‘They treat me like I’m scum’: Social exclusion and established-outsider relations in a British tennis club

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Lawn Tennis Association introduced numerous policies to remove barriers associated with social exclusion in tennis clubs. Ethnographic research was conducted within one club to analyse the incidence of social exclusion, and consider the success of LTA policies in these regards. Findings suggested the club made structural changes to receive LTA funding, such as removing exclusive membership and clothing restrictions, hiring coaches and establishing school-club links, yet its culture remained almost entirely inaccessible to new members. For analysis, Elias and Scotson's 'Established-Outsider Relations' theoretical framework is applied: to discover who was excluded, how and why, and, to set the outcomes of power struggles between members in the wider social and historical contexts of changing LTA policies.

Does Membership in Civil Society Organizations Foster Social Integration? The Case of Danish Voluntary Sport Organizations

“…This could potentially foster strong in-group loyalty and out-group antagonism. Therefore, even if we find high levels of social integration among members of sport organizations, we cannot exclude the possibility that this integration might in some cases be selective and exclusionary (Coalter, 2007;Lake, 2011). Furthermore, this study does not examine the extent to which social integration in sport organizations spread to other aspects of social life.…”

Why ‘the best way of learning to coach the game is playing the game’: conceptualising ‘fast-tracked’ high-performance coaching pathways

“…Cultural capital encompasses 'tastes' of consumption (Moore, 2004) and manifests itself in the embodied, institutionalised and objectified states (Bourdieu, 1986). Embodied cultural capital is represented by "long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body," (Bourdieu, 1986, p.47) accumulated both consciously and subconsciously through socialisation to culture and tradition (Brown, 2005;Lake, 2011;Light & Evans, 2013). Institutionalised cultural capital manifests itself in the forms of educational qualifications, whereas objectified cultural capital is presented in the form of cultural goods (Robbins, 1999).…”

Community and Conviviality? Informal Social Life in Multicultural Places

“…Our focus on social leisure organizations was part of a wider engagement with everyday social lives in places. Sociology has a wellestablished interest in social leisure groups and their role in social relations (see for example; Elias and Dunning 1986;Putnam 2000;Neal and Walters 2009;Morgan 2009;Lake 2013;Spaaij et al 2014 ) and, finding a space between the exclusionary and inclusionary interpretations of social leisure organisations, we examine how they may work as participatory sites generating un/easy place-making, emotive social connection and embodied collaborative practice in broader processes of conviviality in which difference was simultaneously significant and subsumed into a shared sameness.…”