Critical Conversations in Sport and Popular Culture (CCSPC) (original) (raw)
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We’re all transnational now: sport in dynamic sociocultural environments
Sport in Society, 2016
Sport has a deep, enduring attachment to nation as spatial anchor, governmental principle and romantic ideal while being simultaneously implicated in processes that strain, challenge and disrupt the sportnation nexus. Sport institutions, practices and tastes move into new territories and, correspondingly, people relocate to national spaces where they must negotiate the terms of an established sportingsocietal order in the context of a global 'media sports cultural complex'. Sport, therefore, is compulsively transnational, unevenly global, and reflexively national in character by means of multidimensional, dynamic interplay. This article focuses on how the lives of ethnically diverse, urban and mobile human subjects in Australia are interwoven with sport in ways that illuminate its capacity symbolically to bind and separate citizens/residents to extant national formations. In addressing sport's role in social inclusion/exclusion and cultural citizenship in demographically diverse societies, the article explores its positioning at the intersection of national symbols and material processes. Introduction: sport within and beyond nations Sport is a social institution and cultural form that derives much of its symbolic power from the idea of nation while, for over two centuries, increasingly exceeding the boundaries of the national in material and symbolic form (Bairner 2001). For this reason, to talk about sport in 'transnational contexts' is, in effect, to embrace all contemporary sport, including those that are highly local and more 'folk'-oriented (such as kabbadi, kho kho, jukshei and pelota) but cannot be isolated from external sporting forces. It may be more or less national, transnational or global in nature, but to be defined as sport-in short, rationalized, regulated, competitive physical play-is inevitably to be implicated in the realm of the supranational. This article is principally concerned with those sports that are most regulated, commercialized and mediated. Sport in the twenty-first century is pulled in different directions, appealing, especially when involving international competition, to nationalist frameworks and impulses, while, especially in the light of its digitally-facilitated mediation (Hutchins and Rowe 2012), creating myriad connections and points of identification. A double movement,
An Introduction to the Sociology of Sports Mega-Events
The Sociological Review, 2006
It is surprising that the sociological and social scientific study of sport-ritualized, rationalized, commercial spectacles and bodily practices that create opportunities for expressive performances, disruptions of the everyday world and affirmations of social status and belonging-was still seen as something as a joke by mainstream sociology until recently. A similar comment was made in the introduction to a previous Sociological Review Monograph on Sport, Leisure and Social Relations published twenty years ago (Horne, Jary and Tomlinson, 1987). Yet, quite clearly, social aspects of sport can be considered from most classical, modern and postmodern sociological theoretical perspectives, even if the 'founding fathers' did not have much explicitly to say about them (Giulianotti, ed., 2004). Ritualized, civic, events and ceremonies (Durkheim); rationalized, bureaucratically organized, science driven behaviour (Weber); commercial, global spectacles (Marx); expressivity and the everyday (Simmel and postmodernism); and male cultural displays and cultural centres (feminism). These are just a few of the issues that have concerned sociological theorists and inform the sociological analysis of sport. It was Pierre Bourdieu, however, alongside Norbert Elias and his colleague Eric Dunning, who has been one of the few leading mainstream sociologists to have taken sport seriously and who recognized the difficulty in doing so: 'the sociology of sport: it is disdained by sociologists, and despised by sportspeople' (Bourdieu, 1990: 156). This book suggests that just as modern competitive sport and large-scale sport events were developed in line with the logic of capitalist modernity, sports mega-events and global sport culture are central to late modern capitalist societies. As media events, the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA association football World Cup provide cultural resources for reflecting upon identity and enacting agency. More generally they provide resources for the construction of 'a meaningful social life in relation to a changing societal environment that has the potential to destabilize and threaten these things' (Roche, 2000: 225). Sports 'mega-events' are important elements in the orientation of nations to international or global society. As Munoz suggests in his chapter, mega-events,
Assessing the sociology of sport: On media and power
On the 50th anniversary of the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) and International Review for the Sociology of Sport (IRSS), a key international figure in the study of media and sport within the sociology of sport, David Rowe, reflects on the field as a whole and the role for studying media and power within it. Rowe considers how some development in the sociology of sport within the larger discipline of sociology may be seen as 'gestural and instrumental'. In considering the challenges of the field, Rowe notes how the media serves to situate and amplify sport's inherent powers of 'liveness', whether sport is manifest in mega-events or in 'extraordinary ordinariness'. The closing section of the essay focuses on questions of media and power, foremost those concerning spectacle and commodification and their intersection with politics and the transactions of nationalized identities with those of race, ethnicity and gender in a globalized media sports cultural complex. Reflections Meditative articles of this kind often display contrasting, perhaps incommensurate tones – the triumphant versus the elegiac. The former narrates stories of struggle, of barriers overcome and progress made, while the latter laments what has been lost and the regrets that accompany failure and thwarted ambition. The reflections here will be tinged with both analytical moods, taking on an inevitably autobiographical character that is intended to demonstrate that the field and its history looks rather different according to vantage point, and that omniscient claims to encapsulate it all should be treated with appropriate scepticism. In short, this is a commentary by a self-identified sociologist of sport who also identifies as much else besides, who came to the field through academic happenstance, and who is acutely aware of the particularity of his experience.
