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The Connection Between Race and Called Strikes and Balls
We investigate potential racial bias by Major League Baseball umpires. We do so in the context of the subjective decision as to whether a pitch is called a strike or a ball, using data from the 1989-2010 seasons. We find limited, and sometimes contradictory, evidence that umpires unduly favor or unjustly discriminate against players based […]
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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 Critical Sociology of Race and Sport: The Firrst Fifty Years
This review surveys the sociological work on race and sport over the past 50 years. It begins by outlining the importance of C.L.R. James’s book Beyond a Boundary as a foundational text for the critical sociology of race and sport. Two paradigms of research on race and sport are sketched: the critical and the functionalist-evolutionary. […]
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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 Deadly Challenges of Raising African American Boys: Navigating the Controlling Image of the “Thug”
Through 60 in-depth interviews with African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers, this article examines how the controlling image of the “thug” influences the concerns these mothers have for their sons and how they parent their sons in light of those concerns. Participants were principally concerned with preventing their sons from being perceived as criminals, protecting […]
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The Death of a Female Boxer: Media, Sport, Nationalism, and Gender
This article examines the “gendered nationalism” and “gendered media sporting nation” theses in relation to female involvement in sport based mainly on a content analysis of media narratives surrounding the death of a young female boxer in Trinidad in 2009. The nature of this reaction disproves a dominant view that female athletes or sports have […]
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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 Demand for Younger and Older Workers: Patterns From NFL Labor Markets
This study examines how worker productivity and risk factors affect the demand for younger and older workers modeled using concepts from labor economics. The two primary National Football League player labor markets—the draft process and veteran free agent market—provide rich empirical environments for testing hypotheses from the model. Clubs demonstrate greater demand for rookies by […]
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The Deprofessionalization of Football: The People’s Football Movement in Italy
The movement in Italy known as calcio popolare, or people’s football, is characterized by the organization of fan owned and managed football teams in local divisions. Growing out of the Italian ultrà phenomenon, calcio popolare marks a fifth phase in the history of the ultrà movement, expressing the alienation from heavily commercialized mass-market professional football […]
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The Design of Lower Limb Sports Prostheses: Fair Inclusion in Disability Sport
Within lower limb disability running, the design of the prosthesis has shifted from being a tool for restoring function to one of enabling athletes to perform to near non‐disabled standards. This paper examines the background to this development. The authors argue that the impact of technology on the design of prostheses is likely to affect […]
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The Dynamics of Gender Hegemony: Femininities, Masculinities and Social Change
In this article theories of gender hegemony are utilized to assess how changing norms impact upon the binary construction of gender. Transformed gender ideals have materialized in the figure of the ‘empowered’ and autonomous yet reassuringly feminine woman. Despite the assimilation of key attributes associated with masculinity this particular expression of idealized femininity does not […]
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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 Athletic Labour of Femininity: Branding and Consumption of Global Celebrity Sportswomen on Instagram
This article explores the relationship between consumer culture, female athletic representation and online fan engagement on the photograph-based social media platform Instagram. It argues that social media interaction between female athletes and fans is governed by gender norms and arrangements that expect and reward female athletic articulations of empowerment, entrepreneurialism and individualisation in the context […]
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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 Attitudes and Opinions of High School Sports Participants: An Exploratory Empirical Examination
Sport scholars and public commentators have long held both positive and critical opinions about the influence of athletic involvement on participants and their perceptions of the social world. Yet for all of the strong claims and deeply held assumptions, relatively little empirical data or social scientific analysis have been available. This study begins to address […]
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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 Black–White Swimming Disparity in America: A Deadly Legacy of Swimming Pool Discrimination
This article offers a historically informed answer to the question why are Black Americans less likely to know how to swim than Whites. It contends that past discrimination in the provision of and access to swimming pools is largely responsible for this contemporary disparity. There were two times when swimming surged in popularity—at public swimming […]
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The Blade Runner: The Discourses Surrounding Oscar Pistorius in the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics
In 2012, South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius became the first double amputee to compete in both the Olympic and the Paralympic Games. Using the theoretical notions of framing and hegemony, this study used a thematic analysis to analyze the discourse surrounding Pistorius’s competitions. Using the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) broadcasts of the Olympics and Paralympics, […]
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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 Brazilian System of Racial Classification
Michael Banton’s text belongs to the long tradition of European social sciences which rejects the conceptual use of the term ‘race’ in sociological analysis. His work is also linked to the school — this time a minority — that uses individualist and logico-analytic methodologies, largely shunning historical, structuralist or holistic analysis. The real novelty of […]
