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Why Costs Over-run: Risk, Optimism and Uncertainty in Budgeting for the London 2012 Olympic Games
The systematic underestimation of costs in budgeting for large-scale projects raises the vexing question of why there are such incongruities between the projections made at initial stages and the eventual outturn cost. As a first step to understanding the sources of such budgeting overruns in the context of the Olympics, this research note outlines how […]
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Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game, Is There Life after Football? Surviving the NFL, and the NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives
American football fans participate in one of the most profitable forms of spectacle ever mass-produced. The NFL sells stunning feats of athleticism enmeshed within stunning acts of violence. And yet, while the former rivets us, the latter rarely stuns at all – and that is precisely the point. A spectator’s affects, senses and perceptual field […]
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Why Infer? The Use and Misuse of Population Data in Sport Research
While the use of inferential statistics is a nearly universal practice in the social sciences, there are instances where its application is unnecessary or, worse, misleading. This is true for most research on the Relative Age Effect (RAE) in sports. Given the limited amount of data needed to examine RAE (birth dates) and the availability […]
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Why We Ride: Road Cyclists, Meaning, and Lifestyles
Popular media across the Anglosphere has widely feted road cycling as “the new golf,” implying a shift in the social constituency and cultural significance of the activity. Such suggestions posit cycling as a new “middle-class” activity and have also spawned the idea of a new market segment: MAMILS (middle-aged men in lycra). Simultaneously, cycling has […]
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What is a Blue Chip Recruit Worth? Estimating the Marginal Revenue Product of College Football Quarterbacks
The National Collegiate Athletic Association has faced growing scrutiny due to the perceived disparity between the compensation athletes receive and their contribution to athletic revenue. Our novel use of college football game–level statistics shows a gap of millions of dollars between compensation and marginal revenue product (MRP) for elite quarterbacks, consistent with previous studies. Professional […]
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What is the Key for Older People to Show Interest in Playing Digital Learning Games? Initial Qualitative Findings from the League Project on a Multicultural European Sample
Objective: Learning digital games can influence both older adults’ health condition and their capacity to carry on activities in their actual environment. The goal of the current study was to explore and define the user requirements for developing digital learning games for older Europeans, focusing on types of learning games, motivational and social aspects, and […]
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When Celebrity Athletes Are ‘Social Movement Entrepreneurs’: A Study of the Role of Elite Runners in Run-for-peace Events in Post-Conflict Kenya in 2008
This paper reports findings from a study of the role played by high-profile Kenyan runners in the organization of Run-for-Peace events that took place in response to election-related violence in Kenya in late 2007 and early 2008. Acknowledging concerns expressed by some sociologists of sport about the role of celebrity athletes in the sport for […]
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When the Medium Becomes “Well Done”: Sport, Television, and Technology in the Twenty-first Century
One of the fundamental issues in the relation between television and sports has been the transference from watching a game or a sport in the field (the stadium) to the viewing experience through a proxy (the medium). The present article argues that sport broadcasts on television in the twenty-first century do not merely provide a […]
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When the Private Sphere Hides from the Public Sphere: The Power Struggle Between Israeli National Identity and Football Fandom
On 13 May 2012 Israeli sports fans were deprived of one of the season’s most important soccer tournaments, after the scheduling of both legs of the UEFA Champion’s League semi-final matches overlapped with national days of remembrance. A week before, Israel’s sports channels refused to play the first leg of semi-final matches since one of […]
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When the Saints Went Marching In: Social Identity in the World Champion New Orleans Saints Football Team and Its Impact on Their Host City
Social identity theory is used to explain behaviors, thoughts, and feelings associated with group membership. This study focuses on the New Orleans Saints National Football League (NFL) team and its effect on citizens of its host city as well as fans from the surrounding region. While a large body of research shows little evidence that […]
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Where’s All the ‘Good’ Sports Journalism? Sports Media Research, the Sociology of Sport, and the Question of Quality Sports Reporting
Across newsrooms and journalism schools, questions as to what constitutes or ‘counts’ as excellent reporting are currently inciting much debate. Among the various frameworks being put forward to describe and encourage ‘excellent’ journalism in its various forms, sport is seldom mentioned – a legacy perhaps of its perennial dismissal as trivial subject matter. This essay […]
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Using e-Surveys to Access the Views of Football Fans within Online Communities
This essay aims to discuss the key benefits and problems involved in using online surveys (e-surveys) for the purpose of accessing the views of football fans that interact with one another via online discussion forums/message boards. Methodological strategies that were adopted and critical issues that arose regarding the dissemination of an e-survey within a specific […]
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Utilizing Community-based Social Marketing in a Recycling Intervention with Tailgaters
The purpose of the current study was to design and implement a pilot intervention following the community-based social marketing(CBSM) process (McKenzie-Mohr & Smith, 1999) and Darnton’s (2008) social marketing framework to change the recycling knowledge and behaviors of tailgaters during home football events for a particular institution of higher education. Researchers asked what effect does […]
