Maintaining the Trail

Community, Consumption, and Collective Action

Community is essentially a system of symbols that individuals use to find a sense of belonging in a highly differentiated society (Cohen 1985; Delanty 2003; Hunter 1974; Suttles 1972). Genuine, viable communities arise when these symbols, whether nations (Anderson 1991), local areas (Guest and Oropesa 1984), class differences (Logan and Collver 1983), or boundaries of racial segregation (Anderson 1990), are sufficiently meaningful to the members of a group that they take steps to protect their interests from outside forces (Crenshaw and St. John 1989; Davis 1991). Smith (1998, 89) outlines this process for the case of American Evangelicals, arguing that this community “is strong not because it is shielded against, but because it is—or at least perceives itself to be—embattled with forces that seem to oppose or threaten it.”

Scholars typically refer to the formation of collective identities around subcultural statuses such as religion, race, and sexuality—and those communities’ articulation and pursuit of political agendas through collective action—as “new social movements.” As the significance of class for communal solidarity and political movements wanes (Hechter 2004), subcultural groups take up political causes that advance their interests and secure a place for their identities in a culturally diverse society (Castells 1997; Melucci 1989; Polletta and Jasper 2001). The result is a rise in identity politics, in which symbolic communities compete against one another for favorable political outcomes. For example, communal solidarity and identity politics have grown from racial and ethnic identities (Gongaware 2003; McAdam 1982) sexual identities (Armstrong 2002; D’Emilio 1998), and environmentalist identities (Dunlap and Mertig 1992; Sutton 2000).

Consumption, however—as a means of demarcating identity space in society—has traditionally been viewed as inadequate for the tasks of grounding an identity narrative and engaging in genuine community. Familiar critiques of consumption suggest that it leads to individuals’ alienation from their “real” selves, from each other, and from their potential as agents of social change (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002; Baudrillard 1981, 1983; Brenkman 1979; Leavis and Thompson 1933; Marcuse 1964; Packard 1977; Riesman, Glazer, and Denney 1950; Rousseau 1984). As a whole, critical theory suggests that the use of lifestyle as a marker of identity—rather than class—undermines the collective action that might otherwise arise out of more “authentic” allegiances. Dunn (2000, 119) summarizes this assertion:

Consumerism, to the extent that it privatizes choice by enforcing loyalty to the values of leisure and lifestyle, has a depoliticizing effect, turning workers—who might otherwise be militant in solidarity—into consumers, and citizens—who might otherwise engage in collective action—into spectators.

As individuals invest themselves in the consumption of leisure and lifestyle and interact with others who share their interests, they generate “lifestyle enclaves” (Bellah et al. 1985) or “neo-tribes” (Bauman 1992; Maffesoli 1996). These groups celebrate the narcissism of individualism, pulling people into private social orbits and away from the public realm (Lash 1979); they represent segmental forms of social membership that may be subject to dissolution at the winds of fashion. Lifestyle, consumption, and leisure-based groups represent precarious foundations for political action because their members are only committed to the group to the degree that they continue to achieve self-satisfaction from their participation. To the degree that consumption-based groups lack commitment-building mechanisms, we can characterize them as an extreme form of the “community of limited liability” (Janowitz 1967; Greer 1962).

However, as commitment to occupation, residential location, and other traditional foundations of community wanes, collective action should increasingly revolve around the axis of lifestyle. Giddens (1991, 184) anticipates this shift in the boundaries of political mobilization and activity: “Achieving control over change, in respect of lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.” Giddens’ projection is evident in emerging forms of political engagement. “Political consumerism,” for example, exemplifies how commitment to lifestyles and consumption identities can spark collective action (Micheletti 2003); their success relies on consumers’ market engagement (buycotts) or disengagement (boycotts) to bring about social change (Clark 2004; Hilton 2007). Food-justice movements (Alkon and Norgaard 2009; Haydu and Kadanoff 2010), anti-sweatshop movements (Balsiger 2010; Carty 2002), and fair-trade coffee movements (Fisher 2007) suggest that individuals’ politically motivated acts of consumption, in the aggregate, can constitute effective forms of collective action.

Additionally, as people locate increasingly salient identities in the realm of leisure consumption, we should expect these groups to generate affective and moral commitment (Kanter 1972), or internal commitment (Shamir 1988): interactive bonds that are integral to the articulation and maintenance of community. As individuals’ commitment to a leisure identity moves from casual to serious, collective leisure identities may inspire an engagement of the public realm characteristic of social movements grounded in other status-based identities. Stebbins (2007, 5) defines serious leisure as “the systematic pursuit of an . . . activity that people find so substantial, interesting, and fulfilling that, in the typical case, they launch themselves on a (leisure) career centered on acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience.” Many people establish these leisure careers in a wide array of recreational scenes (Irwin 1977). Like occupational careers, leisure careers can provide life-long rewards for ongoing commitment (Heuser 2005; Newmahr 2010; Snyder 1986; Stebbins 2005).

As Frey and Dickens (1990, 272) assert, “leisure activity serves as a major factor in the construction of one’s social identity. And, leisure groups often provide the most significant community bond people experience.” For example, members of a bluegrass-festival community regularly attend these festivals to experience an authentic sense of community (Gardner 2004). Leisure consumption can provide innovative means of maintaining existing communal bonds, and it can also serve as the foundation of new forms of community (Arai and Pedlar 2003); it has played a role in the social construction of deaf communities (Atherton 2009), lesbian and gay communities (Kates and Belk 2001), transnational ethnic communities (Pescador 2004), straightedge communities (Haenfler 2006), and Pagan communities (Calley Jones 2010).

