Leisure, Market and Crime in Greece: Friends or Foes?

1. Leisure, Market and Crime in Greece: Friends or Foes? DR STRATOS GEORGOULAS Ass. Professor Director of Lab for Sociology of Youth, Sports and Leisure University of the Aegean

2. Leisure, Market and Crime in Greece: Friends or Foes? • structures of supervision and mechanisms of control in Greece determine the management of leisure • formal social control functions only in a complementary way and only in relation to the control of a parallel market, existing outside the sphere of the dominant market.

3. Definitions • the analytical tool of leisure will be used as a concept describing a privileged social time in modern societies • a field of comprehension of the hierarchy of social values, that is, a social construction readjustable to the circumstances and the social actors (G. Pronovost,1990).

4. LEISURE • delimited within the social context; determined historically and socially. The division of power and discipline runs through it the same way it runs through all social phenomena • The dominance of one management pattern of ‘free time’, is the crystallized effect of this cultural dominance of the urban - industrial - commercial culture. Dominance leads, through control, to conformism and homogeneity

5. CRIME • crime does not constitute an objective fact, but a social construction, readjustable to the changing social conditions • not a reflection of the God - given “natural law” • not the product of free will but something influenced by factors within a wide social context

6. CRIME • Characterised by the division of power and discipline. Penalisation of behaviours not the result of the entire society’s consensual outcry but an attempt to promote and defend values and interests of groups with great political and economic power. • Since the penalisation of behaviours function by the results of social conflict, we expect no elements of conflict between market and the legal system • low rates of criminality for a social phenomenon with a high level of market self-regulation, as is leisure.

7. LEISURE CONTROL • electronic gambling • the state (which has zero income from this kind of activity) naturally wants to supplement market control with repression via legislative regulation and penalization of behaviours- Presidential Decree 36/1994 • A law with few legal institutions of electronic gambling (oligopoly) is better than anarchy in the market of this leisure product.

8. RESEARCH • Data: Greek National Statistics Organization1991-1996 • a research of state repression-concerns the implementation of legislation patterns in relation to control and the penalisation of specific forms of leisure

9. FINDINGS 1 • The specific penalized behaviour has been categorized as minor offence by the state. • Takes place in cities and is committed by men, as the total of offences. • Punished with short-term imprisonment, without obvious results, as the rate of recidivism shows. • A behaviour not considered to pose a great danger to our society, neither a permanent parameter of the policy against crime. • The repressive mechanisms do not have as their main objective to control this behaviour.

12. FINDINGS 2 • The specific offence in relation to the geographical region it took place • The formal social control is stricter in Attica and Peloponnesus, something which is not the case in the periphery (Aegean, Crete, Ionian). • Stricter in regions where many such centres of activities operate with large concentration of population-regions with a greater need for external determination of regulation • in contradiction to regions with leisure oligopoly, (isolated and sparsely populated regions of Greece)

13. FINDINGS 3 • Profile of the person sentenced: man 35-59 years of age, married with children, graduate of primary education • Profile not differ from the profile of the person that has been stigmatised as a "criminal". • It is crime - control policy that attempts to deal with the symptoms without changing the basic political - economic forces that generate these symptoms (Greenberg 1980)

14. FINDINGS 4 • Professional profile of the person sentenced -self-employed in the sector of service provision, • This reveals the existence of a small size market, which functions beyond the control of the big capital and which is mainly checked by the formal social control.

16. CONCLUSION • attempt to connect management of leisure and mainly the efforts of the State to control it, with the political economy of a specific society, in this case contemporary Greece • penal repression cannot play an autonomous or even causal role, in relation to the dominant management patterns of leisure, which are determined mainly by the market.

17. CONCLUSION • no elements of conflict between the value models of market proposal and penal treatment of the management of "free time" are found. • constitute control of a parallel market which functions beyond the limits of market and for that matter the specific control is permissible and desirable, as far as the ruling class is concerned.

18. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island • This work will try to illustrate structures of monitoring and mechanisms of control in one of the dominant models of modern youth’s leisure in a Greek island (Lesvos), that is going to a night club.

19. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island • A research based on participant observation and informal, semi-structured interviews was held in the most famous night clubs in Mytilene( capital of Lesvos island). • Outcomes of this research are analyzed through the use of a methodology tool that Foucault issued in his work, Discipline and Punishment.

20. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island A. Rules of admission - normative sanctions. B. Internal discipline 1. Distribution in space • a. fencing b. networking c. creation of useful space 2. Control of activity • a. Planning (setting of rhythm, constraint on particular activities, circle of repetition) • b. Time regulation of activity • c. Connection between body and gesture • d. Harmony between body and object • e. Exhaustive utilisation (principle of non sloth)

21. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island 3. Capitalization of time • a. duration is divided into successive parts up to the final one • b. levels that are analytically organized (no mere repetition) • c. test in each final stage 4. Composition of forces • a. Each body can harmonize with the others • b. Accurate system of administration.

22. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island • RESEARCH STEPS • a) Selection of subject and preparation. • b) Selection of spaces and approach. • c) Recording of observations • d) Data Analysis

23. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island • positive correlations with the aspects of the methodological tool that we had constructed were found. • An example regarding capitalization of time – “The only thing that an individual – consumer can seemingly do in night bar is to lose his/her time and hence not to be able to capitalize the latter”.

24. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island • consumption constitutes a duration. • This continuity can be either a simple repetition, or a process analytically separated into stages, which are connected with ordeals, when the last stage has come to an end. • More frequent is the analytical scale which concerns consumption in the company of friends • a solitary drinker or the one who does not have the economic means to evolve his /her consumption, leads often to marginalization in the end and to early retirement from the place where "leisure" is spent.

25. DISCIPLINE, CONTROL AND LEISURENight clubs in a Greek island • “market management of leisure is constituted of DISCIPLINE and CONTROL”

26. Leisure, Market and Crime in Greece: Friends or Foes? • In my opinion- Friends

27. Why do we believe otherwise? • the Media, through the presentation of criminal incidents, transmits an evaluative knowledge determining this way, desirable objectives and propagating for canonistic types of behaviour. The daily knowledge as a constitutive element of the daily reality is a condition of interaction between the members of a society. In that sense, the local press that transmits this daily knowledge constitutes a dominant structuring factor of this reality.

28. research is based on content analysis of newspaper articles of the whole local press of Mytilene (the capital of the prefecture of Lesbos in Greece) and additional interviews from journalists.

29. Outcomes • a. The concept of criminality is being constructed both qualitatively and quantitatively through local press and not vice versa. • b. The local press evaluates negatively illegal behaviours, positively the formal social control, while in most cases it cancels any relevance with the social frame of criminality. • c. The local press with the dramatic narrations that uses it causes fear of victimisation. • d. The journalists transmit evaluative knowledge in an attempt to cover the lack of knowledge of real criminological data.

30. Left --W3 D1 W2 D4 D2 W1 D3----Right 1% 3,58% 5,04% 4,66% 6,39% 7,3% 10,08%

33. Table 6

35. THANK YOUDr STRATOS GEORGOULASAss. ProfessorUniversity of the AegeanE-mail: s.georgoulas@soc.aegean.gr