‘They treat me like I’m scum’: Social exclusion and established-outsider relations in a British tennis club

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Lawn Tennis Association introduced numerous policies to remove barriers associated with social exclusion in tennis clubs. Ethnographic research was conducted within one club to analyse the incidence of social exclusion, and consider the success of LTA policies in these regards. Findings suggested the club made structural changes to receive LTA funding, such as removing exclusive membership and clothing restrictions, hiring coaches and establishing school–club links, yet its culture remained almost entirely inaccessible to new members. For analysis, Elias and Scotson’s ‘Established-Outsider Relations’ theoretical framework is applied: to discover who was excluded, how and why, and, to set the outcomes of power struggles between members in the wider social and historical contexts of changing LTA policies.