Sport, Culture and Ideology (RLE Sports Studies)

Jennifer Hargreaves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138774773
• eBook ISBN: 9781317681014
• Edition: 1

Sport celebrates basic human values of freedom, justice and courage. This collection of essays probes beneath those assumptions in order to illuminate how sport is intimately related to power and domination. Topics include the media treatment of sport, drug-taking in sport and the controversial and problematic relationship between sport and politics in Russia and South Africa.

Chapter 1

Theorising sport: an introduction

Jennifer Hargreaves

In recent years there has developed an increasing interest in sport as a cultural phenomenon (1) – a trend reflected by this book, which is the direct product of a conference organised in 1980 by the Department of Sports Studies of the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, in liaison with the Sports Council (London and South East region). I wish here to give an account of the specific historical context for the conference in order to make clear why it was planned and the ambitions behind it, one important feature of which is a social analysis of sport within the physical education and cultural studies traditions.

The theoretical treatment of sport in Britain has in the past been almost exclusively the preserve of the physical education profession, which has given minimal reference to the ways in which sport is socially constructed and has ignored the fact that any analysis implicitly contains a theory of society. Sport has traditionally been accorded low academic status in higher education. Any student wishing to study sport was obliged to attend a teacher training college, and even the specialist colleges of physical education, (2) which provided an elite qualification in the field, reinforced the institutional separation of sport from the ‘intellectual’ curriculum. For more than sixty years no degree courses in sports studies were available, after which time just one university offered sport as an element of context that various theories of sport were established, all of which, in different ways, tended towards a conservative and uncritical assessment of the function of sport in society.

A traditional influence on the subject has been the entrenched scientific and positivist bias of much sports theory, established in the early days by the strongly upheld medical and therapeutic justifications for exercise when the anatomical and physiological study of the body was the basis from which to teach physical education. (4) In recent years sports science, which has become highly sophisticated and incorporates specialised areas such as human biology, exercise physiology, biomechanics, the psychology of skilled behaviour and motor impairment, is normally presented as pure objectivity. (5) The emphasis on quantitative methodology, rigorous testing, and claims to neutral, context-free procedures have systematically separated sports ‘facts’ from their social and historical context, and, as a result, sports science methodology has incorporated taken-for-granted assumptions about the social function of sport without any attempt to justify them. Sports performance is analysed in terms of the individual with the implicit assumption that sport has a beneficial effect on a person's personality, mental and physical health, and sociability. Sports science is also fundamentally linked to a competitive sports ideology which supports the existing system of high-level competitive sport. Such consequences as widespread and harmful drug use and serious and debilitating sports injuries are viewed as problems which are intrinsic to the sports context and hence to be corrected within it. Sport is thus conceptualised as functional to society in its present form – a ‘common-sense’, ideological premise which masks its important economic, political and ideological connotations. In this way the sports science paradigm has implicitly validated dominant attitudes about the social character and values of sport.

The empiricist tradition of historical and comparative studies of sport has reinforced this dominant sports ethos. (6) Much of the work tends to be descriptive, atheoretical and void of critical analysis. Historical ‘facts’ and analytic categories are used as if they are independent, without reference to the criteria for selection and interpretation, and accounts are frequently constructed around individual pioneers of sport, the compilation of ‘facts’ invariably taking primacy over interpretation. Sport is thus characteristically considered in abstraction from its society and treated as a homogeneous, cultural universal for the purposes of cross-cultural comparison. For example, ‘sporting nationalism’ is a term used as a given – a sort of supra-historical, unproblematic abstraction, whereas in reality, it is a complex and distinctly different phenomenon in, for example, the Soviet Union than in Britain. Furthermore, it comprises many different types of ‘nationalisms’ determined by different contexts and sets of social relations which need to be explained within the situation of each specific nation state. Generally speaking, historical and comparative analyses of sport underestimate both the complexities of the social structures and the complexities of sport itself. They are based upon generalisations in relative isolation from the social, political and economic conditions of the time. Furthermore, they tend to assume a static conception of history rather than a dynamic conception in which history is viewed as a process.

Even the stress on movement creativity and individualism in the 1950s, associated mostly with women's work, did little to challenge the professional domain. (7) This emphasis produced a specialised language and a focus on the experiential which was mystifying to outsiders and which tended to isolate the subject academically and make rational discourse with other disciplines difficult. Physical education as a whole tended to be viewed as intellectually undemanding and devoid of ‘important’ and ‘useful knowledge’ equivalent to that of the ‘academic’ curriculum – an attitude supported by the historic view of physical education as a health-giving process and a force for discipline and the inculcation of important moral values. From the late 1960s, as a result of the unprecedented expansion of higher education throughout Britain, physical education was accepted as a subject in the new Bachelor of Education degree. In an endeavour to provide an academically viable area of knowledge, variants of the sociology of sport and leisure were incorporated into programmes of study. However, such courses produced no fundamental change in the process of production of teachers of physical education who continued to be trained to fit unproblematically into existing vocational and sporting structures.

The recent reorganisation of teacher education in Britain and the introduction of new degree programmes into this sphere of higher education has fundamentally, and dramatically, affected the production of sports theory. Sports studies have been validated as single-subject degrees and as components of joint-subject degrees at undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels. Physical education lecturers are now situated on an ‘academic par’ with colleagues teaching equivalent degree-level work in other subjects. Courses are often wide-ranging in conception, incorporating multidisciplinary analyses of sport with reference to skilled performance, aesthetics, the educational context, medical therapy, and the spheres of leisure and recreation. Significantly, there has been a manifest shift of emphasis from sport in education to sport in recreation. (8) This is a reflection of a policy concern with the ‘problem of leisure’ (9) and a feature of the boom in the leisure industry. Teacher education is now only a small part of the work of ‘physical education lecturers’ – a misnomer for those involved in the study of sport in a wider context.