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Valued Elders or Societal Burden: Cross-National Attitudes Toward Older Adults
Population aging is a nearly universal trend that is placing new importance on how societies view and treat their elderly. Past research has established that perceptions of the elderly vary across countries. This article empirically explores three competing theoretical explanations on potential reasons for these differences: the Value Orientation perspective, the Competition over Resources perspective, […]
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Virando o jogo: The Challenges and Possibilities for Social Mobilization in Brazilian Football
The progressive commercialization of football in Brazil has been accompanied by the emergence of social movements that seek increased visibility and power over decision-making processes in the sport industrial complex. These groups are responding to rapid changes in the political economy of Brazilian sport, particularly football. While many of these processes were well underway before […]
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Visualising Modernity: Development Hopes and the 2010 FIFA World Cup
Inspired by writings in critical geopolitics and development studies, this paper explores the visual dimensions of the relationship between football and development through analysis of the 2010 FIFA World Cup (FWC) in South Africa. The aim is to show how futuristic notions of ‘football now, development later’ rely on two visible icons of hope, namely […]
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Visualizing basketball’s Past: The Historical Imagination of ESPN’s Basketball Documentaries
ESPN’s 22 basketball-themed documentaries are popular and influential sources for students and fans interested in basketball history. I offer close readings of two films, There’s No Place Like Home and The Fab Five, to shed light on how they (and to some degree the corpus as a whole) portray basketball history, reflect on the historiographical […]
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Voluntary Engagement in Sports Clubs: A Behavioral Model and Some Empirical Evidence
Voluntary engagement is an important prerequisite for the production of club goods. Although unpaid, the individual decision for or against voluntary engagement can be regarded and formally modeled as a deliberate act of social exchange using elements of behavioral economics. We lay out a simple behavioral model that captures in a stylized way several motives […]
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Wahhabism vs. Wahhabism: Qatar Challenges Saudi Arabia
As Saudi Arabia seeks to impregnate itself against the push for greater freedom, transparency and accountability sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, a major challenge to the kingdom’s puritan interpretation of Islam sits on its doorstep: Qatar, the only other country whose native population is Wahhabi and that adheres to the Wahhabi creed. It […]
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Watched by the Games: Surveillance and Security at the Olympics
Every four years the Summer Olympic Games fires the imagination of the largest and most diverse sport spectatorship and entices them in their hundreds of thousands to some of the First World’s most iconic and crowded cities. In addition, the ideological symbolism associated with the Olympic Games is rooted in Western, liberal democratic values and […]
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We’re on the Right Track, Baby, We Were Born This Way’! Exploring Sports Participation in Norway
Based on quantitative data from the Norwegian Statistisk Sentralbyrå (Statistics Norway) study of Mosjon, Friluftsliv og Kultur Aktiviteter, this paper explores trends in Norwegians’ participation in sports, with a focus on young people. Norway boasts particularly high levels of sports participation as well as sports club membership and young Norwegians are the quintessential sporting omnivores. […]
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Welcome to the Pleasure Dome?: Emotions, Leisure and Society
In this paper, a version of which was written in the early 1990s, I linked a discussion of the embodied emotions, leisure and society with a consideration of the issue of pleasure. In doing so I provided a critical evaluation of how leisure, pleasure and the emotions are intertwined in late modern/postmodern societies. At the […]
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Trust in Interspecies Sport
This paper explores how young girls develop trust in their equine partners for the purposes of competitive equestrian sport. I argue that interspecies trust manifests through interactional trust and system trust. Interactional trust, as reflected in the horse-human relationship, is built through joint action and results in symbolic interaction. System trust is made possible through […]
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Twitter’s Diffusion in Sports Journalism: Role Models, Laggards and Followers of the Social Media Innovation
The roles of sports journalists have been affected considerably by the influence of Twitter, but what is not known is how the social media application has been adopted across a range of sports newsrooms in different countries. Employing Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory, this study examines how Twitter has been accepted or rejected on the […]
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UEFA as a New Agent of Global Governance: A Case Study of Relations Between UEFA and the Polish Government Against the Background of the UEFA EURO 2012
This article seeks to contribute to furthering our understanding of the new role of sports federations in a globalized world. Building on the concept of “global governors” introduced by Avant, Finnemore, and Sell it presents the evolution of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) against the background of transformation of global order and the […]
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Understanding Globalization Through Football: The New International Division of Labour Migratory Channels and Transnational Trade Circuits
Among all sports, football is the one that saw the largest diffusion during the 20th century. Professional leagues exist on all continents and professional footballers are constantly on the move, trying to reach the wealthiest European clubs. Using the football players’ market as an example, this article highlights some key features of economic globalization: the […]
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Us and them: U.S. ambivalence toward the World Cup and American nationalism.
