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Almost three decades ago, cultural geographer Richard Pillsbury documented the national expansion of NASCAR and what he considered the erosion of major-league stock car racing as a unique southern tradition. This claim is reassessed in light of recent research, leading us to suggest that the sport is actually “transcultural” in nature. It is influe...
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... able to advertise their products on television because of a congressional ban, R. J. Reynolds envisioned stock car racing as a new way of reaching consumers. In 1972, the first full year of the tobacco company's sponsorship, NAS- CAR cut the race schedule from forty-eight events to thirty-one, with the hosting of no more than one race a week ( Figure 1). ''Reynolds believed that a shorter tour, profil- ing bigger events, would create more mean- ingful exposure and a more cost-efficient use of its promotion dollars'' (Hagstrom 1998, 109). ...
Citations
... Despite extensive research on the geographies of sport (for a multi-sport overview see Koch, 2017; for specific US sports, see Alderman et al., 2003;Wise & Kirby, 2020), and specifically football (Baker, 2018;Conner, 2014;Lawrence, 2016), there is only limited examination of the names of the venues in which these activities are, quite literally, played out. In relation to football stadia naming, such work (see Church & Penny, 2013;Vuolteenaho & Kolamo, 2012; 2019, on which this paper builds) is grounded in critical toponymy (Rose-Redwood et al., 2010). ...
This paper explores how the corporate (re)naming of football stadia and their urban environs is negotiated through fans’ toponymic discourses and associated commemoration. Critical toponymy research emphasises oppositional toponymic tensions between sovereign authorities and citizens, which can result in competing inscriptions of space. Adopting a quasi-ethnographic approach, we reveal a more complex picture by exploring the variegated toponymic discourses of football fans. The findings demonstrate intricate entanglements in how fans reluctantly accept a corporate stadium name, yet also actively resist it through counter-performative utterances, often imbued with commemorative intent. Alternatively, fans passively ignore a corporate stadium name, using a former toponym in quotidian and habitual speech. We conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the influence of corporate power in urban toponymic inscription.
... This area has been the home of NASCAR racing for over 80 years, and it is now best known as the 'NASCAR Valley' for its concentration of motorsport-related knowledge and the high profile of its skilled workforce. Research to date has focused mainly on the cultural aspects affecting the sport (see Pillsbury 1974;Howell 1997;Alderman et al. 2003), the economic impact of NASCAR racing in the Charlotte region (Hartgen et al. 1996) and the nature of the cluster (Hurt 2002). However, new trends seem to emerge, with NASCAR companies developing links with companies located outside the cluster (and in particular with companies located in the UK motorsport industry). ...
In this paper, we explore trans-local relationships and their changing dynamics over time, particularly emphasizing their knowledge flows. The underlying proposition is that the clusters are not isolated entities and that inter-cluster ties are as significant as local ties in sustaining the co-evolution of clusters. We use historical and retrospective analyses to study the inter-linkages between the NASCAR cluster and the UK motorsport industry. Our findings highlight that the structure of the inter-firm ties between the two clusters has evolved over time with a marked increase in the number of linkages established and the transfer of more sophisticated knowledge and components. At the same time, the research highlights some impediments that have delayed the transition of the NASCAR cluster to a more open entity. The authors propound that co-location and proximity are poor indicators of the structure of clusters and that the inter-cluster linkages play an important role in their co-evolution.
... Stock car racing was demonstrated by Pillsbury (1974) and later Alderman et al. (2003) to be important to identity in the United States South, but these authors recognized that this sports identity is no simple matter. Southern regional identity has always been complicated by relations with other regions. ...
Sports fandom represents a significant aspect of place identity, as demonstrated by the colorful landscapes associated with team loyalty. However, there has been little research on the geography of sports fandom. While several geographers have studied the link between Southern regional identity and the sport of stock car racing, American football is the most popular spectator sport in the United States, and it seems to have a particular strength in the United States South. Therefore, examining the geography of football fandom can add depth to the study of place identity. A 1988 article by Roseman and Shelley on the geography of collegiate radio football broadcasting serves as a milestone and our inspiration here. Using data on college football radio coverage as our proxy, we mapped college football fandom for the “Power 5” conferences. Our results show that state borders continue to have an important influence on the geography of college football fandom, but we also identified a strong region of identity in the South. Our results support the theory that place identity can be fruitfully examined using quantitative data, although many questions remain about how sports fans contribute to the making of place.
