Norma Nickerson, Black Hills State University, moderated a session on ‘Methods in Market Research’.

Steven L.J. Smith, University of Waterloo, discussed the need to re- analyse how market segmentation is derived when using large databases. His case in point was a large data set of Canadian trips to the USA. Stand- ard segmentation analysis was not found useful when attempts were made to apply this to marketing. Thus he developed a technique which com- bined people according to the kind of trip which held the strongest appeal to them. By combining the records of people according to trip type and ap- plying market segmentation techni- ques, Smith found that these people also had many other characteristics in common.

Benedict Dellaert, Einhoven Uni- versity of Technology, used a statist- ical conjoint technique to elucidate the strategic components of destina- tion decisions. Using a technique which asked people to choose between different scenarios within one impor- tant factor of the destination decision process, Dallaert arrived at an inde- pendent score, its part worth, for each scenario type. He then used a techni- que, which is sometimes used by urban planners, to measure the inter- action of the independent destination decision variables.

Linda Limback, Minnesota Office

of Tourism, presented a paper on how Minnesota is using data from various sources including a national pleasure travel survey and the US Travel Data Center’s national estimate of business travel, extrapolating it to the US population, converting it to the appropriate units, and inputting it into the regional economic model to derive timely estimates of the economic im- pact of travel on the state.

Judy Rogers, Ruston/Tomany and Associates, Ltd, stressed the critical importance of the survey respondent to market research. Rogers’s pre- sentation dramatized the need for practical guidelines in survey design and administration by telling the story of a prototypical family in the midst of preparing the family dinner who are asked to respond to an elaborate and inappropriately designed travel sur- vey. The point Rogers makes is that there is generally an asymmetrical re- lationship between the researcher’s and respondent’s interests. She offered many suggestions for impro- ving the answerability and therefore accuracy of survey questions.

C.R. Goeldner, Gin Hayden and Cindy DiPersio

Graduate School of Business and Administration

University of Colorado Campus Box 420

Boulder, CO 80309-0420, USA

Worlds apart? The Third International Conference of the Leisure Studies Association, ‘Leisure in different worlds’, was held at Loughborough University, 14-18 July 1993. For many delegates it proved to be challenging, stimulating, confusing or irritating depending upon one’s viewpoint, as the majority of the plenary sessions were dominated by arguments about meta-theory and postmodernism, even while individual workshops displayed a variety of concerns including macro-trends, or highly focused research issues, as speakers addressed the conference theme. Chris Ryan, from Massey University, describes some of the debate.

The phrase ‘Leisure in different viewpoint, a difference between a worlds’ could well be interpreted in postmodernist or positivist mode of different ways at this stimulating con- analysis? And if it was a conference ference. Was it the world of the weal- devoted to differences, why were thy, or of the aged, were there diffe- some ‘differences’ not present in terms rent perspectives between male and of papers relating to ethnic minorities, female, or was it, from an intellectual the disabled or different cultures?

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Certainly in the plenary sessions there was much to indicate the chang- ing nature of the world, or, at least as John Urry (Lancaster University) was to say, the world of the north-west shores of the Atlantic when he was asked: to which part of the world does the postmodernist (or is it postmod- ernity?) analysis apply? Graham Mur- dock (Loughborough University) argued that Britain was the first exam- ple of a society engaged in a process of an ‘un-developing economy’. In 1979, according to EC criteria of poverty, 5 million in the UK were ‘poor’; today the figure is 12 million. The domes- tication of leisure meant that the streets were commandeered by the ‘have-nots’, while processes such as privatization, which moved public goods into the market-place, began to generate serious questions of what was meant by ‘citizenship’ which were more profound than the consumerism implied by John Major’s concept of citizens’ charters. John Fiske (Uni- versity of Wisconsin-Madison), in his analysis of the deprived in Los Angeles, argued that the riots/ rebellion/uprising (the choice of term is significant) of South Central LA was one means by which the deprived blacks could actually enter the polit- ical discourse.

Angela McRobbie (Thames Valley University) described some aspects of a fragmented society with her analysis of some subsegments of youth culture; namely the ‘trusties’, and those attracted to ‘rave’ and ‘ragga’. In one sense it all appeared antithetical to mainstream capitalist culture, but she argued that it was consistent with a new capitalism of the casual job, the process of production, and distribu- tion of both symbols and leisure, and it penetrated part of mainstream capi- talism (which displayed similar fea- tures) through media activity. Indeed, the process she described reminded one of Tom Peter’s thoughts of ‘man- agement of chaos’ with his emphasis on creative task teams - the parallels were present! Sheila Scraton (Leeds Metropolitan University) was another plenary speaker who questioned the nature of life and leisure in a postmod- ern world from the viewpoint of meta- theory. Was feminism, like Marxism,

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a ‘meta-theory’ which no longer pos- sessed validity in the fragmentation of a mass consumer market - or was postmodernism itself a new ortho- doxy?

