This is Men’s Ultimate: (Re)creating Multiple Masculinities in Elite Open Ultimate Frisbee
Over the past 10 years, there has been an increasing focus on the complexity and diversity of masculinities produced in sporting contexts. In this article, I draw on Foucauldian notions of power and discourse to examine the performances of elite…
There’s Just Something About This Club. It’s Been My Family: An Analysis of the Experiences of Youth in a South African Sport-for-development Program
This article describes a study of a soccer and life skills programme for youth in South Africa: Buffalo City Soccer School (BCSS). The study aimed to provide insight into the programme’s mechanisms, and evaluate participants’ perceptions of the programme’s impact.…
There was Something That Wasn’t Right Because That was the Only Place I Ever Got Treated Like That: Children and Young People’s Experiences of Emotional Harm in Sport
The article reports findings from a study of negative and harmful experiences of children participating in organised sport in the UK focusing in particular on emotional harm. A convenience sample of 6124 young people (age 18–22) completed an online survey…
There is Loads of Relationships Here: Developing a Programme Theory for Sport-for-Change Programs
This article reports on research on the effectiveness of sports-based interventions that sought to address issues of gang membership, racism, at-risk youth and a rather ill-defined notion of ‘conflict’. The article illustrates the varying centrality of sport in such programmes,…
The Day the Flame Came to Town: The Olympic Flame, Symbol, Community and Commodification
Debates regarding the Olympic Flame Relay oscillate between questions concerning the symbolic value of the Relay and the commodified nature of the Games more generally. While some argue for the potential intercultural understanding that the Flame Relay fosters, others point…
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…
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,…
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.…
Silver Cups Versus Ice Creams: Parental Involvement with the Construction of Gender in the Field of Their Son’s Soccer
This study explores parents’ gendered meanings in their involvement with their son’s soccer participation. We use Bourdieu’s (1985; 1990; 2012) theoretical perspective of fields, positions, habitus and taking positions to examine the way in which parents in two Dutch soccer…
Youths with Migration Backgrounds and Their Experiences of Physical Education: An Examination of three Cases
While understanding young people has never been easy, migration trends make it increasingly difficult. Many classrooms have become culturally heterogeneous and teachers are often faced with pupils with diverse linguistic and cultural heritages. Current scholarship suggests that as a discipline,…
Youth Team, League, and Tournament Sports: Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2018 to 2024.
Radiant Insights has announced the addition of “Youth Team, League and Tournament Sports: Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2018 to 2024” Market Research report to their database. Worldwide $22 billion youth sports markets are poised to achieve significant growth…
Youth Football Participation Dropping
The growing mound of research on the dangers of brain trauma in sports — especially when it comes to the young developing brain — has resulted in many parents deciding to not allow their children to play tackle football. According…
Youth Athletes, Bodies and Gender: Gender Constructions in Textbooks Used in Coaching Education Programmes in Sweden
This paper is based on analysis of ideas about girls and boys in sports as they are presented in textbooks used in coaching education programmes in Sweden. Specifically, it explores gender in relation to descriptions of girls’ and boys’ bodies…
Youth Action Sports and Political Agency in the Middle East: Lessons from a Grassroots Parkour Group in Gaza
In this paper we build upon recent scholarship on the globalization of youth culture and sport to examine the growing popularity of action sports in the Middle East. We focus on the development of the urban physical practice of parkour…
Young People’s Experiences of Parental Involvement in Youth Sport
Recently parental involvement in youth sport has intensified, challenging the understanding of youth sports as an arena where adolescents can develop their identity and autonomy. On this background, our study explores how adolescents understand and negotiate their parents’ involvement in…
World Stadium Index: Stadiums Built for Major Sporting Events – Bright Future or Future Burden?
This report from the Danish Institute for Sports Studies/Play the Game has the objective to obtain a greater understanding of the sporting legacy of stadiums built for or having undergone major renovations to host a major international sporting event. Several…
World Cup 2022 and Qatar’s Construction Projects: Relational Power in Networks and Relational Responsibilities to Migrant Workers
This article explores the relational power and responsibilities to migrant workers on physical infrastructure projects in Qatar connected to the sovereign state hosting the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup 2022. Currently, these construction workers operate under the…
World Cup 2010: Africa’s Turn or the Turn on Africa?
The awarding of World Cup 2010 to South Africa was hailed as a great ‘victory’ for the African continent and the cause of much celebration. It heightened expectations not only about the spectacle itself but about the benefits that would…
Wonderlic, Race, and the NFL Draft
Extending the work of Berri and Simmons on the National Football League (NFL) player draft and the Scouting Combine, the authors use the Wonderlic cognitive ability test to test one implication of a simple Phelps model of statistical discrimination in…
Women’s Ski Jumping, the 2010 Olympic Games, and the Deafening Silence of Sex Segregation, Whiteness, and Wealth
Citing section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 15 women’s ski jumpers took the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) to court over the exclusion of a women’s ski jumping event.…
Women’s Experiences in the Mixed Martial Arts: A Quest for Excitement?
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), like the majority of relatively violent sports, has mainly been organized around the capabilities of the male body. However various indices suggest that women’s engagement with MMA is growing. The purpose of this paper is to…
Women’s Experiences in eSports: Gendered Differences in Peer and Spectator Feedback During Competitive Video Game Play
Despite the growing popularity of eSports, the poor representation of women players points to a need to understand the experiences of female players during competitive gaming online. The present study focuses on female gamers’ experiences with positive and negative feedback…
Women, Social Media, and Sport: Global Digital Communication Weaves a Web
Globally, the digital media has played a key role in generating attention, creating controversy and showcasing changes in media coverage of women’s sports. Social media have made sports coverage an interpersonal, intercultural and international public domain. For the news media,…
Women Play Sport, but not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media
One of the long-standing trends in research on gender in sports media is the lack of coverage of women’s sport and the lack of respectful, serious coverage of women’s sport. In this article, we critically interrogate the assumption that the…
Women Bloggers: Identity and the Conceptualization of Sports.
With the emergence of the blogosphere, women have gained a unique opportunity to share their experiences. This study explored the formation of self and the conceptualization of sports in the “Sports Blog” directory of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. A…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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’…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…