David Rowe

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• BA, MA, PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Western Sydney University

After many years of struggle, women’s sport is experiencing an upsurge around the world. This advance means, given the co-dependent relationship between sport and media, greater coverage of women’s sport. These are positive developments regarding gender equality, especially given the socio-cultural power of the “media sports cultural complex.” It i...

This article reviews the terms in which the Australian Cultural Fields project engaged with the concepts of fields, capitals, and habitus. It also places these concepts in the context of their longer histories of use and interpretation in Bourdieusian sociology, and identifies the new inflections acquired in bringing them to bear on the relations b...

In asking whether the survey conducted for the Australian Cultural Fields project might be the last of its kind, this article reflects on the issues raised by the participants in this review symposium as well as those registered in the Fields, Capitals, Habitus book regarding the limitations of cultural capital surveys. It also draws on recent crit...

There is a deep and enduring relationship between sport and scandal. This chapter recognizes that sport scandals are enormously variable, involving moral and ethical conduct ranging from relatively mundane transgressions such as marital infidelity to serious breaches of the civil and criminal law. Using sociological and anthropological theories and...

The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society features leading international scholars’ assessments of scholarly inquiry about sport and society. Divided into six sections, chapters consider dominant issues within key areas, approaches (theory and method) featured in inquiry, and debates needing resolution. Part I: Society and Values considers matters of...

Sports journalism mediates between sports organizations, sports fans, and wider publics. Its remit ranges from basic reportage through celebrity gossip to serious critique of sport and its social implications. Sports journalists, as agents operating at the intersection of the sport and media fields, encounter conflicting demands to celebrate and sc...

This article addresses issues surrounding changes in television in the digital age, focusing specifically on questions of cultural citizenship as they relate to sport on television. It considers the curious neglect of sport in the Australian Government’s 2020 ‘Media Reform Green Paper: Modernising television regulation in Australia’, especially giv...

This article examines British media coverage of women's association football during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, to identify how the media framed the women's game and how these frames could shape the public perceptions of it. Through a database search of British-based news coverage of women's football, 100 news articles were identified in t...

Artists and creative workers have long been recognized as playing an important role in gentrification, being often portrayed as forerunners of urban change and displacement in former industrial and working-class suburbs of 'post-Fordist' cities. However, as is well represented by recent research, the relationship between the arts, gentrification an...

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase a...

In Distinction, Bourdieu draws out the strong, but mediated, relations between politics and cultural tastes, and the issues through which they are expressed-the right to speak, moral order and class consciousness. While Bourdieu's analysis was framed by an emphasis on French class politics, we adopt a broader sense of the political, focusing less o...

The Covid-19 global pandemic posed a particularly acute problem for sport. Although there was massive sectoral disruption in areas like higher education, music, and tourism, sport is unusually dependent on commercial media-financed, impossible-to-repeat live events performed before large co-present crowds that form a key part of the spectacle for t...

Scandals relating to sport are highly variable in nature, frequent and occupy extraordinary prominence in the media. If the essence of scandal lies in the nature of the transgressive act, then the role of the media can be reduced to that of the vector carrying information and analysis to the wider world. Sport scandals, always play in two direction...

The growth of over-the-top (OTT) Internet and mobile video streaming services is a major development in the distribution, transmission and consumption of global media sport. Heavily capitalised services such as Tencent Video, DAZN and Amazon Prime Video are intervening in coverage rights markets and changing how live sport is experienced and shared...

This report was commissioned to assist the Inner West Council in developing a greater understanding of the nature and extent of future needs for creative space in the local government area (LGA), with a focus on infrastructure for cultural creation and production. The research focuses on the relationships between artists, creators, their activities...

This article explores selected English language media representation of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. These Games were remarkable in suddenly becoming a key subject for global media when North Korea unexpectedly announced its intention to participate barely a month before the Opening Ceremony. There followed an extraordinary turn of events,...