Leisure consumption also plays a role in identity politics: As individuals ground a sense of self and community in their leisure activities, they are likely to take action to protect the foundation of their identity narratives when opposing forces threaten those foundations. For example, Boston Red Sox fans engaged in collective action and succeeded in protecting Fenway Park from being replaced by a new stadium (Borer 2008). In this case, development threatened to break the link between a salient collective identity and the sacred place where members of Red Sox Nation performed their identity-affirming consumption rituals. Similarly, surfers have engaged in collective environmental activism to protect the beaches where they practice their serious leisure (Wheaton 2007). My research provides additional empirical evidence that leisure consumption can inspire commitment, collective identity, and collective action. I analyze Jeepers’ subcultural identity work (Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock 1996), detailing their efforts to overcome perceived stereotypes and political opposition by engaging the public realm.

Setting and Methods

I gathered data during a four-year, multimethodological investigation of a community of Jeep enthusiasts and its members’ relationships to material culture, to each other, and to the wider institutional context of contemporary society. I began the research doing anticipatory fieldwork as a participant observer in corporate-sponsored brand events such as Camp Jeep and Jeep Jamborees. During this first year of my research, I learned as much as I could about the sport of off-road driving and its associated vocabulary by studying relevant media and internet discussion forums. My participation in corporate-sponsored events led to contacts with members of the Midwestern-State Four-Wheel Drive Association (MFWDA), ¹ an organization of off-road enthusiasts composed of twenty-three clubs located throughout a Midwestern state. After receiving approval from my university’s Institutional Review Board, I went on to gather the bulk of my data during three years of ethnographic fieldwork as an “active member” (Adler and Adler 1987) in MFWDA and its constituent clubs. I joined the Association much like any newcomer to the community, with limited knowledge of the sport and possessing an unmodified Jeep. Over the course of the next three years, I followed the path that most new members took, slowly modifying my Jeep so that it would be more capable in extreme off-road situations and becoming increasingly integrated into the group’s social structure.

During my three years of participant observation in MFWDA, I went to every event I could attend and got to know many of the members of the Association. I attended formal events sponsored by the Association and by individual clubs, including trail rides, holiday parties, swap meets, and charity events. I went to the Association’s quarterly meetings and, after getting approval from the president of the Association and the other members of the board of directors, sat in on their meetings, which were closed-door sessions held before the general assembly at each quarterly meeting. While participating in the Association’s formal events was necessary for my understanding of the community’s organization, many of my most profitable interactions with participants came during informal gatherings, such as smaller trail rides on individual Jeepers’ properties and “wrenching parties” held at Jeepers’ personal garages. In many cases, I would attend a formal event such as an organized trail ride or an annual convention and then spend the evening after the event hanging out informally with my participants. These evenings would generally consist of eating dinner and going to a bar, with the informal nature of these gatherings providing another window into my participants’ relationships with each other. Because weekend events frequently demanded that I travel many miles from my home, I would sometimes spend one or more nights at the homes of other Jeepers, which granted me access to a relatively holistic interpretation of their social lives.

I also became involved in several events linking MFWDA to the larger institutional context of Midwestern-State. The Association was heavily involved in the development and maintenance of two designated off-road parks on state-owned land. I attended meetings of the Trinity County Recreational Development Committee, as well as several public hearings on trail-designation proposals in the National Forest. Additionally, I became deeply involved in the Association’s charity events, which served as its most visible links to the public realm. Other events drew my attention because my participants recommended them, despite the fact that they were not official MFWDA events. Jeep enthusiasts often made up only a small sub-segment of the crowd at these larger-scale, off-road lifestyle events, but they granted me a better understanding of the larger cultural context in which my participants were embedded. My exposure to the range of subcultures at these events proved crucial to understanding the role that MFWDA and the Jeep brand played in the larger Midwestern culture of off-road recreation.

To supplement my observational data, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with twenty-five members of MFWDA. As I got to know the members of the group, I asked many of them in person if they would be willing to participate in an interview. I also posted a recruitment letter on the Association’s online forum in order to capture potential respondents whom I had not had the chance to ask in person. I conducted eight of the interviews in one-on-one fashion and the balance of the interviews with small groups of two or three participants in focus-group fashion. In several cases, the interviews took place in my participants’ homes. In the remaining cases, I met respondents at a restaurant where we talked over a meal and a beer. Interview participants varied in age from twenty to sixty-two years. The interviews were semi-structured; I had a list of questions, but the interviews would typically evolve and take the form of relaxed conversations that I would occasionally redirect.

My participants perceived me as embarking on a genuine serious-leisure career similar to their own. My status as a member of the community clearly outweighed my status as a researcher in their eyes. As the formal events of an MFWDA annual convention were winding down, Brad and Nicholas invited me to go out on the town with them and Mitchell, whom I had seen at several events but never spoken with. When Nicholas formally introduced us, Mitchell said, “Oh, yeah . . . you’re the guy writing a book about us, right?” I told him that I hoped it would eventually become a book, but that it would take some time to bring the project to that point. Mitchell spit a mouthful of tobacco juice into his makeshift spittoon and then offered me a pinch of his Copenhagen. After I accepted his offer, Mitchell chuckled and told Nicholas, “Man, he’s just like us, isn’t he? He’s just lucky enough to do this for a living.”

While MFWDA members covered the socioeconomic spectrum, the community embraced and projected a working-class ethic. I was raised in Waco, Texas, and had been exposed to working-class culture at an early age. I was at ease around the culture because of my familiarity with it, which allowed me to interact relatively effortlessly with the group. I dressed in clothing that other members wore when I attended events: functional clothing designed to keep me warm or cool, depending on the season. Flannel shirts, old jeans, and work boots, when combined with my willingness to indulge in subcultural habits such as tobacco chewing, allowed me to blend in with the group. Participants were comfortable interacting with me because of my self-presentation, and my research benefited from others seeing me as just another off-road driving enthusiast. At the same time, I was able to tweak my interactive style when speaking with Jeepers who were highly educated and lived middle-class lifestyles when they were not with the group. I also did this with representatives of the Department of Natural Resources and other external institutions, which allowed them to speak more comfortably with me about the stereotypes that existed about the off-road subculture and its enthusiasts.

