Sport, Culture and Society

An introduction

Grant Jarvie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138917514
• eBook ISBN: 9781317422716
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What can sport do to produce social change in our world today? It is impossible to fully understand contemporary society and culture without acknowledging the importance of sport. Sport is part of our social and cultural fabric, possessing a commercial power that makes it a potent force in the world, for good and for bad. It has helped to start wars and promote international reconciliation, and governments around the world commit public resources to sport.

Sport matters, but how should you make sense of what is going on in the world of sport today?

Now in a fully revised, updated and expanded third edition, this critical, challenging and comprehensive textbook introduces the study of sport, culture and society. International in scope, it challenges us to reactivate an audacious spirit of activism through sport. Full of contemporary examples, it places sport at the heart of the analysis and introduces the reader to every core topic and emerging area in the study of sport and society, including:

• the history and politics of sport;
• sport, gender and sexuality;
• sport, disability and advocacy;
• sport, race and racism;
• sport, violence and crime;
• sport and health;
• sport, globalisation and democracy;
• sport, media and cultural relations;
• sport and the environment;
• sporting cities and mega-events;
• sport, poverty and development.

Each chapter includes a wealth of useful features, including Sport in Focus case studies, chapter summaries, guides to further reading, revision questions, practical projects, definitions of key concepts and weblinks. Additional teaching and learning resources – including a testbank, resource list and glossary – are available on a companion website.

Sport, Culture and Society is the most broad-ranging, in-depth and thoughtful introduction to the sociocultural analysis of sport currently available and sets a new agenda for the discipline. It is essential reading for all students with an interest in sport.

---

Part 1
The broader context

INTRODUCTION

The five chapters that form Part 1 examine broader contexts that have informed our knowledge about sport, culture and society.

SPORT THEORY AND THE PROBLEM OF VALUES

Theory provides us with different frameworks for thinking about sport in society. The constant interplay between theory and evidence helps us to examine sporting assumptions. Sporting myths need to be challenged constantly. How these particular tools, theories and evidence are used should not be the exclusive prerogative of researchers and students talking to one another; they should be used in specific social contexts, interrogated by the public realm and used, not just to advance knowledge about sport in society, but to act on behalf of the individual’s or group’s values and interests. The accuracy, rigour and relevance of theory and evidence not only provide a basis for critically examining popular and unpopular sporting issues, but also provide solutions to and explanations of particular sporting problems. Frameworks and evidence help you to evaluate and come to decision-making moments and actions.

SPORT, HISTORY AND SOCIAL CHANGE

How does the history of sport help us to understand the development of sport today? Knowing the sociohistorical development of sport helps students of sport understand where and when particular sporting practices emerged. It owes as much to cross-comparative contexts as it does to contemporary historiography. It acknowledges the influence of the past on the present, but also the dangers of thinking solely contemporaneously. By helping them to understand other centuries and other cultures, the sociohistorical development of sport provides students with one of the best antidotes to sporting parochialism, which assumes that the only time is now. It also guards against geographical parochialism, which assumes that the only place is here. The emphasis on social change, sporting trends and past solutions to problems forms the core to understanding how sporting worlds are the way they are today. Histories provide a vast resource of solutions and voices in relation to what has been done in the past when similar situations, contexts or problems have arisen.

SPORT, ECONOMICS AND WEALTH

Economics is about choice and is at the heart of decision-making about sport. It is difficult to fully understand sport without an introduction to sports economics and wealth. What is the economic impact of certain sports in certain places? Sport, like other commodities, is affected by decisions made about resources. Where is the economic power in sport, who holds it, and how does the potential redistribution of sporting wealth impact on different places, teams, communities and individuals? Is sport a form of global trade? Do sports clubs redistribute their wealth and/or support charities or humanitarian disasters? What would a critique of neo-liberal sport in today’s world entail? Throughout this book, links between economics, social science, history and politics are encouraged. These and other themes are at the heart of Chapter 3.

SPORT, DEVELOPMENT AND PEACE

Sport is increasingly recognised as a powerful tool within international development and relations. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) look to sport as a social tool to open up opportunities, freedoms and further choices. Sport as a foreign policy lever can assist international relations between countries and transnational stakeholders. Forms of assistance have included direct investment into a sport industry or infrastructure; assistance with the hosting of major sports events; athlete or sport-for-development support; and soft power, sports diplomacy and the use of celebrity ambassadors. Sport Plus or Plus Sport interventions have attempted, in a more nuanced way, to understand what works where and when and under what circumstances. Whether one is a realist or a liberalist, any understanding of global development or global politics is not complete without acknowledgement of sport’s social and political practices. The discussion of sport, development and international relations does not limit itself to Chapter 4 but provides a grounding for subsequent contributions in other chapters.