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The British Asian Muslim Male Sport Participation Puzzle: An Exploration of Implications for Sport Development Policy and Practice
The purpose of this study is to explore intersections between religion, faith and social identity with regards to their impact on either promoting or preventing sport participation amongst self-identified British Asian Muslim males living in Birmingham (West Midlands of the UK) aged 16-25 years old. The research questions around this topic of study are to […]
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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 Career Trajectory of a Black Male High School Basketball Player: A Social Reproduction Perspective
Interscholastic sport in the United States is a social institution within which the social relationships and attitudes needed to sustain the existing dominant economic and class relations of the larger society could be perpetuated or reproduced. This single case study allowed us to explore the question of social reproduction by examining the nuances of how […]
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The Case for Sunday Mails: Sabbath Laws and the Separation of Church and State in Jacksonian America
as a campaign that mobilized thousands of supporters, anti-Sabbatarianism reveals the attitudes of a significant minority toward church-state relations in the first decades of the republic. […]using a series of petitions from Philadelphia as a sample, I offer for the first time an analysis of the social origin of the signers of these petitions.
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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 Civic Engagement Gap(s): Youth Participation and Inequality from 1976 to 2009
Civic participation in the United States is highly unequal, resulting in a “civic engagement gap” between socioeconomic, racial, and gender groups. Variation in civic participation and the civic engagement gap remain contested, primarily as a result of inconsistent definitions and measurement issues in previous work. Using consistent measures from the Monitoring the Future Study from […]
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The Colour Tine and The Colour Scale in the Twentieth Century
Some more recent evidence supports Du Bois’ prediction that the twentieth century would prove the century of the colour line. It indicates that men have always and everywhere shown a preference for fair complexioned women as sexual partners, whereas males seeking a mate are rarely disadvantaged by a dark complexion. In the employment market in […]
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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 South African Sport Seriously
Twenty years on, the image of Nelson Mandela, wearing the number six jersey of the white Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar, remains a poignant moment in South African and global sport. The 1995 Rugby World Cup victory by the overwhelmingly all-white Springboks remains a powerful symbol in post-apartheid South Africa. Clint Eastwood’s (2009) Hollywood film, Invictus, […]
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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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Teamwork: A Systematic Review of Implications From Psychosocial Constructs for Research and Practice in the Performance of Ultimate Frisbee Games
Ultimate Frisbee (UF) is a non-contact, challenging, and self-promoted team sport. Some factors such as the game environment and rules seem to influence athletes’ behavior. Goals: Provide a robust systematic review (SR) of the psychological domains associated with UF
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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 ‘Uptake’ of a Sport-for-Development Program in South Africa
This article reports on the ‘uptake’ dynamics and resultant manifestations of a school-based, incentive-driven, sport-for-development programme in the South African context of poverty. The ecological systems theory of Brofenbrenner, the theory of complexity and a neoliberal framework underpin the social constructions of local meanings associated with programme participation and involvement. Thirty-nine primary schools in the […]
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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 “Logic” of Specialization: Using Children for Adult Purposes
Decisions and policies in both the public and private spheres were based on the ideological assumptions that (1) the sole foundation of social order was personal responsibility, (2) the most effective source of economic growth was unregulated self-interest, and (3) the basis of personal motivation was competition and observable inequalities of income and wealth (Bourdieu, […]
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The (Im)Possible Sexual Difference: Representations From a Rugby Union Setting
To date Luce Irigaray’s sexual difference theory has had very little impact on sport feminism studies. While sexual difference is still considered in some feminist circles as a regression to the old idea of anatomy as destiny, Irigaray’s sexual difference theory is more about criticizing the universal male subject and creating the possibility of female […]
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The (In)Validity of Supercrip Representation of Paralympian Athletes
This article provides a critical overview of the viability of the “supercrip” iconography as an appropriate representation of Paralympic athletes. It focuses on its validity as a vehicle for the empowerment of individuals with impairments both within the context of elite sport and broader society. This type of representation may be seen by the able […]
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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 Active Ageing Agenda, Old Folk Devils and a New Moral Panic
The proposal that older people should engage in “active aging” has come to dominate local, national, and international policy agendas. This encompasses a variety of ways that older persons might maintain active citizenship, but invariably promotes physical activity and exercise as having health and social benefits, despite a lack of conclusive evidence to support such […]
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The Adaptation Challenges and Strategies of Adolescent Aboriginal Athletes Competing Off Reserve
Within the motivation literature, it has been indicated that athletes respond more effectively to sport’s contextual challenges through effective adaptation skills. Fiske identified five core motives as facilitators of the adaptation process across cultures: belonging, understanding, controlling, self-enhancement, and trusting. Through a cultural Sport Psychology approach, the adaptation challenges and strategies of Canadian Aboriginal adolescent […]
