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Gender and age inequalities in regular sports participation: A cross-national study of 25 European countries
This article provides a unique opportunity to compare gender inequalities in sports participation across Europe, and the extent to which this varies by age using large, cross-sections of the population. The Eurobarometer Survey 62.0 (carried out in 2004 at the request of the European Commission and covering the adult population of 25 European member states, […]
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Gender and family status differences in leisure-time sports/fitness participation
Drawing data from the 2010 American Time Use Survey, we examine how time spent in the major life domains, that is, paid work, unpaid work, and personal care, is associated with time spent on sports/fitness participation, and whether the size of this association differs by gender, marital, and parental status. We find that time in […]
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Gender and sport participation in Montenegro.
Since 2006, when the Montenegrin Parliament declared independence, Montenegro had experienced impressive economic growth averaging an annual rate of 8% (until early 2009 when the effects of the global economic crisis began to have an impact) and an upward trend in human development indicators. Nonetheless, these economic trends have been accompanied by a rise in […]
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Gender Differences in Concussion Reporting Among High School Athletes
Background: An athlete’s lack of concussion knowledge could lead to significant underreporting and injury mismanagement. To provide more effective management strategies of concussions in adolescent athletes, further examination of reporting behaviors is of critical importance. Hypothesis: The hypotheses for this study were as follows: (1) Girls are more likely to report concussion, (2) girls are […]
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Gender equality and leadership in Olympic bodies.
This study focuses on the electoral experience of women in submitting Themselves as candidates for senior posts in National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and International Federations (IFs).It has three main objectives: 1) To establish what the current situation was in relation to the recruitment of women to executive committees of the National Olympic Committees and International […]
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Flirting with the Judges: Bikini Fitness Competitors’ Negotiations of Femininity in Bodybuilding Competitions
Women’s bodybuilding manifestly challenges hegemonic understandings of the female body as weak, fragile, and limited. Because it has acquired characteristics that are traditionally deemed masculine, the muscular woman is thought to be in need of having her femininity “restored”. Perhaps for this reason, in bodybuilding competitions, female competitors are required to display femininity and implied […]
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Football clubs and philanthropy: An empirical analysis of volunteering, match quality, and donations.
Using data collected by means of an online questionnaire of German football-club volunteers, we studied whether match quality helps to predict philanthropy as measured in terms of donations. Match quality is defined as the congruence of a volunteer’s motives for volunteering with his or her utility experiences and can thus be expected to foster the […]
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Football Fandom Mobilization and Herbert Blumer: A Social Movement Analysis of F.C. United of Manchester
This article explores the establishment and development of fan-owned association football club, F.C. United of Manchester. It does this by drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, observations and an analysis of multiple texts, such as fanzines, web-based and media reports materials and discusses this using Herbert Blumer’s theory of collective behavior. As such, the […]
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Football Fans’ Views of Violence in British Football: Evidence of a Sanitized and Gentrified Culture.
This article draws on the responses of 1,500 fans from across the United Kingdom to an online survey posted from August 2013 to November 2013 regarding their experience of football violence. Reflecting the 2013 Home Office report that indicated a continued long-term decline of football fan violence in England and Wales, 89% of fans illustrate […]
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Football Fascism and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football
Football fascism and fandom provides a rare look beneath the surface of Italian neo-fascist hardcore football fandom. The book is the product of ethnographic dissertation research conducted by Alberto Testa on two of these fan groups (called UltraS) in Rome, Italy. Based on academic research, the book seems to have been adapted for a mass-market […]
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Football in Arabic literature in diaspora: Global influences and local manifestations.
This paper explores how Arab writers in diaspora present football in their literary works. Through an examination of Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine, Laila Lalami’s Secret Son and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley, the paper highlights the way in which Arab novelists in diaspora draw on the game’s international popularity to supplement and clarify the themes […]
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Football on television: how has coverage of the Cup Finals in Norway changed from 1961 to 1995?
The aim of this study is two-fold: first, to investigate how the production practices of the TV coverage of the Norwegian Men’s Football Cup Final rely on journalism, drama and entertainment and, second, to analyse how the production practice has changed in the period 1961–1995. I conducted a visual analysis of 12 Cup Finals, transmitted […]
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Football’s Dark Side: Corruption, Homophobia, Violence and Racism in the Beautiful Game.
