What's the big idea? A critical exploration of the concept of social capital and its incorporation into leisure policy discourse

Starting from the overwhelming welcome that Putnam's (2000) treatise on social capital has received in government circles, we consider its relative merits for examining and understanding the role for leisure in policy strategies. To perform this critique we identify some of the key points from Putnam's work and also illustrate how it has been incorporated into a body of leisure studies literature. This is then extended to a discussion of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of his approach and its link to civic communitarianism. We suggest that the seduction of the 'niceness' of Putnam's formulation of social capital not only misses the point of the grimness of some people's lives but it also pays little attention to Bourdieu's point that poorer community groups tend to be at the mercy of forces over which they have little control. We argue that if the poor have become a silent emblem of the ways in which the state has more and more individualised its relationship with its citizens, it is they who also tend to be blamed for their own poverty because it is presumed that they lack social capital. This in turn encourages 'us' to determine what is appropriate for 'them'. As a critical response to this situation, we propose that Bourdieu's take on different forms of 'capital' offers more productive lines for analysis. From there we go on to suggest that it might be profitable to combine Bourdieu's sociology with Sennett's recent interpretation of 'respect' to formulate a central interpretive role for community leisure practitioners - recast as cultural intermediaries - if poorer community groups are to be better included. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

Evaluation of teenage pregnancy interventions in Wigan

This report presents the findings from a 12 month study that involved the development of an online questionnaire, and analysis of over 50 completed responses. The questionnaire aimed to determine the impact of a variety of services in Wigan that currently engage in strategies to reduce teenage pregnancy rates in the borough. The report begins with the background and specific study aims and objectives followed by a policy and literature overview. Details of the study design and processes undertaken to develop the instrument are given, together with data collected from a number of participating sites. This data was analysed and the findings and recommendations are presented

Single and Many Particle Correlation Functions and Uniform Phase Bases for Strongly Correlated Systems

The need for suitable many or infinite fermion correlation functions to describe some low dimensional strongly correlated systems is discussed. This is linked to the need for a correlated basis, in which the ground state may be postive definite, and in which single particle correlations may suffice. A particular trial basis is proposed, and applied to a certain quasi-1D model. The model is a strip of the 2D square lattice wrapped around a cylinder, and is related to the ladder geometries, but with periodic instead of open boundary conditions along the edges. Analysis involves a novel mean-field approach and exact diagonalisation. The model has a paramagnetic region and a Nagaoka ferromagnetic region. The proposed basis is well suited to the model, and single particle correlations in it have power law decay for the paramagnet, where the charge motion is qualitatively hard core bosonic. The mean field also leads to a BCS-type model with single particle long range order.Comment: 23 pages, in plain tex, 12 Postscript figures included. Accepted for publication in J.Physics : Condensed Matte

Quartic Gauge Boson Couplings and Tree Unitarity in the SU(3)_C X SU(3)_L X U(1)_N Models

The quartic gauge boson couplings in the ${SU(3)}_C \otimes {SU(3)}_L \otimes {U(1)}_N$ models are presented. We find that the couplings of four {\it differrent} gauge bosons may have unusual Lorentz structure and the couplings sastify the tree unitarity requirement at high energy limit.Comment: 13 pages, Latex, axodraw.st