The stage has been reached now where most of the new degree courses in sports studies offered at colleges, universities and polytechnics throughout Britain typically include some reference to the social construction of sport. Course texts which focus exclusively on sports sociology are mostly American and, although between them different perspectives are represented, together they portray a mainly uncritical analysis of sport which has been characterised as functionalist. (10) There is no equivalent quantity of British work in the field and most of what there is implicitly validates the existing authorities and structures of sport and fails to trace connections between sport, power, domination and political control. A critical sociology of sport, broadly speaking within the Marxist tradition, is a recent development still in its formative stages. Courses in the sociology of sport are taught, almost exclusively, by specialists trained originally in physical education who have acquired additional qualifications in sociology and other related fields. Sadly, in spite of its quest for academic respectability, the physical education profession has failed to extend the social analysis of sport and has produced no substantial or polemical publication which would challenge the influence of ‘mainstream’ sports sociology. (11) In addition, the predominantly unproblematic treatment of the relationship between sport and society in professional journals, courses, and conferences reflects the way in which physical education theorists identify, and work closely with, practitioners, organisers, coaches and administrators of sport. (12) These two groups, the theorists and the sporting personnel, have had a symbiotic relationship in the production of sports theory and practice, a determining feature of which is their shared vested interest in the development of sporting excellence and in the burgeoning sports recreation sphere. The structural position of physical education teachers tends to constrain them from making a contribution to a critical analysis of the institution of sport. In no way is a blanket condemnation of what might be termed the ‘sports establishment’ implied here, or of the physical education profession. Our concern is for a more open, less incomplete and biased social analysis of sport than is at present being provided by the major institutionalised source of theory.

The potential for such an intervention has been enhanced by the recent growth in another area of research – cultural studies. There is increasing concern amongst theorists from disciplines outside the physical education tradition to treat sport seriously as an aspect of culture. Sport is included as an element of study, although not a pivotal one, in increasing numbers of courses run by different faculties under such rubrics as community studies, popular culture, and sociology of leisure. (13) However, it would be misleading to imply that sport is receiving the same attention as other cultural practices: the amount of work is limited and fragmented and sport remains, overall, a neglected area of study with many components of a comprehensive analysis completely unresearched. (14) The paucity of literature in the field directs us to seek out scattered readings from a wide range of sources, such as social history, philosophy, political theory and anthropology. However, the potential for a more sophisticated and rigorously theoretical grasp of sport, which recognises its complex characteristics and its specific relation to the modern capitalist social formation, appears to derive most directly from this group of apparently ‘free-floating’ intellectuals from outside the physical education profession. Such theorists together contribute to the emergent and fast-growing field of cultural studies, which is characterised not so much as ‘a “discipline”, but an area where different disciplines intersect in the study of the cultural aspects of society’. (15)

I have identified two sources of the analysis of sport in society: the traditional physical education paradigm with a powerful scientific component and an unmistakable policy orientation underpinned by predominantly functionalist sociology, and the evolving, multidisciplinary field of cultural studies whose parameters are much wider and whose whole history has embodied the social.

Different theoretical approaches have been influential in the development of cultural studies, and although the arguments are complex and unresolved and cannot be examined in detail here, my intention in outlining the dominant perspectives is to show the position of sport, and its relationship to other cultural forms. In its institutionalised form, cultural studies has had a very brief history in Britain. (16) Various accounts locate its origins in the ‘cultural debates’ of the mid-1950s which were articulated in response to economic, social and political changes in British society. (17) The focus of attention was the ‘lived experience of improvement of a whole generation of working people’ in a post-war, relatively affluent society, and discourse revolved around the apparent homogeneity of the accompanying ‘mass consumer culture’. (18) The so-called early ‘culturalist’ stance is associated with certain key texts rooted in a literary-historical mode, namely, Richard Hoggart's ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1957), Raymond Williams's ‘Culture and Society’ (1958) and ‘The Long Revolution’ (1961), together with E.P. Thompson's ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ (1963), which falls clearly within the Marxist tradition of historiography. (19)

In common, they were hostile to elitist conceptions of culture, and especially to the unreserved elitism of literary critics such as T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis who vehemently opposed the debasement of ‘traditional’ (or worthwhile) culture by the desensitising properties of industrial ‘mass’ (or worthless) culture which had replaced it:

Mass production, standardization, levelling-down – these three terms convey succinctly what has happened. Machine-technique has produced change in the ways of life at such a rate that there has been something like a breach in cultural continuity; sanctions have decayed; and, in any case, the standards of mass-production (for mass-production conditions now govern the supply of literature) are not those of tradition.… It is then vain to hope that standards will somehow re-establish themselves in the higgling of the market; the machinery of civilisation works increasingly to obliterate them. (20)

Leavis took the ‘general state of language as a paradigm of the culture’, and he counterposed the texts and artefacts which con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Theorising Sport: An Introduction
• 2 Sport, Culture and Ideology
• 3 ‘Highlights and Action Replays’ — Ideology, Sport and the Media
• 4 Women and Leisure
• 5 Women in Sport in Ideology
• 6 Sport and Youth Culture
• 7 On the Sports Violence Question: Soccer Hooliganism Revisited
• 8 Sport and Drugs
• 9 Sport and Communism — on the Example of the USSR
• 10 The Politics of Sport Apartheid
• Index