Professor Alan Tomlinson: The Importance of Being Critical’

On his own LinkedIn profile, this how Alan Tomlinson surveys his own work and its contribution to sociology of leisure:

Alan Tomlinson is Emeritus Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton, UK, where he has worked since 1975. Tomlinson studied humanities and sociology at the University of Kent (BA 1971), gained a PGCE (English and Social Studies 1972), and studied for an MA (1973) and a DPhil (1977) in Sociological Studies (sociology of art/literature) at the University of Sussex. His interdisciplinary background has included social and cultural histories of working-class sport forms, studies of international sporting events and their power dynamics, and analyses of sport media. He has published more than 150 articles, book chapters, reports and books, and is especially well-known for his historically-based work on the making and reporting of large-scale sporting ceremonies and events, which has featured on numerous national and international radio and television broadcasts. He has edited the journals Leisure Studies and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. He co-founded Brighton’s programme in Sport Journalism, and led the Sport and Leisure Cultures (SLC) research group to the forefront of international scholarship in the field. His research has been supported by the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the European Commission, the Sports Council/Sport England, the South East England Development Agency, the Central Council for Physical Recreation, and numerous regional and local authorities. He has supervised 31 PhDs and 6 MPhils to successful completion, examined 37 doctoral theses, and reviewed for research councils in the UK, Denmark, Canada and Australia. Professor Tomlinson is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS, UK), an inaugural NASSS Research Fellow (North American Society for the Sociology of Sport), a long-term member of the British Sociological Association and the Leisure Studies Association, and a full member of the Sports Journalists' Association.

My own introduction to Alan Tomlinson happened when I attended a British Sociological Association conference at Reading, where I presented with Ben Carrington some of our research findings on racism in rugby league (Long et al., 1997). Tomlinson proved to be a strong defender of sociology of leisure and the critical, Marxist tradition in leisure studies, and was an inspiration to me when I returned to full-time academic work in 2004. I used his work teaching my students about the meaning and purpose of leisure – and about the commodification of sports events. I then cited his work in my first two monographs, where I identified his contribution to the Marxist turn in leisure studies (Spracklen, 2009, 2011). In my times as a member of the Leisure Studies Association’s Executive Committee I came to know him personally and professionally. Tomlinson was through that time a strong advocate of the sociology of leisure, leisure studies and the sociology of sport. His critical lens was something we all emulated. Tomlinson challenged everyone to think more clearly and critically about the problem of leisure: who gets to have leisure? How much freedom do we have in a late modern, capitalist society, where every form of leisure is commodified? These are the questions Tomlinson tried to get all of us to think about, even as his later career focussed on sports events and the unethical practices that surround them (Allison & Tomlinson, 2017; Sugden & Tomlinson, 2002, 2017; Tomlinson, 2014; Tomlinson & Young, 2006).
In this chapter I want to do three things. First of all, I explore Tomlinson’s entire professional career as a scholar of the sociology of leisure and the theoretical lenses he used, drawing on an interview he did with the editors of the journal Leisure Studies (Andrews, 2006). Second, I focus on one edited collection of his, Consumption, Identity and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure (Tomlinson, 1990a) to see how the trends he and the other chapter authors identified have emerged. Finally, in a short conclusion, I argue that Tomlinson’s later interest in trying to get the sports industry to become more moral, while laudable, overlooked the fact that modern sport may in fact be too much of a tool of modern capitalism and he has missed the chance to argue for the importance of leisure spaces and acts as sites of resistance.