Analyzing media coverage of the men’s World Cup of soccer, this article explores the characterization of the United States relationship to this event as a form of national myth making. American journalists emphasized to their readers that the importance and meaning of the tournament domestically paled in comparison to that found outside its borders. Previous […]
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Topsport Talent Schools in the Netherlands: A Retrospective Analysis of the Effect on Performance in Sport and Education
In order to help talented athletes to attain the highest possible level in both their sport and education, Topsport Talent Schools (TTS) were founded in the Netherlands in 1991. This research aims to investigate the effect of attending a TTS on the sport and education performance levels of talented athletes. A retrospective study was conducted […]
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Tottenham After the Riots: The Chimera of Community and the Property-Led Regeneration of ‘Broken Britain’
David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda is best understood in terms of ideological and policy continuities with earlier Conservative and New Labour governments. But where previous post-1979 governments have sought to renegotiate the role of the state mostly through privatisations and marketisations of public services, the ‘Big Society’ agenda also proposed the replacement of the state […]
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Toward a Physical Cultural Studies
Within this paper we offer what is hopefully both a suggestive (as opposed to definitive) and generative (as opposed to suppressive) signposting of the ontological, epistemological, and methodological boundaries framing the putative intellectual project that is Physical Cultural Studies (PCS). Ground in a commitment toward engaging varied dimensions or expressions of active physicality , we […]
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Toward New Conversations Between Sociology and Psychology
We each came to this special issue from quite different backgrounds, yet we are equally convinced of the need to open up new conversations about the potential and politics of working at the intersection between sport sociology and Sport Psychology. Before outlining the rationale for, and structure of, this special issue, we-Holly, Tatiana, and Jim, […]
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Toward the Post-Westernization of Baseball? The National-Regional-Global Nexus of Korean Major League Baseball Fans During the 2006 World Baseball Classic
This study investigates the multiplicity of South Korean Major League Baseball fans, with a focus on the tensions that they experience under the nationalistic aura surrounding MLB fandom while pursuing their individual hobby. For this purpose, it employs the idea of “post-Westernization” to interpret baseball as a global sport and examine its recent popularity in […]
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Towards Level Playing Fields? A Time Tend Analysis of Young People’s Participation in Club-organised Sports
Over the last 40 years, Sport for All policies – aiming at encouraging the sports participation of all citizens, regardless of age, sex, social class, ethnic origin, etc. – were implemented in a number of European countries. This study examines the extent to which a democratisation of club-organised youth sports has occurred. The data are […]
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Tracing Tears and Triple Axels: Media Representations of Japan’s Women Figure Skaters
Anticipating the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, this article uses the triple axel jump, one of the most challenging moves in women’s figure skating, as a heuristic device to track representations of Japanese skaters Ito Midori and Asada Mao in the New York Times and Asahi Shimbun. Ito and Asada are two of only six women to […]
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Transformational Leadership and Well-being in Sports: The Mediating Role of Need Satisfaction
The present study examined the direct and indirect effect of coaches’ transformational leadership on athlete well-being. Participants were 184 floorball players who completed questionnaires about perceived transformational leadership from their coach, need satisfaction, and sport-related well-being. The analysis revealed positive relationships between perceived transformational leadership, need satisfaction, and well-being. The results also demonstrated that the […]
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Transformative Research and Epistemological Hierarchies: Ruminating on How the Sociology of the Sport Field Could Make More of a Difference
Amidst recent clarion calls for ‘transformative action’ within the sociology of sport, in this paper we consider the prospects of the field with respect to challenging social injustices and inequalities. We reflect on how the sociology of sport has developed in a manner that now privileges the idiographic over the nomothetic, qualitative over quantitative methods […]
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Transformative Sporting Visions
In this introduction to this special issue on Transformative Visions of Sport I draw attention to the tension critical sport studies scholars are likely to experience between the attention they draw to the role of sport in perpetuating and normalizing various injustices and their own passion for particular sports. It is no accident that most […]
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Transforming Communities Through Sport? Critical Pedagogy and Sport for Development
The value of sport as a vehicle for social development and progressive social change has been much debated, yet what tends to get missed in this debate is the way education may foster, enable or impede the transformative action that underpins the social outcomes to which the ‘sport for development and peace’ (SDP) sector aspires. […]
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Transnational Youth Mobility in the Neoliberal Economy of Experience
An increasing number of young people are making long-stay travels while postponing their transition to adulthood and seeking ‘global experience’. Among various forms of long-stay travel, the working holiday has been popular among young people looking for opportunities to work during travel. In order to empirically explore how global experience is negotiated by young travellers, […]
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Traumatic Brain Injury: Endocrine Consequences in Children and Adults
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common cause of death and disability in young adults with consequences ranging from physical disabilities to long-term cognitive, behavioral, psychological and social defects. Recent data suggest that pituitary hormone deficiency is not infrequent among TBI survivors; the prevalence of reported hypopituitarism following TBI varies widely among published studies. The […]
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Trends in NCAA Athletic Spending: Arms Race or Rising Tide?
