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The Effects of the Bosman Ruling on National and Club Teams in Europe
The Bosman ruling and its aftermath allowed soccer players to move more freely between clubs in Europe. This study examines the performance of national and club teams in Europe before and after Bosman. Some national teams improved after the ruling while others became weaker, but the overall effects are small. At the club level, there […]
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The Elite Sport and Christianity Debate: Shifting Focus from Normative Values to the Conscious Disregard for Health
Scholars and theologians continue to debate whether or not God’s intended purpose of elite sport violates the creational normativity for elite sport. However, while it is important to be aware of the contradictions between elite sport and Christianity, there is a need for more deep-seated discussions about emotions and health problems in elite sport and […]
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The Emergence of Neoliberalism: Thinking Through and Beyond Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Biopolitics
This paper uses Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics as a starting point for thinking historically about neoliberalism. Foucault’s lectures offer a rich and detailed account of the emergence of neoliberalism, but this account is far from complete. This paper addresses some of the blind-spots in Foucault’s lectures by focusing on the space between the decline […]
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The Eternal Present of Sport: Rethinking Sport and Religion
In his persuasive study The Eternal Present of Sport, Daniel Grano rethinks the sport-religion relationship by positioning sport as a source of theological trouble. Focusing on bodies, time, movement, and memory, he demonstrates how negative theology can be practically and theoretically useful as a critique of elite televised sport. Grano asserts that it is precisely […]
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The Figuration of a Liquid Modern and Globalized Team Since the Acquisition by TV Azteca: The Case of Club Morelia
This article analyzes the transition from a solid modern soccer-scape into a liquid modern soccer-scape in professional soccer in Morelia, Mexico. The acquisition of the club by TV Azteca is considered the milestone that separates both soccer-scapes. The figurational sociology of Elias and the liquid modern analysis of Bauman serve as the foundations of this […]
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The First Neoliberal Science: Management and Neoliberalism
There has been much recent scholarship on the nature of neoliberalism. What follows develops these connections by examining early neoliberal and management thought. The article explores the foundations of neoliberal and management theory to argue they share fundamental features – namely active intervention, prioritising competition and the necessity of elite leadership. The purpose of all […]
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The Football Fan and the Pub: An Enduring Relationship
This paper draws on qualitative interviews with a sample of English football fans to explore their relationship with one enduring site for fandom practice, the pub. In doing so, the work discusses the significance of structuration processes as a means of explaining the transcendent nature of this relationship across time and space. The findings complement […]
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The Football Supporter in a Cosmopolitan Epoch
Arguably, the later process of globalization served to reshape how socializations are fostered and maintained across time and space. In addition, in the last 15 years, a new phenomenon that reinvigorated time and space compression has emerged: social media. Moreover, it is argued that the conjunction of those processes can be seen as taking place […]
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The Construction of Play: Rules, Restrictions, and the Repressive Hypothesis
Rules are often cited as one of the defining features of games; however, few precise definitions of rules exist and those that do are often self-contradictory and/or reductive. This article seeks to reconceptualize rules for both traditional and digital games, not as a series of restrictions to which the player must submit but rather as […]
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The Contemporary Muscular Christian Instrument: A Scale Developed for Contemporary Sport
Social scientists have conducted quantitative research investigations since at least the early 1980s. However, to date no valid, reliable and objective survey instrument has been developed for sport sociologists to measure important religious ideals in contemporary sport. Historical and theoretical scholarship identifies muscular Christianity as primary to modern sport ideals. Therefore we developed and validated […]
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The Contested Terrain of Alcohol Sponsorship of Sport in New Zealand
This study examines the politics and policy implications of alcohol sponsorship of sport in New Zealand. Specifically, it draws on the recommendations of the 2010 New Zealand Law Commission report titled Alcohol in our lives: Curbing the harm, which called for the gradual elimination of all alcohol sponsorship from New Zealand sport. Using a multi-method […]
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The Corner and the Crew: The Influence of Geography and Social Networks on Gang Violence
