Social Inclusion: Through Sports-Based Interventions?
There is international enthusiasm for the idea that sport can contribute to ‘social inclusion’ strategies. Sport now features in various targeted youth initiatives, including ‘Positive Futures’: a ‘sport and activity based social inclusion programme’ currently operating in England and Wales. The processes through which these ‘sports-based interventions’ might promote ‘social inclusion’ require, however, further investigation. […]
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Stuck in Structure: How Young Leaders Experienced the Institutional Frames at the Youth Olympic Games in Innsbruck
The aim of this paper is to explore how young leaders within the Innsbruck Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee experienced the degree of freedom within the institutionalized structure of the International Olympic Committee. Employing a theoretical framework of new institutionalism, a qualitative case study including observations and interviews was conducted. The concept of translation provides […]
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The Datafication of Everything: Toward a Sociology of Sport and Big Data
This paper explores the articulations of sport and ‘Big Data’—an important though to date understudied topic. That we have arrived at an ‘Age of Big Data’ is an increasingly accepted premise: the proliferation of tracking technologies, combined with the desire to record/monitor human activity, has radically amplified the volume and variety of data in circulation, […]
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White College Students’ Explanations of White (and Black) Athletic Performance: A Qualitative Investigation of White College Students
While the sport sociology community has had a long-running conversation about the relationship between athletes’ success and race, there are few empirical investigations of individuals’ attitudes regarding the connection of race and athletic performance. This study on White college students’ explanations of White (and African American) athleticism attempts to push this discussion of race and […]
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White Domestic Goddess on a Postmodern Plantation: Charity and Commodity Racism in the Blind Side
This article looks at the Hollywood “blockbuster” movie The Blind Side (2009) to explore intersections of race, class, and gender in a significant neoliberal, cultural commodity. Animating the production and, apparently, the consumption of the film is the “inspiring” story of Michael Oher, an impoverished young African American man who was adopted by a wealthy […]
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Who Am I Becoming? A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Self-concept Change
Self-concept change is a phenomenon that many social psychologists have identified through various constructs and phenomena, but to date no one has provided an integrated framework. This review integrates research in self-psychology, and proposes three common elements that occur during the process of self-concept change. The first element is the degree to which the self-aspects […]
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Who Are We? My Club? My People? My State? The Dilemma of the Arab Soccer Fan in Israel
This paper deals with the problematic identity of the Arab male fans of Bnei Sakhnin F.C., which is an Arab soccer club in the city of Sakhnin, Israel. Seemingly, the Bnei Sakhnin F.C. male fan identifies with his club for the same reasons as every other football fan in Israel. However, as an Arab and […]
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Who Bets on Sports? Some Further Empirical Evidence Using German Data
Given the rapid expansion of the German sports-betting market and recent changes in market regulations, it is interesting to reexamine the socioeconomic profile of German sports bettors: Who bets on sports? In order to analyse this question, this study used an online survey to collect data on sports-betting behaviour (N=634). It modelled participation in sports […]
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Who Integrated Major League Baseball Faster Winning Teams or Losing Teams? A comment
This article offers some comments on recent articles in this journal about the process of racial integration in certain sports venues. Nothing in these articles changes the basic result in an earlier article where the authors show that entrepreneurship by winning teams is the key to understanding which teams integrated first and why.
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Who Says “No to Modern Football?” Italian Supporters Reflexivity and Neo-liberalism
This study explores the complexities and ambiguities of the recent increase in criticism among football supporters of so-called “modern football.” Drawing on existing elaborations of the concept of reflexivity in sociology, this contribution theoretically extends the hegemony/resistance analytical framework that has commonly been used to portray the criticism of football supporters in strict opposition to […]
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Why Aren’t There More Black Football Managers?
