Annelies Knoppers

• Utrecht University

Gender can be seen not only as a binary category but also as a performance or doing that is shaped by, and shapes organizational processes and structures that are deeply embedded in (sport) organizations in multiple and complex ways. The purpose of this paper is to explore strategies for addressing the undoing of gender in sport organizations with...

Sport organizations hold substantial ideological power to showcase and reinforce dominant cultural ideas about gender. The organization and portrayal of sporting events and spaces continue to promote and reinforce a hierarchical gender binary where heroic forms of masculinity are both desired and privileged. Such publicly visible gender hierarchies...

The purpose of this paper was to explore how high school PE teachers create norms for inclusion based on gender as it intersected with ethnicity, ability, and effort.

The percentage of women in sport leadership positions continues to be lower than in other sectors. This chapter discusses how resistance to women in leadership in sport manifests itself in implicit ways. Although current scholarship points to many dynamics that contribute to the current gender ratio, less attention has been paid to ways of implicit...

Abusive practices in elite women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG) have been the focus of discussions about how to eliminate or reduce them. Both coaches and parents have been named as key actors in bringing about change. Our focus is on parents and their ability to safeguard their daughters in WAG. Parents are not independent actors, however, but are pa...

The focus of this paper is to examine how social work students (SWs) attempted to enact social work principles to engage in relationship building with young refugees during a Sport for Development project. The project, ‘U on Board’ was built on the assumption that pleasure and enjoyment in physical activity could contribute to the wellbeing of part...

While football remains mostly a sport associated with men and national identity, it has also become a popular sport for women and girls in Western countries. Despite this success, however, the coaching of football remains a strongly male dominated occupation. In this paper, we explored how 10 elite women coaches of national football teams negotiate...

A great deal of research focusing on organizational diversity has explored dynamics that exclude women and minorities from positions of leadership in sport organizations. The relatively little change in diversity in these positions suggests a need to employ ways of engaging in diversity research that do not center on identity categories and primari...

This paper aims to uncover assumptions about inclusion held by preservice teachers in physical education. The focus is on how they construct ideas about inclusion and how these constructions inform their attempts to reduce inequities and enhance inclusion in their teaching practices. A critical approach to the reflections of 41 Dutch preservice tea...

Although diversity is an often cited organisational value, its support is often muted when it pertains to boards of governance. The aim of this study is to identify discursive practices that may prevent or limit the implementation of measures to increase gender balance in sport governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on a total...

We use a nonrepresentational (NRT) lens to explore the affect generated in the use of an action sport for girls from disadvantaged backgrounds in a short-term Sport for Development (SfD) project. Longboards and GoPro cameras were used to enable adolescent girls from disadvantaged communities to participate in urban outdoor action sport and to be di...

The acceptance of gay males in sport is growing in various western countries. However, research also suggests that young males, including athletes, tend to engage in homonegative speech acts, often called microaggressions, that make it difficult for them to navigate practices of masculinity. We used solicited diaries or diary logs written by (non-)...

Participation in sport is highly valued by governments and policy makers. Policies and programs encourage participation of populations who are underrepresented in sport. In many countries sport participation is possible primarily under the auspices of voluntary sports clubs, many of which name demographic diversity as an organizational value. Under...

One of the most important sources of knowledge coaches draw on to inform their practice is their experience of being coached themselves. These experiences are gendered. To date, however, relatively little research is available that indicates how coaches do gender in their discursive coaching practices. We used a Foucauldian lens to explore discours...

Purpose : To explore how the use of gender categorizations inform children’s preferences of working with others in physical education. Method : Draw, write, and tell procedures were used to elicit the thoughts and feelings of 42 children, across four schools, about their peers and working together in groups. The children, aged between 11 and 13 yea...

In this paper, we focus on the use of digital video technology for instruction in physical education (PE). Physical educators can produce PE instruction videos (PIVs) as educational resources and often use them to enable independent learning situations. Little research has focused on the criteria teachers use to select students for demonstration in...

Quotas are a popular strategy to promote women onto executive sport boards 1 .However, women remain underrepresented at this level 2,3. The aim of this study was to identify strategies used to achieve gender diversity at board level. Board members (female=5; male=9) from Australian sports organisations were interviewed. The interviews were transcri...

