conduct. Crucially, however, the Code has changed over time and may act as a means of placating different interests in the countryside as much as observably constraining them. The Code is seen as a constraint project mediated between groups and is found to be contested and reworked over time. Drawing on key concepts expounded in Bourdieu’s post‐structural social theory it is argued that actors occupy positions within social fields and draw on their own habitus, other dispositions of power and imaginations to co‐construct leisure regulation and behaviour. Such conceptual devices should more properly be viewed as contingent dispositions that are subject to challenge and revision. As such the more diffuse and circulatory constraints affect practices differentially. A need for more attention to this in leisure studies research and a recognition of how different constraints are experienced and responded to is needed.

Keywords:

• Constraints
• materials
• power
• behaviour
• countryside
• regulation
• leisure
• citizenship

Notes

1. The Code itself was originally known as the Country Code, although in its more recent incarnations it has been retitled the Countryside Code. For the purposes of this paper I have termed it the Country Code throughout.