Sport and lifestyle

In the three decades since The Devil Makes Work was published many changes have occurred that have influenced social and cultural life. There are also some important continuities; not least the importance of capitalism for understanding developments in the position of sport and leisure life styles. This economic system is an economy of time as Clarke and Critcher (1985: 239-40) concluded: time is a ‘resource that structures many of the conflicts and inequalities of leisure’. Such a temporal economy continues to have profound implications for the social distribution of rewards and dis advantages, poverty and wealth, and the creation of social divisions, and hence alternatives to it have to engage with a politics of time.