Fit for Consumption

Sociology and the Business of Fitness

By: Jennifer Smith Maguire

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Paperback | 11 September 2007 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
252 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.39 x 15.6 x 1.35

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This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture.

Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. Fit for Consumption conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile -  the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that characterize our current era.

Intended for researchers and senior undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport, leisure, cultural studies and the body, this book utilizes the US fitness field as a case study through which to explore the place of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Combining observations in health clubs, interviews with fitness producers and consumers, and a discourse analysis of a wide variety of fitness texts, this book provides an empirically grounded examination of one of the pressing theoretical questions of our time: how individuals learn to fit into consumer culture and the service economy and how our bodies and selves become 'fit for consumption.'

Industry Reviews

"Fitness culture is contradictory, this is what Maguire has demonstrated, and this makes her book a work of high value" Henning Eichberg

"...Smith is a renownded scholar and an expert in this area. This will be the leading book... about an exciting and current topic."

Professor Gertrud Pfister, President of the International Sociology of Sport Association.

"This is a timely text, given the sheer growht in private health club/gym provision. As yet, there is scant literature that provides a critique of these developments. Perhaps more than this, however, is the significance of an account that is critical and actively contextualises and conceptualises the 'fitness boom'."

Dr Beccy Watson, Senior Lecturer in Leisure and Sport Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University.

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