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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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Strong Is the New Sexy: Women, CrossFit, and the Postfeminist Ideal
This article discusses the postfeminist framing of women who participate in CrossFit (CF) and whether that framing provides a counter to traditional narratives regarding the masculinity and manliness of women in competitive sports and activities focused on the body. Our analysis called for us to abandon the ideal that there exists an authentic and true […]
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Submersed in Social Segregation: The (Re)Production of Social Capital Through Swim Club Membership
This article examines the ways in which upper middle class families acquire, transmit, and preserve their social and cultural capitals through membership at the Pine View Swim and Tennis Club, a semi private facility located near a major mid-Atlantic city in the United States. Drawing on Cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s theorizing on sport participation and […]
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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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Successful Sexy Popular: Athletic Performance and Physical Attractiveness as Determinants of Public Interest in Male and Female Soccer Players
This study examines to what extent the public attention directed at individual male and female players of various national soccer teams is influenced by (a) their athletic performance and (b) their physical attractiveness. The results prove that public interest in athletes depends significantly on performance and attractiveness. However, those athletes who both perform strongly and […]
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Suffering and Thriving: Children’s Perspectives and Interpretations of Poverty and well-being in Rural Zambia
Drawing on the findings of a qualitative research in rural Zambia involving 24 children (9- to 16-year old), this article advances our understandings of the ways in which familial and intergenerational relationships influence the experiences, impacts, conceptualizations and interpretations of poverty. It is argued that boys and girls interpret poverty largely in social and relational […]
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Superstar Salaries and Soccer Success: The Impact of Designated Players in Major League Soccer
This study estimates the relationship between production and salary structure in Major League Soccer (MLS), the highest level of professional soccer (association football) in North America. Soccer production, measured as league points per game, is modeled as a function of a team’s total wage bill, the distribution of the team’s wage bill, and goals per […]
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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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Surfistas Locales: Transnationalism and the Construction of Surfer Identity in Nicaragua
Surfers have created their own subculture, which has been associated with concepts such as environmentalism, masculinity, place, and nonconformity, yet the increasing global reach of their sport has created transnational surf communities that bring into question the definition of what it means to be a “local” surfer. This ethnographic study examines identity construction in local […]
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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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Surviving Rather than Thriving: Understanding the Experiences of Women Coaches Using a Theory of Gendered Social Well-being
In shifting our gaze to the sociological impact of being in the minority, the purpose of this study was to substantiate a model of gendered social well-being to appraise women coaches’ circumstances, experiences and challenges as embedded within the social structures and relations of their profession. This is drawn on in-depth interviews with a sample […]
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Suspended Ethics and the Team: Theorising Team Sports Players’ Group Sexual Assault in the Context of Identity
Men’s elite team sports in Australia have recently been the subject of considerable public scrutiny subsequent to a series of instances of group sexual violence against women. Both scholarship and policy work have noted how homosocial institutions such as sporting teams have a greater likelihood of gender-based violence and have proposed the need for more […]
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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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Taking Sex Off the Sidelines: Challenging Heteronormativity Within ‘Sport in Development’ Research
The majority of ‘Sport in Development’ (SiD) research imparts a heteronormative framework that serves to prevent nuanced understandings of how sexuality and gender matter in programming that aspires to achieve development through/with sport. The authors review existing SiD academic literature and draw on personal work and research experiences within the SiD field to evidence this […]
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Sports Review: A Content Analysis of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and the Sociology of Sport Journal Across 25 years
The International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and Sociology of Sport Journal have individually and collectively been subject to a systematic content analysis. By focusing on substantive research papers published in these three journals over a 25-year time period it is possible to identify the topics that […]
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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 Volunteering on University-led Outreach Projects: A Space for Developing Social Capital
The focus of this article centers around an established universities sports outreach program—the Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) project—and explores how its core workforce, student volunteers, perceive that they develop effective working relationships with the project’s “hard-to-reach” clients. The SUNEE project represents an alliance between the region’s five universities to tackle social exclusion, and […]
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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-Based Interventions for Socially Vulnerable Youth: Towards Well-defined Interventions with Easy-to-Follow Outcomes?