The Serious-Leisure Community

Salient identities and their significance for the self are theoretically inseparable from the communities in which individuals enact the roles associated with those identities. In the context of a community that grounds a salient identity, people are more likely to feel comfortable that they can give rein to an authentic self. Outside of such a context, individuals feel—to some significant degree—that they are not really being themselves. Using Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor, we could say that people become aware that their presentations of self feel like following a script rather than spontaneously articulating a meaningful, genuine identity.

Many off-road enthusiasts located a salient sense of self and a primary sense of community in their leisure consumption. Interaction rituals within this serious-leisure community celebrated expressions of spontaneity and authenticity; Jeepers felt these expressions constrained in many other social contexts. Larry, thirty-one years old, was a husband, a father of two children, and a deeply committed member of Freedom Riders Off Road Club. When I asked him if his fellow club members led different sorts of lives when they were apart, he affirmed but suggested that other realms of their lives did not provide them with adequate opportunities to be themselves:

Oh yeah, we all lead different lives. You know, we all got stuff outside of our Jeep clubs that we’re all busy doing. But the main thing is that we’re all taking time out to get together to do what we love. And then when we’re done, we kinda have to put our masks on and go outside of that . . . go to different social events that have nothing to do with Jeeps.

Realistically, people wear masks in all of their interactions, but genuine community requires a mask that is much less distorting of an authentic self. Many Jeepers felt that the rest of the world was often a series of distractions from what they held to be real. Dalton, a forty-three-year-old warehouse manager who was restoring and modifying an old Jeep with his son, put it this way when I asked him to explain the motivation for his long-term participation in the Association:

I tell everybody at work that that’s my shrink; you know . . . that’s my way of keeping out of the clock tower and shooting at the little people. My family and friends get together, and we’ll say, “we need to go wheeling; it’s been a while.” We need some therapy.

There were a number of paths to committed involvement in the reality shared by Jeep people. Some Jeepers, like Bradley, had grown up in the off-road subculture as a result of their parents’ involvement in the community. Bradley, twenty-four, worked part time in retail and attended classes at the local community college. He served as the secretary on MFWDA’s board of directors, and his father was one of the founding members of Fun Times Jeepers. When I asked him how long he had been a member of the Association and whether he could see himself giving up his membership if his interests shifted, Bradley suggested that his membership in the community was ascribed, rather than something he had the power or desire to discard:

I was pretty much born in a Jeep. From what I’ve been told . . . from the time I was nine months old, there was a baby seat in the backseat of the Jeep. My dad has always had a Jeep since I’ve been born. Ever since I can remember, my father was part of an organized four-wheel drive club. I don’t think there’s anything that can change it, so . . . I don’t think I will ever give that up. I mean . . . it’s in my blood. It’s just there.

While some Jeepers grew up in the community, most stumbled upon their eventual leisure career as casual participants in a friend’s off-road excursion or a corporate-sponsored event; they became enamored with the unique tests of skill and focus provided by the sport, and began to take their participation more seriously. As they advanced in their leisure careers, most Jeepers found it advantageous to improve the mechanical capabilities of their Jeeps so that they could test themselves and their machines on increasingly frequent trips to increasingly difficult trails. This growing commitment to the community’s material culture was generally matched by a growing commitment to the relationships they developed with other members of MFWDA.

Jeepers who were serious about their leisure were also serious about building and maintaining friendships with others who had embarked on similar leisure careers. Many Jeepers claimed multi-stranded relationships with other club-members that went beyond casual acquaintanceships focused on a single topic. Because they built interactions with each other using selves that they viewed as authentic, trust and commitment took root quickly among Jeepers; many of my participants identified their off-road club as a primary source of social identity, friendship, and social support. As Larry told me when describing his social network:

Most of the people that I hang out with on a regular basis are actually club members. I’ve got a handful at work that I talk to, and a couple others that I’ve always been good friends with…but for the most part, the ones that I talk to the most are club members.

Eddie, a fellow member of Freedom Riders who was unemployed, echoed Larry’s sentiments:

It’s not just like Larry and I, or Trent and I . . . we don’t just have a Jeep. We also have a friendship outside of that. If anybody needs anything, they’re gonna call, and we’ll all run and try to help. And that’s more important to me than just going out and driving a Jeep.

Jeepers generated trust and pure sociability on the trail, which sparked friendships that grew beyond a shared passion for Jeeps. Driving their Jeeps on off-road trails provided the experiential glue that held the community together, but many Jeepers valued the relationships they developed on the trail enough to get together with other club members outside of that context. Clubs held holiday parties and other gatherings that were typically well attended despite a lack of opportunities for off-road driving. As a result, this serious-leisure community had become a family-oriented group embracing multiple generations. Walter and Linda had been married more than thirty years. They each owned a highly modified Jeep; they were equally serious about their leisure. As I interviewed them over dinner in their rural home, Walter explained that they enjoyed being able to include their children and grandchildren in the community’s events:

We’re all interested in the same thing, and that’s Jeepin’ and having fun. And you won’t hear the young kids saying, “What’s this old goat doing here,” you know, “he should be sitting on the beach in his rocking chair,” and you don’t hear the old people saying, “What’s this kid doing here? He should be in school or he should be on the corner with his gang buddies,” you know. Everybody clicks together like a big family, and that’s what makes it interesting and, you know . . . that’s what makes it unique.

While Jeepers could theoretically choose to give up their membership in the community at any time, the norm of long-term involvement in the group reflected a significant identity cost associated with leaving the group. Jeepers’ interactions on the trail generated interaction ritual chains (Collins 2004) that functioned as powerful commitment-building mechanisms; the emotionally charged, shared reality of the trail generated solidarity and a sense of community among Jeepers and solidified the symbolic goods used in their adventures as strong markers of group membership. As a Jeeper’s tenure in the community increased, the emotional energy and sense of community he or she received from ongoing involvement in communal rituals increased; and the cost of exit from the community—when measured in terms of maintaining a coherent self—increased correspondingly.

