Subcultural Power Among Australian Lifestyle Sports

This study aims to create a ranking of five lifestyle sports for their subcultural power. Subcultural power is a new theoretical construct defined as the relative value of a subculture’s aspirational appeal that affords it the ability to attract its share of mainstream societal interest (Sims &amp; O’Brien, 2025). The five lifestyle sports are surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking and trail running. <br/><br/>Lifestyle sports have been given this name because participants engage the technical skill of the activity as well as integrate the sport’s fashion, values, customs, and argot (slang or jargon) into their daily lives. As such, it is a way of life that provides adherents “a particular and exclusive identity” (Wheaton, 2019, p. 389). Moreover, each lifestyle sport has a specialist industry supported by a core base of consumers who actively participate in the sport and rely on their core industry for technical and lifestyle products. These specialist industries are also supported by passive consumers, who do not actively participate in the sport but relate or aspire to the lifestyle. We argue it is the subcultural power of a lifestyle sport that attracts passive consumers who bring commercial scale to these sports. Indeed, many of these lifestyle sports have a consumer base that is significantly larger than their participation base due to their substantial passive consumer base. <br/><br/>Our presentation contains the preliminary findings of an online survey (n = 720) which will be followed by a series of semi-structured interviews. This study is important because, it gives a name and a form of measure (ranking) to an important driver of consumer demand in lifestyle sports. <br/>