A Companion to Sport

David L. Andrews, Ben Carrington, David L. Andrews, Ben Carrington

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781405191609
• eBook ISBN: 9781118325285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to Sport brings together writing by leading sports theorists and social and cultural thinkers, to explore sport as a central element of contemporary culture.

• Positions sport as a crucial subject for critical analysis, as one of the most significant forms of popular culture
• Includes both well-known social and cultural theorists whose work lends itself to an interrogation of sport, and leading theorists of sport itself
• Offers a comprehensive examination of sport as a social and cultural practice and institution
• Explores sport in relation to modernity, postcolonial theory, gender, violence, race, disability and politics

Part One

Sporting Structures and Historical Formations

Introduction

Sport is neither endowed with nor evokes any universal elements, functions, values, or experiences. It possesses no transcendent substance, and is in fact wholly relational. For this reason alone, sport can be considered an important object of sociological inquiry, since its very po­pularity and ubiquity renders it unavoidably implicated in the myriad relations that structure societal existence. The sheer magnitude of sport's presence within, and influence upon, contemporary societies means it is complexly interconnected to broader social, cultural, spatial, political, economic, and technological forces and formations. As such, this opening section pinpoints some of the key issues pertinent to understanding the sport–society dialectic. These include discussions of: the historical and epistemological foundations of sport; the relationship between sport and globalization; the convergence of media and sport sectors; the social class politics of sport and capitalism; sport, the gendered body, and gender relations; the role of sports medicine and perceptions of health in the context of a risk society; and, finally, the sport industries' collusive engagement with environmentalism. Many of these “big themes” are addressed in more specific detail in subsequent chapters. However, within this opening section, these topics are introduced as key formations of contemporary sporting structures in order to “set the scene” for the rest of the volume.

In chapter 1, Douglas Booth offers a challenging re-examination of the assumptions underpinning how the formations of modern sport have been studied by historians and sociologists of sport. Booth's chapter is doubly useful. First, it provides a broad overview of research pertaining to the origins and causes, diffusion, and reception of modern sport practices and structures. Through recourse to research informed by Marxian, Weberian, Habermasian, and Eliasian theorizing, Booth highlights the objective, if nonetheless partisan, “truths” of modern sport. Second, Booth's empirical survey elucidates the dominant forms of, or approaches to, knowledge adopted by researchers in framing their sporting inquiries. He is critical of the primary epistemologies he identifies within much sport research, namely those realist approaches founded on reconstructionist and constructionist ways of knowing, or epistemes. As a remedy to the perceived empirical, methodological, and political inadequacies of reconstructionist and constructionist thought, Booth advances a deconstructionist-leaning position. This sporting deconstructionism is based on an anti-essentialist and unselfconsciously subjective epistemology. According to this understanding, the generation of knowledge related to modern sport is inveterately contingent, informed as it is by the subjective impulses of both the researcher and the contexts (micro, meso, and macro) within which the research process is enacted. Booth's deconstructionist approach counters the empirical realism, theoretical prefiguration, and associated political insipidity that he identifies as being characteristic elements of extant sport research. As such, Booth's deconstructionist clarion call represents a challenge to the epistemological assumptions (be they reconstructionist or constructionist) framing many chapters in this volume, as it does to the field more generally.

While not concerning themselves overtly with the epistemological underpinnings of their work – something which perhaps belies their constructivist approach toward sociological practice – Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson (chapter 2) offer an empirically rich and theoretically nuanced examination of the relationship between sport and globalization. They identify globalization – a multifaceted, complex, yet uneven process of temporal and spatial compression, and social, cultural, political, and economic interconnection – as a defining feature of the contemporary condition (or what is often referred to as “modernity”), and something clearly implicated in the development and contemporaneous expression of modern sport. The discussion utilizes Robertson's six-phase historical periodizing of globalization, as an interpretive schema explaining the development of modern sport from its germinal phase in the fifteenth century, to the millennial phase of the early twenty-first century. Thus follows a considered examination of the sociocultural dimensions and effects of sport's globalization. Through recourse to the constitutive tensions and interpenetrations linking sporting particularism and universalism, heterogenization and homogenization, localization and globalization, Giulianotti and Robertson highlight the varieties of cosmopolitanism (banal, thick, and thin) operating within contemporary sport cultures and social relations. The political-economic aspects of sporting globalization are then discussed, paying particular attention to sport's contribution to the continued political, economic, and indeed cultural, relevance of the nation state. However, unlike many discussions of sport and globalization, Giulianotti and Robertson scale the discussion down to the subnational level, and illustrate how globally aspirant urban and corporate regimes use sport to advance the interests and particularities of the local. Significantly, they also illustrate the complexities of sport's relationship to the various dimensions of the emergent global civil society.