Nearly a century of empirical research examines how neighborhood properties influence a host of phenomena such as crime, poverty, health, civic engagement, immigration, and economic inequality. Theoretically bundled within these neighborhood effects are institutions’ and actors’ social networks that are the foundation of other neighborhood-level processes such as social control, mobilization, and cultural assimilation. Yet, […]
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The Corporal Dimension of Sports-based Interventions: Understanding the Role of Embedded Expectations and Embodied Knowledge in Sport Policy Implementation
The aim of this paper is to show how the corporal character of activities commonly provided in sports-based policy interventions has implications for the results of policy implementation. By employing the theoretical concepts of embedded expectations and embodied knowledge, this paper examines how expectations embedded in such activities interact with experiences embodied by the participants […]
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The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports
Serving as an appropriate follow-up to her groundbreaking and oft-cited collection, Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity, and Difference (2004), Belinda Wheaton’s new book invites readers to explore the political potential of under-theorized and differentially marginalized (sub)cultures within contemporary lifestyle sporting spaces. In so doing, she attempts to unearth some of the multilayered complexities with respect […]
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The Culture of Sport, Bodies of Desire, and the Body of Christ
The culture of sport plays a persuasive role in the shaping of cultural conceptions of identity, the body, and what constitutes being human. The author gives a cultural exegesis of sport to highlight its authoritative influence on societal ideation about the body, and how society views, values, and valorizes ability as a dominant attribute of […]
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The Dark Side of Social Capital: An Ethnography of Sport Governance
This article extends the discussion on the ‘dark side’ of social capital in sport which has recently been increasingly conceptualized in civil society studies. We define the dark side of social capital as situations in which trust, social ties and shared beliefs and norms that may be beneficial to some persons are detrimental to other […]
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The Decline of Nationalism Among Football Fans
Throughout the history of the nation-state, political leaders have used sport as a means of promoting individual and national agendas. Over the last few years, their hold over sport appears to have weakened. In an era of commercialization, individualism, and globalization, many sport fans have access to matches from all over the world at all […]
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The Discursive Construction of ‘Good Parenting’ and Digital Media – the Case of Children’s Virtual World Games
This article investigates ways discourses which are present on the virtual world gaming websites and in popular press produce constructions of ‘good parents’ and ‘good websites’ for children, and in the process create distinctions which position other parental practices and online media as undesirable. The article includes a discussion of historical constructs of parenting in […]
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The Effect of Coach Education on Reporting of Concussions Among High School Athletes After Passage of a Concussion Law
Background: Increasing attention has been paid to concussions and especially sports-related concussions in youth. To prevent an inappropriate return to play while symptomatic, nearly all states have now passed legislation on youth sports-related concussions. Purpose: To determine (1) the incidence of sports-related concussions in high school athletes using a unique system to collect reports on […]
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The American Dream, Then and Now
America has always taken pride in being the land of opportunity, a country in which hard work and sacrifice result in a better life for one’s children. Economic growth made that dream a reality for generations of Americans, including many people who started out poor. Between 1947 and 1977, a period in which the gross […]
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The Athlete and the Spectator Inside the Man: A Cross-cultural Investigation of the Evolutionary Origins of Athletic Behavior
Athletic contests constitute an important aspect of human affairs. However, the evolutionary origins of athletic behavior, that is, behavior which is associated with participating in and watching athletic contests, are rather obscure, as they do not seem to contribute directly to increasing survival or reproductive success. This article argues that athletic behavior has been shaped […]
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The Attitude of the Holy See Toward Sport During the Interwar Period (1919-1939)
During the interwar period (1919-39), nations used sport and athletes for propaganda purposes, especially those countries with fascist and National Socialist ideologies. Through insights gleaned from the archives of the Vatican Secretariat of State and the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the author discusses how the Holy See, at every level, regarded this phenomenon.