Benschop and Verloo (Feminist organization theories: Islands of treasure, 2016) argue that while feminist theories are primarily used in management and organization research when the central focus is on gender, they have applicability beyond social power relations. Similarly, we contend that explicit feminist theorizing is also not common in sport...

There are approximately 250,000 Orthodox Reformed Christians (ORC) in the Netherlands, who live according to a strict adherence to the Bible. The ORC dissociate themselves from the mainstream sport discourse in the Netherlands that regards sport as a societal good. We draw on post-structural perspectives to explore how governmentality enables Dutch...

Bodies are always present in organizations, yet they frequently remain unacknowledged or invisible including in sport organizations and sport management research. We therefore argue for an embodied turn in sport management research. The purpose of this article is to present possible reasons why scholars have rarely paid attention to bodies in sport...

ROCKING THE BOAT? CHANGING THE UNDERREPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN SPORT GOVERNANCE Popi Sotiriadou, Griffith University, Australia; Donna de Haan, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands; Annelies Knoppers, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Much has been achieved in the movement towards gender equity in sport in the last decades....

Many measures to achieve gender equality in sport governance have focused primarily on the underrepresentation of women and how they experience this (Burton, 2015; Claringbould and Knoppers, 2013). A common approach to balancing boards of directors has emphasized gender equality through the creation of women’s groups/commissions and the identificat...

Sociology of sport does not exist as a (sub)discipline or course of study in the Netherlands. Scholars who call themselves sport sociologists engage in a variety of research and related publication activities. Many of these might not strictly fit under some understandings of the title "sociology" since they focus on sport management, policy impleme...

About 75% of Dutch PE teachers integrate ICT in their PE lessons or plan to do so in the future (Reijgersberg et al, 2014). Yet relatively little research has focused on the consequences of the use of such technologies for the perceptions on student bodies. Contextual research on PE suggests an implicit curriculum (re) produces inequalities among s...

Many physical education (PE) teachers have been challenged by the shift from teaching in primarily ethnic homogenous contexts to multi-ethnic (ME) classes. Teachers in secondary schools often experience difficulty in class management in such classes. This difficulty may limit their ability to create a positive student–teacher relationship and may r...

We use the concept of governmentality to explore how different historically constituted regimes of practice operate to govern the thinking and practicing of full-contact martial arts and combat sports (FCMACS) in the Netherlands and consequently, to resist regulation. After conducting 43 interviews, observing a meeting and various FCMACS events, an...

This study answers a recent call for research on the complexity, locality, and use of power in the governing of diversity in organizations. We used the concepts of governmentally and of governing sameness and difference to explore multiple and heterogeneous ways of regulating gender diversity in organizations. Governmentally was defined as interrel...

The continuation of emotional abuse as a normalized practice in elite youth sport has received scholarly attention, often with the use of a Foucauldian framework. The use of sense-making, a theoretical framework that focuses on how meaning is created in ambiguous situations, may give additional insights into the continuation of emotionally abusive...

Various discourses construct youth sport as a site for pleasure and participation, for positive development, for performance and for protection/safeguarding. Elite youth sport however continues to be a site for emotionally abusive coaching behaviour. Little attention has been paid to how the institutional context may enable or sustain this behaviou...

‘Contemporary Issues in Sport Management presents an extensive array of absorbing contemporary issues relevant to managing sport. Internationally recognised scholars have contributed thought-provoking chapters on current global and local issues that are challenging traditional ways of thinking about and delivering sport. This exciting new book is r...

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Annelies Knoppers, one of the leading scholars in understanding the culture of sport in organizational settings, considers how the critical lens of sociology can enhance and mesh with research on sport management. Knoppers argues that there have been lost opportunities and understandings from the little...

His current research focuses on psychological and cognitive mechanisms underlying effects pedagogical interventions and the evaluation of such interventions, with special attention to interventions aiming to prepare students to take an active role in society. A frequent critique of coach education courses is that they are designed by scholars with...