In this paper, we critically examine the burgeoning scientific discourse about sports-based interventions for socially vulnerable or disadvantaged youth from a socio-pedagogical perspective. It is argued that the call for more well-defined sports-based social interventions with easier-to-follow outcomes may be at odds with the open-ended philosophy that is viewed as a fundamental principle when engaging […]
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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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Sportswomen and Social Media: Bringing Third-wave Feminism Postfeminism and Neoliberal Feminism into Conversation
In this article, we take seriously the challenges of making sense of a sporting (and media) context that increasingly engages female athletes as active, visible, and autonomous, while inequalities pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, and class remain stubbornly persistent across sport institutions and practices. We do so by engaging with three recent feminist critiques that […]
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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 2018: Trends and Development
Five years ago this spring, Project Play was launched. We invited more than 80 leaders from sport, health, media, philanthropy and other sectors to the Aspen Institute’s campus in Aspen, Colo., to take measure of how well children were being served through sports and to consider ways to improve the state of play. The impetus […]
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Sticking Out in the Field: No, Ma’am, I Do Not Work for the Governor
The purpose of this paper is to further existing research on fieldwork practices and experiences by focusing on issues of reflexivity (Pillow, 2003) and research ethics (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004) within “openly ideological research” (Lather, 1986) that actively renounces the objective observer in favor of the praxis-driven embodied research actor (Giardina & Newman, 2011a). This […]
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Stigma and Status: Interracial Intimacy and Intersectional Identities Among Black College Men
In this article, I use in-depth interviews with Black college students at two predominantly white universities to investigate the construction of race, gender, and sexuality, and to examine intersectional identities as a dynamic process rather than bounded identity. I focus on Black college men’s talk about interracial relationships. Existing research documents Black women’s angry reactions […]
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Strike a Pose! The Femininity Effect in Collegiate Women’s Sport
The apologetic strategies women employ to manage the cultural tension between athleticism and hegemonic femininity are well documented. Existing research, however, tends to be small-scale. The cumulative symbolic implications of female athlete appearance on cultural ideals remain under-theorized as a result. Our quantitative content analysis of a stratified, random sample of 4,799 collegiate women athletes’ […]
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Strong and Hard Women: An Ethnography of Female Bodybuilding
In Strong and Hard Women, Tanya Bunsell offers an insightful ethnographic exploration of female bodybuilding in the United Kingdom, questioning whether female bodybuilding can operate as a vehicle for women’s empowerment and for resistance to cultural constructions of hegemonic femininity. Since the birth of the sport in 1979, female bodybuilding has grown and changed significantly, […]
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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,Fiction and Sociology: Novels as Data Sources
This paper is primarily concerned with the types of data that are of value to sociologists – in this instance, particularly to sociologists of sport. It is argued here that we can and should add works of fiction to the more commonly accepted data sources. Whilst most academic writers may be cautious about the excessive […]
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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 Space Invaders: Elite bodies in Track and Field, a South African Context
This article builds on previous work that conceptualizes certain bodies – particularly women and racialized minorities – as ‘bodies out of place’ and ‘space invaders’ – to put forth the notion of the sporting space invader. I argue that certain sporting bodies become sporting space invaders by transgressing sporting boundaries, real and/or imagined. Specifically, this […]
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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 and Structured Leisure as Sites of Victimization for Children and Young People in Finland: Looking at the Significance of Gender and Ethnicity
Availability and access have been central worries that are discussed related to children’s and young people’s sport and other structured leisure activities. In this article, we shift the focus towards children’s and young people’s experiences of violence perpetrated by coaches or leaders within such activities in Finland. We use a large-scale survey on children’s and […]
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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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