Sport in a Changing World

Howard Nixon II

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317383772
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book shows how the dynamic interplay of a powerful "golden triangle" of sports, media, and business interests with social, cultural, economic, and political forces shapes sport in a changing world. This edition is a condensed and updated version of the first edition, with an emphasis on current social issues in sport. It also has more global content. The golden triangle concept is more developed and applied more extensively. Other key themes of the first edition—power, status, and inequality—are also more developed. New "Stop and Think Questions" have been added to challenge students to think about the meaning of what they have read. The book is now divided into five sections. The new sections highlight sociology and the sociology of sport; inequality and diversity; globalization and social deviance; major social contexts of sport, including the high school, college, and professional levels; and power, political economy, and global sports.

Part I
Sociology and the Sociology of Sport

1
A Sport Sociologist’s Perspective of Sport

Sport sociologists look at sports differently than most people do. People who follow sports as fans or even casual observers often focus on the scores, team standings, and athletic accomplishments of individual athletes and teams. Increasingly, though, these aspects of sport seem to be overshadowed in the sports news by what happens off the field. Reports of these extracurricular activities can be very distracting and annoying to those who only want the sports news to be about what happens on the field. These reports can be especially disconcerting when they raise serious questions about the conduct or character of those who play, coach, or run popular sports.

For a sociologist of sport, the action outside the lines is of primary interest because it places sport in the larger context of society. Sport is interesting to sociologists because it gives us important insights about what society and culture are like. Although people act in distinctive ways when they play and watch sports, they are nevertheless participating in a sector of society that bears the imprint of the larger society and its culture. It may be easy to dismiss sport as unworthy of the serious attention of scholars. However, even casual observers understand that sport is often taken very seriously by a large number of people in society. People pursue careers in sport, take various kinds of risks with their bodies and careers when they play sports, and organize their lives around sports as fans. People who genuinely care about sports, as well as many who do not, have used sports events, teams, and stars to advance their purposes in realms as diverse as education, business, religion, and politics. This widespread interest in sport and the serious commitment it can create are reasons why sociologists should study sport and why it is important to understand what sociologists learn about sport.

Sport sociologists often draw from the facts, observations, and insights of journalists and expert sports commentators, and learn from what athletes, coaches, and fans do and say. However, unlike these other people, sport sociologists understand sport on the basis of theories and research. Sport sociology is a way of talking about and understanding sport and society that relies on critical thinking, careful theoretical analysis, and systematically gathered evidence.

Sport sociologists challenge assumptions that other people often take for granted, and in doing so, they open windows on sport and society through which you may never have looked or have purposely ignored or avoided. Sport sociology could create an experience of culture shock for those not used to looking critically at this realm (Berger 1963). Culture shock occurs when we realize that the world we have taken for granted is different, more complex, and less innocent than we had previously assumed. It can be unsettling for the familiar to become unfamiliar.

Since there are so many ostensibly simple and obvious truths about sport that we learn as children and are reinforced as we get older, it is easy to understand why applying a critical sociological perspective to sport could create culture shock. It is also easy to understand why an unsettling sense of culture shock could result in a refusal to believe that sport is not what we always thought it was. Tainted heroes often remain on their pedestals long after their images have been besmirched because their devoted fans refuse to accept the realities that undermine their heroic status. After all, sports heroes inspire devotion, and sport is an anchor giving meaning to the lives of many ordinary people. Making sports heroes more human and embedding sports in the messiness of real life can be too disorienting for people to accept. Although the purpose of sport sociology is to create understanding, helping people understand the world as it really is can create discomfort. This discomfort of culture shock has to be overcome in order to see the insights and knowledge about sport that can come from the sociological perspective and sociological research. Sociologists are not in the business of preaching values, but one value statement that characterizes the sociological study of sport is that understanding the realities of sport is better than being uninformed about them or misunderstanding them. Being armed with such insights and knowledge offers some insulation from the discomfort of culture shock.

