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What does it mean to be alternative? What is alternativity, and how does it relate to other attempts to make sense of those on the margins? In the first part of this chapter, I will undertake a history and philosophy of alternativity, from deviance through subcultures to neo-tribes. This will focus partly on popular notions of alternativity, and partly on academic attempts to understand it in various disciplines and subject fields. In the second part of the chapter, the author will focus on how alternativity has been explored in two specific subject fields – leisure studies and popular cultural studies – to make the claim that both subject fields have failed through different means to get to groups with the idea of the alternative: leisure studies have failed through a lack of theory, and cultural studies have failed through a lack of empirical research. In the final part of the chapter, I will attempt to reconcile leisure and culture, and I will sketch out a new theory and empirical programme of alternative leisure that returns to the idea of subculture as counterculture.

Let us submit the following proposition for consideration: the essence of socialist construction lies in the bid to appropriate the future and is therefore expressed politically, in the organised manipulation of time. What we ordinarily take to be the sine qua non of socialist relations, namely central planning, totalitarian rule and the abolition of private property are, in fact, epiphenomena. They exist as real influences on people's lives in the presently existing socialist societies, but they derive in esse, from the basic organising principle of socialist relations which is to restructure the popular experience of time.

In this chapter, I utilize insights from symbolic interaction to analyze the identity work processes of larp subculture participants to construct and perform their in-game identities. I extend the research on larp subcultures in two ways. First, I place larping within the larger context of leisure subcultures and society by arguing that larping is representative of changes in leisure and subcultures in postmodern society. Second, I draw upon ethnographic data collected among the New England Role-playing Organization (NERO) to analyze larpers character identity performances. RPG and Larp researchers have developed several theories about the relationship between larp participants and their character performances. While these concepts provide a helpful framework for understanding the participant-character relationship, they undertheorize the in-game constructed performance of identity. Using symbolic interaction theory, I analyze the identity work processes larpers use to construct and perform their larp identities extending our understanding of the similarities between everyday identity and larpers' character identity performances.

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.