Sport in Society

With rule violations as the practical case, the study presents a critical discussion of various approaches to sport ethics. In the first section, tentative distinctions are proposed between unintentional and intentional rule violation, and, within the latter category, between various forms of cheating and so-called tactical or professional fouls. The second section provides a critical review of the various positions towards intentional rule violations found in the literature on sport ethics. A basic distinction is drawn between contextualist and cognitivist approaches. The conclusion argues for the need for a revised cognitivist approach to sport ethics.

Child welfare and women's rights both feature prominently in contemporary debates on equal rights. Whereas gender equity has been a policy objective for the past thirty years in sport organizations, however, child abuse and protection have only recently emerged as a sport ethics issues. Arguably, child protection has now leapfrogged over gender equity as a policy priority. The chapter opens with a discussion of the role of children in sport in relation to opposing ideologies of social control and personal freedom, and outlines the development of child protection and gender equity initiatives in sport, including the establishment of the not-for-profit Women’s Sports Foundation (UK) and the first national women in sport policy in England, and of a dedicated Sport England/NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit (CPSU). The shift in theoretical focus from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ has been accompanied by a widening of the general social policy attention away from solely heterosexual interests. Sport organisations have responded comparatively slowly to the new rights agenda for gay men, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered people but it is argued here that the arrival of the CPSU not only gave huge impetus to the institutionalisation of child protection in sport but also forced sports bodies to address ethics and equity agendas more forcibly than they had done before. In this way, the issue of child protection has acted as a kind of ethical Trojan horse in sport. The paradox of child protection in sport, however, is that it has simultaneously drawn public attention to issues of abuse and exploitation and deflected attention away from the specific issue of women’s rights in sport.

This is an electronic version of an article published in Sport in Society, Volume 4, Issue 3, Autumn 2001, pages 65-80. Sport in Society (formerly Culture, Sport, Society) is available online at informaworldTM at http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a713999835 The disproportionately low number of Asian Heritage professional soccer players in Britain is a matter that has been increasingly noted within the game. Indeed, comparisons are now being made between players of Afro-Caribbean Heritage 'breaking in' 35 years ago and the current lack of Asian Heritage players. Through use of questionnaires, this research focuses on the perceptions of Youth/Community Development officers at UK professional football clubs and Asian Heritage males who are involved in playing the game. Comparisons are drawn in particular with the Bains and Patel report (1996) which remains probably the most significant discussion of the issue from the last decade. Findings suggest that there are some encouraging signs of progress in some clubs and that the two groups share views on certain barriers to Asian Heritage players entering professional soccer. However, they remain very polarized in important respects, not least concerning the prevalence and impact of racism.

This article is not available through ChesterRep. In his book Sociology in the Balance, the Dutch sociologist Johan Goudsblom attempted an overview of the development of sociology as a whole. This essay sets out ot provide a similar stocktaking of the sociology of sport. Its objectives are threefold: to mark any advances in knowledge which have been mae in the field in the century which recently drew to a close; toprovide a guide to the principal conflicts and difficulties which have arisen in the field; and to scholars to some of the mistakes that have been made and some of the recipes that been advocated for avoiding them.

Nowadays sport is assigned a crucial role in solving social problems, especially those relating to social cohesion. Participation in sport is assumed to build relevant bonding and bridging social capital that generates reciprocal contacts and trust in others. In this essay we will present findings of two, mainly qualitative studies on participation in sport in the Netherlands. We argue that while sport indeed makes contributions to the development of social capital, bonding and bridging are much more complex and differentiated processes than is usually assumed in both social policies and social capital theory. An argument is made to view bonding and bridging as identity work.

This paper constructs a brief history of British ice hockey and The Manchester Storm (the self-proclaimed largest ice hockey club outside of North America), focusing specifically on the re-emergence and commercialisation of the sport in the 1990s. The paper argues that ice hockey has a long (but marginalized history) within British culture, but has always been heavily tied to North America in both its style of presentation and in its personnel. However, the 1990s has seen a specific move towards a more, family-based, ‘affluent working class’ core of supporters, and a popularity based largely upon the novelty and ‘family-orientated’ entertainment that surrounds the sports event. A popularity, which I suggest, may be reducing as the novelty of the sport begins to fade with many of its supporters, and these ‘cultural tourist’ move onto new and fresher (cultural) pastures.