This article introduces the Themed Section of Media International Australia, ‘Tastes and practices in three Australian cultural fields: television, music and sport’, which presents selected findings of the 2014-2015 survey of Australian cultural practices conducted as part of the Australian Research Council project Australian Cultural Fields: Natio...

The Australian sport field (as in other countries) is powerfully influenced by the media field, and for this reason, the survey on which this article is based placed considerable emphasis on mediated spectatorship. The survey, which draws on and adapts the work of Pierre Bourdieu, revealed differences in the place of sport in the lives of responden...

This article discusses the findings of a national survey of the social organisation of television viewing practices in contemporary Australia. These questions are addressed through multiple correspondence analyses of the aspects of television practices and tastes covered in the survey. These go beyond channel and genre preferences to include a samp...

This research was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing an up-to-date, wide-ranging understanding of its future needs for creative space, especially with regard to cultural creation and production. Most studies of creative space tend to focus on the material aspects of cultural venues and infrastructure, such as capacity, design o...

Almost a decade ago I published an article (with Dr Kylie Brass) based on Australian Research Council-funded research1 about criticisms in the media and public sphere of 'ivory tower' academe, and how, under pressures of 'relevance', 'accountability', and 'brand identity', academic knowledge was being progressively and institutionally encouraged to...

This chapter explores the role of food and drink in the Australian sporting experience and highlights issues surrounding the quality and price of stadium food and drink.

This study tests the associations between news media use and perceived political polarization, conceptualized as citizens' beliefs about partisan divides among major political parties. Relying on representative surveys in Canada, Colombia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we test whether p...

Sport has a deep, enduring attachment to nation as spatial anchor, governmental principle and romantic ideal while being simultaneously implicated in processes that strain, challenge and disrupt the sport- nation nexus. Sport institutions, practices and tastes move into new territories and, correspondingly, people relocate to national spaces where...

Mediated sport has assumed an extraordinary position in contemporary global culture. It is enormously popular, especially when stimulated by both artful and ‘carpet bomb’ marketing and promotion. It is, correspondingly, in high commercial demand in the transition from scheduled, ‘appointment’ broadcast television to a more flexible, mobile system o...

The scandalous events surrounding the 65th Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Congress in Zurich in mid-2015 produced an enormous quantity of media coverage. While few have a deep level of knowledge of FIFA’s history or governance, this global story worked effectively as narrativized media characterization by often constructin...

In Creative Nation, sport is distinguished by its almost complete absence, except as a competitor for sponsorship with ‘cultural organisations’, and in brief mentions as content for SBS Radio and Aboriginal community radio stations. Sport is not mentioned at all in the 2011 National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, but in the ensuing policy, Creat...

This article introduces the Special Issue, ‘Transforming Cultures? From Creative Nation to Creative Australia’. Taking its historical reference point from the 1994 national cultural policy Creative Nation, it outlines the issue’s theoretical foundation in the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu, while also signalling field theory’s limitations in relat...

This article draws on preliminary findings from a qualitative study of the relationships between sport, media, identity and national cultural citizenship in Greater Western Sydney, Australia’s most dynamically diverse urban region. It addresses the place of sport, including association football (soccer), in the lived experience of those who, under...

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key international figure in the study of media and sport within the sociology of sport, David Rowe, reflects on the field as a whole and the role for studying media and power within it. Rowe considers how some development in the sociology of sport within the larger discipline of sociology may be seen...

The complex, often unpredictable and shifting media sport landscape demands a reinvigorated concern with consumption and innovation. But it also must embrace production, adaptation, resistance, reproduction, and the exercise of power - as well as pleasure, identity and strategic citizen mobilisation. This theme section exemplifies these tensions be...

The concept of leisure emerged in modernity as the subordinated ‘other’ of a dominant labour in industrialized societies taking shape as bounded nation states. In late modernity, the notion of a coming ‘leisure society’symbolized a shift in their power balance whereby subordinated labour was foreshadowed as the ‘other’ of a dominant leisure. Leisur...

