Geography Reference
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lack of progress towards a theory of leisure and recreation simply reflects
poor funding is now much less plausible.
(Owens 1984:176)
As a consequence, Perkins (1993:116-17) suggests that 'there are four reasons for this
neglect of theoretical geographical leisure research. The first is that within the discipline,
leisure research is considered' to be unimportant when compared to the central concerns
of economic, social and urban geography. The second reason is that very little research
funding has been made available to geographers to pursue theoretical leisure research
(see Perkins and Gidlow 1991). Third, much research has been British or North American
in origin, 'where pressures between recreational uses of particular sites are very
great…geographers have worked closely with recreational site managers to develop short
to medium term management strategies for these areas'. Finally, recreation geographers
'have hardly participated in the theoretical debates which have thrived in their discipline
since the 1970s' (Perkins 1993:117).
In fact, Perkins (1993) offers one of the few attempts by geographers to rise to this
challenge, using social theory, particularly structuration theory (Giddens 1984), and his
research is valuable in relation to the understanding of locales for the analysis of human
and spatial interaction. Locales comprise a range of settings which are different and yet
connected through interactions. The interactions result from
the life path of individuals…in ways that reflect patterns of production
and consumption. These interactions result in a particular pattern of
locales which have social and physical forms. Each life path is essentially
an allocation of time between these different locales. A particular mode of
production will emphasise dominant locales to which time must be
allocated.
(Perkins 1993:126)
Within the theoretical literature on structuration, in a capitalist society, structure and
human interaction are brought together through the concept of the locale. The dominant
locales are
• home
• work
• school
and they are settings in which consumption occurs. Thus a leisure locale is a setting for
interaction whereby 'people pursue leisure within the context of their life commitments
and access to resources. Leisure interactions, of course, occur in and are influenced by
places, and to this extent the leisure locale includes a spatial component' (Perkins
1993:126). In such theoretically determined analyses, Perkins (1993) calls for the
geographers of recreation to consider the position and internal organisation of the leisure
locale in a rural setting, in relation to the dominant locales (i.e. the home, work and
school) and other institutional locales such as religion and the arts. One possible
mechanism for pursuing such theoretically determined research may be to employ new
conceptualisations of geography using the new regional geography informed by