Association football is the richest, most popular sport in history with a multicultural global following. It is also riven with corruption, racism, homophobia and a violence that has for decades resisted all attempts to tame it. Cashmore and Cleland examine football’s dark side: the unpleasant, sleazy and downright nasty aspects of the sport.
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Football’s Irish exodus: Examining the factors influencing Irish player migration to English professional leagues.
The intention of this paper is to examine the range of interdependent processes that influence the decisions of Irish footballers to migrate from teams based in the League of Ireland to English Premier League and Football League clubs. Using data derived from a series of qualitative interviews conducted with a group of Irish players that […]
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Football’s tsars: proprietorship, corporatism and politics in the 2010 FIFA World Cup
This essay explores the political economy of the 2010 World Cup as it is defined by the major commercial, corporate and political forces that have come to be prevalent in the organization of the FIFA finals. It examines the interchange between international and domestic processes of sport corporatization, commercialization and general trends of sport politics, […]
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For Ed McVaney, Valor Christian High School is labor of love.
Ed squirms in his seat and occasionally whispers to the person next to him in freshman English class at Valor Christian High School — he’s not bored, just so excited he can’t sit still.
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For Your Ears Only!’ Donald Sterling and Backstage Racism in Sport
The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how racism manifests ‘behind closed doors’ in the backstage private domain. We do this with reference to recent high-profile controversies in the US and UK. In particular, we use the concepts of frontstage (public) and backstage (private) racism to unpack the extraordinary case in point of the […]
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Foreign players in the English Premier Academy League: ‘Feet-drain’ or ‘feet-exchange’?
The aim of this article is to make sense of the effects of foreign player involvement in English football’s elite youth academy system. Based upon a series of interviews conducted with academy directors, managers, and coaches at Premier League clubs, and senior figures in the Premier League’s Youth Development department, the article argues that the […]
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Forget Me . . . Not: Marion Jones and the Politics of Punishment.
In 2008, Marion Jones was convicted and sentenced to 6 months in a federal prison for lying to federal prosecutors about steroid use and knowledge of a check-cashing scheme. This article explores the Jones scandal and the aftermath in the context of the contemporary cultural politics of Black female bodies and Black womanhood. I examine […]
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Foucault, Flying Discs and Calling Fouls: Ascetic Practices of the Self in Ultimate Frisbee.
Dominant analysis of sporting subjectivities suggest the contemporary athletic subject embodies a win-at-all-costs instrumental rationality. Yet, as Carless and Douglas (2012) argue, athletes are able to find less problematic alternatives to this understanding of sport. In this article, I use Foucault’s concept of “practices of the self” to undertake a sociological analysis of ethical subjectivities […]
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Framing the 2007 National Basketball Association finals: An analysis of commentator discourse
Television broadcasters often exhibit bias in the reporting of sport events. Through framed discourse, networks embed multiple storylines to build and maintain audiences over the duration of an event. Research has typically focused on mega-events occurring every four years. This study, through content analysis of American Broadcast Company’s announcer discourse of a smaller annual event, […]
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Fantasy sport and media interactivity
Media interactivity in the field of sport functions as both a lure and a way of transforming a viewer’s relation to a game. Sport websites, along with the more traditional medium of television, have taken on the pedagogical task of acquainting a mass audience with a variety of sports and their rules, skills, histories and […]
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Fantasy Sports: Socialization and Gender Relations
Fantasy sports are played by millions of people throughout the world. By 2017, it is predicted to be an industry with a turnover measured in billions of dollars. Recent scholarly attention has focused on the motivations for participating in fantasy sports leagues. In this article, we report on ongoing qualitative research being conducted with fantasy […]
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Fastest, highest, youngest? Analysing the athlete’s experience of the Singapore Youth Olympic Games.
The Youth Olympic Games (YOG) are the newest addition to the Olympic Movement and, in light of recent discussions of the education of high-performance athletes, represent a change within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from a philosophy of ‘winning by all means’ to a philosophy much more informed by education. Therefore, this paper analysis the […]
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Fathers on Child’s Play: Urban and Rural Canadian Perspectives.
