The Consumption and Representation of Lifestyle Sports

Belinda Wheaton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317979098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Since their emergence in the 1960s, lifestyle sports (also referred to as action sport, extreme sports, adventure sports) have experienced unprecedented growth both in terms of participation and in their increased visibility across public and private space. book seeks to explore the changing representation and consumption of lifestyle sport in the twenty-first century.

The essays, which cover a range of sports, and geographical contexts (including Brazil, Europe, North America and Australasia) focus on three themes. First, essays scrutinise aspects of the commercialisation process and impact of the media, reviewing and reconsidering theoretical frameworks to understand these processes. The scholars here emphasise the need to move beyond simplistic understandings of commercialisation as co-option and resistance, to capture the complexity and messiness of the process, and of the relationships between the cultural industries, participants and consumers. The second theme examines gender identity and representations, exploring the potential of lifestyle sport to be a politically transformative space in relation to gender, sexuality and 'race'. The last theme explores new theoretical directions in research on lifestyle sport, including insights from philosophy, sociology and cultural geography.

The themes the monograph addresses are wide reaching, and centrally concerned with the changing meaning of sport and sporting identity in the twenty-first century.

This book was previously published as a Special Issue of Sport in Society.

Introducing the consumption and representation of lifestyle sports

Belinda Wheaton

Chelsea School Research Centre, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

The emergence and growth of the field: a personal account

My own academic interest in what I have termed lifestyle sports began back in the mid 1990s when I embarked on a Ph.D. based on the culture of windsurfing. As one of only a handful of scholars worldwide who shared this interest, I remember vividly my excitement when, during the research, Becky Beal’s paper on skateboarding in Colorado was published.¹ This was the first in-depth empirical study to emerge in English publications, and it was very exciting to learn that I wasn’t the only person who thought there was something interesting and potentially different about lifestyle sport that needed articulating. Since then, there has been an explosion in academic interest in what has been variously labelled alternative, new, extreme, adventure, panic, action, whiz and lifestyle sport.² These labels encompass a wide range of participatory and made-for-television sporting activities including residual cultural forms, such as climbing, and emergent activities, such as kite-surfing.³ While commentators have differed in nomenclature, many are agreed in seeing such activities as having presented an alternative and potential challenge to traditional ways of ‘seeing’ ‘doing’ and understanding sport.⁴ This special issue is testament to the steady stream of exciting work that has emerged over the past three decades, research that has not only contributed to comprehending the significance of these sporting activities, their cultures and identities, but that has provided insights into understanding the relationship between sport and society more widely.

Initially this body of work on alternative/extreme/lifestyle sport was dominated by scholars from North America and to a lesser extent Australasia.⁵ This is not surprising as North America is the home of the extreme sport phenomena – and as Bourdieu⁶ observed, the spiritual base of many lifestyle sports. However it is also where commercialization and institutionalization processes are most developed, and as a consequence, many activities have experienced fundamental shifts in their meanings. For example, as Beal’s work has illustrated, the emergence and success of ESPN’s X Games has had a profound impact on the growth and trajectory of North American skateboarding culture.⁷ More recently, empirical work has emerged from a wider and more international range of sites including Europe, New Zealand, Africa,⁸ China, Brazil (Dorfman Knijnik et al, this issue), illustrating both commonalities and diversity in participants’ experiences. Over these decades the academic interest in lifestyle sport has also broadened to encompass a broad range of different academic (inter) disciplines including cultural geography,⁹ architecture and urban planning,¹⁰ anthropology,¹¹ gender studies,¹² philosophy¹³ and psychology,¹⁴ which as evidenced in this issue, has lead to the emergence of new theoretical developments and to fruitful avenues of enquiry.

Lifestyle sport in the twenty-first century

Since their emergence in the 1960s, lifestyle sports have experienced unprecedented growth both in participation, and in their increased visibility across public and private space. In Britain, for example, the BBC draws on imagery of street-running, surfing and kite flying in its idents, (the imagery used between programmes to ‘identify’ the station), and in the USA extreme sport has featured on a postal stamp.¹⁵ The allure and excitement of lifestyle sport has been appropriated to sell every kind of product and service imaginable, from cars and deodorant to holidays, and to market geographic regions.¹⁶ Lifestyle sports have been the focus of numerous ‘mainstream’ television shows and films such as Blue Crush, Point Break, Kids, Jackass, Touching the Void, and Dogtown and Z-Boys that present the danger, but also the vertigo, inspired by the sports, demonstrating what Beck describes as the importance of experiencing danger and ‘living life to the full’ in a ‘risk society’.¹⁷ Specialist magazines still fill newsagent’s shelves, and are sustained by a multimillion-dollar industry selling commodities and lifestyles to ‘hard-core’ aficionados and grazers alike. The media’s appetite for such sports is exemplified by the continued and still-growing success of ESPN’s X Games, which in 2003 commanded a global audience of 50 million, in a context where television contracts for football, baseball and basketball lost the North American networks billions of dollars.¹⁸