A significant element of sport's globalization has been its institutional convergence with the various dimensions of the media, beginning with print, and extending into electronic and computer-based media platforms. David Rowe (chapter 3) develops this theme through a focus – inspired and framed by Sut Jhally's groundbreaking critique – on the evolution and operation of the sports/media complex. While acknowledging the political, economic, and technological elements of sport broadcasting, Rowe focuses on the production of media sport as an important popular cultural form and practice: the creative appropriation and manipulation of sport as live media content providing the television audience with a simulated experience of the event. According to Rowe, media sport, and especially that involving nationally representative teams and individuals, has played an important role in (re)producing a sense and feeling of national cultural citizenship within diverse national politics and sporting economies. The very popularity of live sporting events renders them a prized acquisition as broadcast content for advertising-driven commercial television interests, and is also the root of ongoing tensions regarding the protection of major sporting events for the “free-to-air” television sector, thereby illustrating the enduring commercial/non-commercial, global/local relations operating within media sport. Bringing the discussion of the sport/media complex up to date, Rowe points to the ever more convergent new media technologies and practices (including digital networking, mobile viewing, social media, micro-blogging, and computer gaming) that are radically altering the way sport media content is both produced and consumed, particularly with regards to the ownership and control of the sport media environment.

One of the most domineering formations within modern societies was that related to the hierarchical social class structure through which industrial capitalism was able to enact its productive and accumulative functions. The relationship between sport, shifting modes and relations of industrial production, and social class hierarchies, provides the focus for Joshua I. Newman and Mark Falcous in chapter 4. Focusing on the social class politics of sport, the authors highlight the role played by the sporting body in both challenging and reproducing dominant modes of production and their attendant social class divisions. This is achieved through an exposition of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literatures examining sport and social class politics. Amongst other things, these works exposed capitalism's consumption-driven class distinctions, and instead offered progressive sport-based programs tied to the principles of the burgeoning Soviet regime. Newman and Falcous then review the place of social class politics within sociology of sport research, highlighting structural functionalist, figurational, neo-Marxist, activist, cultural studies, and Bourdieuian approaches. This is followed by a recognition of the pressing need to revisit the social class politics of sport within an era characterized by global neoliberalism's creative appropriation of productive and consumptive sporting bodies. Nevertheless, and while acknowledging the continued relevance of sport to the reproduction of social class distinctions and divisions, the authors conclude with an acknowledgement of the “intersubjectivity” of the sporting body. Such an understanding requires that theorizations of the sport and social class relation are not abstracted from other subject formations. Rather, the social class analysis of sport has to be simultaneously attuned to pertinent issues of race, ethnicity, generation, (dis)ability, gender, and sexuality.

Sheila Scraton and Anne Flintoff (chapter 5) focus on the relationship between sport and gender. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly given the masculinist orientation of sport more generally, they show how the sociology of sport community in its formative phases was dominated by male academics with little concerted interest in gender and gender relations. Scraton and Flintoff summarize the considerable body of research which addressed the sociology of sport's foundational malestream. They illustrate how the field's journey through liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist/socialist feminism, black feminism, poststructuralism, queer theory, and postcolonialism, has heralded a shift from a focus on women and sport to one which engages the complexities and interrelationships of the sport–gender–sexuality nexus more generally. This approach highlights the enactments and operations of power in both the construction and contestation of unequal gender relations, practices, and identities within sport. The authors also identify how recent work focused on sport both denaturalizes assumptions pertaining to male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual bodies and points to sporting possibilities for resisting and/or redefining these categories. In doing so, they elucidate the dynamic nature of sporting-based gendered power relations, as well as that fluidity of approaches used to interpret them. Like Newman and Falcous, Scraton and Flintoff point to the value of intersectional approaches to understanding sport's role in facilitating the constitutive relations linking gender and other expressions of embodied difference. However, they warn against a pluralist relativism that subsumes gender with other categories of difference and thereby obscures what they consider to be the principal significance, and consequential effects, of gender politics within sport.

Parissa Safai (chapter 6) focuses on sport, health, medicine, and the ways in which the tensions of contemporary risk-society are played out, with sometimes tragic consequences. Hence, and invoking Ulrich Beck's and to a lesser extent Anthony Giddens' conceptualizations, Safai locates sport within the context of risk-society. According to this line of thinking, the rational control associated with the modernization of society is inimitably linked to the emergence of an ethos and culture of risk. An institutionalized structure of risk identification and management (or what Safai refers to as the safety-industrial complex) has thus emerged, not least as a response to the dangers and uncertainties posed by modern life itself. This necessarily leads to some internal contradictions within sport spaces. Much of commercial culture glamorizes the risk-taking uncertainties of involvement in sport, almost as an antidote to the banalities of modern everyday existence. Conversely, the very banality of that existence is constituted by the pervasiveness of risk-averse paranoias and initiatives. Thus sport is located at the intersection of the safety/danger, responsibility/irresponsibility, precaution/risk tensions which characterize risk-society. According to Safai, the solution to this seeming sport–risk paradox comes through the production of sporting constituents of the safety-industrial complex. These commodified experiences stimulate the fears and anxieties of their consumer/participants (or sport-risk citizens), while simultaneously addressing their demands for overt risk management strategies and resources. Safai concludes with a dissection of high-performance sport within the context of risk-society. Propelled by th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Sport as Escape, Struggle, and Art
• Part One: Sporting Structures and Historical Formations
• Part Two: Bodies and Identities
• Part Three: Contested Space and Politics
• Part Four: Cultures, Subcultures, and (Post)Sport
• Part Five: Sport, Mega-events, and Spectacle
• Part Six: Sporting Celebrities/Cultural Icons
• Index