Social trends show that contemporary fathers are spending increased time with their children and that active play and outdoor recreation are important features of their relationships. Dominant ideals of masculinity can differ by settings, which in turn guide men’s understandings and practices of fathering regarding the functions of and opportunities afforded by active play. This […]
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Fatness, Fitness, and Feminism in the Built Environment: Bringing Together Physical Cultural Studies and Social Materialisms, to Study the “Obesogenic Environment”
In a climate where the “obesity epidemic” is a consistent focus within discussions of public health, the theory that the environment is one of the main drivers of the “obesity epidemic” is coming to the fore. In this paper, we look to the example of the “obesogenic environment” and the literature tracing the relationship between […]
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Fear and loathing in Lesotho: An autoethnographic analysis of sport for development and peace.
This paper is an autoethnographic analysis of my experiences working for a year in southern Africa on a sport for development and peace (SDP) project. I reflect on the ways in which some of my day-to-day practices exemplified aspects of whiteness and masculinity. In terms of methodology, I combine literature from autoethnography and arts-based inquiry […]
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Federal government funding and sport: the case of Brazil, 2004–2009
In 2009, Brazil won the right to host the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. International media coverage of the bid process revealed the involvement of the then Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the project application. To further understand the government’s involvement in Brazilian Olympic sport, we undertook an analysis of federal investment […]
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Female anglers in a predominantly male sport: Portrayals in five popular fishing-related magazines.
Kim Bain-Moore galvanized public interest as the first female competitor in the 2009 Bassmaster Classic fishing tournament. To examine the extent to which women were depicted by the fishing media during and after this watershed event, as well as how they were portrayed, we analyzed the content of five for-profit, fishing-related magazines from 2009–2012. Female […]
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Female fan experiences and interpretations of the 1958 Munich air disaster the 1966 World Cup finals and the rise of footballers as sexualised national celebrities
The experiences of female sports fans have largely been neglected in academic research to date with socio-historical accounts focusing almost exclusively on male fans. Through an excavation of the sporting histories of female football fans this article aims to make one contribution towards changing this. Drawing on Glaser and Strauss’s ‘grounded theory’ approach, 21 semi-structured […]
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Female Olympians: A Mediated Socio-Cultural and Political-Economic Timeline.
This book examines women’s participation in the Olympic Games since they were allowed to be included in that global arena. Using a holistic, social scientific approach, and emphasizing the rhetoric of sport mediatization, Female Olympians reviews the literature relative to sexism, racism, and ageism before providing historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural perspectives such as the […]
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Feminine Writing: The Effect of Gender on the Work of Women Sports Journalists in the Swiss Daily Press
This study investigates the specificity of women sports journalists’ writing in the context of the French-speaking Swiss daily press. By analysing their working practices (observations and interviews) and their output (content analysis), it shows that women sports journalists do not adopt the customary professional norms of this journalistic speciality. Their ‘feminine’ writing is characterized by […]
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Feminist Cultural Studies: Uncertainties and Possibilities
This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which […]
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Feminization of sport audiences and fans? Evidence from German men’s national soccer team
Sport and sport consumption represent highly gendered spheres. Accordingly, sport spectatorship and fandom have been predominantly male. Recently, however, a trend towards a ‘feminization of sport crowds’ within European soccer has been detected. The piece of research presented here focuses on the concept’s quantitative dimension and aims to provide empirical evidence on long-term trends in […]
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Fields of Individuals and Neoliberal Logics: Japanese Soccer Ideals and the 1990s Economic Crisis.
This article explores the relationship between popular representations of soccer and the rise of neoliberal discourse celebrating a new individualism in Japan at the turn of the millennium, a time when the country experienced sharp economic decline and consequent economic restructuring. Examining dominant vocabularies and practices present in coaching discourse, on soccer fields, and in […]
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Fields of Play: An ethnography of children’s sports.