No abstract available.

This article analyses the spread of sports culture, both from a historical and comparative point of view, using British ice hockey as a case study example. It compares the development of ice hockey in various European countries from the late nineteenth century all the way to the beginning of the twenty-first century paying particular attention to the interaction between European and North American hockey cultures. In Great Britain, as well as in Germany and the Nordic Countries, influences imported from the home country of hockey, Canada, have merged into distinctive local traditions. Nowadays the whole hockey world, however, seems to be taking a more uniform shape everywhere.

There are few sports that display so commanding a dominance by a nation as Canada in curling. A demonstration sport in the first winter Olympics in 1924, its world organization now boasting 34 member nations, Curling became a medal sport in the 1998 Games. This essay explores reasons for the popularity of curling in Canada (estimates are of 1.3 million curlers in the country), how it became an Olympic sport, and within driving themes of this volume provides a conclusion about the tension that persists between assuring the purity of the sport's history and making it an internationally marketable sport.

This article, based on a national survey of Chinese elite athletes in 1996 and interviews with successful sportswomen, attempts to explore the issues relevant to social mobility through sport, including the occupational prestige of sport as a career, family backgrounds, changing state policies on athletes' geographic mobility, post-sports employment and educational opportunities. It claims that elite sport is meritocratic and elite athletes in China come from various social backgrounds. Finally, it makes the point that sports success has created routes for some outstanding sportswomen to realize considerable upward social mobility.

This article argues that television-sporting events that are of social and cultural importance generate positive externalities. In addition, there is also a public good element related to these externalities. This provides an economic efficiency rationale for the Listed Events regulation, the idea of which is to guarantee that such events remain freely available to the general television audience. However, data from Norway and other European countries indicate that such lists can be too long and include events and sports that do not deserve their place. In addition, a required minimum penetration as high as 90 per cent seems to be too strict.

The World Health Organization estimates 10 million people will die in 2025 from tobacco-related disease compared to the current 3.5 million. The tobacco industry for a century has been tested successfully to market merchandise with such adverse effects on the user. An early approach in the U.S. mass advertising of tobacco was to couple products with metaphors for health and freedom. Sport participants and venues, for example, have been common features in tobacco promotions. Associating sports with tobacco continues as a powerful vehicle for introducing new products into the emerging markets of Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and China.

This article examines the deep racial divide in apartheid South Africa through the narrative of Yacoob Omar, one of the finest Black cricketers during the 1970s. Omar's story underlines the unequal opportunities afforded to Black and White South Africans, the legacy of which was hastily forgotten when cricket unity was negotiated with obscene haste in 1991. White players and administrators, citing 'merit', continued to monopolize lucrative sponsorships and high wages. The poignant stories of people like Yacoob Omar must be acknowledged and policies mooted to achieve redress so that meaningful reconciliation can be achieved. This article engages with contemporary debates on narrative. Omar's story, though selective, incomplete and partial, provides an alternative to prevailing metanarratives, which are dominated by the 'Great Men' of this period. This suggests that there are many different narratives to be constructed from a variety of viewpoints, with multiple voices, and recounted diversely.

Since the days of Frank Holbrook, a football and track star in the late nineteenth century, blacks have competed in sports at the University of Iowa in growing numbers. During the era of Jim Crow, Iowa gained a reputation as a haven for black male athletes. Like other campuses elsewhere, however, black athletes at Iowa enjoyed fewer opportunities for social and cultural interaction compared with their white counterparts. The purpose of this essay is to examine the problematic nature of this aspect of sport history at the University of Iowa and by extension in U.S. higher education.

The interview with Alex Gilady, Senior Vice-President of NBC Sport, which forms the basis of this contribution, attempts to shed some light on views, held within the television industry, of mediated sport. The interview reaffirms the notion that from commercial television's perspective televised sport is a business driven almost entirely by economic logic. Moreover, it provides an insight into views held by a television executive in a position of power within the television/sport industry, which in turn provides a challenge to the ways in which the academic community often views the role of broadcasting.