Abstract Sport scholars have paid relatively little attention to meanings that participants in recreational youth sport may give meanings to their participation and how those meanings are informed by coaching practices. In this study, we draw on Bourdieu’s notions about the development of the habitus, symbolic capital and the positions youth take...

In this study we discuss how gender relations are influenced by a ‘girls only’ martial arts-based sport, gender and development (SGD) programme that aims to improve young women's discipline, leadership skills and self-defence capabilities in a rural Ugandan community with widespread domestic and gender-based violence (GBV). The results of our quali...

The purpose of this paper was to gain insight into how coaches problematized their coaching practices and the process in which they engaged to become what they perceived to be better coaches using a course based on critical reflective practice. We assumed that constant critical selfreflection would enable coaches to move closer to their individual...

It is relatively di cult for teachers/researchers to capture children’s perceptions about how they perceive their learning within PE settings. Additionally, little is known about the ways in which children think how they learn in physical education classes (Koekoek, Knoppers, & Stegeman, 2009). Currently, researchers seek to enter children’s experi...

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The concept of diversity as an organizational value has become an integral part of many organizational policies, yet women and minorities continue to be underrepresented as managers. Scholars have drawn attention to the paradox in which managers recognize diversity as an organizational value and yet top level managerial ranks remain primarily homog...

Boxing gyms in the Netherlands, which were traditionally bastions of ‘white’ men, have become more and more diverse. Since boxers with different ethnic backgrounds and women have joined boxing clubs, trainers need to manage this emerging diversity in their gyms. This empirical study of a gym in the Netherlands, where full participation of women is...

In this chapter we focus on processes that reproduce gender and may exclude women from top-level positions in sport organizations

Background: Most research on how children learn when using the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach has focused on cognitive dimensions in teaching games models. A social constructivist perspective suggests, however, that learning also takes place during social interactions. Since the process of learning game skills tends to have a rela...

In this paper, we explore how physically disabled youth who participate in mainstream education discursively construct and position themselves in relation to dominant discourses about sport and physicality that mark their bodies as ‘abnormal’ and ‘deviant’. We employ a feminist poststructuralist perspective to analyze the narratives about sport, ph...

This article explores how Dutch physical education (PE) teachers discursively construct body differences between students related to gender, (dis)ability and health. Our results show how disciplinary technologies of categorisation and normalisation are embedded in two distinct discourses that our participants used: the discourse of naturalness for...

The purpose of this study was to expand on current research about ways in which race and ethnicity are socially constructed through popular media culture. In this article we explore to what extent broadcast commentary of televised soccer in the Netherlands reproduces and challenges hegemonic discourses about race/ethnicity and is congruent with fin...

404 – 416 The gender ratio of those in positions of leadership continues to be skewed toward a male majority. The purpose of this study is to explore how practices of gender may contribute to the lack of significant change in this skewed ratio in (sport) organizations. We situate our study within Martin’s (2003, 2006) notion of practices of gender...

In this article, we draw on key concepts from cultural studies, post-colonialism, whiteness theory, and sport media studies to search for and discuss shared processes of racialization/ethnization in three sport-related cultural practices – soccer commentary, sport media viewing, and sport policy making. Our analysis reveals how discourses surroundi...

In this article we explore body norms Dutch youth create in their discursive constructions of athletic and (non-)athletic bodies and how these norms are enforced by the Panopticon and the Synopticon. Our methodology consisted of auto-driven photo elicitation group interviews with 42 secondary school students. The results indicate the complexity of...

Background: Education policies and curriculum documents in many European countries promote the social and moral development of young people as a cross-curriculum goal and place that goal at the center of the education process. All subjects, including physical education (PE) are required to contribute to the social and moral development of the child...

In this article we draw on a cultural studies perspective to reflect critically on the racial and ethnic categorizations that are used by those who employ content analysis to study the sport media and to demonstrate how such categories naturalize racial thought and erase ethnic distinctions. We use examples of content analyses of the sport media to...

In this paper we critically review how research on girls or women and sport has developed over the last 35 years. We use a post-positivist lens to explore the content of the papers published in Sex Roles in the area of women, gender and sport and examine the shifts in how gender and sport have been conceptualized in these accounts. In order to init...