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The Beautiful and the Damned: The Work of New Media Production in Professional Rock Climbing
This article examines new media production in professional climbing through the prism of the work relationships between climbers and companies. The development of new media has driven significant transformations in the production, diffusion, and consumption of professional sports, notably in the relationships between athletes, companies, fans, and organizations. However, little is known on the influence […]
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The Bidding Paradox: Why Politicians Favor Hosting Mega Sports Events Despite the Bleak Economic Prospects
Politicians generally favor hosting mega sports events despite the discouraging evidence of financial benefits or direct economic gain. This paradox is surveyed from two different perspectives. First, we weighed the merits of the most prominent methods of economic analysis of mega sports events. Then, we discuss the ways in which politicians still manage to infer […]
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The Bodily Engagement of Snow Park Freestylers: A Study in Three French Winter Sports Resorts
Snow parks constitute an essential part of the drawing power of winter sports resorts. However, epidemiological studies have highlighted the increased risk of snow park accidents when compared with those of traditional piste runs. In the light of such findings, the aim has been to understand why and how freestyle enthusiasts deal with the particular […]
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The Cardinal Virtues and Kinesiology
What is a good kinesiologist? Is it possible that the ancient and medieval tradition of the Cardinal Virtues sheds light on this question? The four Cardinal Virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance are so called from the Latin cardo meaning “hinge.” The Cardinal Virtues are said to be the hinge upon which all the […]
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The Catholic Mission, Sport and Renewal of Elites: St Michel de Tananarive Jesuit College (1906-1975)
The emblem of Jesuit ambition was St. Michel College, built in the heart of the capital in ‘fortress’ style proclaiming the educational plan for training the country’s elites. Our intention here is to show how, within the specific framework of this Catholic establishment, the disciplinary, associative and identitary functions of gymnastics and sports played their […]
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The Comparability of Quantitative Surveys on Sport Participation in France (1967–2010)
Results from quantitative surveys enable historians, sociologists and demographers to describe and analyse the evolution of sport participation in France from 1967 to 2010. However, most of these social scientists use the results of these surveys to create very different methodologies without having studied the surveys’ empirical data or databases. In this article, we demonstrate […]
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Taking the Fun Out of It: The Spoiling Effects of Researching Something You Love
This reflexive analysis of two sports ethnographers’ studies of an aerobics class and a swimming pool explores the effects of doing fieldwork on a physical activity that one loves. While using our bodies as phenomenological sites of perception initially created an epistemological advantage, researching the familiarly beloved not only ‘took the fun out of’ the […]
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Talent Recruitment and Firm Performance: The Business of Major League Sports
Firms rely heavily on their investments in human capital to achieve profits. This research takes advantage of detailed information on worker performance and confidential information on firm revenue and operating costs to investigate the relationship between talent migration and firm profitability in major league sports, one of the few industries in which detailed information about […]
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Tales from the Mat: Narrating Men and Meaning Making in the Mixed Martial Arts Gym
Based upon five years of observant participation, I examine how participants justify their engagement with the controversial but increasing popular practice of mixed martial arts. Several themes emerge: necessity (“it is a violent world”), sociobiological discourse, emulating the exotic, spiritual teachings, alienation from consumer society, and the body as a project. These themes suggest that […]
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Talking About Trayvon in 140 Characters: Exploring NFL Players’ Tweets About the George Zimmerman Verdict
This research explored how National Football League (NFL) playersused Twitter to discuss the verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial in the immediate aftermath of its announcement. A textual analysis, using constant comparative procedures of 465 tweets from 125 NFL players, was conducted. Results revealed that players discussed the case in the following ways: (a) […]
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Teaching Across the Lines of Fault in Psychology and Sociology: Health, Obesity and Physical Activity in the Canadian Context
While interdisciplinary knowledge is critical to moving beyond categorical ways of knowing, this comes with its own set of pedagogical challenges. We contend that acknowledging existing knowledge hierarchies and epistemological differences, recognizing the ideological baggage that students’ bring to the classroom in terms of their understandings of health, embracing intellectual uncertainty, and encouraging learning-as-witnessing, are […]
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Television Sport in the Age of Screens and Content
The death of television has been long predicated in the digital age, yet it remains a powerful mediator of live sports. This article focuses on football and examines the implications for the sport of the move to an age of screens and content. These may be large screens in public places or in our homes […]
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The “Caddie Question”: Why the Golf Caddies of Bangalore Reject Formal Employment
The mainly poor and lower-caste caddies who carry the golf sets of wealthy members at exclusive golf clubs in Bangalore, India, are not employees. Still, they must hand over personal identification to the clubs, sign an attendance register, wear uniforms, attend training sessions, and submit to managerial oversight. Despite laboring under conditions that mimic regularized […]
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The Absence of Resistance Training? Exploring the Politics of Health in High Performance Youth Triathlon