The number of black and minority ethnic (BME) managers in English professional association football, or soccer, has been stable for nearly ten years: there are usually between two and four (out of a possible ninety two). Yet black players regularly make up more than a quarter of professional club squads. The reasons for this apparent […]
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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 do Students Bully? An Analysis of Motives Behind Violence In Schools
Research on school bullying and violence has always been working with taxonomies of bullying to categorize aggressive acts. Researchers distinguish between direct and indirect or between physical, verbal, and relational bullying. Cyberbullying is categorized either by type of action or by type of medium. In this article, we propose another kind of categorization: the taxonomy […]
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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 is There so Little Critical Physical Education Scholarship in the United States? The Case of Fitnessgram
In posing the question in our title, we have set ourselves the task of trying to understand why so little scholarly scrutiny and questioning of Fitnessgram—a product designed to assist in the school-based physical fitness testing of young people—exists in the country of its origin and then consider the implications of this silence. We begin […]
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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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Why We Should Think Some More. A Response to ‘When You’re Boxing You Don’t Think So Much’: Pugilism, Transitional Masculinities and Criminal Desistance Among Young Danish Gang Members
This paper forms part of a discussion with scholars working in the field of criminology and youth crime, in particular those who are interested in sport, gender, and desistance from violence. Furthermore, this paper challenges previous work into the sport of boxing and desistance from violence, and therefore argues for a more nuanced approach, by […]
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Win or Go Home: Why College Football Coaches Get Fired
Models of dismissals of sports executives frequently ignore the development of expectations regarding performance. The author explores the interplay between these expectations and the coach’s tenure by examining dismissals of college football head coaches from 1983 to 2006. Using a discrete-time hazard model, the author demonstrates that schools use prior performance in two ways: to […]
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Window of Opportunity? Adolescence, Music, and Algebra
Research has suggested that musicians process music in the same cortical regions that adolescents process algebra. An early adolescence synaptogenesis might present a window of opportunity during middle school for music to create and strengthen enduring neural connections in those regions. Six school districts across Maryland provided scores from the 2006-2007 administrations of the Maryland […]
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Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women’s Sports
This research explores the factors in choices women make about watching sports. The assumption about coverage of women’s sports in post‐Title IX decades has been that girls who have played will turn into women who watch, encouraging media producers to provide more women’s sports programming. Yet that audience has not materialized, and women’s sports have […]
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Women and the Blogosphere: Exploring Feminist Approaches to Sport
The notion of sports fandom is generally built on the ways men understand and relate to sport. In this research, we explore how women, who come together in an online place, define and understand sport with the goal of better understanding female fandom. Using Coakley’s ((2004) Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies. New York: McGraw-Hill) […]
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Women as ‘Armchair Audience’? Evidence from German National Team Football
Research conducted here aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about gender differences in sport spectatorship. While media coverage of sports represents a “gendered experience”, recent research has questioned the explanatory value of anatomical sex for understanding differences in sport consumption. analysis of TV ratings for German national team football presented here are set out […]
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What About Place? Considering the Role of Physical Environment on Youth Imagining of Future Possible Selves
Identity research indicates that the development of well-elaborated cognitions about oneself in the future, or one’s possible selves, is consequential for youths’ developmental trajectories, influencing a range of social, health, and educational outcomes. Although the theory of possible selves considers the role of social contexts in identity development, the potential influence of the physical environment […]
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What Can Al Pacino Teach Norwegian Youth Athletes? A Norwegian Coach’s Ritual Use of Hollywood Media to Produce Team Culture
This article examines a coach’s use of a Hollywood film as a ritualized means for addressing concerns arising from boys’ participation in Norwegian handball. Through the prism of the ritual I elucidate a set of underlying cultural processes that are unlikely to be unique to this sport and setting. Participant observation among 15 year-old handballers […]
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What counts as “positive development?”
There is a widespread belief that sport participation inevitably contributes to youth development because sport’s assumed essential goodness and purity is passed on to those who partake in it. Promoted and perpetuated by sport evangelists and kindred spirits, this belief inspires the strategy of using sports to create among young people the attributes needed to […]
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What if. . . Flag Becomes the Standard Way of Playing Football Until High School
Last year, in a milestone development that flew beneath the radar of national media, flag football surpassed tackle football as the most commonly played form of the game among children ages 6 to 12, according to annual survey data by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Last week, the LA84 Foundation, a major grant-maker to […]
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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 Physical Literacy, Really?
Physical literacy has become an increasingly influential concept in the past few decades, and is being woven into education, sport, and recreation policy and practice, particularly in Canada. The term is based on a metaphor that likens movement fluency to language literacy. Use of a metaphoric rather than a theoretical foundation has enabled various interpretations […]
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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 Every Test is a Winner: Clean Cycling Surveillance and the New Preemptive Governance
This article examines the trend toward risk-based, preemptive social control as it has developed in anti-doping regulation in professional cycling. Specifically, this research considers how the regulatory technologies of anti-doping surveillance have become a core component of the everyday routines of professional cyclists. Drawing from interviews with professional cyclists and analysis of mediated representations of […]
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When is a Drug Not a Drug? Troubling Silences and Unsettling Painkillers in the National Football League
This paper uses a genealogical approach to explore the conjuncture at which the longstanding but partial and uneasy silence surrounding painkiller use in the National Football League seems increasingly under threat. We historicize and problematize apparently self-evident narratives about painkiller use in contemporary football by interrogating the gendered, racialized and labor-related discourses surrounding Brett Favre’s […]
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When is it Too Early for Single Sport Specialization?