The experience of watching sport on television is changing with the proliferation of screens, the diversification of screen-based content, and the extension of interactive screen-facilitated communication. In recent decades, sport broadcast television viewing opportunities shifted from a primary reliance on a single “box in the corner” in the domes...

This study, based on a content analysis of television news and survey in eleven nations, explores the split between those who see the media as politically alienating and others who see the media as encouraging greater political involvement. Here, we suggest that both positions are partly right. On the one hand, television news, and in particular pu...

Sport is routinely evident as a key signifier of nation around the world. But in Australia the unusually elevated place of sport in ‘official’ and popular national culture means that questions surrounding sport, citizenship and national fealty have an especially deep resonance. For example, sport is more prominent in the advisory information for Au...

In analysing the news media's role in serving the functions associated with democratic citizenship, the number, diversity and range of news sources are central. Research conducted on sources has overwhelmingly focused on individual national systems. However, studying variations in news source patterns across national environments enhances understan...

Over the last decade there have been well-documented, far-reaching changes to the media environment as digitalization – among other forces and processes – has substantially altered media production, consumption and use. A notable consequence of this shift has been the intensified co-dependency of the media and (especially ‘live’) sport, and the con...

This Twitter Research Forum essay by Communication & Sport Associate Editor David Rowe explores the common assumption that Twitter has insinuated itself into all the communicative crevices of contemporary everyday life, including those set in the sporting context. Invoking Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it is noted that the interpretiv...

This article draws on preliminary findings from a qualitative study of the relationships between sport, media, identity and national cultural citizenship in Greater Western Sydney, Australia’s most dynamically diverse urban region. It addresses the place of sport, including association football, in the lived experience of those who, under condition...

Social Sciences in Sport presents discipline-specific knowledge in the social sciences, which aids in understanding the problems and potential of contemporary sport practices and experiences. This interdisciplinary reference provides in-depth coverage of sport studies and 14 social sciences, drawing connections across these disciplines to illuminat...

While numerous studies view the internet as a patron of internationalism and public empowerment, this comparative study of leading news websites in nine nations shows that online news is strongly nation-centred, and much more inclined to cite the voices of authority than those of civil society and the individual citizen. Online news is very similar...

Sociologists have tended to take insufficient account of the importance of emotions to the social power of the institution of media, particularly as altered by the emergence of social media in the current media ecology. This paper compensates for this neglect by means of a brief illustrative case study of the effect of social media on the public re...

To measure relationships between Olympic media viewing and nation-based attitudes, 6 nations (Australia, Bulgaria, China, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United States) were surveyed in the 5 days immediately after the 2012 London Olympics. A total of 1,025 respondents answered questions pertaining to four measures of nationalism: patriotism, na...

Public service broadcasters (PSBs) are a central part of national news media landscapes, and are often regarded as specialists in the provision of hard news. But does exposure to public versus commercial news influence citizens’ knowledge of current affairs? This question is investigated in this article using cross-national surveys capturing knowle...

This chapter returns to Jhally's early intervention in the field of media sport studies to reflect on the history, present, and future of what the author prefers to call the “media sports cultural complex” but is described variously in this context. It traces the twists and turns in sport's relationship with first print, then electronic, and finall...

This book examines the political debates over the access to live telecasts of sport in the digital broadcasting era. It outlines the broad theoretical debates, political positions and policy calculations over the provision of live, free-to-air telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship. In so doing, the book provides a number of comparat...

This article investigates the volume of foreign news provided by public service and commercial TV channels in countries with different media systems, and how this corresponds to the public's interest in and knowledge of foreign affairs. We use content analyses of television newscasts and public opinion surveys in 11 countries across five continents...

There is a continuing tension in the modern Olympics between the universalist humanism inscribed within the Olympic Charter and the competitive nationalism that is foregrounded in its media coverage. Television, as the most important medium within the `media sports cultural complex', is particularly dependent on generating and sustaining audiences...