Thousands of children participate in community sports every year, enjoying recreation time with their peers, getting healthy exercise, and learning a variety of personal and group skills. At the same time, children’s sports are not without controversy: parents can be overly invested in their children’s exploits, competitive success is often the focus, and rising costs […]
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Fighting for “Respectability”: Media Representations of the White “Working-Class” Male Boxing “Hero”
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the White male boxer has long held a special appeal among the public and media. Boxing “heroes” are constructed not only on the basis of Whiteness but also on the basis of their perceived “working-class” nature, at a time when “working-class” or “blue-collar” identities in both the […]
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Financial Risk Management: The Role of a New Stadium in Minimizing the Variation in Franchise Revenues
One of the absolutes in professional sports, and a reason for its success, is the uncertainty of the outcome of individual games, seasons, and championships. This uncertainty impacts a team’s attendance and financial operation. While leagues cultivate uncertainty through various rules such as salary caps, revenue sharing, and the amateur draft, individual franchises have to […]
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Fist, feet and faith: An ‘elite’ interview with ‘Fight Church’ Pastor Jude Roberts
The interest in mixed martial arts (MMA) in the United States has escalated since its advent in 1993. In the last 10 years, there has been a heightened interest in Christian MMA (CMMA). Several evangelical churches across the country have started MMA ministries to attract and retain men and boys. Proponents of CMMA suggest that […]
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Fit for prosumption: interactivity and the second fitness boom
This article advances the claim that a new ‘fitness boom’ has arrived, one marked by the proliferation of devices such as wearable fitness trackers. The first fitness boom of the 1970s/1980s was characterized by the heightened availability of fitness ‘tools’ and the supposition that pursuing a ‘fit’ lifestyle was tantamount to responsible living. The new […]
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Experiences in Sport, Physical Activity, and Physical Education Among Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu Asian Adolescent Girls
Multicultural scholarship in sport and exercise psychology should help us understand and apply cultural competencies for all to be physically active. In the present study, two Asian countries, Japan and Singapore, were chosen. The participation rate for physical activities among adolescent girls tends to be lower than that of boys in both countries. Thus, the […]
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Experiencing Spiritual Aspects Outdoors in the Winter: A Case Study from the Czech Republic Using the Method of Systemic Constellations
The article focuses on spirituality on two semantic levels: the first one analysis participants’ experiences during a winter expeditionary course on snowshoes and considers the question of whether residing in the winter landscape with a community of other people may acquire a spiritual dimension in spite of the non-religious environment. The second level verifies whether […]
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Exploring an Activist Approach of Working With Boys From Socially Vulnerable Backgrounds in a Sport Context
This study explores an activist approach for co-creating a prototype pedagogical model of sport for working with boys from socially vulnerable backgrounds. This paper addresses the key features that emerged when we identified what facilitated and hindered the boys’ engagement in sport. This study was an activist research project that was conducted between July 2013 […]
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Exploring Narratives of Boyhood Sexual Subjection in Male-Sport
While little attention has been paid to stories of boyhood sexual abuse in sport, in recent years autobiographical accounts from male “survivors” have emerged in relatively quick succession. This paper argues that this is a significant development for the sports community which requires further attention. More specifically, it argues that the use of narrative analysis […]
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Exploring NCAA Division I Athletic Administrator Perceptions of Male and Female Athletic Directors’ Achievements: A Photo Elicitation Study.
This study employed the concept of hegemonic masculinity as an interpretive framework to explore NCAA Division I athletic administrator perceptions regarding the professional accomplishments of male and female athletic directors. Using photo elicitation methodology, athletic administrators (e.g., athletic directors, academic advisors/counselors for athletes, and coaches) responded to a photograph of and vignette about either a […]
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Exploring the cultural intersection of music, sport and physical activity among at-risk youth.
Although sport can serve as a valuable mechanism for social change, this does not imply it can single-handedly solve large-scale problems; rather, sport should be utilized with passionate leadership, efficient and innovative program design, and ancillary cultural enrichment activities to achieve optimal results. This research was motivated by developments in some marginalized and at-risk communities […]
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Exploring the Relationship Between Violent Behavior and Participation in Football During Adolescence: Findings from a Sample of Sibling Pairs.
The current study examined the association between playing high school football and involvement in violent behaviors in sibling pairs drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The analysis revealed that youth who played high school football self-reported more violence than those youth who did not play football. Quantitative genetic analysis revealed […]
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Exploring the Truth: A Critical Approach to the Success of Korean Elite Sport
This article examines the structural problems that have accompanied South Korea’s increasing emphasis on success in elite international sport. After discussing how this was brought about by the political context of the 1960s and 1970s, we focus on three particular social issues: the educational problems experienced by student-athletes, the problems these cause in later life, […]
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Exports and Olympic Games: Is There a Signal Effect?
A recent study finds that Olympic Games host countries experience significant positive, lasting effects on exports. They interpret their results as an indication that countries use the hosting of such events to signal openness and competitiveness. The authors challenge these empirical findings on the grounds that a comparison of structurally different and non-matching groups of […]
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Extending the benefits of leveraging cycling events: Evidence from the Tour of Flanders.