When the news seems to contain too many stories of war, terrorist threats, environmental dangers, and risks to our health and well-being, along with a multitude of social problems from family violence and divorce to a variety of crimes on the street and in the corporate suite, we can easily understand why people seek refuge in or escape to the world of play and games. Philosopher Michael Novak (1976) wrote about the special joy that could be found in sport as a diversion from everyday stresses and concerns. Some have even attributed a religious meaning to sport. For example, Novak and others have written about the religious qualities of sport as a source of inspiration and fulfillment, capable of inspiring devotion and dedication that more traditional religion often seems incapable of inspiring in contemporary society. Still others have written about sport as a symbolic refuge, offering a safe haven of fantasy in a world often filled with too many stresses, strains, frustrations, disappointments, and problems (e.g., see Nixon 1984:207–211; Nixon and Frey 1996:55–56).

Much as we might want sport to be a fantasyland or refuge, it is embedded in the same society that we may idealize or try to escape when we follow sports. Athletes are real people, as are the coaches, managers, owners, investors, officials, commentators, reporters, and spectators whom we also associate with the world of popular sports today. The games athletes play are real, too. They incite real passions, even violent ones at times. People spend large sums of money on the games, media, and assorted paraphernalia sold in the sports marketplace. Newspaper publishers and radio and television producers create sports sections and sports programming because they realize that a lot of people follow sports, and many do so faithfully and passionately. Politicians and world leaders sometimes use sports to further their careers and their political or national interests. Major corporations use athletes and the games they play to increase their market and their bottom line.

The challenge for sport sociologists should be clear. It is to document and explain the realities of sport in a way that is compelling for the audience. This is challenging because the myths of sports are themselves highly compelling, and demystifying sport can create culture shock and make people dismissive. After all, myths and illusions may be far more reassuring, gratifying, and meaningful than reality.

Documenting and explaining major social and cultural patterns in sport will necessarily involve an analysis of change, since powerful forces of social and cultural change are leaving their imprint on society and sport. We will examine contemporary forces of social demographic, organizational, economic, political, and technological change as well as changes in social institutions and in the patterns of social interaction and social relationships linking networks of people, groups, and organizations to each other. We are ultimately interested in how these various kinds of social factors influence sport and cause it to change. We will also see how various inequalities weave their way through sport in different contexts and at different levels of sport. Sport itself will be understood in terms of a dominant network of powerful and intertwined people and organizations in highly commercialized sports, the media, and the corporate world, which we will call the golden triangle. Since we cannot understand change today without seeing it from a global perspective, we will look at sport in a changing world and try to understand how the most visible and commercially successful sports are being shaped by forces and patterns of change occurring in a global context.

Sociology and the Sociological Imagination

Although this book draws from the insights and evidence of scholars in many related fields, sociology is the foundation for the analysis that is presented in these pages. As sport sociology, this analysis utilizes sociological concepts, theories, and evidence to describe and explain the relationship between sport and society. This analysis of sport in society will reveal important ideas about how people interact with each other, how society is organized, and how it changes.

Sociologists look for patterns in social connections linking people in social interactions, relationships, and networks. These patterns form social structures, which are the recurrent or enduring characteristics of social interactions, relationships, and networks. Sociologists are interested in how social structures form, what they look like, how they influence people interacting in society or social actors, and how they change. In contrast, psychologists are more interested in the qualities of social actors as individuals, including the brain and cognition, consciousness, memory, sensation, emotions, learning, motivation, personality, and mental health problems. Thus, while sport sociologists may focus on how interactions in sports groups and organizations are structured by social and cultural forces in society, sport psychologists are more likely to be interested in how the cognitions, perceptions, motivations, and social adjustment of individuals in sport shape their performance and the performance of their teams.