We develop and empirically test a model of intercollegiate athletic department expenditure decisions. The model extends general dynamic models of nonprice competition and includes the idea that nonprofit athletic departments may simply set expenditure equal to revenues. Own and rival prestige are included in the athletic departments’ utility functions, generating rivalrous interaction. The model predicts […]
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The Trouble with Tebowing
Sociologists Grace Yukich, Kimberly Stokes, and Daniela Bellows explore cultural norms around religious displays in sports, and in public life more generally, by examining media coverage of controversial football player Tim Tebow.
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The Ubiquitous Baseball Cap
The baseball cap completes the T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers as the common kit of late modern life, the recent decades when consumption, as acquisition, display, and deployment, has become preeminent in asserting self-identity and negotiating social placement. This essay traces the codification and commercialization of the baseball cap within that sport and its adoption […]
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The Writing’s on the Firewall: Assessing the Promise of Open Access Journal Publishing for a Public Sociology of Sport
The process of digitization has transformed the ways in which content is reproduced and circulated online, rupturing long held distinctions between production and consumption in the (virtual) public sphere. In accordance with these developments over the past fifteen years, proponents for open access publishing in higher education have argued that the (not yet absolute) transition […]
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Time Use and Physical Activity: A Shift Away From Movement Across the Globe
Summary Technology linked with reduced physical activity (PA) in occupational work, home/domestic work, and travel and increased sedentary activities, especially television viewing, dominates the globe. Using detailed historical data on time allocation, occupational distributions, energy expenditures data by activity, and time‐varying measures of metabolic equivalents of task (MET) for activities when available, we measure historical […]
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Timing and Imaging Evidence in Sport Objectivity, Intervention, and the Limits of Technology
This article analyzes timing and imaging systems used as sports decision aids (SDAs). Evidence of athletic performance in the form of timing and imaging data is the product of distinct interactions between humans, technology, and the live environment. As such, sports decisions are fallible. Yet the measurement of athletic performance is often presented as irrefutable […]
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Too Good to be a Sport? Why Dog Agility Struggles in Gaining Recognition as a Sport
Over the last two decades, the Finnish community of dog agility practitioners has worked diligently towards gaining recognition for agility as a sport. The process reached an important milestone in 2016 when the National Sports Council listed the Finnish Agility Association as eligible for financial support from the state. As one of the pioneer countries […]
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Top 10 Reasons Why Children Find Physical Activity to be Unfun
“That was so fun!” is a phrase that physical education teachers and coaches will likely never get tired of hearing from children. Without fun, youth are unlikely to voluntarily engage in physical activity. While the notion of fun (i.e., enjoyment) in physical activity has been increasingly studied over the past few decades, there has been […]
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The Secularization of Sunday: Real or Perceived Competition for Churches, Review of Religious Research
In a survey of pastors and members of 16 declining congregations in the US and Canada, respondents most commonly identified competing Sunday activities as the primary reason for the decline in Sunday worship attendance. The repeal of “blue laws” that kept stores closed on Sundays has resulted in many more people working or shopping on […]
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The Significance of Family Culture for Sports Participation
Contrary to commonplace assumptions regarding ‘determinants’ of sports participation, Birchwood et al. (2008) found strong evidence that family cultures were the chief factor underpinning individuals’ propensities to play sport. The central objective of this study was to investigate family sporting cultures in more detail. To do this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight ‘sporty’ children […]
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The Social Construction of Ability in Movement Assessment Tools
This paper focuses on how ‘ability’ is conceptualised, configured and produced in movement assessment tools. The aim of the study was to critically analyse assessment tools used for healthy and typically developed children. The sample consists of 10 tools from 6 different countries. In the study, we pay special attention to content and evaluation methods. […]
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The Social Construction of the Sociology of Sport: A Professional Project
This paper presents a historical sociological analysis of the sociology of sport. It draws on theoretical insights from the sociology of professions to examine ‘state-of-the-field’ reviews written by sociologists of sport. The paper argues that in establishing why the sociology of sport emerged, how people identified its earliest manifestations, and how the sub discipline’s boundaries […]
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The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a Sociology of Impairment
What is the case for and how would one begin to construct a sociology of impairment? This paper argues that the realignment of the disability/impairment distinction is vital for the identity politics of the disability movement. The body is at the heart of contemporary political and theoretical debate, yet the social model of disability makes […]
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The Sociology of Emotion in Elite Sport: Examining the Role of Normalization and Technologies