In 1995, Robert Putnam published an essay entitled 'Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital' in the Journal of Democracy. Putnam posited that participation in sports represented one of the most important ways that modern liberal democracies produced the 'social capital' required for the maintenance of healthy, free societies. Putnam used the term 'social capital' to define the cultural norms, shared values, co-operative networks and devotion to the commonwealth which he thought were necessary for effective democracy. 'Bowling Alone' built on an earlier study, 'Making Democracy Work', which argued that soccer clubs and other voluntary associations had built healthy and democratic societies in modern northern Italy. In southern Italy, such groups had failed to take hold, preventing the development of the necessary conditions for making healthy societies. In 'Bowling Alone' Putnam lamented that, in the United States since the end of the Second World War, engagement in co-operative sporting activities, such as participating in local bowling leagues, had declined dramatically. He worried that, as more and more people 'bowled alone', the stocks of social capital required for building democratic communities would evaporate.

Communities enhance their integration through commonly understood factual records and by the special meanings that are found in them. Baseball with its numeral records and the embodiments of valued meanings in heroic acts serves this memoralization. This essay considers Joe DiMaggio's and Cal Ripkin's records successively of a hitting streak and games played as positive sources of memory. Negative sporting displays further can be exploited by communities to solidity identity as well, through articulating boundaries. Darryl Strawberry has been depicted as a negative reference, for records that were not realized from his potential and for his involvement with drugs.

This essay focuses on the main arguments in favour of a legal ban on boxing: (i) the argument from health risk; (ii) the argument from intentional harm; (iii) the argument from violence; and (iv) the argument from social responsibility. These arguments are not as strong as those in favour of a ban like to think and neither individually nor collectively establish the moral case against boxing. The practical implications of a ban are also considered: it is not clear that a ban would produce a better state of affairs as a ban may well force the sport underground where the medical controls would be non-existent, the consequences being much higher health risks to boxers than if boxing had remained legal. The article concludes that the best way forward is reform rather than an outright ban. Two reforms are suggested: direct punches to the head should be forbidden; and a boxer's knowledge of the health risks should be tested by a written examination.

In 1972, the U.S. Congress enacted Title IX of the Educational Amendments prohibiting gender discrimination in educational settings. Title IX would result in a huge surge in female participation in sport. One sport to which girls sought access was the national game of baseball. The original Little League baseball charter limited the youth game to boys. This essay analyzes the rhetoric of the legal decisions treating the attempts of girls to play baseball. Some courts adopted unusually creative strategies to exclude girls largely because of baseball's great cultural significance, fearing girls' entry would ruin the 'male' game in the U.S.

The Great North Run is a cultural phenomenon, a hugely popular participatory, spectator sport and televised half-marathon event in its native north-east England, and a powerful expression of regional pride. Yet, like its southern big brother, the London Marathon, it has been largely ignored by British academic students of sport in favour of a focus upon team sports such as cricket, the rugby codes, and most especially football. This study begins by exploring the development of the Great North Run as a regional and national sporting event, its origins, the changing nature of sponsorship, participation rates, and media coverage. The second half of the piece examines a number of its features and its mode of portrayal in the media which have combined to make it of some significance in celebrating the North-East, its changing identity and its struggle for wider recognition during a period of economic difficulty and challenge.

This essay focuses on international dimensions of the Super Bowl - specifically, how this supremely U.S. event is marketed to U.S. audiences by the National Football League and the national news media as an international event. Worldwide audiences of nearly one billion are routinely announced in the pre- and post-game hype. But do these viewers really exist? If so, who are they? And how do they interpret this 'super' event? The essay also reviews the origins of the Super Bowl, especially how the event has evolved from a Cold War mythic spectacle to a televised carnival, with multiple - but still U.S.-centri - narratives.

Until relatively recently, the state of Israel was preoccupied with its military security and paid little attention to cultural politics. However, the emergence of other ‘battlegrounds’ has seen a shift to ‘soft power’ in an attempt to generate a more benevolent global image. This paper spotlights an international sporting event which ordinarily attracts very limited interest from the mainstream media. However, when held in Israel, it created much greater interest. The paper identifies the UEFA’s Men’s U-21 tournament, held in Israel in 2013, to assess how different groups responded to the event: celebratory by the host nation and its supporters, the Israeli Football Association and UEFA; critical amongst Palestinians and their supporters in the international community. The paper identifies how the Israeli state is using ‘hasbara’ in an attempt to arrest its deteriorating international image and shows how the concept is empirically operationalized (‘hasbara in action’).

