Browsing by Subject "grounded theory"

This thesis focuses on sauna-going activities, also called sakatsu, to look at how contemporary Japanese sauna enthusiasts distinguish themselves from nonenthusiasts and each other. The current Japanese sauna boom is much more massive in scale compared to the earlier developments regarding saunas in Japan. Nevertheless, the boom has been left largely understudied in academic research. This is especially true when considering its social nature. Therefore, there is an enormous research gap to be filled. A case study of 67 semi-structured interviews was done between June 2022 and March 2023 to generate new data on the subject. The interviews were performed both online and locally in several locations across Japan. In this study, Bourdieu’s ideas of distinction and cultural capital are utilised as a theoretical basis. Prior research has been supplemented with contemporary commentaries and critiques, particularly Consalvo’s theorisations of gaming capital, to recontextualise the concept of cultural capital and apply it to the field of sauna-going. The author develops sauna-going capital as a theoretical approach to examine the social dimension of Japanese sauna enthusiasts. Through grounded theory, the study inductively unveils the five core categories of health and wellbeing, conduct, locality, connectedness and masculinity to show how saunas are discussed in different ways within each of these themes. The findings suggest that sauna enthusiasts have some commonly shared values based on which distinctions to nonenthusiasts are made. However, sauna enthusiasts are also very diverse as a group, which is seen in the contrasting opinions and assumptions concerning how sauna spaces should be utilised for enjoyment. This shows that there is not only one but multiple, diverging ways of accumulating sauna-going capital. Some of these ways are partly delineated according to the demographic lines of age and gender.