... France squashed two attempts to organize racers, and NASCAR continues an antiunion management style " more typical of a cotton mill than a modern, billion-dollar, professional sporting enterprise " (Pierce 2001, 9). Today, professional stock car racing has expanded beyond its southern roots, but it remains associated with conservative, if not reactionary , racial politics and white cultural nationalism (Alderman et al. 2003; Kusz 2007). Despite ongoing investment in its " Drive for Diversity " program, NAS- CAR grandstands, garages, and tracks are still largely marked by reports of personal and institutional racism, and the display of racially insensitive symbols such as the Confederate battle flag is routine (Lee et al. 2010; Ryan 2014). 2 Since NASCAR's inception in 1947, only a handful of black drivers have competed in its premier racing series, and Wendell Scott was the only one to compete in any significant and sustained way. ...
... France squashed two attempts to organize racers, and NASCAR continues an antiunion management style "more typical of a cotton mill than a modern, billion-dollar, professional sporting enterprise" ( Pierce 2001, 9). Today, professional stock car racing has expanded beyond its southern roots, but it remains associated with conservative, if not reactionary, racial politics and white cultural nationalism ( Alderman et al. 2003;Kusz 2007). Despite ongoing investment in its "Drive for Diversity" program, NASCAR grandstands, garages, and tracks are still largely marked by reports of personal and institutional racism, and the display of racially insensitive symbols such as the Confederate battle flag is routine ( Lee et al. 2010;Ryan 2014). 2 Since NASCAR's inception in 1947, only a handful of black drivers have competed in its premier racing series, and Wendell Scott was the only one to compete in any significant and sustained way. ...
This article explores spatial mobility as a form of African American resistance and self-determination. We argue for examining the everyday activism and “countermobility work” of ordinary people of color as they move in ways that subvert, negotiate, and survive white supremacy. These ideas are developed through a historical case study not typically identified with the black civil rights struggle, specifically the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) and the “hard driving” of Wendell Scott. The first and only African American driver to win at NASCAR’s top level, Scott raced throughout the segregated South and faced considerable discrimination in what was otherwise an all-white sport. We offer a critical (re)reading of Scott’s racing career as antiracism mobility work and focus on the bodily, social, and technological practices he employed to maintain and even enhance his mobility around tracks and to and from races. Scott did not represent his efforts in terms of civil rights activism, but it is important to contextualize black resistance outside the confines of formal protest to include the struggle for survivability and material reproduction. The work of racing and driving was part of Scott’s geographically situated political practice and important to the struggle to access and move about the sport of stock car track racing and hence the larger U.S. landscape of citizenship. Our discussion has implications for analyzing historic practices of resistance but also has currency for understanding how countermobility practices remain central to resisting continuing racial discrimination.
... France squashed two attempts to organize racers, and NASCAR continues an antiunion management style " more typical of a cotton mill than a modern, billion-dollar, professional sporting enterprise " (Pierce 2001, 9). Today, professional stock car racing has expanded beyond its southern roots, but it remains associated with conservative, if not reactionary , racial politics and white cultural nationalism (Alderman et al. 2003; Kusz 2007). Despite ongoing investment in its " Drive for Diversity " program, NAS- CAR grandstands, garages, and tracks are still largely marked by reports of personal and institutional racism, and the display of racially insensitive symbols such as the Confederate battle flag is routine (Lee et al. 2010; Ryan 2014). 2 Since NASCAR's inception in 1947, only a handful of black drivers have competed in its premier racing series, and Wendell Scott was the only one to compete in any significant and sustained way. ...
... France squashed two attempts to organize racers, and NASCAR continues an antiunion management style "more typical of a cotton mill than a modern, billion-dollar, professional sporting enterprise" ( Pierce 2001, 9). Today, professional stock car racing has expanded beyond its southern roots, but it remains associated with conservative, if not reactionary, racial politics and white cultural nationalism ( Alderman et al. 2003;Kusz 2007). Despite ongoing investment in its "Drive for Diversity" program, NASCAR grandstands, garages, and tracks are still largely marked by reports of personal and institutional racism, and the display of racially insensitive symbols such as the Confederate battle flag is routine ( Lee et al. 2010;Ryan 2014). 2 Since NASCAR's inception in 1947, only a handful of black drivers have competed in its premier racing series, and Wendell Scott was the only one to compete in any significant and sustained way. ...