Brittany is the most western part of France and is noted for two cultural characteristics: rurality and religiousness. The Breton pardons, which are complex expressions of religion, have religious, social, educative and bodily functions in traditional Breton society. They frequently involve physical activity. Further, they are an expression of the honour of the parish or the conquest of beauty. In this article, we particularly study the profane and play dimension of the pardon, inseparable from its religious nature. Our analysis is set in a nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century context.

The study examines the English media coverage of what is popularly labelled 'football hooliganism'. While there have been studies of this nature in the past, this remains a relatively under-researched area. By revisiting some of the findings of previous studies, this essay investigates the media construction and representation of the 'football hooligan' in contemporary English society through an exploratory textual analysis of the coverage of recent football-related disorder. The analysis focuses specifically on reported incidents of the now infamous public disorder involving English supporters during the 1998 World Cup (France 98) and the 2000 European Championships (Euro 2000). Stuart Hall's seminal 1978 study of the press treatment of 'football hooliganism' found it to be 'brutal, short-hand and simplifying'; with the press implicated in 'generating and keeping alive societal reactions' to the phenomena. From the analysis of the reporting of football-related disorder during France 98 and Euro 2000, it would appear that little has changed in the media agenda over two decades on.

This essay explores the media narratives that have constructed a particular social memory for Canadians based on the lives of two sporting celebrities, one, Wayne Gretzky, as hockey hero, and the other, Ben Johnson, the sprinter, as fallen hero. Social memory is always contested, and the essay emphasizes the potency of the crises in Canada in the late 1980's over national identity that provides the context for the ways in which sport and its visible participants serve the country in refining and protecting its favored image, or, alternatively, tarnish its image in its own eyes and potentially world-wide.

The expansion of Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association into Canada represents a significant shift in the way Canadians identify with sport teams. As the Canadian media environment becomes increasingly crowded by U.S. sports, the ability to preserve and develop Canadian sport organizations and the accompanying cultural exchanges and understandings diminishes. With them the shared national memories that such exchanges serve begin to vanish as more 'global' oriented ones supplant them. Historical sporting moments remain collectively significant if they prove useful to present priorities of national image and identity, and this possibility is diminishing for indigenous Canadian sports.

Sport under capitalism exhibits the dominant features of that mode of production: competition, commodification, alienation, labour-process specialization, nationalism, and so on. But sport also expresses the class contradictions of capitalism. It is not just an 'opium for the masses' but also an arena, like other embodied cultural practices such as dance, of contested meanings, latent and overt resistance and, occasionally, struggle. To be successful, however, resistance via sport must articulate with wider movements for change. Only then will humanity recapture the sense of playfulness and pleasure that sport is constructed upon but which it has virtually obliterated.

A 222-minute film, Laagan, has been accepted as one of the most successful Indian blockbusters of recent years, both in India and abroad. Laagan, for the author, is a commentary, in the filmic and imaginative mode, on the evolution and development of cricket in colonial India. This article draws on the representations of the game in the film to comment on the lost realities of Indian cricket, facts largely ignored in existing historiography on the subject. Laagan helps rectify certain conventional wisdoms about the evolution of cricket in India, viewing it as more than an aristocratic pastime of certain elite groups. The cricket match shown in the movie becomes an arena for asserting indigenous strength against the might of the colonial state. The sporting prowess of the villagers and their ultimate victory helped them emphasize that their 'Indian' identity was in no way inferior to the Whites'. Native mastery of the colonial sport of cricket had thus emerged as the leveller between the colonizer and the colonized. Unlike claims made in conventional historiography of cricket in India, the sport, as seen by the author, was also used for purposes of resistance by the Indians, a fact this article aims to demonstrate, using the fictional tale in Lagaan as a point of entry into such untold histories.