Recent research has examined the role of negative emotion norms and elite athletes’ decisions to continue to train in sport when they are not physically healthy enough to do so. According to Lee Sinden ((2010) The normalization of emotion and the disregard of health problems in elite amateur sport. Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology 4: […]
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The Sociology of Sports Work Emotions and Mental Health: Scoping the Field and Future Directions
The central object of this introductory essay, and of this Special Issue more broadly, is to explore relations between the study of work and the continuing evolution of the sociology of sport with a particular focus on the mental health of sports workers. In particular, we argue that revitalizing the study of sports work, and […]
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The State of Play: Critical Sociological Insights into Recent ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ Research
The maturation of the field of ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP) is reflected in the growing number of research publications on the topic. This article focuses on a recent review of English-language research publications on SDP from 2000–2014 conducted by Schulenkorf et al. (2016. Sport for development: an integrated literature review. Journal of Sport […]
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The Sustainability of the Youth Olympic Games: Stakeholder Networks and Institutional Perspectives
This paper explored the Youth Olympic Games’ (YOG) potential sustainability (survival and success) through an analysis of how actors exert various forms of pressure on the YOG. Given the impact of the Olympic Games and of youth on society, it becomes important to study the newest member of the Olympic Family. Combining stakeholder, network and […]
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The Training Camp: American Football and/as Spectacle of Exception
In this article, we use the theories of Giorgio Agamben to conceptualize the contemporary American football training camp as a material and metaphorical “camp”—a “space of exception” or a zone of indistinction where bare life is produced and the exception becomes the rule. Our aim is not to sportingly trivialize the horrors of those camps […]
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The Transformative Potential of Using Participatory Community Sport Initiatives to Promote Social Cohesion in Divided Community Contexts
Sports are popularly believed to have positive integrative functions and are thought, therefore, to be able to galvanise different, and sometimes divided communities through a shared sporting interest. UK government and policy rhetoric over the last two decades has consistently emphasised the positive role sport can play in building more cohesive, empowered and active communities. […]
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The Promise of Violence: Televised, Professional Football Games and Domestic Violence
This study asks, “Does a highly identified sports fan feel a strong bond while watching his favorite football players and then exhibit violent, copycat behavior?” Using the media, copycat framework, this research looked at five categories of domestic violence arrests in the city of Philadelphia on Eagles’ “game days,” for an 8-hr period, beginning with […]
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The Quest for Victory: Collective Memory and National Identification Among the Arab-Palestinian Citizens of Israel
The interdependence of collective memory and national identification has become a widespread scholarly axiom. While the related literature recognizes the role of memories of victimization and heroic victories, this article illustrates the importance of a ‘semiotic balance’ between these two for the maintenance of national identification. The study is based on an individual-centered quantitative method, […]
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The Regulation of Television Sports Broadcasting: A Comparative Analysis
Based on seven different sports broadcasting markets (Australia, Brazil, Italy, India, South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States), this article provides a comparative analysis of the regulation of television sports broadcasting. The article examines how contrasting perspectives on television and sport – economic and sociocultural – have been reflected in two main approaches to […]
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The Relationship Between Ethical and Abusive Coaching Behaviors and Student-Athlete Well-Being
Drawing on social-cognitive theory, this research examined the impact of college coaches’ ethical and abusive behavior on their athletes’ college choice satisfaction, perceptions of the team’s inclusion climate, and team members’ willingness to cheat. We examined the relative impact of these coaching behaviors controlling for team gender as well as the contextual influences of the […]
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The Rich, the Affluent and the Top Incomes
The article reviews the literature on the rich, the affluent and the top income earners focusing on the determinants of affluence or richness. The review surveys empirical results about the composition of the income and wealth of the rich and its direct determinants, such as individual characteristics, the state and the structure of production. The […]
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The Role of Pastor Support in a Faith-based Health Promotion Intervention
Pastor support has been viewed as an integral part of successful faith-based health promotion programs; however, few studies have systematically studied these relationships. This study examined associations between pastor support and program-related variables among African American churches taking part in a physical activity and dietary intervention. Results showed that some pastor support-related variables were associated […]
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The Role of Trusted Adults in Young People’s Social and Economic Lives
In moving toward adulthood, young people make formative choices about their social and economic engagement while developmentally seeking autonomy from parents. Who else then contributes to guiding young people during this formative life-stage? This article explores one contributing relationship: relationships with trusted adults. Past research has shown that these adults provide motivational, emotional, and instrumental […]