SPORT, POLITICS AND CULTURE

What are the changing politics of sport and culture? Politics has been described as being centrally concerned with sport when sport is involved with: (1) civil government, the state and public affairs; (2) human conflict and its resolution; or (3) the sources and exercise of power. A contemporary view might be that politics only applies to human beings, or at least to those who can communicate symbolically and make statements, invoke principles, argue and disagree. The politics of sport occurs in practice when people disagree about the distribution of resources and have at least some procedures for the resolution of such disagreements over sport. At the heart of the political decision-making process is the question of choice. This is particularly pertinent to the analysis of sport, culture and society, where competing definitions of this relationship struggle for dominance within and outside the sporting world. Power, justice and violence are not just concepts, for they are also important issues of our time, but, if sport has a part to play, we should know more about where, how and what works. Chapter 5 moves towards a discussion of the politics of the possible. The politics of sport and culture require a realistic politics of hope in a world that is increasingly tense, unequal and conflict-ridden.

---

Chapter 1
Sport, theory and the problem of values

© Tukaram Karve/Shutterstock

The world of rural village boys playing cricket in India is different from the world of the many sporting ambassadors who champion different social and political causes. Many sporting worlds exist, but how should an approach that enables and talks to so many different sporting worlds be framed and explained?

PREVIEW

Key terms defined ■ Introduction ■ Who controls sport? ■ Framing the analysis of sport, culture and society ■ Sport in social thought ■ Different forms of thinking about sport (1) ■ Different forms of thinking about sport (2) ■ Different forms of thinking about sport (3) ■ Contemporary themes in sport ■ Globalisation ■ Identity ■ Social inequality ■ Culture and power ■ Development as freedom ■ Summary: In search of common ground and social change

OBJECTIVES

This chapter will:

■ discuss the role of theory in the analysis of sport;

■ outline the relationship between sports theory and values;

■ consider different theoretical approaches to the analysis of sport;

■ consider the common ground between different traditions of social thought and sport;

■ reject the notion of neutral or value-free sport.

KEY TERMS DEFINED

Globalisation: A historical process involving a fundamental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organisation that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents. It is also something of a catchall phrase often used to describe a single world economy after the collapse of communism, though sometimes also employed to define the growing integration of the international capitalist system growing in the postwar period.

Epistemology: The study of how we can claim to know something. It is about our theories of knowledge.

Identity: The understanding of the self in relationship to an ‘other’. Identities are social and thus are always formed in relationship to others. Constructivists generally hold that identities shape interests; we cannot know what we want unless we know who we are. But, because identities are social and are produced through interactions, identities can change.

Power: In the most general sense, the ability of a political actor to achieve its goals.

Ontology: The study of what is. It is about the nature of being.

INTRODUCTION

It is useful to think about contemporary approaches to the study of sport, culture and society. Many sporting texts are not written from the standpoint of the critical thinker, economist or political scientist, all of whom use concepts, ideas and theories as a basis for explaining and understanding sport as part of social life. All have made domain assumptions, adopted starting points, prioritised certain questions and marginalised others. They are not neutral or value-free. It is necessary to understand where different questions about sport come from, and why they are being asked. Those interested in political economy will ask questions about wealth and redistribution. The issue, as Piketty (2014: 575) asked, is – who is working in the interests of the least well off? Sport, culture and society as a subject is in itself a distinct body of knowledge, and one might ask who is working in the interests of those at the margins.

Each of the approaches in this chapter and all other forms of analysis are ‘problematic’, not in the sense that they are wrong or unethical, but because, at various levels of sophistication, they have provided the basis for the organisation of a field of knowledge about society and/or sport. This book speaks of a problematic as a definite structuring of knowledge about sport that organises a particular research enquiry into making certain kinds of question about sport and what is possible or permissible, while suppressing or marginalising other questions. The problematic in which you choose to operate determines the sorts of question that you ask about sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Sport in Focus boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 The broader context
• Part 2 Global sport and community
• Part 3 Sport and contemporary social issues
• Part 4 Sport as a resource of hope and the politics of the possible
• Conclusion: Theses on sport, culture and society
• Bibliography
• Index