Research question: This paper examines event leveraging for public health benefits with the outcome of increasing physical activity participation. While event leveraging provides the foundation for this research, social ecological theory is additionally applied to further examine how leveraging efforts can increase physical activity participation through an understanding of systems and targets.Research methods: An in-depth […]
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Facing an Unequal World.
To face an unequal world requires us to interpret and explain it, to be sure, but also to engage it, that is, to recognize that we are part of it and that we are partly responsible for it. In other words, inequality is not just something external to us, but also invades our own world. […]
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Factors Associated with Health Promotion on Megachurches: Implications for Prevention
Objective: Megachurches (churches with 2,000 + attendance) represent a community institution with extensive reach within the United States population, although little is known about their health and wellness programming (HWP). The purpose of this study was to examine factors associated with HWP in megachurches.Design and Sample Staff at megachurches were recruited to take an online […]
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Factors associated with using research evidence in national sport organisations
The purpose of this study was to explore factors associated with the use of research evidence in Canadian National Sport Organisations (NSOs). Data were collected via individual semi-structured interviews with 21 representatives from Canadian NSOs. A qualitative description approach was used. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and subjected to an inductive-to-deductive thematic analysis. A research implementation […]
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Falling in love with a wheelchair: Enabling/disabling technologies.
The aim of this article was to explore how young women with physical impairments make use of technology in their identity construction, drawing on the metaphor of the cyborg as well as on science and technology studies and disability research. In addition to participant observation, semi-structured interviews were conducted and video diaries were kept of […]
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Family matters: studying the role of the family through the eyes of girls in an SfD programme in Delhi.
This article elaborates on the significance of the ‘family factor’ in facilitating sport for development (SfD) opportunities by presenting findings related to a research project with an SfD project based in Delhi, India, which seeks to empower adolescent girls through sport. The findings add to the limited understanding of the role of the family in […]
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Equine Athletes and Interspecies Sport
This article draws on a range of sociological literature including studies of sport, subculture, interspecies relationships and animal advocacy to understand the social processes that have contributed to the horse being defined as an athlete in equestrian sports. Using a combination of qualitative interviews and archival analysis, we identify trends in the equine industry that […]
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Estimating the Value of Medal Success in the Olympic Games
We estimate Canadians’ willingness to pay (WTP) for medals won by Team Canada in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games using data from contingent valuation method (CVM) surveys of nationally representative samples conducted before and after the Games. The results permit an assessment of Own the Podium, a government program designed to increase Canada’s medal count. […]
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Estranged Labor, Habitus, and Verstehen in the Rise of Extreme Endurance Sports
Extreme endurance sporting events and participation in these events have grown exponentially since the 1970s. Events such as Iron-distance triathlons, marathons, ultramarathons, ultra distance cycling, and military-style obstacle courses now attract millions of participants in the United States annually. Although many studies have analyzed this late 20th and early 21st century phenomenon from a microsociological […]
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Evaluating Culture: World Music and Fusion Food
The problem of how to adapt criteria of evaluation to stylistic change will always be with us. Our current era of multiculturalism, postmodernism and globalism, however, confounds the problem almost beyond recognition. Multiculturalism, an heir of cultural relativism, asks us to withhold our evaluation, insisting that all cultures and subcultures deserve to be analyzed only […]
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Evaluation of Men’s and Women’s Gymnastics Injuries: A 10-Year Observational Study
Background: Injuries are common in collegiate gymnasts. Most descriptive studies of injury patterns in collegiate gymnasts are limited in duration or are only inclusive of women. Hypothesis: Injury patterns in men and women differ significantly; women sustain a higher rate of injuries than men. Study Design: Descriptive epidemiology study. Level of Evidence: Level 4. Methods: […]
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Event Power: How Global Events Manage and Manipulate
Book Review: Chris Rojek, Event power: How global events manage and manipulate