Naturework: Environmentalism on the Trail

As their length of membership increased, Jeepers also grew more committed to ensuring that the places integral to their interaction rituals would continue to be available. The opportunity to experience nature in the presence of others was one of the primary joys that my participants found in participating in off-road clubs. When on the trail, Jeepers were involved in “naturework,” a process Fine (1998, 2) describes as a “rhetorical resource by which social actors individually and collectively make sense of their relationship to the environment.” While individuals’ personal relationships with the natural environment are often a key component of serious leisure, leisure organizations bring together individuals who have taken up similar leisure careers and allow those people to build a sense of community with others who share similar ideological perspectives on human–nature relationships (Fine 1998; Stebbins 2007).

The vast majority of the Jeepers I came to know over the course of my research thought of themselves as environmentalists. At first glance, this might seem oxymoronic, but approximately 80 percent of Americans consider themselves to be environmentalists, embracing a wide range of ideological commitments and behavioral repertoires. In other words, people are “environmentalists” in identifiably different ways, with structural lines of demarcation such as social class and lifestyle likely wielding heavy influence in differing subcultural translations of “environmentalism.” Jeepers felt that other groups of environmentalists held misconceptions about them and that these other user groups were actively trying to shut them out of the wooded areas they used for their serious leisure. Jeepers saw “tree huggers” as their primary political enemies, and they used this term widely to describe people who had embraced a “protectionist” vision of nature. According to Fine (1998, 7), “this view implies that nature is a preserve that human beings could easily spoil.” Protectionists’ “goal is not to manage ecosystems, but to protect them.” From my participants’ perspective, tree huggers held that no human activity was compatible with the authenticity of nature, least of all humans driving sport-utility vehicles through parks, forests, and other natural environments.

While many mainstream environmentalists and their representative organizations would not label driving a sport-utility vehicle through wooded areas as “environmentally friendly” (Vancini 1989), Jeepers embraced a “humanist” vision of nature, “emphasizing the priority of the needs and desires of homo sapiens. This perspective emphasizes . . . that nature is to be used for human purposes (Fine 1998, 11).” Jeepers sought authentic social experiences and inner serenity in nature; and they found it perfectly acceptable to achieve these goals by being in—and using—the natural environment. Their responsibility as environmentalists, they believed, lay in reducing any explicit harm that off-road enthusiasts caused to natural environments and, also, in maintaining the community’s access to those places so future generations would be able to experience the woods in the same way they did—from the driver’s seat of a Jeep.

The Existential Threat of Negative Stereotypes

Off-road driving enthusiasts do not fall within the mainstream of the environmental movement; in fact, their interactions with the natural environment place them on the ideological fringe of a larger group of environmentalists who fall short of embracing a protectionist vision of nature. As a result, the majority of my participants felt threatened by common stereotypes of their leisure activities. Jeepers believed that the general public saw them as “rednecks” and “terrorists of the woods.” When I asked Trent about outsiders’ perceptions of his club’s recreational pursuits, he described what he saw as common stereotypes and suggested they were false and unjust:

They see a bunch of damned rednecks—uneducated, no real semblance of decent manners, running around out there poaching animals, feeding our family from the land, just out drunk and tearing up everything, burning holes in cornfields.

The misconception is so funny. I was telling some people at work that we were at a jamboree. A fella had popped up and hit a tire on a tree and actually put a hole in his oil pan and the oil was shooting out, and all of us got underneath there and started scooping up the leaves and scooping up the dirt that was soaked in oil to make sure we didn’t leave that there. And she said, “Well, why would you do that?” And it’s like . . . do you know how much damage that would do to the environment? Animals eat that, you know . . . and the bugs that the animals eat. And she was floored by the fact that we would think to that level to do that. I mean, you’d have thought the NASCAR pit crews were out there trying to clean up the track, ’cause I mean that’s the way we jump on it and try to do it so we don’t make any impact. I can’t tell you anybody I’ve ever been out with that purposefully will damage the environment, but yet everybody thinks that we do.

In expressing his concern for the environment to his coworkers, Trent managed impressions of his serious leisure in a way that highlighted and legitimated his environmental ideology. As Fine and Sandstrom (1993, 30) suggest, “Ideologies are not merely held by individuals, but are presented to others; ideology is a dramaturgical tool.” Protectionists would undoubtedly point out that negative impacts on the environment are not always as obvious as oil leaking from the underside of a Jeep onto the grounds of a forest, but Trent was confident that expressing his club’s reaction to such obvious harm would legitimate his identity as an environmentalist. Many Jeepers made similar statements when discussing outsiders’ stereotypes of their serious leisure. Megan, a thirty-nine-year-old office worker and relative newcomer to the community, claimed that outsiders stigmatized her leisure consumption because they lacked knowledge of the sport:

I think there are assumptions that we’re out there tearing up land. I do think that is a real assumption. They think speed. And I told many people, you know, this is just . . . SO the opposite of speed. You may be going 10mph all day. But they think you’re just out there doing doughnuts in your trucks or your Jeeps in 4-wheel-drive.

Like gun collectors (Olmsted 1988), belly dancers (Kraus 2010), and skydivers (Anderson and Taylor 2010), off-road enthusiasts engage in serious leisure that generates stigma. Hank, an underemployed, certified electrician, had been pursuing his leisure career for more than twenty years. He articulated similar concerns about the views other user groups in natural areas held toward his leisure pursuits and claimed that those views were based on false assumptions:

They think we’re terrorists of the woods. I think a lot of people have a picture of guys just going out and tearing up the woods. It’s like they see the extreme stuff on TV and maybe the mud bog stuff and they think we’re just out in the woods tearing up the woods. I’m sure there are environmentalists that don’t understand and probably think that too.