Chris Rojek (Sociology Editor - Routledge) also questioned the valid- ity of postmodernism as an interpreta- tion of ‘new reality’. Yet even while he questioned the degree to which we are in a ‘depthless culture’, he commented that many theme parks, tourist attrac- tions and other aspects of popular culture offer clear, simple stories which provide a clear narrative that our lives otherwise lack. Sheila Scra- ton indicated why that clarity might be lacking for large sections of our socie- ty when she examined the realities of many women today and their roles as part-time workers, home-keepers and heads of single-parent families.

Given this review thus far, it might be asked: what was the relationship between the plenaries and the subject of the conference, namely leisure? Many posed this question in one form or another. As Bohdan Jung (Warsaw School of Economics) commented, PM (postmodernism) was discussed into early AM! In one sense the plen- ary speakers had provided an answer - leisure was the culture of the future, a culture that consumed symbols and packaged experience, and hence the links were made with a traditional concern of leisure and tourism; name- ly, what was, and how important is, the authenticity of the participant’s experience?

A second response lay in some of the workshop sessions. As Tony Veal (University of Technology, Sydney) stated in the feedback session, there was a feeling that there were two conferences - the conference of the plenaries and the conference of the workshops. Yet there were linkages. David Leslie spoke of tourism as a

product of affluence, as the example par excellence of conspicuous con- sumption. On the other hand, in other sessions, there was evidence that while the post-Fordism world was one of fragmentation and destructuring, old structures still contained discrimina- tory powers. Heather Gibson (Uni- versity of Connecticut) presented evi- dence of life-stage still playing a role in choice of tourist roles, something that Chris Ryan (Nottingham Trent University) confirmed as emerging from his research. Jan Willem te Klceze (Wageningen Agricultural Uni- versity) also confirmed very limited shifts in camping styles of the Dutch population.

The workshops were divided into 13 themes including environmental issues, sport, mass marketing, leisure constraints, leisure and ageing, leisure and adolescence, mass media, the arts and, linking with the themes of post- modernity, leisure in postindustrial societies and the concept of leisure. It was not possible to get to all of these, there being 42 in total, but the perpe- tual workshop around the bar indi- cated that many good sessions had taken place. Neil Rock from Friends of the Earth had raised the question as to whether pressure groups should negotiate directly with tourist in- terests, while David Botterill (Cardiff Institute of HE) indicated the politics of pressure groups with his paper on Tourism Concern. Cara Aitchison (University of North London) criti- cized comparative studies for not being comparative, while David Bruce and Marian Jackson (University of the West of England) in their paper de- scribed current comparative work in European walled towns even while their practical difficulties indicated the problems that comparative resear- chers faced. Simply to list other papers and authors is in part invidious, but

the quality of the conference can be gauged from a list of speakers that included not only those mentioned above but also, in no particular order, Stephen Page (Christ Church Col- lege), Brian Wheeller (University of Birmingham), John Crompton (Texas A & M), Greg Richards (University of North London), Karla Henderson (University of North Carolina), Tony Seaton (Strathclyde University), Guy Jackson and Sue Glyptis (Lough- borough University), Ken Roberts (Liverpool University), Brian Hay (Scottish Tourist Board) and many, many others. What was missing, as is only too common, were representa- tives from the actual leisure and tour- ism industries themselves. Only seven could be identified; and that included four from the publishing industry!

None the less, this was for many a challenging conference where positiv- ist tradition met phenomenological sociologist with economists cheering from the sidelines; a cocktail that was stirred as eagerly as any that featured in Tony Seaton’s analysis of the more conventional cocktail and its history; and a potent mixture which meant, at least for this delegate, an interesting and well worthwhile conference. The papers are to be published either through the Leisure Studies Associa- tion or in Leisure Studies, and as such details can be obtained from Myrene McFee, The Leisure Studies Associa- tion, LSA Publications, Chelsea School Research Centre, University of Brighton, Eastbourne BN20 7SP, UK.

Chris Ryan Department of Management Systems

Massey University Private Bag 11222 Palmerston North

New Zealand

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