Conclusion: Making Sense of Alternativity in Leisure and Culture: Back to Subculture?

Abstract 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.