The Women's National Basketball Association began its first season in 1997. If television coverage could approach the sport in a non-stereotypical way, it held the potential for dramatically shifting the landscape of gender-role socialization. As a package, television programming should not be separated from the commercial messages interspersed within it, which also speak powerfully to the audience. Consequently, this study examines commercials aired during WNBA games in terms of gender roles and sexism. The results suggest that, to some degree, commercials aired during WNBA games exhibit fewer sexist images than found in earlier studies. In fact, there was a greater number of non-stereotypical than stereotypical images shown during these commercials. However, these results are skewed by the fact that the least sexist commercials aired the greatest number of images. When image is the unit of analysis, the majority of images are non-stereotypical, but when the commercial is the unit of analysis, there is a greater number of commercials with predominantly sexist images.

The 1992 Winter Olympics was a particularly interesting turning point in Olympic coverage, marking the first time a TV network fully realized the blockbuster potential of the Games. Women's figure skating coverage, highlighted as the most important sport, played an especially large part in CBS' ratings success in 1992. This essay analyzes CBS coverage of that event and illustrates how the network employed narrative storytelling conventions to turn the figure skating competition into a melodrama. The formula effectively drew audiences into the skating fold and created a programming precedent upon which considerable broadcasting strategy in the last decade has developed.

The study explored the psychological links that may exist between the feeling of being threatened and the perceived risk of sports situations, the interest for television sports programs, and the interest for conversations about these television sports reports. One hundred ninety-nine participants were presented with a series of questionnaires to assess: a) the degree of threat, the perceived risk as well as the amount of personal experience associated with certain sports situations, b) the degree of interest and the viewing habits associated with the same sports situations, c) the degree of interest shown for participating in conversations about these sports programs. The more the sports were considered threatening and perceived as risky, the more the participants were interested in watching these sports on television and to talk about these television programs. The concept of protective frame explained this finding.

This article examines the relationship between sporting estates, hunting, and recreational land use in the context of a growing debate about the ownership and use of land in Scotland. We argue that the sporting estate is a complex social phenomenon which has very little to do with the rational exploitation of the hunting economy. Its relationship with deeply embedded landownership and social structures has confused and frustrated public policy towards outdoor recreation in the Highlands and Islands. To develop public policy in a coherent and rational way, policy makers require better information about the extent, nature and management of sporting estates and an analytical framework which recognizes hunting as a form of recreation but which can discriminate between hunting (the activity) and sporting estates (the landholding framework).

Societies and individuals depend on some stability in visions of the past construed for purposes of present tasks, and sport is an important technical and metaphorical container for such cultural ballast. Memorializing entails strategic selection, meaning not simply evocation of past events, but also restriction of recall in opportunistic ways as part of adaptation to changing circumstances. Drawing on the several sport accounts that display the distinctiveness of U.S. and Canadian cultures, and also reviewing large portions of recent research on local-global exchanges of labor, capital, and images through sport, a typology of patterns is outlined in this final essay.

In the United States, according to Kinkema and Harris, ‘there are occasions when as many as ten sporting events are televised simultaneously’. 1 Many recent developments within mass sport have been guided by economic considerations that can easily be traced back to the media, and especially television. Sport for its part has also transformed the media. 2 The relationship between media and sport has become of particular interest to media scholars over the last decade. However, as sport itself has been of interest in a variety of other disciplines, the study of the ways in which media and sport interact crosses boundaries and can be found in literature concerned with the sociology of sport, history of sport, gender studies, cultural studies, journalism, leisure studies and beyond. For scholars interested in the media in particular, sport is important as a popular content of the media, which can also shed light on a range of related issues central to media studies. Much of the writing on sport and the media addresses general issues within media studies, such as the vast field of representation and identity (some commentators see sport’s most important contribution to society as symbolic) and globalization, as well as aspects of the political economy of the media (here the focus may well be institutional or economic, rather than concerned with symbolic processes). ‘Theory’ as a category is addressed explicitly at the end of this collection. Neil Blain suggests some approaches to theorizing the relationship between the symbolic functioning of sport and the domains of culture, and of media culture in particular. He argues that the symbolic development of sport is most satisfactorily comprehended when culture, sport, media, economics and ideology are all maintained as strong terms in the debate. This is an argument against compound constructions that subsume sport beneath the enveloping category of 1

