Moving with the Times: Parkour, Leisure and Social Change

Abstract

This explores the evolution of leisure in post-industrial consumer capitalist society, specifically the relationships between work, leisure and identity. It begins by suggesting that in contemporary society the association of leisure with freedom, autonomy, voluntarism, enjoyment and its distinction from work are all obsolete. In doing so, it uses ethnographic and interview data to outline how the popular cultural lifestyle sport of parkour and freerunning conforms to the contemporary values of consumer capitalism and is a product of tectonic changes in the global economy in the latter part of the twentieth century. This goes a long way to dismantle the prevailing wisdom that such forms of spatial transgression are a mode of performative resistance against contemporary capitalism.

Citation

Raymen, T. (2018), "Moving with the Times: Parkour, Leisure and Social Change", Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography (Emerald Studies in Deviant Leisure), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 21-41. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78743-811-820181002