Abstract
‘Community’, one of the most frequently used words in our vocabulary, is a highly honorific term. We deplore the ‘loss of community’ and search for ways to ‘rebuild community’. But at the same time we have difficulty saying precisely what it means to be a community, or, alternatively, deciding which among various proposed but mutually incompatible definitions of community should be preferred. This chapter seeks to enhance our understanding of community, and of the conditions under which it deserves its honorific connotation, by looking at some ways researchers have connected the idea of community with that of leisure. Leisure research itself, with some significant exceptions to be noted below, has paid scant attention to the idea of community. But in the disciplines out of which the interdisciplinary study of leisure has arisen — for example, sociology, social psychology and political theory — leisure and community are frequently interrelated themes.
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Pedlar, A., Haworth, L. (2006). Community. In: Rojek, C., Shaw, S.M., Veal, A.J. (eds) A Handbook of Leisure Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625181_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625181_32
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