The idea of social structure can seem fairly abstract. It may be clearer if we think of it as similar to the basic framework of a house, which includes the basement, walls, windows, door frames, floors, ceilings, and roof. It is what endures in the face of strong winds; new coats of paint; changes in furniture, appliances, floor and wall coverings, and heating and cooling systems; and new homeowners. The framework of a house may warp, rot, or even collapse over time, and it may be seriously damaged or leveled by extreme weather or fire. However, these kinds of changes take time or are relatively unusual. Thus, social structures are like the framework of most houses because they endure over time.

Unlike the framework of a house, though, the basic elements of social structure are abstract and cannot be directly observed. These basic elements include social norms, statuses, roles, relationships, and networks. Social norms are the expectations or rules we have for how we will interact with each other. Norms vary from informal to very formal, and some may be enacted as laws. However, informal norms, called folkways by sociologists, should not be mistaken as inconsequential. For example, the informal rules that teammates have about the secrecy of hazing rituals can lead to shunning or more serious social penalties if they are ignored. Violating some norms has significant moral implications, such as when athletes are publicly blamed for intentionally and seriously injuring teammates in practice or opposing players in competition.

Statuses are the positions we occupy in society, such as occupations and places in the family, other social groups, and organizations. Statuses are defined by the expectations we associate with them. We expect certain kinds of behavior from people in distinctive places in the social structure in relation to others with whom they interact in these positions. For example, mothers and fathers are expected to act in certain ways toward children, teachers are expected to fulfill certain responsibilities toward students, and coaches are expected to treat athletes in certain ways. These status expectations are defined reciprocally, which means that just as coaches are expected to interact in certain ways with the athletes on their team, athletes are expected to interact in certain ways with their coaches. It should be evident that status expectations may be broad and also could be very narrowly defined in relation to particular social contexts, such as the locker room, the coach’s office, the playing field, or public settings for coaches and athletes.

While we occupy social statuses, we perform social roles. For example, there are athletes who diligently try to do all the things that coaches ask of them, and there are athletes who display much less diligence or even defy their coach. In a sense, then, roles are the ways people interpret and respond to status expectations. Since the expectations of different statuses that people occupy can clash, people can experience stress or discomfort when they perform their roles. This stress or discomfort is called role conflict, such as when a woman who is a coach and mother is pulled in different directions by the competing expectations of these two statuses. Role strain occurs when people have to deal with competing expectations in different roles associated with the same status, such as when a public high school coach must tell players who want team prayers before games that school administrators expect the coach to discontinue this practice. Role conflicts and role strain are called social structural issues because they result from clashing expectations related to different statuses, norms, or role relations in the social structure rather than from the personalities or desires or motivations of individuals.

Social relationships are established when our interactions with others persist over time. Social relationships link us directly or indirectly to others in social networks. Social networks can be as simple as a small group or as complex as the relationships between national bodies and teams in the Olympics. We may be connected to others in a variety of ways, such as talking to them, e-mailing them, communicating through social media, engaging in economic transactions or exchanges with them, or trying to influence them. Sometimes we have direct or face-to-face interactions with others in a group or organization, and at other times, we are indirectly linked to them because they are friends of our friends or members of the same large group or organization who are tied to others in the group or organization but are not directly tied to us. For example, professional athletes in different sports who have no direct contact with each other may nevertheless have an indirect tie to each other because they are represented by the same agent or marketing firm. Both will be affected by how well their agent and marketing firm represents them and all the others in their business networks.

We refer to the enduring patterns of social arrangements of norms, statuses, roles, relationships, and networks that serve larger purposes in society as societal institutions. These institutions are an essential aspect of social order since their existence contributes to the persistence of society by making it possible to meet the needs of everyday life in expected or predictable ways. For example, organized societies have some form of family life to prepare children for their membership in society, of religion to provide spiritual meaning for people’s lives, of economy to enable people to produce and exchange the goods and services needed to sustain life in their society, of government to order or organize collective lives and decisions of people in a society, and of mass media to enable people to communicate in and across social networks in modern mass societies. Sport is also a societal institution since it is part of the structure of societies. As part of popular culture in modern societies, it serves as a diversion or form of entertainment. The nature of sport will be made clearer later in the chapter when the concept of sport is more formally defined.