While research and scholarship on the dynamic interconnections between sport and health has steadily grown in the sociocultural study of sport in the past few decades, this paper focuses more directly on the politics of health within sport. Drawing on a small study of the lived experiences and understandings of health, pain/injury, risk and precaution […]
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The Academic Reform of Intercollegiate Athletics: The Good the Problematic and the Truly Worrisome
The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to Harrison’s (2012) work. The author highlights the positives associated with many of the academic reform efforts Harrison highlights (i.e., the good); addresses concerns about academic clustering, rewarding teams performing at high academic levels, and athletic administrators’ resistance to upset the status quo (i.e., the […]
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The Allure of Games: Toward an Updated Theory of the Leisure Class
Gamers spend as many as 2.5 billion hours per week playing games. The gaming literature has relied on the field of positive psychology and the concept of flow to explain why gamers are willing to work so hard in order to have fun. However, many games are played within a social context and hence produce […]
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Subsidies and Stadia’ Opulence
Quirk and Fort’s gold plating hypothesis stipulates that subsidies are partly capitalized into stadia’ opulence. If the gold plating hypothesis is true, it would indicate that subsidies contribute to their own existence, as owners and major league executives argue subsidies are necessary to meet leagues’ increasing facility design standards. This study tests the gold plating […]
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Surf Film Then & Now: The Endless Summer Meets Slow Dance
Media shifts in the past 50 years based on a late capitalist economics have profoundly affected how a film is produced, delivered, and received. In this article, I aim to examine two exemplar surf films—The Endless Summer (1964) and Slow Dance (2013)—as well as the surf film genre to note some of the ways these […]
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Surf’s up! A call to take English Soccer Fan Interactions on the Internet more Seriously
Soccer fandom practices in England have been significantly impacted by globalization. The creation of the Premier League in 1992, and the way in which satellite television company BSkyB dominated coverage of this, together with other developments, have led to changes in how fans consume top‐level English soccer. Whilst such global transformations are well documented in […]
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Surveillance and Securitization: A Forgotten Sydney Olympic Legacy
The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games were the last Olympic Games held before 9/11. Even though the 2000 Games were held prior to this landmark terrorist incident, Australia implemented a range of increased security processes to safeguard the Games. As such, the Sydney Games provide a compelling case study to examine how Olympic security measures were […]
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Sustainable Mega-events: Beyond the Myth of Balanced Approaches to Mega-event Sustainability
The concept of sustainability is now integral to the lexicon of tourism and is increasingly become part of the discourse of mega-events. Yet despite the success of the concept of sustainable development in being adopted in tourism policy-making and research tourism is less sustainable than ever if environmental measures are adopted. Similarly, substantial questions have […]
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Symbolic Violence and the Olympic Games: Low-income Youth, Social Legacy Commitments, and Urban Exclusion in Olympic Host Cities
Drawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers […]
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Symbols, Meaning, and Action: The Past, Present, and Future of Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical perspective in sociology that addresses the manner in which society is created and maintained through face-to-face, repeated, meaningful interactions among individuals. This article surveys past theory and research in the interactionist tradition. It first provides an overview of three main trajectories in symbolic interactionist thought, focusing on the work of […]
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Syria and the Olympics: National Identity on an International Stage
Since its independence in 1946, Syria has fielded a team for every summer Olympic competition except 1956, yet has won only three Olympic medals. In contrast with its smaller, higher-powered neighbour Lebanon, its participation at the Olympics has been consistent but limited, with the country making little impact internationally. Yet the history of Syria’s involvement […]
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Sports Sociology’s Still Untapped Potential
Following up on Zirin’s (2008) challenge that sports sociologists “get off the bench,” and Karen and Washington’s (2001) plea to make sports sociology more central to analysis of social power, this article empirically reviews and assesses the sociology of sports from 1977—2008. Using a sample of 441 articles selected from the three major sports sociology […]
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Sports Tribes and Academic Identity: Teaching the Sociology of Sport in a Changing Disciplinary Landscape
Using data from 15 semi-structured interviews with UK-based early/mid-career academics, this paper offers an empirically informed assessment of how lecturers teaching/researching the sociology of sport are managing their careers in a changing higher education landscape. Those interviewed were involved in the delivery of sociological content to a range of sports-themed courses with the interviews focusing […]
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Sports-Based Interventions and the Local Governance of Youth Crime and Antisocial Behavior
Drawing on analysis of youth crime and antisocial behavior reduction policies and a qualitative study of sports-based interventions (SBIs) in England, the article considers three ways in which SBI staff, managers, partners, and participants suggest projects contribute to youth crime reduction: encouraging young people’s “self-transformation” through the development of supportive and mentoring relationships (changing people), […]
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Sports-related Concussion in Youth: Report from the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council
A report from the Institute of Medicine (IoM) and National Research Council has revealed the prevalence of sports-related concussions in youth. The need to view concussions as more serious threats to the health of young athletes is highlighted.