... While the consumption of the race-day spectacle is increasingly dispersed, the production side of the sport displays a very different geography, one built upon increased agglomeration rather than decentralization. In the face of NASCAR's increasing national (and even global) influence (Alderman et al. 2003;Hurt 2005), the centrality of Charlotte, North Carolina within the sport has not waned but actually has increased. The city and its surrounding area serve as an important economic cluster or ''knowledge community'' around which stock-car racing teams, mechanics and engineers, and related firms interact with each other as they develop a surprising variety of process and product innovations in order to maintain a competitive advantage within and for the industry. ...
... The industry also seems to be somewhat avoiding areas with higher African American residential population densities (BLK) indicated by a significantly negative regression coefficient (-2.22). NASCAR has been historically criticized for its ineffective attempts to include African Americans in its patterns of consumption (Alderman et al. 2003). The lack of African American drivers and crew (Mitchelson and Alderman 2010) along with this empirical spatial result suggest that race is still a key feature in the production of the Sunday spectacle. ...
The past two decades have witnessed rapid growth in the popularity of stock car racing and its major sanctioning body, NASCAR. While the consumption of the race-day spectacle is increasingly dispersed, the production side of the sport displays a very different geography, one built upon increased agglomeration rather than decentralization. We refer to the locational clustering of stock car racing's industrial activities in and around the Charlotte region as "NASCAR Valley," a term inspired by a similar regional concentration of racing-related firms in southern England called Motor Sport Valley. We show that the establishment of the cluster was hardly accidental. NASCAR Valley is illustrated to be a clearly defined uniform region just north of Charlotte with a major axis running northwest/southeast from Mooresville to Concord, North Carolina. The Valley contains about half of the state's racing establishments, 60 percent of its racing employment, and 70 percent of its racing revenues. This empirical work confirms some key expectations associated with the creation of knowledge communities in which engineered technologies dominate. First, such communities are spatially cohesive. NASCAR Valley is tightly regionalized with surprisingly few holes and islands. Second the spatial expression of such a knowledge community is not large. We estimate NASCAR Valley to be no more than 400 square miles. Third, the spatial expression of such an industry is not well explained by reference to traditional lists of site and situational factors. Statistically, the appropriate response to "where?" resides with reference to external scale economies.
... NASCAR also remains the only major spectator sport in North American without any form of representatation from its competitors (Pierce, 2001). On two occasions in the 1960s, NASCAR successfully fought attempts by drivers to organise into a union, and drivers have traditionally enjoyed little say in how their sport operates (Alderman et al., 2003). Public displays by drivers questioning rule changes, expansion plans, or other operational decisions, such as Richard Petty's attempt to force 'Big Bill' France to consider safety regulations at Talladega in 1969, have been met with indifference or hostility by NASCAR (Menzer, 2001). ...
... Currently, NASCAR's top drivers are drawn from throughout the USA and with the start of the 2008 season, also from Colombia, Scotland and Canada. Year Though NASCAR has diminished its presences in the Southeastern US, nearly all of its top-level race teams remain located within a 100-mile radius of Charlotte, North Carolina, similar to the industrial knowledge agglomeration found in the British Motorsport Valley (Alderman et al., 2003). Many of these race teams operate large race shops employing a number of skilled workers and generating tremendous economic development for this area. ...
... NASCAR's desire to remake itself into a global sport has alienated many of its long-time fans. New racing facilities constructed throughout the country are designed to cater to more affluent consumers, forcing many working class fans to watch races on television (Alderman et al., 2003). These facilities contain state-of-the art amenities such as premier locations for luxury motor homes, rows of corporate suites, expensive condominiums overlooking the track, and even helipads so the wealthiest spectators can avoid traffic (Tuschak, 1997). ...
Despite the growing popularity of NASCAR stock car racing throughout North America, it has remained largely ignored in the sport management research literature. This article suggests that unlike other major spectator sports, which formed cartel systems based on the principles of industrial Fordism, NASCAR organised within a capitalist system more characteristic of Harvey's theory of flexible accumulation. Using NASCAR as a case study, we describe its organisation within an ideal type methodology. The unique characteristics of NASCAR include fragmentation of production systems, new dimensions of labour practises, new consumption processes, and geographical manipulation and re-configuration. Because of its economic system, NASCAR is better positioned than other North American sports to break free from geographic constraints and exploit emerging markets. However, approaching NASCAR within the framework of flexible accumulation reveals that the sport may be more vulnerable to future crises than other major North American spectator sports.