I use a discursive analytical approach to explore ways in which senior managerial men working in nonprofit organizations understand the contribution, if any, of their own sport history to their work skills, how this may vary by organizational contexts and how the subtexts of these discourses may strengthen the dominance of managerial men in a speci...

Relatively little is known about the ways in which children understand and perceive how they learn tasks or skills in physical education classes. The purpose of this study was to use a constructivist framework to explore how children express their experiences, thoughts, and feelings about how they learn in physical education classes. A variety of m...

Processes of sense making enable individuals to explain or give meaning to their experiences including those pertaining to gender. Meanings shape both individual behaviors and expectations for the behavior of others. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine how board members of national sport associations in the Netherlands made sense o...

The higher the organization level, the lower the percentage of women in governance. The purpose of the present study was to explore how men and women negotiate women’s ‘fit’ as candidates for boards of national sport organizations. We based our analysis on in- depth interviews with male chairs and female board members. The results provide evidence...

The lack of women in senior management functions in sport may in part be attributed to dominant discursive managerial practices in sport organizations. The purpose of this study is to explore ways in which the discourses and their subtexts used by directors of Dutch national sport organizations to talk about their work, sustain homologous reproduct...

Onder het kopje breedtesport op de website van NOC*NSF (n.d.) staat: “Sport is mooi, sport is belangrijk, sport levert veel op. Het is fantastisch om te doen en brengt vooral ook veel plezier en ontspanning.”Verschillende rapporten en nota’s van het Sociaal Cultureel Planbureau (Breedveld & Tiessen- Raaphorst, 2006) en het Ministerie van VWS (VWS,...

The popularity and influence of sport in Western society have been steadily increasing. The most visible of such sports continue to be men's professional sports that dominate media coverage. Consumers of the sport media see primarily men in action. Similarly, management continues to be numerically dominated by men, especially in the senior ranks. A...

In this paper symbolic inclusion/exclusion processes in sport with respect to gender and ethnicity among adolescents (n = 1025) are analyzed from a social-critical perspective. It was found that sport participation preferences of young people are still influenced by dominant normative gendered and racial/ethnic images. Sport can serve not only as a...

Although it is generally assumed that the (sport) media play an important role in the meanings readers/viewers give to gender and race/ethnicity, relatively little is known about the way ‘the public’ deals with hegemonic (media) representations about race/ethnicity and gender. The purpose of the present study is to describe the dominant discourses...

Although the results of content analyses of television and newspaper sport coverage have shown quantitative and qualitative gender differences, such analyses do not reveal why some texts are selected and others not. Although this selection process is constrained by structural factors, there is room for agency since journalists decide what to includ...

The relatively low percentage of women and minority sport journalists suggests dynamics of exclusion. We used J. Ackers (1990, 1992) theory about gender and organizations to examine several interrelated processes in the construction of gender andethnicity in sport journalism. Acker named 4 processes that inform these constructions:division of labor...

Over the last two decades the founding of sport clubs and organization of sport events specifically for gays and lesbians has increased in the Netherlands and most other western countries. For many policy-makers the popularity of playing sport ‘apart’ seems to be in contradiction to current liberal legislation concerning homosexuality and gay and l...

Over the last two decades the founding of sport clubs and organization of sport events specifically for gays and lesbians has increased in the Netherlands and most other western countries. For many policy-makers the popularity of playing sport ‘apart’ seems to be in contradiction to current liberal legislation concerning homosexuality and gay and l...

Gender, class, and sexuality are intersecting categories of inequality and also social forces that shape meanings given to organizations, social institutions, identities, and images. The authors use Acker's (2000) concept "regimes of inequality" to explore how gender, specifically masculinities, intersects with social class and sexuality in women's...

The diversity of sport participants in the Netherlands is beginning to reflect the diversity within the general population. Sport as a whole is becoming more accessible and participation in sport of different social groups takes place within both mainstream and "separate" sports clubs and in differently organized sports groups. In our paper we crit...

This article focuses on the dominant meanings given by coaches and managers to "performance" in Dutch (amateur) sport clubs and how such meanings contribute to organizational processes related to (the intersection of) gender and race/ethnicity. We use the results of six studies conducted in (amateur) sport organizations in the Netherlands for this...