Prelims

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SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT: A GLOBAL SUBDISCIPLINE IN REVIEW

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RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT

Series Editor: Kevin Young

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RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT VOLUME 9

SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT: A GLOBAL SUBDISCIPLINE IN REVIEW

EDITED BY

KEVIN YOUNG

Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2017

Copyright © 2017 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78635-050-3

ISSN: 1476-2854 (Series)

Dedication

For pioneer sociologists of sport everywhere, alive and deceased, who never knew a fiftieth anniversary might ever be celebrated.

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Michael Atkinson, Jay Coakley, Chris Hallinan, Steven Jackson, Jim McKay and Emma Stevenson for their help and support with this project.

Introduction

Kevin Young

Occasion, Objective, Outcome

This volume marks not one but two anniversaries. Most importantly, the subdiscipline known usually (but inconsistently) as “sociology of sport” recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of its global body, the International Sociology of Sport Association, and its flagship journal, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. A far more modest, but second, anniversary relates to this book series, Research in the Sociology of Sport, as it approaches its 10th volume. This is the ninth volume; Volume 10 will quickly follow. Over the past 14 years, the previous eight volumes have dealt with a cluster of sociological matters: theory, risk/pain/injury, the Olympics, sport subcultures, cultural diversity, qualitative methods, indigeneity, and sport, social development, and peace. Including this volume, nearly 200 authors have contributed their ideas culminating in, at this point, an impressive corpus of research papers and knowledge. It is a genuine pleasure to acknowledge both anniversaries with the publication of “RSS9.”

The underpinning objective of this volume is very simple. At a time when an often marginalized subfield reaches a half century anniversary, it seems both fitting and useful to take stock of “what’s out there” in as inclusive and global a fashion as possible. Of course, not every country or region is represented, nor could it be for all sorts of logistical reasons. If “sociology of sport” exists at all, it does so in fairly predictable places and for fairly predictable reasons having to do with the development, institutionalization, and political economy of education of those settings. Entire blocks of the world are neither well represented in our discipline nor in this book – Africa being the most glaring example. As one of the American leaders of our field has been arguing for some time, the global distribution of sociology of sport knowledge is fundamentally uneven (Coakley, 2007).

That said, I am confident that this volume represents the most inclusive set of subfield summaries ever collated in one source. As two small comparisons, Part Four of Coakley and Dunning’s well known, well cited and well respected compendium, Handbook of Sport Studies, published by Sage in 2000 (“Sport and Society Research around the Globe”) featured brief articles representing 12 different countries, approximately half as many as this volume. Further, the mammoth special issue of the IRSS published in 2015 (Pike, Jackson, & Wenner, 2015) certainly highlighted the work of many international scholars scattered around the world (50 to be exact) and thus many international sport issues and experiences, but its primary focus was substantive research, not state-of-play commentaries on the health of the subfield per se in certain places. In this respect, while there have been several thoughtful historical reviews of the subfield (Ingham & Donnelly, 1997; Jackson, 2015; Malcolm, 2014; Pike et al., 2015), this volume represents perhaps the most ambitious and comprehensive overall review of global sociology of sport undertaken to date.

The sociology of sport has grown impressively since its inception in the 1950s and has become robust and diverse, though again uneven. In addition to countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom where it is difficult to imagine a scholarly scene without a sociology of sport presence, many countries now boast strong scholars in the field and fascinating research is being done. For instance, Latin American sociology of sport is expanding quickly, and South Korea and Japan have had organized and vibrant sociology of sport communities for some time. Individual or small groups of scholars interested in sociology of sport have bubbled up in other parts of the globe (such as the Middle East, the Caribbean, and India) where there is relatively little institutional infrastructure or help.

To relative degrees, being a sociologist of sport is no cakewalk and, despite the fact that all disciplines develop differentially in social contexts, there seem to be some common denominator challenges across the globe. As so many of the chapters to follow attest and recount, in departments of physical education, kinesiology, and exercise science, the biomechanists and lab researchers who understand sport as a chilly chi square or a blob in a test tube scoff at the touchy-feely nature of our craft (“What do you mean, ‘critical’?!”) and the mere possibility of something like qualitative fieldwork or auto-ethnography being “real” science (Bairner, 2012), while in the parent discipline mainstream sociologists often struggle to see sport as a social entity at all. As many readers of this volume know, this is a long and depressing story, but the fact that so few (actually, almost no) introduction-to-sociology textbooks feature a chapter on sport (a social institution that surely shapes human lives in impacting ways) is a testament to the often asociological character of sociology itself. To quote one of my own mainstream sociology colleagues from a department meeting some time ago, “What does sport have to do with work and occupations anyway?” While C. Wright Mills performs crocodile rolls in his grave, the only sensible response is “Et tu, Brute?” Among others, Irena Slepičková (Czech Republic) laments this myopia in chastising the “obliviousness” of scholars professing scholarly imaginations.

