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Sport signifiers and symbols: an ideographic analysis of the 1990 women’s world ice hockey championship
Abstract
Many organizations and teams in the sport industry rebrand themselves by making changes to team logos, names, and/or colors; these changes are not always favorably received by fans and other stakeholders, as team logos or colors can have hidden or secondary meanings. This was the situation in 1990 at the women’s world ice hockey championship (WWHC), held in Ottawa, Canada. Instead of wearing the colors associated with Canadian national teams, players wore bright pink jerseys with white trim. Response was widespread and immediate, with stakeholders taking a strong stance on the decision. This paper introduces ideographic analysis to further examine the reaction to the jerseys. Several themes emerged, where response was articulated in terms of the traditional red and white national team colors and the history of representing Canada in competition, and in terms of what wearing the color pink meant for women during this time period.
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Elite and professional sport events have been recognized as potential mechanisms to enhance well-being. This multi-country study investigates how engagement in such events, behaviorally through live spectating and psychologically through team identification, is associated with life satisfaction. Data from Australia (N = 268) revealed a positive association between live spectating and life satisfaction through a two-wave design measuring live spectating and life satisfaction in separate surveys. Data from the United States (N = 564) confirmed the live spectating–life satisfaction relationship found in Study 1. Additionally, Study 2 revealed individuals with higher levels of team identification perceived greater emotional support from other fans, and this perception, in turn, predicted life satisfaction. Our findings provide sport managers with implications for positioning appeals in support of sport programs and designing events that facilitate engagement to promote life satisfaction in the community.
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The Holocaust cartoon competition of 2006 in Iran as an instance of social controversy has the potential to raise social and political arguments over various international and global issues. Through using McGee’s theory of ideograph and Edwards and Winkler’s theory of representative form, I identify the ideographs used in these cartoons and argue that the Holocaust cartoons function ideographically to portray Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Israel, Zionism, and the Holocaust. I explain how these controversial images function as representative characters and representative anecdotes and create different ideological interpretations of the Holocaust and associated issues, such as Israel–Palestine conflicts and Western freedom of speech. I
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As an institution that helps bind Canadians to an imagined community, hockey has long been associated with an essential Canadian identity. However, this reductionism ignores the ways Canadians consume hockey differently based on their socio-economic background, gender, ethnicity, and location. Moreover, Canadian culture is not static, and hockey's place in it has evolved and changed. In Coast to Coast, a wide range of contributors examine the historical development of hockey across Canada, in both rural and urban settings, to ask how ideas about hockey have changed. Conceptually broad, the essays explore identity formation by investigating what hockey meant to Canadians from the nineteenth century to the Second World War, as well as the role of government, entrepreneurs, and voluntary associations in supporting and promoting the game. Coast to Coast is an intriguing look at the development of a national sport, a must-read for hockey fans and historians alike.
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The relationship of sport to sustainability management is relatively unknown. Despite the increasing recognition of the growing role of athletics in regard to environmental sustainability, it remains unclear what role athletics departments have with regard to environmental action and what is currently being done now. The purpose of this study is to examine American intercollegiate athletics department personnel in relation to their organization's sustainability practices, organizational strategies, and personal perspectives at National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) universities. Athletics department members (N = 97) who were most responsible for sustainability initiatives responded to a survey designed to assess awareness levels and concern for environmental issues and the strategies and practices at work in their respective athletics departments. Findings based on prioritization, planning, decision-making, and use of initiatives using frequencies and means are reported. Differences, using t tests were also compared based on BCS or non-BCS standing. Results show that although environmental concern is high, there is disconnect between concern and action perhaps due to a lack of communication between the athletics department and the general university, cost concerns, and a lack of knowledge about sustainability initiatives. Implications related to the need for better communication between the athletics department/university and improved planning and prioritization is discussed.
Using legal scholar Felix Cohen's philosophy of Indian-rights, this article provides a broad interpretive analysis of the American Indian sport imagery issue. The article begins with an introduction to Cohen's,work and then elaborates on how White privilege operates within the culture. An analysis of various aspects of American Indian sport imagery follows, using a concept Cohen called "transcendental nonsense." Finally, the article concludes with recommendations for how teachers, corporate executives, and government leaders can move beyond the transcendental nonsense that American Indian mascots and team names represent to a better and more meaningful understanding for both American Indians and non-American Indians.
For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism, Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments. Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little. Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.
Courses: Persuasion, Argumentation, and/or Rhetorical TheoryObjective: This one-day activity uses Franklin Delano Roosevelt's “Four Freedoms” speech, in combination with contemporary reinterpretations of Norman Rockwell's related images, to explore the concepts of ideology and visual ideographs.