Over the past 15 years, there has been an increase in youth sports participation with a concomitant increase in early year-round training in a single sport. Many factors contribute to the desire of parents and coaches to encourage early single sport specialization, including the desire to give the young athlete an edge in competition, pursuit […]
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When New Media Make News: Framing Technology and Sexual Assault in the Steubenville Rape Case
The 2013 Steubenville, Ohio, rape case featured a sadly familiar story of juvenile acquaintance rape involving star football players; what captured national interest in the case, however, was how the rapists and peer witnesses alike captured video and photos of the sexual assault and disseminated them swiftly and publicly via social media sites. This qualitative […]
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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 are the Female Athletes in Sports Illustrated? A Content Analysis of Covers (2000–2011)
We content analyzed more than 11 years of Sports Illustrated (SI) covers (2000–2011) to assess how often females were portrayed, the sports represented, and the manner of their portrayal. Despite females’ increased participation in sport since the enactment of Title IX and calls for greater media coverage of female athletes, women appeared on just 4.9 […]
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Where are the Kids?
Huge numbers of children participate in sports. However, kids and sports are rarely seen, much less systematically studied by sport sociologists. Our survey of the past decade of three major sport sociology journals illustrates a dearth of scholarly research on children and sport. While noting the few exceptions, we observe that sport studies scholars have […]
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Where Bodies End and Artefacts Begin: Tools, Machines and Interfaces
Our use of artefacts has at different moments been characterised as either replacing or impoverishing our natural human capacities, or a key part of our humanity. This article critically evaluates the conception of the natural invoked by both accounts, and highlights the degree to which engagement with material features of the environment is fundamental to […]
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Where Has Class Gone? The Pervasiveness of Class in Girls’ Physical Activity in a Rural Town
This paper seeks to animate discussion around how social class operates with adolescent girls from low socioeconomic status backgrounds to shape and inform their decisions about participation in physical activity (PA) inside and outside of school. Examining the instance of girls in a single secondary school in an Australian regional town, the paper questions the […]
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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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Using Soccer to Build Confidence and Increase HCT Uptake Among Adolescent Girls: A Mixed-methods Study of an HIV Prevention Program in South Africa
HIV prevalence is eight times higher in young South African women compared to men. Grassroot Soccer (GRS) developed SKILLZ Street (SS), a single-sex intervention using soccer to improve self-efficacy, HIV-related knowledge and HIV counselling and testing (HCT) uptake among girls aged 12-16 years. Female community leaders – ‘coaches’ – deliver 10 two-hour sessions bi-weekly. Attendance […]
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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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Utilizing the Theoretical Framework of Collective Identity to Understand Processes in Youth Programs
This article explores collective identity as a useful theoretical framework for understanding social and developmental processes that occur in youth programs. Through narrative analysis of past participant interviews (n = 21) from an after-school theater program, known as The SOURCE, it was found that participants very clearly describe a collective “member” identity. Aspects of the […]
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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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Violent Representations: Hostile Indians and Civilized Wars in Nineteenth-Century USA
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, white settlers officially labelled most conflicts with Native Americans as ‘wars’, unlike the ‘massacres’ white settlers experienced. This differential description indicated each race’s respective ‘civility’ and ‘savagery’. Indiscriminate warfare was officially attributed solely to Indians, despite much contrary evidence. State bodies’ recognition of conflicts as ‘wars’ was also necessary […]
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Violent Video Games and Reciprocity: The Attenuating Effects of Cooperative Game Play on Subsequent Aggression
Numerous studies have shown that playing violent video games alone increases subsequent aggression. However, social game play is becoming more popular than solo game play, and research suggests cooperative game play is beneficial for players. The current studies explore the effects of cooperative game play on player’s subsequent aggressive behaviors toward video game partners (Experiment […]
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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 Disability and Activism in Second Life
Drawing on an ethnographic study of identity and disability in the 3D environment of Second Life (SL), this article documents the authors’ discussions with many regular users (known as ‘residents’) of SL who identify as having a disability or impairment in their ‘actual’ (off-screen) lives. Since SL offers the possibility of anonymity, regular users with […]
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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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Voices of Empowerment: Women from the Global South Re/Negotiating Empowerment and the Global Sports Mentoring Program
The topic of women’s empowerment in the Global South not only dominates gender and development programming but continues to be at the forefront of political concerns about the status and position of women across the ‘developing world’. Increasingly, it is being championed as an essential ‘developmental goal’ of northern-led sport for development and peace and […]
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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 Need to Talk About Race