Imagine a world without sport; the euphoric triumphs, the heart-breaking losses and the everyday sporting controversies which captivate a global audience would no longer exist. For millions of people around the world the excitement that sport entails ‘are like lightning bolts that interrupt an otherwise continuous skyline’ (Cashmore, 2000:6). Without sport, the world would never have witnessed Andy Murray make history by being the first Briton in 77 years to win the Wimbledon men's title, Victoria Pendleton would never have powered her way to winning gold in the women’s Keirin during the 2012 London Olympics, and Alex Ferguson would not have retired as the ‘greatest’ football manager of all time (?). Needless to say, there is more to sport than the sports themselves. Sport has become so deeply entrenched as a pillar of modern society, that to envisage a world without it seems inconceivable; neither the globalisation of commercial sports (Coakley, 2003) nor the intimate relationship between sport and politics (Houlihan, 2002) would ever have been formed. Additionally, the idea of using mega-sporting events, such as the Olympics, as global platforms for protest (Cottrell and Nelson, 2010), or as backdrops for terrorism (Giulianotti and Klauser, 2012), would be non-existent.
Topics and trends: 30 years of sociology of sport
European Journal for Sport and Society, 2018
What is and was the sociology of sports all about? Through the method of topic modelling, I will investigate the content of all articles (full text, N ¼ 1923) from what has historically been the three leading sociology of sport journals-Sociology of Sport Journal, International Review for the Sociology of Sport and Journal of Sport and Social Issuesfrom 1984 to 2014. The study extracts 20 dominant topics: from the vague but central topic of Culture via Organization & Politics, Gender, Race, and Body to the less central, but more specific, topic of Football, Nationalism and Globalization. Additionally, I look at how the three journals have their strongholds in these topics, and how the topics have fluctuated over time. The results are discussed against the background of previous reviews and studies in the sociology of sports.
Assessing the sociology of sport: On media, advertising and the commodification of culture
International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2015
On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key scholar in developing meshed understandings of sport, media, globalization and nation, Steven Jackson, considers inquiry on media, advertising and the commodification of culture within the sociology of sport. By virtue of focus on the notion of a ‘sport/media complex’, key early works on media and sport posed the ongoing need to understand the relationships, complexities and contradictions in the life of cultural commodities associated with sport. In focusing on the ‘sport media promotional culture nexus’, understandings of advertising as a pivotal link between production and consumption are central to broader questions about sport, including the roles of global media, mega-events and corporate nationalism as they relate to both identity formations and politics. Future research on sport, advertising and commodification will play an important role in understanding how consumer capitalism has transformed citizenship and how effective...
SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT: UNITED KINGDOM
1. ABSTRACT Sociology of sport in the UK is as old as the subdiscipline itself but was uniquely shaped by the prominence of football hooliganism as a major social issue in the 1970s and 80s. While it remains a somewhat niche activity, the field has been stimulated by the growing cultural centrality of sport in UK society. This quantitative and qualitative development has been recognized in recent governmental evaluations of research expertise. Current research reflects this expanded range of social stratification and social issues in sport both domestically and on a global level, while the legacy of hooligan research is evident in the continuing concentration on studies of association football. Historically, this empirical research has largely been underpinned by figurational, Marxist/neo-Marxist , or feminist sociological theories, but there is now a greater emphasis on theoretical synthesis and exploration. As a consequence of the expansion of the field, allied to its empirical and theoretical diversity, there is a burgeoning literature produced by UK sociologists of sport which spans entry level textbooks, research monographs and the editorship of a significant number of specialist journals. The chapter concludes by noting the future prospects of the sociology of sport in the UK in relation to teaching, research and relations with other sport-related subdisciplines and the sociological mainstream.