... 6 To accommodate this growth, the NASCAR season was lengthened (even though NASCAR's schedule spanned every weekend from February to November) with competitions at these new venues coming at the expense of Southern raceways like North Wilkesboro, North Carolina (1996) and Rockingham, North Carolina (2003). Further, while between 1956 and 1980 every Winston Cup Champion was born in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Virginia (Alderman, Preston, Mitchell, Webb, & Hanak, 2001), just one of the past fourteen champions of NASCAR's top division hailed from a state inside the geographic boundaries of the American South (Fielden, 2004). Moreover, 2007 marked the first time that a driver born in North Carolina, long considered the birthplace of NASCAR, failed to record a single victory on NASCAR's premier circuit (Mondaca, 2007). ...
... 6. Alderman et al. (2001) chronologically maps the areas in which new tracks were built over the past two decades: in western areas such as Las Vegas, Nevada (1998), Fort Worth, Texas (1997), Phoenix, Arizona (1988), Fontana, California (1997, and Kansas City, Kansas (2001), as well as northeastern and Midwestern areas such as Loudon, New Hampshire (1993), Indianapolis, Indiana (1994), and Chicago, Illinois (2001). 7. The three-time defending champion of NASCAR's most-prized NEXTEL Cup, Jimmy Johnson, comes from the "Left Coast" of California. ...
This article profiles the ascent of stockcar racing from parochial pastime of the late industrial American South into an internationally-distributed corporate sport conglomerate. We explicate the role NASCAR (the sport's governing body), its spectacles, and its consumer-spectators played in reproducing the political, economic, and cultural conditions by which it was made both "local" and "global." It also briefly illustrates the problematic nature of recent initiatives to sell historically localized NASCAR commodities to "nontraditional" national and international markets.
... After a slow start with races scattered around the eastern coast and mid-west in the 1940s, stock-car racing started to grow in the 1950s and 1960s and this growth happened almost exclusively in the south. It was during this time when stock-car racing emerged uniquely as a southern institution (Alderman et al., 2003) and was especially popular in the western part of North Carolina. An often cited reason why many stock-car racing teams started to locate in the area around Charlotte since the early days is that, until fairly recently, Charlotte was the geographical centre of stock-car racing. ...
... The area acts also as a knowledge community in a sense that it serves as a gathering place for fans to tour and observe race shops, museums, venues and other places related to particular sports. Indeed, many of the facilities double as tourist attractions (Alderman et al., 2003). Besides the technological or manufacturing side of the agglomeration, the cultural side of the industry is heavily based on both history and the role of stock-car racing still experienced as part of the "southern tradition". ...
This paper examines the emergence of university–industry partnerships in the motor sports industry cluster located in the Charlotte region of North Carolina, USA. Despite little industry demand for the local engagement, the universities and community colleges started to approach the industry in the late 1990s and recently several new programmes of motor sports-related research and education have been initiated. During the past 3 years, the regional and state governments have also started to play a role in building up support for the motor sports industry. This process has largely been influenced by the ideas of knowledge economy and innovation as an interactive process, by the ideas of the wider social and economic role of universities, and by increase awareness of the relevance of the motor sports industry for the regional economy. Charlotte's motor sports industry is an interesting example of how a previously rather craft-based industry transforms into one in which technology, innovation and creativity play a key role in firm performance. However, the strategy for building up regional capabilities and relationships necessary to support the increased technological intensity of the industry has been slow to develop. This paper addresses the important question of how the universities together with other research and educational organizations can build collaboration with an industry that has traditionally prospered in the region without any links to them, but which in the face of technological challenges needs to reach out to access cutting-edge knowledge and highly qualified personnel.
... As he explains, 'rather than resisting … potentially disruptive changes … many southerners seem … not just to embrace them but to claim them as their own' (Cobb, 1999). For Cobb, and others (Alderman et al., 2003), the New South is not a radical break from the past but rather an adaptation that fuses the past with chosen aspects of the present and future. While the chapters in this book have focused on the transitions that have come as a result of recent and large scale Hispanic arrival in the region, it is critical to recognize that the resultant transformations of place are not wholly transformative but rather contributive to an ongoing process of regional transition that is historically embedded and multilayered, and more about the melding of past and present than about the replacement of one culture by another. ...