The sociological imagination is a perspective introduced by C. Wright Mills ([1959] 2000) that helps us see the distinctive way that sociologists understand human behavior, and it shows us how to interpret sport from a sociological perspective. The sociological imagination pushes our perspective beyond seeing the uniqueness of each individual’s behavior to seeing human behavior in a broader social, cultural, and historical context, where the behavior of people in one context can be compared and contrasted with the behavior of people in other contexts. Thus, the serious injury you sustained when you were training for a marathon becomes more than something that disrupted your training or prevented you from competing in the marathon. It is one of many similar cases in a statistical pattern of training injuries sustained by runners or recreational athletes in a particular year, age group, and region or country. By looking at statistics about rates of training injuries over time for different types of athletes in different types of sports, we begin to see that human behavior is not merely a collection of unique random events or experiences that happen only to particular individuals. We also see that certain kinds of behavior form patterns where the same kinds of things happen repeatedly to the same kinds of people under the same social or cultural circumstances or conditions.

Mills proposed that cultural influences combine with social structural influences and our historical understandings to shape our experiences in society. These combined influences make us similar to some people in society and different from others. Sharing a culture is one of the important reasons we are like other people. The word “culture” is sometimes casually used interchangeably with the word “society,” but sociologists distinguish these ideas. Culture refers to our way of life and beliefs we have in common or share with other people in a society or sector of society. It includes shared patterns or practices of everyday life, such as our work and family life routines, our politics, and our cuisine, housing, music, and recreation. It also includes shared values, beliefs, behavior, and material objects or artifacts the people in a society create and pass on to later generations. We interact as a cultural group in society when we are influenced by shared cultural ideas and traditions. Society refers to social networks among people in a specific area, and it reflects how we organize our social interactions and relationships. The substance or meaning of relationships in social networks reflects cultural influences.

The sociological imagination enables us to see beyond the things that make us unique to patterns of social behavior that tend to characterize groups or categories of people and tend to recur when the same causal factors are present in the contexts of our experience. To return to the case of sports injuries, we may find, for example, that in contact sports that are played at high levels of competitive intensity by big, strong, and well-conditioned athletes, there are fairly predictable rates of certain types of injuries over time. The fact that athletes continue to compete in dangerous sports despite the risk of injury may be understood with sociological imagination as a result of the influence of status expectations for serious athletes to “play hurt” and of a culture in sport that glorifies “playing hurt” and minimizes the seriousness of injuries. This contrasts with the view that athletes independently make decisions to keep playing despite the risk, pain, and damage of injuries. Rather than seeing these athletes as irrational or masochistic individuals, we are able with sociological imagination to see their behavior as a product of larger forces of society, culture, and history in serious or highly competitive sports. This is the sociological analysis I have proposed in my own research about pain and injury in sport (Nixon 1993).

The sociological imagination implies a type of clear and precise thinking and generalizing about the social world, which is often different from the ways we think and talk about our experiences in our everyday lives. However, what people think and say about sport in their everyday interactions is important to sport sociologists as data that inform their own sociological imaginations and help them make sense of sport and society. One of the purposes of this book is to use sport sociology to convey an understanding of sport and society that enriches and broadens your sociological imagination and helps you see the social world of sport with new eyes and new insights.

Sport Sociology

Sport sociology is the application of sociology and the sociological imagination to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents in Brief
• Contents
• Special Features
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Part I Sociology and the Sociology of Sport
• Part II Social Organization of Sport
• Part III Building, Spreading, and Disrupting Sport in the Golden Triangle
• Part IV Social Contexts of Sport
• Part V Power, Political Economy, and Global Sports
• References
• Index