Sport and Social Exclusion

Second edition

Michael Collins, Tess Kay, Mike Collins, Michael F. Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415568807
• eBook ISBN: 9781135165215
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Tackling social exclusion should be a central aim of any civilised social policy. In this meticulously revised and updated new edition of his groundbreaking study, Sport and Social Exclusion, Mike Collins has assembled a vast array of new evidence from a range of global sources to demonstrate how the effects of social exclusion are as evident in sport as they are in any area of society.

The book uses sport as an important sphere for critical reflection on existing social policy and explores sport's role as a source of initiatives for tackling exclusion. It examines key topics such as:

• What is meant by 'social exclusion'

• How social exclusion affects citizenship and the chance to play sport

• How exclusion from sport is linked to poverty, class, age, gender, ethnicity, disability, and involvement in youth delinquency, and living in towns or countryside

• How exclusion is linked to concepts of personal and communal social capital.

It uses four revised and five new major case studies as detailed illustrations, notably Be Active, Birmingham, the national PE and Youth/School Sport strategy, Positive Futures and Street Games.

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Sport and Social Exclusion features a wealth of original research data, including new and previously unpublished material, as well as important new studies of social exclusion policy and practice in the UK and elsewhere. This revised edition surveys all the most important changes in the policy landscape since first publication in 2002 and explores the likely impact of the London Olympic Games on sport policy in the UK. The book concludes with some typically forthright commendations and critiques from the author regarding the success of existing policies and the best way to tackle exclusion from sport and society in the future. By relating current policy to new research the book provides an essential guidebook for students, academics and policy makers working in sport policy and development."

1 Introduction

This second edition, like the first, is intended for both academic and professional audiences. It is not a ‘cookbook’, nor even a guide to good practice, though it does include some of the latter. The first part of the chapter summarises very briefly constraints on playing sport and the benefits when one does, both summarising a small mountain of material.

Constraints on playing sport

Goodale and Witt (1989) and Jackson (1988) reviewed current research into barriers faced and constraints experienced by would-be recreationalists, and the latter (Jackson, 1991) criticised it for the following: for being limited to barriers to using public resources, for concentrating on groups subjectively identified as constrained, and for using ‘rudimentary’ item-by-item analysis. Subsequently, Jackson identified moves from recreation to leisure, to a wider range of activities and groups, and to other points of constraint, in lapsing, preferences and satisfactions. He also distinguished (Jackson, 1990a, b) between antecedent or structural constraints (influencing preference formation, divided into intrapersonal and interpersonal) and intervening or direct ones (affecting which preferences turn into participation). Kay and Jackson (1991) reported high levels of constraint on lower social groups in their Stoke-on-Trent sample, but also constraints on affluent groups who wished to participate in more activities or more frequently, virtually everyone being constrained relative to their dream/ideal lifestyle.

Having reviewed over fifty studies affecting particular groups, Collins, Henry and Houlihan (1999) produced Table 1.1, later with detailed weighting modified by new work, but its utility has been proven several times. It distinguishes three groups of constraints. The first, comprising rows 1–4, is labelled structural/environmental factors – the nexus of economic, physical and social factors that lead to identifying ‘problem estates’ and neighbourhoods in cities so graphically described in Bringing Britain Together, but which present in a more dispersed and concealed form in rural areas (Chapter 10). At the other end of the scale in the lower six rows is the personal/internal psychological group – seeing some activities as ‘not for me’ because of feeling powerless and unfit, ‘unsporty’, or lacking the money, skills or educational and social capital to take part. As Harland et al. (nd) showed, these are just as effective as poverty, lack of transport, and managers who are blind to or prejudiced about some particular clients. Between these two groups lie the mediating factors of ‘gatekeepers’ like facility managers, coaches, sports development officers, teachers, or club officers who select who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of groups, and of society’s representatives who label people as ‘different’ (an issue explored in both Chapter 7 on ethnic groups and Chapter 9 on disabled people). This arrangement has some echoes of structure and agency issues in sociology. The columns of the Table 1.1 cover the main groups in society that may be considered excluded, and about whom the evidence is displayed in Chapters 3 to 9.

The number of +++ indicates the estimated strength/salience of a particular factor for a particular group. Presenting this material in this manner brings out:

• The large numbers of people affected by one or more factors (looking across the rows). Thus improving the design of buses and buildings for access for wheelchair users also benefits others with mobility problems, like older people using walking sticks, and mothers with pushchairs, toddlers and lots of shopping bags.

• Many groups are multiply constrained (looking down the columns). So implementing an inherently good single policy to attack a particular constraint, like leisure/loyalty cards with discounts to combat poverty (Chapter 3) or of adapting access for physical disability, have no effect on exclusion if managers do not proactively market and make their facilities or services known to particular groups, or if the target population feel insecure in going to certain venues (females, ethnic minorities, aged and disabled citizens at night and in secluded places). Releasing one constraint merely gives another prominence. Here is the permanent ground and justification for better partnerships and ‘joined-up’ thinking, and client-centred policies.

Poverty adds an extra intensity to each of the other factors in terms of ‘locking people in’ and accentuating their feeling that they are not autonomous agents, capable of bringing change to their lives (Chapter 3). Even for the community as a whole, money is listed as the most significant constraint; the second, time, is quoted by rich and poor alike, even by retired people; the chronic unemployed is the group with the greatest problems of time structuring (Kay and Jackson, 1990, 1991). As we see in much of the rest of this book, there are combinations of exclusions that can be said to lead to double deprivation – e.g., being elderly or from an ethnic minority and in lower social groups.

As evidenced in Chapter 4 and elsewhere, if exclusion is prolonged in youth, it tends to affect the rest of the life trajectory, and only a few determined people break through, often for short periods, while some can also slide down ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Author's preface and acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From absolute poverty to social exclusion
• 3 Poverty: the core of exclusion
• 4 Exclusion, education and young people's sport
• 5 Gender, sport and social exclusion
• 6 Exclusion and older people in sport
• 7 Social exclusion and sport in a multicultural society
• 8 Sport and exclusion by disability
• 9 Sport and youth delinquency and crime
• 10 Rural and urban perspectives on exclusion from sport
• 11 Policy implementation: partnerships, stronger citizenship and social capital through sport?
• 12 Conclusions
• References
• Author index
• Subject index