Populism, sport, leisure, and popular culture: Setting the scene

Populism is ascendant around the world, and global media are on notice. One headline in Al Jazeera declared: “National-Populism: A New Global Model Is Born” Nowhere in this seminal study did he address how the concept of populism might inform work on how massification, spectacularisation or fragmentation shaped sport and leisure. In a challenging intervention comprising a special issue of the journal Leisure Studies Stanley Thangaraj and his collaborators pose important questions concerning the nature of national populism. The study of leisure and its constituent elements - sport, music, drama, tourism, and an infinite list of other free-time activities - has been a focus of sociological interest and inquiry since the founding days of the discipline, though always explicit in sociological scholarship and debate. Forms of leisure and sport were by no means marginal in or peripheral to the developing societies of the modern period, but they have remained relatively neglected across the social sciences.