The Local Surfer - University of Exeter

Lowdon, & Bond, 1990), and sociology (Butts, 2001; Hull, 1976; Pearson, 1979,
1981), (Booth, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2003, 2004; Booth, Jaggard, & Phillips, 2002;
Ford & Brown, 2006; Preston-Whyte, 2002).
The Sociological Study of Surfing
This study will continue on the trend of researching surfing from a sociological
perspective. There are important reasons for this approach. The first reasons is
better understanding social behaviour. Coakley (2001: 2) believes that sociology
provides the researcher with “concepts, theoretical approaches, and research
methods to describe and understand behaviour and social interaction as they
occur in particular social and cultural contexts”. These tools enable the
researcher to examine sport as a social activity and as a setting for social
relationships and activities that influence our ideas about our social life
(Coakley and Donnelly, 1999). Although, Jarvie and Maguire (1994: 2) believe
that some researchers view sport as a meaningless object of sociological
enquiry, they challenge this view by suggesting that key sociological figures
such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel all viewed sport as anything but
meaningless and that sport features in many key areas of sociological thought
including feminism, postmodernism, figurational sociology and cultural
studies. Despite the use of sociology within studies of sport becoming more
frequent during the beginning of the twentieth century, sociological studies on
surfing are still relatively few. The qualities of sociology can be applied to
studies of surfing to expose surfing as a socially constructed phenomenon.
Although many researchers have realised the opportunities of a sociological
perspective within sport, to date these have tended to focus on the most well
known surfing locations such as California, Australia and New Zealand.
Popular Locations for the Sociological Study of Surfing
Quite logically, sociological studies of surfing were and still are focused on
locations where surfing culture is deeply rooted and strongly linked to the
cultural context. For example Pearson (1979), Booth (2001a), Dutton (1983), Law
(2001) and Stranger (1999) all base their studies in Australia and New Zealand,
and Flynn (1989), Butts (2001), Hull (1976) and George (1991) all base their
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