Many Jeepers believed that environmentalists who opposed their access to natural areas lacked an appropriate understanding of their serious leisure, which generated unnecessary anxiety about the harm Jeepers might do to the environment or other users of natural areas. Ted, a member of Fun Times Jeepers, told me about Cloak Road, an old logging road through the National Forest that he and other Jeepers had used for years to explore the woods. Horse riders’ complaints over the presence of motorized vehicles on Cloak Road had led to a closure of the trail; and Ted was upset that he could no longer take a Saturday-morning drive on this route, one which had previously provided him and his wife, Lisa, with a chance to relax and enjoy nature. While advocates of the road’s closure had convinced the Forest Service that the presence of Jeeps on the road generated unnecessary safety issues and environmental damage, Ted disputed those claims in an attempt to neutralize the stigma associated with his leisure (Sykes and Matza 1957):

If you stacked the amount of people that were hurt off-roading back there against the amount of people that were hurt on horses; the horses would far outnumber us. Yet they continue to allow horses to go anywhere they want pretty much. If you look at the horse trails, I don’t see no difference from the jeep trails. I used to be a horse person. I had horses for years. I don’t understand what the difference is between the Jeep people and the horse people. The horse people are more organized, maybe. I’m not even sure if that’s really true. Maybe the horse thing is more established.

Environmentalists who embraced a protectionist vision of nature—as well as others who supported human access to natural areas but believed that motorized vehicles were incompatible with their use of those areas—had been successful in blocking Jeepers’ access to Cloak Road, an area in which many of my participants had grown accustomed to practicing their naturework. Several other land-use controversies emerged during my time in the field, the most significant of which revolved around the Forest Service’s implementation of a federally mandated plan to designate appropriate uses for all trails located in national forests. The lack of formal trail designations throughout national forests had resulted in people driving their vehicles on environmentally sensitive trails throughout the country without legal repercussions, and complaints had reached a critical mass; the Forest Service implemented new rules requiring each state to map all existing trails in their national forests and designate appropriate uses for each.

The Midwestern-State Forest Service was in the process of soliciting public comments on desired and appropriate uses for the trail systems in the state’s national forests so it could move toward compliance with the federal ruling. At a public hearing in Maxwell, representatives from the forest service explained the requirements of the new federal ruling and solicited comments from the public on how they should go about making trail designations. Prior to the meeting, Walter, MFWDA’s Director of Environmental Affairs, sent an email through the Association’s list-server encouraging members to attend this meeting and voice their opinions. While the forest service had scheduled numerous meetings throughout the state, Walter suggested that MFWDA needed to have a large turnout at the Maxwell hearing because of that town’s proximity to College Town. College Town held a reputation among my participants as the primary location of the state’s tree huggers, leading to Walter’s concern that an exceptionally large turnout of tree huggers at this one public hearing might sway the Forest Service in a policy direction that did not accurately represent the majority of people who used the state’s national forests for recreation. He claimed that the tree huggers would “bus people in from College Town” and that MFWDA must generate a large presence at the meeting for the sake of political impression management (Hall 1972); he hoped to counterbalance the influence their political opponents had on defining the situation. Walter framed the upcoming hearings in a way that made the identity of the opposition and the necessity of participation clear to members of the Association.

Walter’s email was relatively successful, as twenty-four members of the Association showed up for the public forum. I spoke with Patrick and Dorene, another couple in their fifties who rode together in their purple and yellow Jeep, before the meeting about their expectations; and they both claimed that the forest service had probably already made up its mind to keep motorized vehicles out of the forests. Patrick told me that that National Forest Service had identified “Off-Highway Vehicles” as one of the “top four threats” to the forests and that Midwestern-State’s branch of the forest service would likely follow suit. Dorene was visibly disgusted by the implications of her husband’s suggestion and argued that the tree huggers wielded too much influence in politics: “They’re closed-minded is what they are. There’s room for everybody in there,” she said, asserting that the forests should be accessible to all user groups, including Jeepers and other user groups who embraced a humanist perspective on nature.

While the final outcome of the forest service’s route designations were not official by the time I left the field, I did witness successful efforts by my participants’ political opponents to shut down private off-road parks. Why would people oppose off-road recreation on private land? Environmental concerns were certainly a point of contention, but much of the opposition to Jeepers’ access to both private and public lands reflected outsiders’ desire to keep the off-road driving subculture at a comfortable distance. In order to counter cultural opposition to their leisure consumption, my participants attempted to bring into their organizational fold the small portion of off-road enthusiasts they believed were responsible for negative stereotypes of their serious leisure. At the same time, they encouraged their constituency to become active in the public realm so that MFWDA could claim a seat at the political table where policy makers would ultimately make decisions affecting Jeepers’ ability to maintain their serious-leisure careers.

Identity Talk: Reining in the “Rednecks”

Because my participants were aware that many outsiders perceived their leisure in a negative light, the Association directed substantial effort toward reining in the “redneck” portion of the off-road subculture—those enthusiasts who did their off-road driving outside of an organized context. In the Association’s view, people who practiced their leisure in an unsafe and environmentally disrespectful manner, while constituting only a small proportion of off-road enthusiasts, had, nonetheless, created a bad impression of the entire subculture in the general public’s eye. To keep the trails open to Jeepers who acted responsibly, MFWDA wielded symbolic power in order to more clearly define its organizational culture (Hallett 2003); the Association attempted to recruit new members into the organizational fold and commit itself to promoting safety and respect for the environment.

