Leisure, Diversity and Social Justice

Issues of justice and injustice have only been tangentially addressed in the leisure literature. The "social justice paradigm" may provide an important conceptual umbrella for leisure scholars to connect a range of research] scholarly endeavors including issues related to gender, race/ethnicity, social class, disability, age, and sexual orientation. This paper explores the viability of the social justice paradigm for leisure research by focusing on the work of Young (1990) in Justice and the Politics of Difference. According to Young, many historical discussions of justice are grounded in a distributive paradigm that emphasizes instrumental principles embedded in individualism, accrual of goods/resources, and a competitive marketplace ethos of survival of the fittest. Thus, the "good life" has been defined within parameters of the possession and consumption of material goods and the acquisition of pleasure and comfortable lifestyles. Many post modern theories of justice, however, move beyond the distributive paradigm to assess the institutional conditions and arrangements that explain particular distributions of wealth, power, and status that exist among historically disenfranchised populations including women, people of color, individuals with disabilities, days and lesbians, the poor, and the elderly: As doers and actors we seek to promote many values of social justice in addition to fairness in the distribution of goods: learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings; participating in forming and running institutions, and receiving recognition for such participation; playing and communicating with others, and expressing our experience, feelings, and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen. (Young, 1990, p. 37) Social justice, then, concerns the degree to which societal institutions promote the conditions necessary for the realization of these values. Injustice is defined by the extent to which the pursuit of such values are inhibited by the oppressive institutional constraints and barriers that inhibit self determination and growth. Contemporary notions of justice and injustice thus move beyond the overt forms of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and ageism toward uncovering the more covert and systemic properties of injustice that are embedded in everyday interaction (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1998; Young, 1990): Some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanism-in short, the normal processes of everyday life. (Young, 1990, p. 41) Although the social, cultural, historical and political histories of oppressed groups differ, there are five conditions that they share in common: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Exploitation refers to the control and domination of one group over the economic and social resources of less powerful groups. Issues about who gets which jobs, how that work is compensated, and what types of work are left for particular groups form the central dimension of economic exploitation. Not only is the distribution of types of labor important, but so to are the structural, societal features that continue to constrain the kinds of opportunities available to people of difference. Marginalization and powerlessness refer to the extent to which groups of people are "expelled from useful participation in social life" (Young, p. 53). Marginalization and powerlessness may take on many forms including material deprivation as well as exclusion from decision-making, opportunities for personal and workplace development, and a range of life choices. "Even if marginals were provided a comfortable material life within institutions that respected their freedom and dignity, injustice of marginality would remain in the form of uselessness, boredom, and lack of respect" (Young, p. …