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The Role of Uncertainty of Outcome and Scoring in the Determination of Fan Satisfaction in the NFL
Fan satisfaction with individual sports games is likely to be an important indicator of future sales of tickets, television and radio advertising, and team merchandise sales. For the 2009-2010 National Football League (NFL) season, NFL.com, the official website of the NFL, had fans enter a ‘‘fan rating’’ for each game of the season. This rating […]
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The Neoliberalization of Football: Rethinking Neoliberalism Through the Commercialization of the Beautiful Game
This ethnographic study explores how football (soccer) fandoms respond to neoliberal reforms, adding to a growing debate on the nature of neoliberalism by scholars such as geographer David Harvey, sociologist Nikolas Rose, and anthropologist Anna Tsing. In order to critique spatially and temporally coherent characterizations of neoliberalism, brief case analysis of fan reactions to the […]
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The Normal Body–Anthropology of Bodily Otherness
The Normal Body – Anthropology of Bodily Otherness Human biology and medical science focus on the normality of the human body. This focus deserves, however, to be questioned. Cultural studies, in contrast, focus on normalities in plural – normalities of diverse cultures, revealed by comparison and under the historical perspective of change. The normality and […]
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The Olympic Movement, Action Sports and the Search for Generation Y
During an International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in 2006, IOC president Jacques Rogge asked the International Cycling Union (ICU) to assist with the entry of skateboarding into the Olympics. Accepting Rogge’s request, an ICU spokesman proclaimed: ‘From our side we are committed to help the development of skateboarding’ (quoted in Higgins 2007: para. 6). Newspaper […]
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The Pain and Pleasure of Roller Derby: Thinking Through Affect and Subjectification
Writing about pain in roller derby challenges us to rethink old dichotomies that separate mind and body, ‘real’ and virtual, feminine and masculine. The ‘tough’ roller derby ‘girl’, willing and able to endure pain for the pleasure of the game, has become a powerful figure in contemporary western popular culture. Our analysis of roller derby […]
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The Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro 2007: Consequences of a Sport Mega-event on a BRIC Country
Sport mega-events were very important for Brazil in 2007. The 15th Pan American Games took place in Rio de Janeiro. It was the largest international tournament held in Brazil since the 1950 World Cup and the 1963 Pan American Games. The latter were held in São Paulo. In 2007, 5000 athletes and 60,000 tourists were […]
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The Paradoxical Character of Live Television Sport in the Twenty-First Century
The interacting social forces that have shaped the development of the electronic media constitute complex and contrary developments. Television technology, unlike that of the cinema, took a long time to grow from a technological possibility in the1930s to maturation in the 1970s. Mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup have both a […]
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The Paralympic Games as a Force for Peaceful Coexistence
The International Olympic Committee advocates that one of the three ultimate goals of Olympism is to build a peaceful and better world through sport. The International Paralympic Committee, on the other hand, is slightly less grandiose when stating its key aim of enabling Paralympic athletes to achieve sporting excellence and to inspire and excite the […]
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The Passion of the Tebow: Sports Media and the Heroic Language in the Tragic Frame
As one of the most widely covered athletes of recent years, Tim Tebow is both beloved and resented. In this essay, I critique sports media coverage of Tebow to demonstrate how tragic framing constitutes this opposition. By emphasizing his character both as a football leader and a Christian missionary, sports media frame Tebow in transcendental […]
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The Politics of Countermeasures Against Match-Fixing in Sport: A Political Sociology Approach to Policy Instruments
As match-fixing has emerged as a global problem, states and sports organisations have proposed a range of countermeasures. However, despite their neutral, technocratic appearance, these instruments produce their own political effects. Drawing from a case study of the 2011 South Korean ‘K-League’ football match-fixing scandal that resulted in a raft of countermeasures, this article examines […]
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The Politics of Identity and Methodology in African Development
Since the reflexive turn in sociology and social anthropology, ‘identity negotiation’ and the ‘insider/outsider’ dilemma have been central topics of ethnographic literature. Much of the writings have exposed how the sociocultural biography and the identity of Western researchers interact, contradict and collaborate with the constructed ‘self’ of the participants of research. However, African development researchers […]
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The Politics of Pleasure: An Ethnographic Examination Exploring the Dominance of the Multi-activity Sport-Based Physical Education Model
Kirk warns that physical education (PE) exists in a precarious situation as the dominance of the multi-activity sport-techniques model, and its associated problems, threatens the long-term educational survival of PE. Yet he also notes that although the model is problematic it is highly resistant to change. In this paper, we draw on the results of […]
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The Politics of Sport-for-Development: Limited Focus Program and Broad Gauge Problems?