This study examines research relating to the epidemiology of injuries in rugby union and provides a critique of the seminal pape in this area, Garraway et al.'s ‘Impact of Professionalism on Injuries in Rugby Union', published inthe British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2000. We argue that Garraway et al. 's central thesis - that a) professionalism and b) Protective equipment lead to a greater incidence of injury - is flawed due to a simplistic (that is, non-sociological) understanding of professionalism and because conclusions are drawn in the absence of data, sometimes, despite the existence of other, contradictory evidence. Having presented the basis of a more rounded explanation for the apparent increase in injury rates, we conclude by arguing that in the light of the very limited critical scrutiny which appears in the soprts medicine community, it is the task of social scientists to exert their cirtical weight and expose research which assumes a greater social significance than its methodological and analytical quality merits.

Sports equipment not only attests to the great diversity in the development of culture, society, sport and technology, but also bears signs of the influence of these phenomena on each other. The factors and circumstances discussed here all play an important role in this development. The driving force behind, as well as the yardstick for, the creation and evolution of sports equipment is functionality - a functionality which accords with the conditions prevailing in a given society and the demands imposed by it, conditions which are subject to constant change. Functionality and technology as a whole are not 'socially neutral' and do not develop according to any inherent logic; technology, rather, is to be understood as a social construction and as an integral part of the social order.

In 1894, during a period of 'boom' in cycling world-wide, the League of American Wheelmen, the governing body of the American sport, legislated the exclusion of black Americans from membership, thus turning the de facto segregation of 'Jim Crow' into a de jure separation within in prominent sports institution. At the same moment, however, one outstanding black cyclist, the sprinter Major Taylor, began to fight a bitter battle for the right to participate in American bicycle racing, quickly winning his way to national and ultimately international professional success in one of the most popular sports of the time.

This study of Indian cricket in Durban questions the notion of a homogeneous South African 'Indian' community and probes the true nature of its identities. 'Indianness', it is suggested, does not identify who Indians really were. Cricket was divided along racial, class, ethnic, religious and linguistic lines, reflecting the contingent and complex identities of Indians. Further, the construction of parallel sporting forms on the basis of race resulted in popular culture entrenching differential identities rather than forging a unique culture. While conflict among Indians mirrored a multitude of local and national identities, they were 'Indians' in relation to others in the peculiar South African setting where racial difference was enforced by law.

The period 1920-50 was one of tremendous change for Africans living in and around Johannesburg, South Africa. Rapid urbanization, the economic depression of the 1930s, acute housing shortages, high unemployment, rising crime rates and increased political activity provided the social context for Africans. Yet, the period is also characterized by the development of a rich social and cultural life among Africans in the city. Even though informal sports activities took place from Johannesburg's earliest days, it is significant that the first formal organization of sport for Africans was only founded in the 1920s. Alongside a system of repression, organized sport became one of the non-coercive measures used to control urban Africans. Despite extensive labours to control African leisure time, these efforts were never entirely successful.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, segregation, or 'Jim Crow', as it was called by contemporaries, began to spread out of the American South to many cities around the northern United States. Gradually, Jim Crow gained acceptance in American sports. This study attempts to outline some of the major themes of this largely unwritten history. Rather than focus on well-known sports heroes, such as boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, track-and-field star Jesse Owens, or baseball star Jackie Robinson, this essay looks at the communities from which such figures emerged. Moving beyond the semi-professional sporting teams that developed within the communities, it describes the institutions that were established to help channel players into these teams. In the process, it reveals a history of organizational initiative in Philadelphia's African-American communities that was virtually brought to an end by the process of integration in the 1950s.

Black athletes, who were a dominating force in sports such as boxing and football in the pre-1950s, used their physical prowess as a marketable commodity and managed to join the ranks of motion picture stars, whether or not they were talented actors. Because of their bodies, these athletes were transformed on the screen to provide representations of black masculinity. This essay examines selected black athletes who contributed to this early screen image and that include: Paul Robeson and Woody Strode in the sport of football with Joe Louis and Canada Lee representing the sport of boxing. Others athletes who similarly contributed to the Black screen image are noted in an historical overview in these two sports.