These, you will quickly see in the following 23 chapters, are not my experiences alone. Almost all of them, though in different ways and to different extents, speak of disciplinary hegemony and how cannibalistic both sociology and kinesiology can be to their subdisciplinary offspring. Authors speak of incessant battles for recognition, for legitimacy, for funding, and for resources, and every chapter, in its own way, records a story of disciplinary and campus struggle. Many sociology of sport colleagues continue to work in isolation (“isolation” need not necessarily only refer to geographical or institutional isolation but also isolation within departments that simply don’t recognize the importance of sport socially or sociologically). For my own part, as one of the very few Canadian sociologists based in a mainstream sociology department (see Chapter 18), I have had to frequently rationalize and explain over the past 30 years of teaching to keep sociology of sport alive in the “curriculum,” ironically in the face of some of the largest undergraduate classes taught in my department. Strange how sociologists might at times miss the most obvious social facts – sport is meaningful. But, for all of this, if you want to see hope and optimism for our subfield you will find it in the sheer robustness and unshakeable commitment of the chapters that follow, every one of which demonstrate that sport, as Eric Dunning so famously put it, “matters” (1999).

Content, Layout, Sequence

Given the task at hand that celebrates not just parts of the world where the subdiscipline has prospered and the research is strong, but other parts of the world where sociology of sport remains in its infancy or is perhaps in decline, it seemed important to format the book in a fashion that rejects any implication of power relations, geo-political domination, or any other such perception of imperialism or colonization. This is a tougher task than it at first seems. Some, for instance, may question countries or regions considered under the rubric of certain names, and others might not agree with the continent certain countries have been slotted into. However, with advice from a number of colleagues along the way, the 23 chapters simply follow an alphabetical protocol, arranged first by continent and then by country or region within that continent. In keeping with this spirit, I have meant no disrespect in deliberately avoiding the flags of the world’s most powerful nations on the book cover.

To assist in the framing of chapters, I provided authors with a suggested skeletal outline. Some authors followed it; others didn’t. Readers will notice this as they make their way through the chapters. Interestingly, even where authors did not intentionally follow my skeletal framework they tended to address similar themes and categories anyway.

In the same way, while these national/regional summaries have each been written by recognized and experienced scholars within each setting, this is not to say that the respective settings would necessarily have been perceived, understood, and assessed differently by other authors from that country/region. Many authors appropriately acknowledge this possibility.

For readers wondering why x country was left out or y region wasn’t invited, please consider the routine perils of book editing that have to do with issues like withdrawal, non-response, missed deadlines and such. This project was no anomaly in this respect. All of this is to say that a genuine attempt was made to eke out subfield summaries which were viable but, given the vagaries of time, space and human communication sometimes lost in translation, such a task can never be exhaustive or complete.

Putting it Together

This project contains a sort of double resonance. On the one hand, it is institutionally and organizationally rewarding to see our growing subdiscipline mature. As it emerges out of and inevitably interacts with the particulars of the settings that gave rise to it in the first place, it’s obviously developing in a nonuniform and nonlinear fashion (Ingham & Donnelly, 1997; Jackson, 2015). For a subdiscipline that struggled for so long in so many settings to liberate itself from the quicksand of description and structural functionalism and now seemingly headed, again in so many (but not all) settings, toward a physical cultural studies metamorphosis (Andrews, 2008; Atkinson, 2011), the sociological study of sport has, as they say, come a long way. Again, almost every chapter speaks to processes of dynamic subdisciplinary development, struggle, and change.

But the project contains strands of personal poignance too. Never initially anticipated, this book at one point or another raised the voices of so many sociology of sport colleagues I have met over the years, from my time as a graduate student, to an ISSA member, to two 4-year terms as ISSA Vice President, to my more removed and less involved current role. ISSA colleagues who have experienced how simultaneously diverse and close our international community of scholars is will quickly relate to this not insignificant angle on “knowing” sociology of sport.

Each reader will have her/his own version of this, no doubt, but for me, pulling these chapters together – from inception to correspondence to submission – was filled with ISSA-related nuance. I do not personally know all the authors, but I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many of them at international conferences. As I read their chapters submitted from thousands of miles away, I could hear their culture-infused voices telling their own sociology of sport story. As was always going to be the case in a project like this, dynamics of language, intonation, and expression inevitably frame what’s being said and how. Arguably, this enhances rather than detracts from the sensitivity and authenticity that such a project requires in both production and reception phases. Readers should remember that, for most authors, English is a second or even a third language.

Indeed, while these dynamics certainly made editorial tasks more challenging and time-consuming, they also ultimately promoted a far more personified outcome. Furthermore, as these writers “spoke,” I could also hear the voices and see the faces of so many influential ISSA characters from the past, many of whom bravely set a track of opportunity for subsequent generations to follow. Their names appear frequently in these pages, and their pioneer contributions in all cases hover in the background.

I am confident that as they read these chapters, sociologists of sport everywhere, especially those connected to ISSA, will also see the faces and hear the voices of those that went before them and helped make their subdisciplinary careers possible. If there is a better way of celebrating “our” 50th anniversary, I cannot think of it.

Happy Anniversary!