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Every time they ride, I pray: Prents managmenet of daughters” Horseback Riding Risks
This study uses qualitative interviews with 29 parents of horseback riding daughters aged 10–23 years old to explore parents’ perceptions of risk and their risk management strategies, as their daughters engage in horse sports and recreation. First, parents are keenly aware of risks in equestrian sports and liken them to risks from automobile accidents and […]
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Everybody’s Team? The National Narrative in the Hebrew Press Covering Israeli National Soccer Team Matches
Sports media offer a unique discourse site because the nationalistic nature of reporting is often radicalized and in most cases ‘the national flag is waved with eternal enthusiasm’. Therefore, this study examined changes in the coverage of the Israeli national soccer team between 1949 and 2006 through an exploration of the identity of the journalistic […]
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Evolution and Revolution: Gauging the Impact of Technological and Technical Innovation on Olympic Performance
A number of studies have pointed to a plateauing of athletic performance, with the suggestion that further improvements will need to be driven by revolutions in technology or technique. In the present study, we examine post-war men’s Olympic performance in jumping events (pole vault, long jump, high jump, triple jump) to determine whether performance has […]
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Ex Ante and Ex Post Expectations of Outcome Uncertainty and Baseball Television Viewership
Sporting event attendance is determined by ex ante expectations about the quality of the game, but because changing television channels costs nothing, sporting event viewership is influenced by actual game progression. This implies that demand determinants for televised baseball may change as games progress. This study examined the dynamic relationship between demand for televised baseball […]
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Examination of Birthplace and Birthdate in World Junior Ice Hockey Players
The present study investigated birthdate (known as the Relative Age Effect; RAE) and birthplace as determinants of expertise in an international sample of elite ice hockey players. The sample included 566 World Junior (WJR) ice hockey players from four countries (Canada, n = 153; USA, n = 136; Sweden, n = 140; Finland, n = […]
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Examining Representation of the Non-local: China in the UK Media in the Run-up to the Beijing Olympics
This article examines how the United Kingdom’s media represents contemporary China. Using the context of the Beijing Olympics, the article examines the UK media’s representation of China through the prisms of ideology, history and geopolitics. Using Content Analysis, the inquiry examines news reports on the Olympics published in the UK’s ‘national newspapers’ (as classified by […]
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Examining Whiteness and Eurocanadian Discourses in the Canadian Red Cross’ Swim Program
Each year, over 1 million Canadians participate in the Canadian Red Cross’ (CRC) Swim Program. Despite the increasing importance of cultural diversity in Canadian society, the CRC has yet to incorporate diversity training for this program’s Water Safety Instructors (WSIs). Through the use of critical Whiteness theory and critical discourse analysis, in this article, we […]
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Exclusionary Power in Sports Organisations: The Merger Between the Women’s Cricket Association and the England and Wales Cricket Board
This paper contributes to existing literature on gender equity within sporting organisations, focusing on the merger between the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA) and the England and Wales Cricket Board in 1998. At the time of the merger those involved in the WCA debated whether the merger would be positive for the future of the women’s […]
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Editorial on the Special Focus: Drug Policy in Sport: Critical Perspectives
Ecological modernization refers to the idea that capitalist-driven scientific and technological advancements can not only attend to the world’s pending environmental crises, but even lead to ecological improvement, thus allowing sustainability and consumption to continue in concert. In this paper, we examine ecological modernization at the confluence of environmentalism, international development and global sport. Through […]
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Editorial Preface: Critical Perspectives on Development and Social Change in Africa
In the preface to the special issue on Africa which we published in March 2006 (Harris, 2006), we indicated that in future issues of the journal we hoped to publish more articles on the economic, political, and social challenges faced by the people of Africa, and to publish more contributions from the present generation of […]
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Editorial: IP, Copyright and Cultural Production
This editorial outlines the important role that IP issues are increasingly playing across the media industries. It identifies some of the key sectors discussed in this issue of the journal and why particular media industries face specific IP challenges even in an age of converging media.