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Sports’ Disciplinary Legacy and the Challenge of ‘Coaching Differently’
Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to […]
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Stages of the Global: Media, Sport, Racialization and the Last Temptation of Zinedine Zidane
Major sport spectacles are probably the most potent, vibrant stages on which human drama can be played out in real time before a vast international audience. Media sport, through global scale ‘frozen moments’, can precipitate popular interrogations of ‘race’ and its myriad connections to other socio-cultural structures and identities. This article considers the case of […]
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State of Play: Trends and Developments in Youth Sports
Our fourth annual report is the latest snapshot of how well stakeholders are serving children and communities through youth sports. The report includes the most recent youth sports participation data and coaching metrics from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association; new survey results of youth sports parents from the Aspen Institute and Utah State University; […]
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Sport, Theology, and the Special Olympics: A Christian Theological Reflection
The authors explore the potential of the Special Olympic movement to act as a counternarrative and prophetic message to the big-business world of professional sports. Drawing on the work of pioneers in the field of theology of disability, such as Jean Vanier, John Swinton, Brian Brock, Amos Yong, and Stanley Hauerwas, the authors provide a […]
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Sport, Violence and Society
Is violence an intrinsic component of contemporary sport? How does violence within sport reflect upon the attitudes of wider society? In this landmark study of violence in and around contemporary sport, Kevin Young offers the first comprehensive sociological analysis of an issue of central importance within sport studies. The book explores organized and spontaneous violence, […]
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Sport. In D. Southerton (Ed.)
Once formally codified and standardised the social practice we now term ‗modern‘ sport was destined to form part of consumer culture. In the 21st century we now find ourselves in a position where sport—both in terms of an activity that is participated in globally by billions from elite to recreational levels, and also as a […]
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Sporting Mythscapes, Neoliberal Histories, and Post-Colonial Amnesia in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Andrews (1999) has argued that under conditions of market-based liberalization, the sporting past has increasingly been put to use for the purposes of accumulation. This selectively rendered “sporting historicism,” he argues, results in “a pseudo-authentic historical sensibility, as opposed to a genuinely historically grounded understanding of the past, or indeed the present by rendering history […]
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Sporting Spinal Cord Injuries Social Relations and Rehabilitation Narratives: An Ethnographic Creative Non-fiction of Becoming Disabled Through Sport
Working at the intersection of sociology and psychology, the purpose of this paper was to examine people’s experiences during rehabilitation of being and having an impaired body as a result of suffering a spinal cord injury (SCI) while playing sport. Interview data with men ( n = 20) and observational data were collected. All data […]
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Sports and Exercises in Spiritual Formation
Some followers of Christ claim that sports are pointless activities and even spiritually dangerous, given some of the values that are present within them. Other Christians look more favorably upon the value of sports. In this paper, I defend the latter view. I focus on the manner in which sports can provide a context for […]
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Sports and Religion
The purpose of this study was to look at the two concepts Sports and Religion as an essential tool for development, unity and peaceful co-existence. Both of them have laid down rules and encourage team work and discipline among others. The paper will also focus on the relationship between sport and religion regarding the use […]
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Sports as Never Before: Isolating Celebrity Athletes in Football as Never Before, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and Kobe Doin’ Work
This article constructs a genealogy of three poetic sports documentaries, all of which use multiple cameras to isolate a star athlete for the duration of a team game. All three films are defined by their distinction from dominant forms of coverage, which allows them to foreground elements of the spectacle typically marginalized by the standard […]
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Sports Clubs’ Volunteers: Bonding In or Bridging Out?