Politically conscious Jeepers used “identity talk” (Hunt and Benford 1994) to categorize off-road enthusiasts, to encourage some enthusiasts to embrace more politically sensitive identities, and to express the legitimacy of their own identities to outsiders. Walter, for example, described identities among off-road enthusiasts as divergent and sometimes contradictory:

You can go out and take care of your Jeep, take care of your equipment, know what you’re getting into, take the safety classes and stuff . . . go out and Jeep in the proper way and you don’t leave nothing behind and you don’t tear up the land. Then there’s the other group of people that just don’t care. They got an old beater Toyota, uh, a built-up 4×4 truck with big tires and stuff on it, and they don’t respect nobody. They’ll go out there and just do what they want to do and tear up stuff and then ride away. And uh, the ones that do that are the ones that give us a bad image. So therefore, people think that we’re all that way. And it’s hard to make ’em understand that we’re not all that way, that there’s 90% of us that doesn’t do that, but there’s 10% of us that do. And that 10% is what they see all the time, because we don’t tear up stuff, so they don’t see where we’ve been so therefore, they don’t realize that we’ve been through there and there’s nothing wrong.

Interestingly, Walter held that Jeep people were more likely than drivers of other brands to respect the environment. As we talked about the differences among the various clubs that comprised MFWDA, this assumption became even clearer:

You have your clubs, but your Jeep clubs as such is usually a better club. The main difference is your Jeep people is the ones that’s going to the Jeep Jamborees and stuff. Now, your other side of the coin is the other drivers that drive Toyota pickup trucks and Dodges and Fords and Suzukis and stuff like that. They are more of a party crowd, because they haven’t really been to something organized like a Jeep Jamboree is.

Many Jeepers believed that people who wheeled other brands were more likely to be disrespectful and unsafe, thus perpetuating the negative stereotypes that all off-road enthusiasts had to face. I heard similar accounts of brand differences from other participants, particularly from members of Fun Times Jeepers, which was one of the few Jeep-exclusive clubs in the Association. Because Fun Times considered itself a family-oriented club, it promoted safety and caution much more explicitly than did other clubs belonging to the Association. This club regularly sponsored safety-instruction courses in which experienced Jeepers taught “newbies” how to use trail equipment such as tow straps and winches in a safe manner. Not only did the club want to avoid losing a new member to a preventable accident, but also, when outsiders heard stories of off-road enthusiasts being killed by metal tow chains while trying to extract their vehicles from obstacles, they were likely to label the entire subculture as undesirable. Outlining this relationship between brands, behaviors, and the sport’s reputation in the public realm, Megan recounted a time when she had witnessed some off-road enthusiasts using a metal chain:

We saw these idiots with a chain, and the chain broke and went flying. Thank God no one was hurt! You know . . . it was like a big (Ford) Bronco with no cab on it pulling out a Suzuki that’s got mud up to its doors. I mean . . . they were stupid! And you can tell when you look at people like that. I hate to say “white trash,” but you can kinda tell it when you see it. Number one; their vehicles are beat up. Number two; they’re usually hitting mud puddles at 60 mph when you should be hitting ’em at about 10. They’re show-offs . . . and I know I’m stereotyping people, but . . . they don’t care. They just don’t care. And you can tell that when you look at their vehicles. You have some that are just your hillbilly, white-trashy type that tear up and down hills; that can’t even spell “Wheel Smoothly.”

Wheel Smoothly is a national off-road organization whose mission statement declares that it is a “non-profit organization offering a variety of tools to help arm recreationists and the industries that serve them with essential outdoor ethics. Our mission is to proactively protect recreation access and opportunities in the outdoors through education and stewardship initiatives.” In other words, the organization is attempting to institutionalize the humanist perspective on nature by encouraging responsible land use by off-road enthusiasts so they might leave a good impression with people who use nature for other purposes. Many members of MFWDA saw the organization as crucial to their long-term interest in preserving access to the natural areas serving as contexts for their naturework. During my time in the field, MFWDA began offering its members classes from certified Wheel Smoothly instructors, as well as a safety-awareness program sponsored by the United Four-Wheel Drive Association. I attended both of these courses and found that, while some members of the Association participated in these events enthusiastically, other factions actively resisted participation. Some even suggested at quarterly meetings that the Association was wasting time and money in its affiliation with these programs.

When I asked Walter about these programs and the resistance emerging from some clubs, he explained that he, himself, would have opposed these efforts in the past. However, his involvement in the Association in recent years had impressed upon him that the future of his leisure career depended on the success of formal efforts to institutionalize a collective identity that other environmentalists might find more palatable:

There’s some clubs that’s from the old ways that just wants to go some place and ride and tear up the land and drink. They don’t like change. And the reason they don’t like change is they don’t see the writing on the wall. They’re against the safety awareness program. They’ve been wheeling for years, they know everything, and they don’t need it. I guess you’d say a guy’s a fool if he can’t learn something, you know. They’re probably going to learn it the hard way. You know . . . I would hate to think that a friend of mine, or myself, or somebody else got badly injured, got their vehicles totaled, or anything that could have been prevented by taking this course, versus buying a couple cases of beer. It’s sad to say, but it’s . . . I think safety awareness and Wheel Smoothly is probably the biggest issues that we have facing us right now. They’re very important issues and, as time goes on . . . the more and more things you’re gonna see us getting shut out of, that if them principles would’ve been adhered to, starting way back when, we’d still be there.

Engaging the Public Realm

MFWDA was acutely aware of the negative political consequences associated with a failure to manage impressions of their serious leisure among external organizations. While part of this impression management involved encouraging its members to enjoy their trail rides in ways that were safe and respectful of the environment, the Association also actively managed impressions in the wider institutional and political context of Midwestern-State. One set of public-sphere activities serving to present the serious-leisure community as a family-oriented and socially responsible group involved the charity events sponsored by MFWDA and its constituent clubs. This civic engagement through charity work served as one of the Association’s most visible links to the public realm, but engagement through advocacy had the most direct impact on the existential stability of the community’s lifestyle.