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Education for Social Change? A Freirean Critique of Sport for Development and Peace
Background: The previous two decades have witnessed an increasing number of policymakers and practitioners using sport programmes to achieve broader social development aims, particularly in countries in the Global South. A core element of these programmes has been the use of sport as a context to provide young people with social, personal and health education. […]
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Effects of Achievement Goals on Self-Regulation of Eating Attitudes Among Elite Female Athletes: An Experimental Study
The influence of achievement goals on eating attitudes has mainly been examined through correlational studies (e.g., De Bruin, Bakker, & Oudejans, 2009; Duda & Kim, 1997), and none of the studies to date has focused on the self-regulation of eating attitudes in athletes. The present study experimentally tested the effects of achievement goals on both […]
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Effects of Women’s Football Broadcastings on Viewers’ Moods and Judgments: Investigating the Moderating Role of Team Identification and Sex
The objective of this article is to improve the understanding of mood and judgment effects evoked by major televised sport events like national football matches. According to disposition theory of sport spectatorship, viewers’ affective experiences, specifically their moods, are assumed to be affected by the outcomes of the matches they watch. This study tests whether […]
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Elite and Ethical: The Defensive Distinctions of Middle-Class Bicycling in Bangalore, India
This article applies social practice theory to study the emergence of sustainable consumption practices like bicycling among the new middle classes of Bangalore, India. I argue that expansions of bicycling practices are dependent on the construction of defensive distinctions, which I define as distinctions that draw equally on lifestyle-based and ethics-based discourses to normalize bicycling […]
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Emancipating Play: Disabled Children, Development and Deconstruction
This paper reflects critically on the meaning of play, especially as it relates to disabled children and their experiences. We explore the close alliance of play to cognitive and social development, particularly in the case of psychologies of development, and reveal a dominant discourse of the disabled child as a non‐playing object that requires professional […]
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Embodied Faith: Islam, Religious Freedom and Educational Practices in Physical Education
The growing incidence of withdrawal of Muslim girls from physical education prompted this study into tensions between religious freedom and educational practices. It was located in a city in the West Midlands of England. Data on experiences, issues, concerns and solutions related to participation of Muslim girls in physical education were collected by a team […]
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Embodiment and Social and Environmental Action in Nature-Based Sport: Spiritual Spaces
This paper explores the interrelationship of space, the elements and the embodied experiences of water-based physical activity. It draws upon alternative forms of research and representation to draw out the embodied nature of the experiences in exploring the practices of windsurfing amongst communities of windsurfers. It proposes that ethnography and autoethnography can provide for unique […]
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Embodying Compassion: Disability Sport and the Mercy of God
The author offers a robustly theological account of compassion, highlighting its bodily nature. Divine mercy is presented as being conveyed through human bodies to remake and enliven both the human agent and recipient. Culminating in a story of a physically and mentally impaired runner, this account of mercy and compassion fleshes out God’s mercy, which […]
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Emotional Entrainment, National Symbols, and Identification: A Naturalistic Study Around the Men’s Football World Cup
Some theories suggest that collective emotions, in particular emotional entrainment as the feeling of affective attunement with others during rituals, can increase the identification with a social group. Furthermore, emotional entrainment is supposed to emotionally ‘charge’ group symbols that are part of ritual practices and influence group-related attitudes and solidarity even beyond the ritual context. […]
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Empower, Inspire, Achieve: (Dis)Empowerment and the Paralympic Games
This paper undertakes a critical examination of the International Paralympic Committee’s desire to use the Paralympic Games as a vehicle to empower individuals with a disability. We achieve this by applying Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concepts of habitus and capital to semi-structured interviews conducted with Paralympic stakeholders. Interviewees included current and former Paralympians, active and retired […]
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Do as I Say: Contradicting Beliefs and Attitudes Towards Sports Concussion in Australia
The objective of this study was to explore beliefs and attitudes of students studying exercise science in Australia towards sports concussion. A secondary objective explored differences between gender and previous experience of concussion. A total of 312 participants (m = 217; f = 95) responded to a series of statements ranging across a number of […]
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Do Sports Mega-Events Boost Public Funding in Sports Programs? The Case of Brazil (2004–2015)
This article explores public expenditure in Brazilian sport from 2004 to 2015 and aims to understand if hosting sport mega-events has influenced investments in different types of sport (elite sport and educational/participation sport). Data were collected through governmental records and examined through descriptive statistics. Positive and negative variations of spending were reported, regarding both the […]
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Does Christianity Demean the Body and Deny the Value of Sport? – A Provocative Thesis
According to a thesis which is today authoritatively supported by some authors, the scarce recognition given to sport sciences in our culture should be ascribed to Christianity. This paper, in addition to attempting to refute this thesis, wishes to enrich the epistemological background of the emerging areas of research, to which sport belongs, with the […]
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Does the Australian Football League Draft Undervalue Indigenous Australian Footballers?