The aim of this study is to re-evaluate the nature of bonding and bridging social capital in sports clubs. Exploratory research involving interviews with club volunteers reveals that shared values and norms of commitment to the sport or the club are an important dimension of homophilic and heterophilic ties. These are expressed in the recruitment […]
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Sports Coaches as ‘Dangerous Individuals’—Practice as Governmentality
Recent concern surrounding sports coaches’ interaction with young people has reflected a fundamental change in the way coaches and others regard the role of sports. In this paper, we consider the identification and definition of the contemporary sports coach (whether acting in a professional or volunteer capacity) as, in Foucault’s term, a ‘dangerous individual’. We […]
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Sports in Society; Issues and Controversies, Southern African Edition
Sports in Africa reflect a complex, colonial history in which recent democratic changes have set out to redistribute wealth, reclaim notions of an African heritage and celebrate diversity. With a growing need to discuss and analyse issues, images and controversies with relevance to both the African and South African contexts, a detailed introduction to the […]
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Sports Mega-events, Soft Power and Soft Disempowerment: International Supporters’ Perspectives on Qatar’s Acquisition of the 2022 FIFA World Cup Finals
Through the use of document analysis, field work and semi-structured interviews at five major tournaments in Asia, North America, Europe and South America, the paper examines the perspectives of international football supporters on the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) decision to award the 2022 World Cup finals to the State of Qatar. The paper […]
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Sports on Traditional and Newer Digital Media: Is There Really a Fight for Fans?
In this essay, we examine a series of platform, content, reception, and lifestyle factors likely to shape sports fans’ use of traditional and newer digital media. Because of signal fidelity, screen size, presence, and the rights to air top-tier sports events, television is likely to remain the medium of choice for fans ready to watch […]
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Sports Participation Styles Revisited: A Time-trend Study in Belgium From the 1970s to the 2000s
Social changes have been influencing determinants for sports participation since the introduction of the Sport for All ideology in the early 1970s. Consistent with Crum’s sportisation theory, today’s modes of sports practices, as well as the network of sport services, have diversified and the-traditionalised. As part of a research tradition, this contribution aims at analysing […]
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Sport in Malaysia: National Imperatives and Western Seductions
Professional sport has been radically altered by global capitalism, expanding from its once highly localized origins into an increasingly internationalized, mediatized, and commoditized cultural form. Like other commodities, sport has branched out from saturated domestic markets in the West. The rapid development of Asian economies has witnessed a wave of economic and cultural modernization, and […]
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Sport in the Underlife of a Total Institution: Social Control and Resistance in Canadian Prisons
While it is clear from a small body of scholarly literature that sport and physical activity play important roles in the daily lives of many inmates in diverse prison contexts around the world, there remains relatively little research that sociologically explores the significance of these physical practices in correctional environments. This paper helps to address […]
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Sport Involvement and Educational Outcomes of High School Students: A Longitudinal Study
This study examined the relations among sport involvement and social and personal influences on high school students’ educational expectations and attainment, using National Education Longitudinal Survey-88. Athletic engagement, educational expectations of significant others, peer support for academics, parental involvement in academics, and academic and athletic identities were measured in the 10th grade. Educational expectations and […]
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Sport on the Move: The Unfolding Impact of Mobile Communications on the Media Sport Content Economy
The increased popularity of mobile smartphones and tablet computers in developed economies is transforming how and where sports footage, highlights and information are accessed. These developments are contributing to new commercial arrangements in the media sport sector, as well as legal conflicts over sought-after content that is transferable and reproduced across broadcast (pay-for-view and free-to-air […]
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Sport-based Youth Development Interventions in the United States: A Systematic Review
The growing number of sport-based youth development interventions provide a potential avenue for integrating sport meaningfully into the U.S. public health agenda. However, efficacy and quality must be reliably established prior to widespread implementation.
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Sport-for-Change: Some Thoughts from a Skeptic
Sport’s historic attraction for policy makers has been its claims that it can offer an economy of remedies to seemingly intractable social problems–“social inclusion”, “development”. Such usually vague and ill-defined claims reflect sport’s marginal policy status and its attempts to prove its more general relevance. The dominance of evangelical beliefs and interest groups, who tend […]
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Sport-for-Development in the South Pacific Region: Macro- Meso- and Micro-Perspectives
As the field of sport-for-development (SFD) has developed, there has been increasing debate over the ability of SFD programs to effect lasting structural change on target communities. Highlighting the barriers to SFD program delivery in five Pacific Island nations, in this paper we argue that numerous challenges emerging at macro-, meso-, and microlevels must be […]
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Sport, Celebrity and Religion: Christianity, Morality and the Tebow Phenomenon
Sporting celebrities are rarely discussed within the broader realms of theological debate. Yet that is not to say that their identities cannot offer insight into wider patterns of cultural influence. Indeed, it is our contention within this paper that the reverse is true; that analysis of the autobiographical details of contemporary sporting figures represent key […]
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Sport, Islam, and Muslims in Europe: In Between or on the Margin?