MFWDA allied itself with external organizations that wielded direct influence on the long-term viability of off-road recreation on both public and private lands. Through its involvement with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) in the planning and maintenance of off-road parks on state-owned land, the community worked directly to stake its claim to the future. Middle Lake was a 2,500-acre spread of land in Trinity County that the DNR, in conjunction with the Trinity County Recreational Development Corporation (TCRDC), had purchased in the hopes of developing a multiuse recreation park. Middle Lake would be the second DNR project in Midwestern-State benefiting off-road enthusiasts. The Coal Creek State Riding Area, a 600-acre tract of land dedicated exclusively to motorized recreation, had opened five years earlier. MFWDA had taken an active role in the development and opening of Coal Creek, donating money and volunteer hours to mark and clean trails and sponsoring frequent trail clean-ups, attempting to impress upon the DNR the willingness of its membership to take primary responsibility for the long-term maintenance and success of the park.

I attended several events at Coal Creek, including a trail ride, a trail clean-up, and a “VIP” ride in which members of MFWDA took DNR officials on a tour of the property so they could evaluate the impact of motorized recreation on the land. Coal Creek had developed according to plan and appeared to be a politically stable area in which Jeepers could come together and participate in trail rides. Because of Coal Creek’s success, the DNR had decided to support the development of Middle Lake in a way that would allow access to motorized vehicles. Unlike Coal Creek, however, the DNR was designing Middle Lake as a multiuse park: Jeepers would have access to trails built and maintained on state property; but they would share the trail system with hunters, campers, hikers, horse riders, and other outdoor enthusiasts.

I joined Walter and Linda at a TCRDC planning meeting on the Middle Lake property. Walter was wearing a T-shirt displaying the silhouette of a short-wheelbase Jeep and declaring it an “Endangered Species.” He predicted that this meeting would be very different from the public hearings held by the Forest Service. Walter expected contentious crowds at those meetings, but believed there would not be people at this meeting who opposed our access to the property. He explained: “We’re all different user groups, but we’re all in the same boat. We’re all trying to make sure we get our own piece of the pie here.” The meeting played out in a way that confirmed his expectations. The crowd was small, consisting of four Jeepers—Walter, Linda, Larry, and me—and four other people; a hunter, two members of a local horse-riding club, and a middle-aged woman trying to secure access to an area in which her family could ride ATVs.

Nicole, the “streams and trails specialist” for the Midwestern-State DNR, directed the meeting. She discussed an upcoming VIP trail-ride, similar to the one I had attended at Coal Creek, at which DNR officials would inspect the park in order to file official updates. Nicole had orchestrated previous VIP events, which had typically proved beneficial to Jeepers’ interests. “After a VIP ride,” she said, “DNR officials usually tell me, ‘That’s not what I thought it was at all!’ They think it’s a bunch of rednecks tearing up the land.” She also told us that the DNR officials she had regular contact with did not believe that Middle Lake would work because they did not think multiple user groups could get along well enough to share the same property. Echoing the statements made by many of my participants, she asserted:

Those people who don’t think it will work don’t know. People in different user groups are coming together at these planning meetings to make sure that it will work. Lands are getting closed off from y’all all the time because a few bad apples are ruining our image, and that’s why this level of organization is important. If you don’t show up and voice your presence, you can’t complain when you’re shut out.

Two weeks later, I attended a “workday” at Middle Lake, during which volunteers helped clean existing trails on the property. In exchange for four hours of work in the morning, the volunteers were allowed to drive their vehicles on the property’s trails during the afternoon. Most of the volunteers at this event were Jeepers and ATV riders who were eager to have the opportunity to wheel trails unavailable to them under normal circumstances. We split up into several groups to tackle the projects planned for the day. The group I joined spent the majority of the morning tearing down an old, dilapidated wooden shelter house, taking turns pulling the structure apart and loading the old lumber onto a small trailer we had attached to the back of Larry’s Jeep. After four trips through the woods, we had moved the entire structure back to the meeting area, where we deposited it in a large dumpster donated by a local trash company.

As we filled the dumpster, other people would emerge from the woods in their trucks or on their ATVs, pulling loads of trash they had found in the woods. Before the morning was over, we had filled the dumpster and built a pile next to it big enough to fill another one. An amazing quantity and variety of trash came out of the woods: beer cans, bottles, old tires, and random pieces of furniture, as well as appliances, including a washer, a dryer, and a television. Looking at this pile of rubbish, it became quite easy to understand how my participants were able to think of themselves as environmentalists. They were disgusted by the volume of trash spread throughout an otherwise aesthetically pleasing spread of rolling, forested hills. Their serious leisure did not produce such obvious blight in natural areas, and their efforts to rid the land of trash so they could enjoy their drives on trails resonated with their environmental ideology.

Later that afternoon, as we sat in the shade drinking lemonade and eating hamburgers prepared by a member of Freedom Wheelers, I asked Larry if he thought the day had been productive. His answer implied that the work we had done that day was significant because it served as another blow to the stereotypes of the lifestyle that prevailed in the wider culture:

I’ll tell you why I’m involved with TCRDC: I’m trying to get involved so that we can make a difference. If we can get enough people traveling on that land, there’s gonna be that many more people understanding what wheeling truly is and maybe we can make a difference in our state government to allow more wheeling and allow more areas to be opened up so we can have something else. And if we don’t, we’re gonna be hurting ourselves, and we’re gonna have to travel out of state every time we wanna ride.

The workday at Middle Lake, like many of the community’s events, provided participants with an opportunity to have a fun time with friends and family. At the same time, however, the event served as a means of managing impressions of the community’s lifestyle in the public realm. Like actors in other, more established social movements, my participants were constructing and articulating meaning for members of their own community and for outsiders (Benford and Snow 2006). While Jeepers felt they faced stereotypes that labeled them as irresponsible “rednecks,” large turnouts at events like trail clean-ups impressed upon organizations such as the DNR that MFWDA was a group that took its activities seriously and would work with other interests to promote safe and environmentally responsible recreation. As many Jeepers who had been involved in the development of Coal Creek told me, Middle Lake would not have been possible if the community had not taken advantage of the opportunity that Coal Creek provided them to show that their serious-leisure pursuits were not incompatible with the goals of the state.