It is not easy to name racism in a context in which race is almost entirely denied. Despite a recent focus on the ‘silencing’ of race at a macro level, little has been done to explore the effects of living with these processes, including how they might be resisted. Drawing from a study with 20–30 […]
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We Walk the Line: An Analysis of the Problems and Possibilities of Work at the Sport Psychology-Sport Sociology Nexus
Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars in Sport Psychology and sport sociology have begun forging inter- and transdisciplinary research lines that attempt to follow Ingham, Blissmer, and Wells Davidson’s (1998) call for a coming together of the sport sociological and sport psychological imaginations. This paper presents the results of a thematic analysis […]
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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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Wearing Their Chains Willingly: Athlete Burnout and the Case of Adolescent Gaelic Footballers in Ireland
The aim of this article is to challenge the widespread acceptance of player burnout as an athlete’s personal inability to deal with the situational demands of sporting competition. Adapting Coakley’s earlier assertion that burnout is ‘a social problem rooted in the social organization of high performance sport itself’, the interactions between Gaelic athletes and the […]
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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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Triathlon Magazine Canada and the (Re-)Construction of Female Sporting Bodies
This paper provides a critical look at the ways in which the female sporting body is discursively constructed within Triathlon Magazine Canada (TMC), Canada’s only triathlon-exclusive magazine. By exploring both visual and narrative representations of the athletic female sporting body, this paper exposes some of the discursive tensions that seem to persist in this popular […]
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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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Truth Untold? Evidence, Knowledge, and Research practice(s)
What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth? (Foucault 1997, p. 327) I produce data. You produce data. She produces data. They produce data. Data is being produced. Data produces us. Data. Data. Data… But only illusions […]
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Twelve Not so Angry Men: Inclusive Masculinities in Australian Contact Sports
Sport’s utility in the development of a conservative orthodox ideal of masculinity based upon homophobia, aggression and emotional restrictiveness is well evidenced in critical masculinities scholarship. However, contemporary research is reflecting a more nuanced understanding of male behaviour in many Western contexts, with men performing softer and more inclusive versions of masculinities. Through exploring the […]
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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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Two Cheers for Spaaij and Anderson: A Rejoinder
In their article ‘Soccer Fan Violence: A Holistic Approach’, published in this issue of International Sociology, Ramon Spaaij and Alastair Anderson (S & A hereafter) take up the challenging task to come up with an overarching framework to understand the occurrence of soccer fan violence.They develop a rich and elaborate model that has the potential […]
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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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Underrepresentation of Women in Sport Leadership: A Review of Research
Despite increased participation opportunities for girls and women in sport, they are underrepresented in leadership positions at all levels of sport. The objective of this review is to provide a multilevel examination of available scholarship that contributes to understanding why there are so few women in leadership positions within sport. From a macro-level perspective, scholarship […]
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Understanding College Application Decisions: Why College Sports Success Matters
Using a unique, national data set that indicates where students choose to send their SAT scores, the authors find that college sports success has a large impact on student application decisions. For example, a school that has a stellar year in basketball or football on average receives up to 10% more SAT scores. Certain demographic […]
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Understanding Difference Amid Superdiversity: Space ‘Race’ and Granular Essentialisms at an Inner-city Football Club
Using the findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an inner-city football club, the article examines the relationship between superdiversity and understandings of human variation. It is argued that club personnel relied on what I have termed ‘granular essentialisms’ to make sense of their super diverse surroundings. These were assertions about ethnicity and ‘race’ that resulted […]
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Understanding Gender Differences in Children’s Risk Taking and Injury: A Comparison of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Reactions to Sons and Daughters Misbehaving in Ways that Lead to Injury
This study compared reactions of mothers and fathers to the risk taking behavior of sons and daughters. Mother–father pairs ( N = 52) imagined their 2-year-old boy or girl behaving in risky ways in common home situations that could, and did, result in injury. Emotional and parenting reactions to the behaviors were assessed before and […]
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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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Understanding Racial Portrayals in the Sports Media: Why Is Michael Vick So Fast and Peyton Manning So Smart
Despite a historical track record of black Americans’ phenomenal athletic success, a racial dichotomy has emerged in the sports media where black athletes’ achievements are qualified based on unearned physical qualities, yet white athletes’ achievements are often attributed to earned cognitive and psychological qualities, like discipline and effort. This presents a problem, as television viewers […]