The aim of this paper is to reveal how misconceptions-or using the concept of Arkoun, “the crisis of meanings”-about the role and position of Islam in Europe is impacting on the discourse on sport, Islam, and immigration. France is selected as a case study for this paper as it is in this country where the […]
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Sport, Physical Culture, and the Environment: An introduction
We1 were excited that day in December of 2015 when world leaders in Paris announced that representatives of 196 countries—all living in very different circumstances, constraints, politics, and economic disadvantages—had committed to reducing their respective country’s environmental footprint. As Domonoske (2017) explains, it was the call of 2 degrees that catalyzed negotiations and moved the […]
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Sport, Religious Belief, and Religious Diversity
In this paper I examine some issues raised by conspicuous displays of religiosity in sports. In particular, important questions have been occasioned by the relatively recent pronouncements and behavior of a celebrated evangelical Christian athlete in American professional football. I explain reasons why some find such conspicuous piety worrisome. I raise concerns related to the […]
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Sport and Prosumption
This article engages and extends understanding of the interrelated concepts of prosumption, the prosumer, prosumer capitalism, and McDonaldization in relation to the highly commodified and spectacularized world of professional sport. Developing an understanding of modern sport forms as having always exhibited presumptive dimensions, the discussion focuses on the contemporary sporting context. The analysis highlights the […]
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Sport and Social Class: The Case of Finland
Sports have often been neglected in the research on taste and cultural consumption. This article investigates lifestyle choices in the area of sports, with particular focus on the differences that can be drawn from occupational class and other background variables. Based on nationally representative survey data from Finland, participation in sports and sports spectatorship are […]
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Sport and Social Cohesion in a Provincial Town in South Africa: The Case of a Tourism Project for Aid and Social Development Through Football
This article examines sport and social cohesion in South Africa through a case study of a project on aid and social development through tourism and football in the provincial town of Stellenbosch, in the Western Cape. The field of study includes the project that was initiated, the group that benefits from it – African footballers […]
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Sport and Social Development: Promise and Caution From an Incipient Cambodian Football League
One of the enduring controversies found in the literature on the role that sport plays in social development is whether this assumed relationship is weak or robust. Despite evidence both for and against the ‘sport-enhances-social-development’ model, a rapidly expanding cluster of case studies and a growing literature in a number of disciplines, there remain entire […]
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Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Borders
Can sport serve as a vehicle for social mobility of disadvantaged social groups? How and to what extent are different forms of social capital created through sport participation? Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries takes up these questions through a critical examination of the ways in which sport facilitates or inhibits upward social mobility. Drawing […]
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Sport and Spirituality: An Introduction
In September 2007 the first international conference on sport and spirituality was held in York, England. There, an international collection of philosophers, theologians, kinesiologists and sports team ministers gathered to present papers and investigate the common ground of philosophy, theology, ministry and sport. Some of those at the forefront of this emerging field have published […]
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Sport and the Resettlement of Young People from Refugee Backgrounds in Australia
Within recent years, policy makers and practitioners have increasingly drawn on sport as a vehicle to assist with the resettlement of young people from refugee backgrounds. This article presents the views of sport development and resettlement service staff responsible for supporting the participation of young refugees within sport. Our data suggest that while there are […]
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Sport as a Vehicle for Socialization and Maintenance of Cultural Identity: International Students Attending American Universities
Immigrants can utilize sport as a vehicle for maintaining cultural identity. Conversely, sport participation provides immigrants with opportunities for adopting an entirely new culture. Previous research also suggests that sport provides individuals with opportunities for attaining social capital. While this can be a beneficial situation for some individuals, sport is also promoting elitism and serving […]
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Sport for Development and Peace in Action: Building Facts for Funding
The aim of this article is to provide insight on how claims that sport contributes to development or peace are transformed into facts. Beyond a theoretical discussion about how sport for development and peace (SDP) facts are built, this article demonstrates, in rich detail, the subtle art of SDP fact building for funding purposes. Specifically, […]
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Sport for Development and Peace: A Critical Sociology
“The role of sport in development initiatives has grown dramatically over the last five years, now finding a place in the UN’s millennium development goals. In Sport and Development for Peace, Simon Darnell outlines the most recent sociological research on the role of sport in development initiatives. The book analysis the relationship between sport and […]