Economics assumes that behavior is based on rational expectations and market efficiency. However, previous research into professional sports indicates that there are cases where decisions are consistently made that do not conform to this. This article examines this issue within the context of how indigenous Australian footballers are recruited via the Australian Football League (AFL) […]
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Does the Threat of Suspension Curb Dangerous Behavior In Soccer? A Case Study From the Premier League
Using data from the 2011-2012 season of the Premier League, we study empirically and theoretically the impact of soccer suspension rules on the behavior of players and referees. For players facing a potential one-game suspension, being one versus two yellow cards away from the suspension limit results in an approximate 12% reduction in fouling, while […]
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Domestic Moves: An Exploration of Intra-National Labour Mobility in the Working Lives of Professional Footballers
This article investigates the domestic, intra-state labour mobility of professional footballers. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represent a range of career trajectories; the specific object of 19 interviews was to examine meanings and experiences tied to job relocation. An interactionist perspective was employed to highlight […]
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Double-Trouble: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Post-Colonial Women’s Rugby in Fiji
Although women’s exclusion in sport has attracted significant attention in the western context, similar issues in relation to post-colonial societies have remained in the margins of the sociology of sport. By analysing primary, interview-based evidence, in this article we explore the challenges female rugby players face regarding gender and sexuality in Fiji: a male dominated […]
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Drinking With the Derby Girls: Exploring the Hidden Ethnography in Research of Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby
This paper explores Blackman’s concept of ‘hidden ethnography’ with respect to drinking alcohol by and with participants during ethnographic research of a women’s flat track roller derby league. A brief review of the positive and negative consequences of drinking alcohol for the research process pays specific attention to the potential consequences for research participants and […]
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Driving to the “Net”: Blogs, Frames, and Politics in the New York Islanders’ Stadium Saga
On October 24, 2012, the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League announced a plan to move from their current stadium in Nassau County to the recently opened Barclays Center in the borough of Brooklyn, marking the end of a decades-long political saga about whether and where to build a new home arena for […]
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DSD is a Perfectly Fine Term: Reasserting Medical Authority Through a Shift in Intersex Terminology
Purpose – Intersexuality is examined from a sociology of diagnosis frame to show how the diagnostic process is connected to other social constructions, offer new support that medical professionals define illness in ways that sometimes carries negative consequences, and illustrate how the medical profession holds on to authority in the face of patient activism. Methodology/approach […]
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Dynamics of Inequalities in a Global Perspective: An Introduction
The contribution in this introduction, and in this monograph issue of Current Sociology itself, is to explain how patterns of inequality associated with global capital have been reconfigured in different contexts and have historically produced varied results. The definition of global inequality used here transcends Euro- and US-centric models of linear development and comparisons of […]
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Ecological Modernization and the 2014 NHL Sustainability Report
In December 2015, the National Hockey League (NHL) was invited to present on a special sport panel showcasing the green leaders of the sport industry, which was hosted as part of the COP21 United Nations climate change talks in Paris. The NHL has won numerous awards for its environmental initiatives over the last number of […]
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Ecological Modernization and the Olympics: The Case of Golf and Rio’s “Green” Games
In December 2015, the National Hockey League (NHL) was invited to present on a special sport panel showcasing the green leaders of the sport industry, which was hosted as part of the COP 21 United Nations climate change talks in Paris. The NHL has won numerous awards for its environmental initiatives over the last number […]
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Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
It’s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children—boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks—we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about […]
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Derby Drag: Parodying Sexualities in the Sport of Roller Derby
The roller derby revival has created a unique stage and community for women athletes. Using Helen Lenskyj’s foundational work to frame the institutional oppressions on women in sports, I explore how marginalized spaces like derby engender performances and identities outside the male-dominated hegemony of mainstream sport. In parodically dragging sexualities, derby skaters expose and critique […]
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Designing the Healthy Bodies, Healthy Souls Church-Based Diabetes Prevention Program Through a Participatory Process
Background: The Healthy Bodies, Healthy Souls (HBHS) program aims to reduce diabetes risk among urban African Americans by creating healthy food and physical activity environments within churches. Participant engagement supports the development of applicable intervention strategies by identifying priority concerns, resources, and opportunities. Purpose: We developed a church-based diabetes intervention program using participatory research methods. […]
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Determinants of Business Engagement With Regional Sport Events
Research question: Small-scale sports events provide commercial opportunities for regional communities, and yet research suggests that local commercial organisations are sometimes reticent to engage with sport event organisations to leverage benefits. This paper examines variation in business engagement with sport events and identifies determinants to sport event leverage that are previously unrecognised in the academic […]
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Determinants of Sport Participation in Different Sports
Previous research has shown that the demographic–economic model consisting of variables such as age, gender, nationality, income, and time can generally be used to explain sport participation. However, this model has not yet been tested for participation in different sports. The purpose of this paper is to test the applicability of the model for different […]
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