Jeepers who were active in the Association believed that the only way to secure access to natural areas was to continue to build and strengthen their own institution so they could successfully participate in the bureaucratic processes that would determine the legality of their leisure consumption on public lands. Natural areas located on public lands are under growing pressure to accommodate an increasing number of people with an increasingly diverse set of recreational interests and goals. The settling of disputes over appropriate uses of the environment occurs in the bureaucratic realm, and Jeepers recognized that engaging that bureaucracy was the only way to maintain access to places in which they could tend to their leisure careers. Cindy was a college-educated, single professional who always brought her six-year-old son to the trail with her; and she expressed this realization with a tinge of regret:

It’s unfortunate that you have to get to the point where you’re doing all this . . . more bureaucratic stuff that takes you away from the stuff you really love in order to protect the stuff you really love. But it seems like people are starting to come around to understanding that.

Increasing membership in MFWDA and encouraging current members to expand their involvement served as means of managing the risks associated with grounding an identity in a form of leisure consumption under threat from opposing political forces. Like advocates of mainstream environmental movements, politically involved Jeepers tried “consciously to align action with a symbolic moral order by transforming personal passion into movement support” (Fine and Sandstrom 1993, 28). Walter, for example, made the following representative plea to MFWDA members in a quarterly newsletter:

Just when we start making some headway, the groups against us fire up and try to get it shut down. They are a large group and they voice things very well. That is why we need to do everything possible to keep a positive image out there. Help other user groups and work together to get things done. This is definitely a time of change, trouble is it can go either way. We can win out, and you have a chance right now to be a big part of it. We need to come on stronger than ever. If we show just a 10% decrease, those groups will see it as a victory and push even harder. Please talk to your friends and former club members and other people you meet who show interest in off road use, and try to get them to get involved, too.

As competing cultural and political movements threatened to limit Jeepers’ access to wilderness areas, the community actively sought to manage the cultural risk associated with contemporary society. By working to secure a place for their Jeeps in the future, members of the Association were also working to maintain their identity narratives and their serious-leisure community.

Conclusions and Implications

Perry, Abbot, and Hutter (1997, 76) assert: “If we assume that people in modern society are increasingly finding sources of identity in leisure and consumer activities, not work activities . . . interactionists need to outline the relevant implications.” In this article, I have outlined implications of my participants’ identity investments in leisure consumption. Their efforts to maintain an identity trail built with serious leisure have theoretical and empirical significance for sociological literatures on community, consumption, and collective action.

Charges of a declining community and a languishing public sphere (Nisbet 1970; Putnam 2000; Sennett 1977) generally rest on the assumption that people’s means of achieving group identification and solidarity are limited to class, geography, or other traditional categories of analysis fading from relevance in a society characterized by rapid transit and mass media. It is unnecessary, however, to assume that an ever-decreasing stability of communal life must accompany the ever-increasing mobility of bodies and culture. Consumption now rivals production as an organizing principle of society, but the interactive processes generating social identities are largely stable. Social life now allows people to construct interaction patterns that resonate with salient aspects of their identities, which may or may not be tied to any objective classification of their occupation, race, religious affiliation, gender, or geographic location. In this light, community is not lost. Rather, it is simply not hanging out where it did in the past.

Community is felt and enacted; the best way to analyze it is by immersing oneself in a particular group—investigating whether, why, and how people feel that they belong together and that they are among others like themselves. This perspective on community, despite its empirical messiness, retains the fundamental character of Weber’s (1947, 136) definition of communal relations: “A social relationship will be called ‘communal’ if and so far as the orientation of social action . . . is based on a subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they belong together.” Weber’s definition demands a perspective on community that casts aside insistence on any essential structural foundations of community and focuses instead on the socially constructed nature of community. This article offers additional empirical support to theoretical claims that new forms of community grounded in leisure consumption can foster benefits to individuals and societies that are similar—and perhaps functionally equivalent—to those generated by traditional forms of community based on class or residential proximity.

A collective identity represents the sense of “belonging together” to which Weber refers, and as his definition suggests, the social action that membership inspires reflects the strength of a community’s collective identity. My participants’ collective action has implications for theories of social movements and identity politics. Jeepers’ collective actions incorporated many of the same strategies and techniques that scholarship on the new social movements has identified as integral to the success of political movements based on collective racial, sexual, and religious identities. Like the symbolic communities behind these established social movements, Jeepers’ collective identity drew strength from cultural and institutional opposition. “Tree huggers,” as their primary political adversary, provided significant ideological opposition, inspiring solidarity and collective action among Jeepers. Additionally, activists in the Midwestern-State Four-Wheel Drive Association used strategies that established identity-based social movements have used to successfully advance their causes. Their subcultural identity work reflected and engaged the reality that the collective resistance of external threats demanded they enroll and educate diverse off-road identities grounded in diverse ideological commitments and behavioral repertoires. Jeepers employed identity talk and framing strategies as dramaturgical tools to encourage involvement among members of the Association and also to offer its constituency unambiguous identity portraits of MFWDA and its political adversaries.

This article provides further evidence of the growing significance of leisure consumption as a source of personal and collective identity; these Jeep people’s collective action challenges pessimistic assumptions about the potential of leisure consumption to inspire the commitment characterizing membership in “genuine” communities. As macro-level structural changes in economy and society continue to undermine occupation’s role as a stable foundation of self and community, many people turn to leisure and lifestyle as functional alternatives. Many of my participants worked at jobs that did not offer them opportunities to express their creativity or apply accumulated skills and knowledge to an ongoing career. Leisure consumption did provide these opportunities, however; and these Jeep people embraced serious leisure as a foundation of their identity narratives. They navigated this identity trail with other members of a serious-leisure community, and their efforts to maintain that trail in the face of external threats reflect a broader shift from production-based political communities to consumption-based political communities.