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Social Class the Elite Hockey Player Career and Educational Paths
This paper focuses on how engaging in hockey as an elite athlete influences educational paths. It relies on qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews with 36 ice hockey players in Switzerland and 605 respondents who completed a questionnaire. We argue that a strong family belief in sport capital predisposes athletes to leave school early, for […]
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Social Responsibility and the Competitive Bid process for Major Sporting Events
The 2016 Summer Olympic Games 1 bids were selected as a case study to explore how the focus on social responsibility (CSR) and community development (CD) differs in traditional versus nontraditional bid cities. We employed a media framing methodology to examine how the bids were represented through media and articulated by various stakeholders. Of specific […]
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Social Stratification and Sports in Amsterdam in the 20th Century
Participation in organized sports is considered as a lifestyle characteristic that is dependent on social class and status considerations. It has been argued that each sport, to a certain extent, can be considered as a representative of certain status categories. These social status categories are dynamic and their size, exclusiveness, and even existence are related […]
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Socioeconomic Determinants of Success at the Summer Paralympics
For the first time, the determinants of a country’s success at the Paralympic Games are studied, using data from four editions, starting in 1996. By means of a tobit panel, the authors find that gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, population, having many participants per million inhabitants, being a former communist country, hosting the Paralympics, […]
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Socioeconomic Differences in Sport and Physical Activity Among Italian Adults
We aimed to assess the extent of socioeconomic differences in sport and physical activity among Italian adults. A secondary data analysis of a multipurpose survey carried out by the National Institute of Statistics in 2006 in Italy was performed. We found marked differences in the practice of physical activity and sport by socioeconomic position. Subjects […]
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Socioeconomic Status and Sport Participation at Different Developmental Stages During Childhood and Youth: Multivariate Analyses Using Canadian National Survey Data
This study examines the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and sport and physical activity involvement at different stages of childhood and adolescence in Canada. From the previous literature on SES and health-related behavior, there was reason to test competing hypotheses on the direction of the predicted relationship. The data employed in our analysis came from […]
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Spectator Demand, Uncertainty of Results, and Public Interest: Evidence From the English Premier League
This article tests the impact of match outcome uncertainty on stadium attendance and television audiences of English Premier League football. The method accounts for different measures of outcome uncertainty, an issue identified as a potential source of discord between existing evidence. Results show that more certain matches are preferred by spectators at the stadium yet […]
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Sport and Alcohol – Who’s Missing? New Directions for a Sociology of Sport-Related Drinking
This paper presents a series of emerging research avenues and agendas for under-represented aspects of sport-related drinking. Extending the findings of a previous paper, which mapped the dominant themes in sociological treatments of drinking and sport to date, this paper argues for the importance of widening the empirical and theoretical base so as to better […]
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Sport and Exercise Medicine’s Professional Project: The Impact of Formal Qualifications on the Organization of British Olympic Medical Services
This article documents the intended and unintended outcomes of recent organizational change in UK elite sport. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 14 doctors and 14 physiotherapists who are current members of the British Olympic Association medical and physiotherapy committees, it argues that attempts by managers in sports medicine to create a highly specialized area of […]
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Sport and migration: Borders, boundaries and crossings.
Over the past two decades, the rate of sport-related migration across the globe has intensified, as has academic interest in the causes and effects of these migratory patterns. As editors, Maguire and Falcous sought to summarise the ways in which academe has analysed these changing patterns and highlight possibilities for further research. The greatest strength […]
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Sport and Neoliberalism: Politics, Consumption, and Culture
Offering new approaches to thinking about sports and political ideologies, Sport and Neoliberalism explores the structures, formations, and mechanics of neoliberalism. The editors and contributors to this original and timely volume examine the intersection of sport as a national pastime and also an engine for urban policy–e.g., stadium building–as well as a powerful force for […]
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Sport and Physical Culture in North Korea: Resisting, Recognizing and Relishing Globalization
There is little doubt that the globalization process has developed unevenly across time and space. This is most pronounced in the context of North Korea, one of the very few remaining communist societies, which has been isolated from the rest of the world since the end of the Korean War in 1953. This paper explores […]
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