Thus in the twenty-first century lifestyle sports are attracting an ever-increasing body of followers and participants, from increasingly diverse global geographical settings.¹⁹ While the outdoor, non-association-based and itinerant nature of these activities makes it hard to accurately measure participation levels, it is clear from the available sources, such as sales of equipment, market-research surveys²⁰ and media commentaries,²¹ that participation in many types of lifestyle sports continues to grow, rapidly outpacing the expansion of most traditional sports in many western nations. Moreover, this expansion in participation includes not only the traditional consumer market of teenage boys, but older men, women and girls. Nonetheless, these participants and consumers have a broad range of interests and experiences, from the ‘outsiders’ who experience activities as media consumers, or who occasionally experience participation via an array of ‘taster’ activities being marketed through the adventure sport and travel industries, to the ‘hard-core’ committed practitioners who are fully familiarized in the lifestyle, argot, fashion and technical skill of their activity(ies), and spend considerable time, energy and often money doing it.

Aims of the special issue

This special issue seeks to explore these changing representations and understand the consumption of lifestyle sport in the twenty-first century. However the essays gathered together in this volume were not solicited to create a comprehensive collection that reflects core developments in the field; rather it has emerged more organically as a result of a rigorous peer-review process.²² Indeed, 25 papers were submitted – from a wide range of geographic locales, reflecting the increasing range of interest and scholarship in this still-growing field. Those selected were chosen on the basis of academic merit, not for their capacity to illustrate themes or trends; nonetheless, where possible essays that illuminate previously under-researched sports (like BMX and mountain biking) or geographic locales (like Brazil) have been included. Inevitably therefore the coverage of conceptual and theoretical trends is uneven, and there is an over-emphasis on some activities – such as surfing – and an absence of others, including skateboarding. Thus my objective in the remainder of this introductory chapter is to overview current directions in research on lifestyle sport, illustrating both productive trends, and gaps in the body of knowledge. First, I briefly introduce readers to the ‘alternative sportscape’,²³ focusing on the type of activity termed lifestyle sports. I discuss what these activities are, and their significance in contemporary sporting culture, also noting central themes in their conceptualization, and theorization. Then I give an overview of the essays, illustrating how they inform these broader themes. Lastly I point to some of the areas where further work is required.

The alternative sportscape

Lifestyle sports are a specific type of alternative sport, including both established activities like skateboarding²⁴ through to newly emergent activities like kite-surfing. It is not my objective to contribute to debates about nomenclature as numerous comprehensive commentaries on what lifestyle/action/alternative/extreme sports are, their histories, and how they at least initially differed from more traditional sporting forms and cultures, already exist.²⁵ However, as I outline in more depth elsewhere, my preference for the term lifestyle sport is informed by concerns about the labels of alternative and extreme; the former, as Rinehart explores, is a wider-ranging term and set of activities,²⁶ and the latter a media-driven and misleading label. As Booth and Thorpe outline, many activities labelled ‘extreme’ are actually very safe.²⁷ My preference for lifestyle sport is because this is the term used by many of the participants, who describe their activities as ‘lifestyles’ rather than as ‘sports’. Indeed in this collection there are commentaries on yoga and fell running, activities one might not usually describe as lifestyle sports, but as the author Michael Atkinson argues, it is not the ‘form and context’ of sport practices but ‘the orientation to and use of athletic movement in these post-sport spaces that creates fundamental differences’.²⁸ Thus as Atkinson’s chapter reminds us, our understanding of what lifestyle sports are, their boundaries and definitions needs to be continually reviewed in the light of emerging research.

While each lifestyle sport has its own history, identities and development patterns, there are nevertheless some commonalities in their ethos, ideologies and increasingly the national and transnational consumer industries that produce the commodities that underpin their cultures. Historically as Bourdieu noted, many of these sports originated in North America in the late 1960s, and were then imported to Europe by American entrepreneurs.²⁹ With their roots in the counter-cultural social movements of the 1960s and 1970s many have characteristics that are different to the traditional rule-bound, competitive and masculinized, ‘dominant’ institutionalized, western ‘achievement’ sport cultures.³⁰ Participants identify themselves through recognizable styles, bodily dispositions, expressions and attitudes, which they design into a distinctive lifestyle, and a particular social identity. Unlike more traditional sports, subcultural affiliation tends not to be based around ‘national’ attachments, but operates more transnationally,³¹ often connecting with other ‘alternative lifestyle’ groupings such as those found in domains of art, fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Citation Information
• 1. Introducing the consumption and representation of lifestyle sports
• Section one: (global) industries and medias
• Section two: the female athletic revolution? Gender identity and representation
• Section three: new theoretical directions
• Index