This essay identifies the debate over the Brady Bill as part of a longstanding public argument rooted in two conflicting views of handguns that conceptualize competing social realities, and it argues that the social constructions of the handgun, in divergent synecdochic forms, shape the debate and maintain controversy over gun control. The divergent representations of the handgun in the debate are viewed as tactical components of competing discourses that function to sustain the practice of handgun ownership rights on the one hand, and to replace that practice on the other. Thus the critical task in this essay is to identify these synecdochal representations of the handgun as vital to both the construction and maintenance of competing social realities in the debate over the Brady Bill, and to demonstrate how such representations serve as divergent rhetorical constructs for competing interests.
In 1909, at the height of the woman suffrage controversy and during the golden age of postcards, the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York produced a twelve-card set of full-color lithographic cartoon postcards opposing woman suffrage. The postcard images reflect, and depart from, verbal arguments concerning woman suffrage prevalent during this period. They reflect arguments against suffrage that highlighted the coarsening effect the vote would have on women. The postcards also present an argument that was absent in the verbal discourse surrounding suffrage: that men (and the nation) would become feminized by woman suffrage. Accordingly, these postcards offer a productive location in which to explore how the icons of the Madonna and Uncle Sam, as well as non-iconic images of women, were deployed to reiterate the disciplinary norms of the ideographs of and .
Much has been written about the iconic power of Joe Rosenthal's 1945 photograph of the flag‐raising at Iwo Jima. This scholarship, however, insufficiently accounts for the rhetorical function of this image as it is appropriated in an unusual number of recent editorial cartoons. Building upon rhetorical theory addressing repetitive form and visual metaphor, we propose a concept of representative form. Exemplifying representative form, the parodied Iwo Jima image operates as an instance of depictive rhetoric that functions ideographically.
This essay attempts to describe political consciousness in collectivities. Symbolist thought, focused on the idea of “myth,” seems linked with material thought, focused on the concept of “ideology.” It is suggested that a description of political consciousness can be constructed from the structures of meaning exhibited by a society's vocabulary of “ideographs.”
This essay examines the spotted owl controversy as a public argument rooted in conflicting owl synecdoches that conceptualize competing social realities for environmentalists and the timber industry. It argues that these conceptions not only represent conflicting realities of the old‐growth forest, but also function as “figurative” or “representational ideographs” that disallow resolution and maintain conflict because the controversy is too significant to resolve. By applying Burke's view of synecdoche and extending McGee's concept of the ideograph to conflicting views expressed in synecdochal form, the essay offers a unique perspective for understanding how controversies are influenced by rhetorical tropes and how such tropes prevent resolution and maintain controversy by becoming issues in and of themselves.
This essay examines the controversy over environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) as a public argument rooted in two conflicting synecdoches of the “cigarette” that conceptualize competing social realities for pro‐ and anti‐smoking interest groups. It argues that the social construction of the cigarette in divergent synecdochic forms or “representational ideographs” is based on varying degrees of narrative and scientific knowledge that are provided by each group in such a way as to sustain social controversy while it transforms the meaning of both the cigarette and the idea that it represents. The essay furthers research on representational ideographs in social controversies by broadening the existing theoretical perspective derived from Kenneth Burke and Michael McGee to include Jean‐Francois Lyotard's view of narrative and scientific knowledge in the construction of social reality.
Sport is a crucial arena in which masculine hegemony is constructed and reconstructed. The effects of sporting activity are usefully analyzed in terms of two major dimensions. Those that relate directly to men, and those that serve dominant interests less directly, though no less effectively, through inferiorizing women and their activities. Processes through which sport directly supports male dominance are ones which associate males and maleness with valued skills and the sanctioned use of aggression/force/violence. Sport celebrates the dominant form of masculinity, though it must be noted that as well as women, some men are also excluded. This monopolization process is completed by a series of concrete processes which exclude women from the terrain completely, or if they do manage to pass through the barriers, effectively minimizes their achievements. Four concrete processes are considered and illustrated from the Australian sporting scene, those of definition, direct control, ignoring, and trivialization. It is necessary to understand these processes if we are to develop strategies to circumvent them. The mere fact that it is necessary for these processes to be continually invoked demonstrates that there are contradictions which can be exploited.
In August 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ignited a firestorm of controversy when it announced a policy that would require colleges and universities with Native American mascots and imagery to refrain from displaying those during NCAA-sponsored events. The policy further stated that institutions with this imagery would be ineligible to host NCAA championships starting in 2006. This article examines what the controversy reveals about White people, power, and privilege. Consideration is given to the complications associated with who gets to claim being “Indian” and the racial trappings contained within the continuum of sustainable racism emerging in the scheme of NCAA policy exemptions. The article ends with a reflection on the role racialized Native American mascots play in perpetuating a culture whose level of tolerance for slights directed toward Native Americans cannot be reconciled with the central mission of higher education.
Disagrees that "dialectical enjoinment" and "collective behavior" are necessary characteristics of a rhetorical study of social movements. Prefers a focus on individual perceptions or consciousness of movement. (PD)