This article explores the almost evangelical policy rhetoric of the sports-for-development ‘movement’ and the wide diversity of programmes and organizations included under this vague and weakly theorized banner. It is suggested that, although the rhetoric of sport as a human right has provided some rhetorical and symbolic legitimation for sport-for-development initiatives, the recent dramatic increase […]
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The Predictive Ability of the Frequency of Perfectionistic Cognitions, Self-oriented Perfectionism, and Socially Prescribed Perfectionism in Relation to Symptoms of Burnout in Youth Rugby Players
Perfectionism has been identified as an antecedent of athlete burnout. However, to date, researchers examining the relationship between perfectionism and athlete burnout have measured perfectionism at a trait level. The work of Flett and colleagues (Flett, Hewitt, Blankstein, & Gray, 1998 ) suggests that perfectionism can also be assessed in terms of individual differences in […]
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The Invisible Hand of Thierry Henry: How World Cup Qualification Influences Host Country Tourist Arrivals
This article highlights an aspect of mega-events that has been neglected: the changing composition of tourist arrivals during and after the event. The change happens because, in the FIFA World Cup, a quota of countries participate from each continent and this opens up new tourism markets. We show that the 2010 FIFA World Cup in […]
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The London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony and its Polyphonous Aftermath
Global mega-events are widely perceived as a tool used by host countries’ elites to propagate national narratives. But how are the messages actually decoded by international publics? The article takes the case of the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony to reveal the multifaceted character of mediated responses to a global event. This case is particularly […]
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The Masters Athlete: A Review of Current Exercise and Treatment Recommendations
Context: With the ever-increasing number of masters athletes, it is necessary to understand how to best provide medical support to this expanding population using a multidisciplinary approach. Evidence Acquisition: Relevant articles published between 2000 and 2013 using the search terms masters athlete and aging and exercise were identified using MEDLINE. Study Design: Clinical review. Level […]
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The Mediating Effects of Family on Sport in International Development Contexts
The role of family in influencing sports behaviour is widely recognized. This article extends this body of knowledge by examining how the family influences young people’s responses to sport programmes operating in international development contexts. Recognizing the central role of the family as a social institution, the article highlights the cultural significance and specificity of […]
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The Mental Health of Elite Athletes: A Narrative Systematic Review
Background The physical impacts of elite sport participation have been well documented; however, there is comparatively less research on the mental health and psychological wellbeing of elite athletes. Objective This review appraises the evidence base regarding the mental health and wellbeing of elite-level athletes, including the incidence and/or nature of mental ill-health and substance use. […]
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The Militarization of American Professional Sports: How the Sports–War Intertext Influences Athletic Ritual and Sports Media
This article investigates how “war-speak” is incorporated into both sports media coverage and athletic rituals. It posits that while the militarization of American sporting events may help to comfort a nation in crisis and afford the Armed Forces a valuable recruitment tool, it simultaneously encourages a coercive patriotism that is morally problematic for many athletes […]
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The Moral Glocalization of Sport: Local Meanings of Football in Chota Valley, Ecuador
Studies of the glocalization of sport usually focus on ‘aesthetic glocalization’ (how local actors adopt a global sport and create a new hybrid aesthetic). This has led some critics to dismiss glocalization as a superficial ‘façade’ of diversity hiding global homogeneity. This paper challenges this view by looking at the‘moral glocalization’ of sport and at […]
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The National Football League: Does Crime Increase on Game Day?