As news media change, so media news consumption changes with them. This paper, part of a larger international research project involving 11 countries in four continents (Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia), is focused on news consumption. As the range of media outlets has increased dramatically in recent years, this paper asks which news sources...

n analysing the news media's role in serving the functions associated with democratic citizenship, the number, diversity and range of news sources are central. Research conducted on sources has overwhelmingly focused on individual national systems. However, studying variations in news source patterns across national environments enhances understand...

Professional sport has been radically altered by global capitalism, expanding from its once highly localized origins into an increasingly internationalized, mediatized, and commoditized cultural form. Like other commodities, sport has branched out from saturated domestic markets in the West. The rapid development of Asian economies has witnessed a...

Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere....

Every Olympic Games involves a dual process of attempting to project favourable images of the host city/country/region and seeking to manage the international gaze that is invited as a key rationale for staging the Games in the first place. How each site seeks to be seen varies, though, with historical, political, social, cultural, spatial and tech...

Contemporary global politics is characterized by intense debate about the status of multiculturalism. Framed within discourses of crime, counter-terrorism and moral decline, multiculturalism has been declared redundant just as the Australian government has rehabilitated the term in local citizenship legislation and policy making. Tensions between t...

This article examines changing patterns of work and play in the context of Sydney's night-time leisure economy. It documents some of the substantial changes that have occurred to the structure of work which have had clear ramifications for the leisure industry, including the proliferation of part-time, service-oriented labour within the leisure ind...

Hosting mega sport events, especially the Olympics, demands an extensive engagement with global civil society given the voluntary, highly mediated exposure of host cities and nations to the world. The philosophy of Olympism requires ethical authority in demonstrating ‘fitness’ to host the Games, so demanding intensive strategic image management. Of...

Television is no longer the only screen delivering footage and news to people about sport. Computers, the Internet, Web, mobile and other digital media are increasingly important technologies in the production and consumption of sports media. Sport Beyond Television analyzes the changes that have given rise to this situation, combining theoretical...

In this essay, David Rowe reflects on how the nexus of sport and communication has affected national and global sensibilities. Sport contests take place at particular times in specific places, usually in a stadium setting, but not all who desire to watch can be present in the stadium. Without mediated communication, the vast edifice of contemporary...

The concept of the night-time economy emerged in Britain in the early 1990s in the context of strategies to counter de-industrialization and inner-urban decline. Despite registering a shift towards more fluid, fragmented and diversified structures and rhythms of work, leisure and urban space, a framework that acknowledges cultural complexity has no...

Social Text - 60 (Volume 17, Number 3), Fall 1999

Most critical analyses of racism in sport have taken place under conditions of white institutional domination, deploying a white/non-white binary model. But what of cases in which the issue of racism may not be confined to the usual antagonists? In recent years, international cricket, once clearly bearing the stamp of British imperialism, has been...

Discussing newspapers in the 21st century commonly entails a narrative of impending extinction arising from technological, demographic, and cultural change. This article reports on research into three Australian newspapers (two broadsheet, one tabloid) that is concerned, in the first instance, with the concept of ‘tabloidization’, and the propositi...

Introduction: An Audience for and with SportAudience Formation Pre- and Post MediatizationCitizenship and Media Sport AudiencesOther Media, Other AudiencesConclusion: The Sportization of Media and Their AudiencesAcknowledgmentsReferences

Universities, as part of their remit as public organizations, encourage academics to disseminate their research, engage with communities and contribute to public policy formulation and debates. University media offices, whose role and size have grown as universities have developed a more systematic, wide-ranging approach to media communication, hav...

It is increasingly the case that cultural policy at all levels of governance is expected to address a suite of concerns much broader than those traditionally associated with the arts and creative practice. Indeed, in many nations, including most notably Britain, the concerns of cultural policy now embrace the economic and the social, as well as the...