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Understanding the Complexity of the Lived Experiences of Foundation Degree Sport Lecturers Within the Context of Further Education
This paper provides an ethnographic account of the lived experiences of Further Education (FE) lecturers (N=4) who are engaged in the transmission of pedagogic knowledge within a Foundation Degree. To further understand the experiences of the lecturers the paper draws upon Stones’ quadripartite cycle of structuration. This conceptual and methodological approach has informed an understanding […]
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Unwinding Madness: What Went Wrong with College Sports—and How to Fix It
A critical look at the tension between the larger role of the university and the commercialization of college sports Unwinding Madness Is the most comprehensive examination to date of how the NCAA has lost its way in the governance of intercollegiate athletics-and why it is incapable of achieving reform and must be replaced. The NCAA […]
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Update on Banned Substances 2013
Context: Doping has been pervasive throughout the history of athletic competitions and has only recently been regulated by organizations such as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). These regulatory bodies were created to preserve fair play and maintain the safety of the participants. Their updated […]
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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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Use It or Lose It: Ageing and the Politics of Brain Training
This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of promotional websites for three prominent ‘brain games’ – that is, consumer technologies designed to train and improve the brain through challenging cognitive exercises. The study was specifically designed to critically examine how brain training is promoted as a viable endeavour and how brain games are made […]
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Uses and Meanings of ‘Yid’ in English Football Fandom: A Case Study of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club
This is the first empirical study to explain the contested uses and meanings of ‘Yid’ in English football fan culture. A pertinent socio-political issue with important policy and legal implications, we explain the different uses of ‘Yid’, making central the cultural context in which it is used, together with the intent underpinning its usage. Focusing […]
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Using Court Reports to EnhanceKknowledge of Sexual Abuse in Sport: A Norwegian Case Study
Sport scientists face difficulties in gaining access to data on sexual abuse in sport through conventional research sources and also in verifying media reports of such cases. One potential alternative source of data is court reports. The study reported here used a small number of court reports to examine issues confronting those researching sexual abuse […]
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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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Tough Girls in a Rough Game: Televising the Unruly Female Athletes of Contemporary Roller Derby
This article examines the production and promotion of A&E’s Rollergirls (2006), a US docu-soap featuring the Texas Roller Derby Lonestar Rollergirls (TXRD), the league that revived roller derby as a sport for female amateurs. Focusing on the representation of TXRD skaters in Rollergirls, as well as A&E’s promotional campaign for the series, this analysis is […]
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Tour du Dopage: Confessions of Doping Professional Cyclists in a Modern Work Environment
Despite widespread condemnation of drug use in sport, recent flurries of riders’ confessions have emphasized the normalization and omnipresence of doping within cycling. This has particularly occurred since the Festina affair in 1998, and Lance Armstrong’s confession about drug use in 2012. Whilst there is an array of reasons for cyclists’ doping, little is known […]
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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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Towards the Transhuman Athlete: Therapy, Non-therapy and Enhancement
This essay examines the future of sport by considering how medical and ethical distinctions between therapy, non-therapy and enhancement affect the likely use of human enhancements. It considers whether one can easily distinguish among these categories and investigates the legitimacy of such distinctions with respect to medical intervention. It argues that the ambiguity of medical […]
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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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Training History, Deliberate Practice and Elite Sports Performance: An Analysis in Response to Tucker and Collins Review—What Makes Champions?
With the recent advances in genome-wide mapping studies and the emerging findings on the relation between athletes’ training histories and their performance, this should be a time for integrating these two bodies of knowledge for a more complete understanding of the complex development of elite performance. 1 In their recent article, Tucker and Collins 2 […]
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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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Transgender Inclusion and the Changing Face of Lesbian Softball Leagues
This article examines the re-negotiation of sex-based boundaries within the context of transgender/transsexual inclusion in North American lesbian softball leagues. Semi-structured interviews with transgender participants combined with participant observation have been undertaken. We focus on the ‘climate’ (Hall and Sandler, 1982) for transgender participation in lesbian softball leagues that have adopted radical (non sex-binary-based) trans […]
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Transgender Netballers: Ethical Issues and Lived Realities
Transgender people are increasingly tolerated, and sometimes even actively celebrated, within contemporary Western popular culture. However, despite the broader political movement against gender-based discrimination, transgender people’s participation in élite sport remains contentious. Although American transgender professional tennis player Renee Richards drew attention to transgender athletes as early as the mid-1970s, even major sports organizations such […]
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