This article investigates the effects of National Football League(NFL) games on crime. Using a panel data set that includes daily crime incidences in eight large cities with NFL teams, we examine how various measurements of criminal activities change on game day compared with non game days. Our findings from both ordinary least squares and negative […]
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The Gaelic Athletic Association, Transnational Identities and Irish-America
This article draws on the concept of transnationalism to examine the role and function of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) among Irish migrant communities in the United States. In particular, it examines the role of the GAA in the production and reproduction of shifting notions of Irish national identification in America. The analysis here are […]
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The Games People Play: Theology, Religion, and Sport
In ‘The Games People Play’, Robert Ellis constructs a theology around the global cultural phenomenon of modern sport, paying particular attention to its British and American manifestations. Using historical narrative and social analysis to enter the debate on sport as religion, Ellis shows that modern sport may be said to have taken on some of […]
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The Generalized Exchange of Punishments in Adult Recreational Softball: The Case of ‘Going Middle
Exchange theory has a long tradition of systematic theory development and testing using experimental methodology. Webster and Whitmeyer (2001) argue that the application of a theory can be used to demonstrate its usefulness. The purpose of this paper is to apply well-developed theoretical concepts from exchange theory to explain interactional processes that occur in adult […]
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The Globalization of Time and Space: Soccer and Meaning in Chota Valley, Ecuador
Globalization is commonly defined as time–space compression, a view that relies on an idea of ‘empty’ time and space where these dimensions have been stripped of local meanings by abstraction and standardization. This notion is incompatible with the globalization of culture literature that suggests that these processes do not erase local meanings but rather mix […]
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The Gospel According to Tim Tebow: Sporting Celebrity, Whiteness, and the Cultural Politics of Christian Fundamentalism in America
In this article, we explore the media and cultural politics of former National Football League (NFL) quarterback Tim Tebow. More specifically, we investigate paradoxical and contradictory media representations of Tebow as his celebrity surfaced within, and came to dominate, the Obama-era ‘American’ media landscape. In so doing, we draw lines of articulation from Tebow—as performative […]
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The Growth of TV News, the Demise of the Journalism Profession
In response to the dearth of critical literature on the transformation of local news ownership structure and the impacts of technological reorganization of news production on the television profession and local communities, we analyze the consolidation of local news and the paradox of expanded news hours in times of shrinking staffs and less-trusting audiences. Focused […]
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The Gym and the Beach: Globalization, Situated Bodies, and Australian Fitness
Fitness culture is becoming gradually more globalized, both in terms of body ideals, and in terms of body techniques and philosophies of the body. This article discusses the consequences of the globalization of fitness. In particular, the article analyzes the relationship between processes of globalization and how local cultural ideals, gender, and environmental factors may […]
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The Hoolifan: Positive Fan Attitudes to Football ‘Hooliganism’
Popular accounts of ‘football hooliganism’ have identified the phenomenon as being harmful and damaging for both the sport of football and the interests of spectators who attend matches. As a result, it has been generally assumed that ‘non-hooligan’ supporters disapprove of their hooligan counterparts and their activities. However, this one-sided account does not recognize the […]
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The Hooligan as ‘Internal’ Other? Football Fans, Ultras Culture and Nesting Intra-orientalisms
Football fans, specifically fan associations (navijačke udruge), are sometimes depicted as stereotypical of Balkan ‘mentality’, drawing on associations with violence, organised crime and examples of ‘primitive’ behaviour and attitudes at football matches. In this paper, I argue that the drawing of such associations may explored in terms of a nesting intra-orientalism, whereby non-European ‘others’ are […]
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The Hunting Industry: Exploring the Marriage of Consumerism, Sport Hunting, and Commercial Entertainment
This article makes a case for the inclusion of sport hunting in studies of consumer culture. This argument is advanced through an analysis of “the hunting industry” in North America. The hunting industry comprises a vast commercial network, exemplified by specialty retailers and advertiser-supported media involved in the marketing of hunting-related merchandise. The analysis contrasts […]
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The Impact of a Sport-based Service Learning Course on Participants’ Attitudes, Intentions and Actions Toward Social Change
Framed in the context of a sport-based service learning program that engages in interdepartmental university partnerships (including athletics), the current study focused on addressing the need to analyze the long-term impacts of service learning on students’ intentions and actions toward social change. Service learning courses have been shown to facilitate positive outcomes such as increased […]
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The Effects of Revenue Changes on NCAA Athletic Departments’ Expenditures
This study uses a panel of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I athletic department revenue and expenditure data from 225 public colleges and universities to empirically investigate the behavior of athletic departments over the period 2006-2011. Three empirical relationships were explored: (a) how changes in total revenue affect disaggregated expenditure categories, (b) how disaggregated […]
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