Sports betting has become a truly global phenomenon, facilitated by new communication technologies. As a result, the development of deviances, from match-fixing to money laundering, has accelerated. This new reality has numerous implications, for both the regulation of this billion-dollar industry and the very integrity of sport, sport financing and betting operations. Written by an international team of academic researchers and industry professionals, International Sports Betting explores the central concepts of integrity and deviance, governance and policy, as well as perennial issues linked to the gambling sector, such as regulatory responsibilities and the fight against gambling addiction. Unlike other treatments of the gambling industry, the book offers a multi-disciplinary sociological and managerial critique that goes beyond a traditional focus on law and regulation. This is fascinating reading for any student, researcher or practitioner working in the areas of sport business, international business, international regulation, policy studies or gambling studies.

Although everyone loves to watch a fair, evenly matched sports contest, there is no such thing as "pure sport". The Sport and Society Reader is a collection of key scholarly and journalistic articles that demonstrate the ways that the sports we love to watch and the teams we love to root for are embedded in important social structures and processes that undermine sports' "purity". The volume presents articles on: sports with - more or less - class race matters in sports gender myths and privileges in sports sports and deviance sexuality and sport globalizing sport. The articles selected are both entertaining and highly illustrative of the links between sport and other areas of social study, resulting in a book that is as compelling as it is useful. In addition, the introductory approach used throughout orients the reader to specific key issues, making The Sport and Society Reader an ideal standalone text for students of all levels. Davide Karen and Robert E. Washington's fascinating collection of scholarly and journalistic articles challenges the prevailing perception of sports, and will stimulate discussion in the classroom and beyond. This is essential reading for all students of sports studies, the sociology of sport, and the sociology of culture.

Issues of reputation management are negotiated in a wide array of contexts, yet arguably one of the most visible of these areas involves how such stories unfold within the sporting arena. Whether involving individual athletes, teams, organizations, leagues, or global entities, the process of navigating issues of image repair and/or restoration and crisis-based communication has never been more byzantine with a plethora of communicative media outlets functioning in myriad manners. Reputational Challenges in Sport explores the intersection of reputation, sport, and society. In doing so, the book advances theory and then explores individual, team, and organizational applications from varied methodological perspectives as they relate to reputation and identity management and crisis orientations. The book provides a synthesis of previous works while offering a contemporary advancement of these subjects from a variety of epistemological approaches. It gives voice to variety of perspectives that offer a robust advancement of issues relating to reputation, sport, and modern society.

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Leisure Sciences journal, this book focuses on where it and leisure sciences (as a field) started and what the future might hold for both. The foremost scholars in our field dialogue, debate, critique, and reflect on leisure studies' progress and future. Authors consider and write about the key issues and controversies of the field, developments we should be celebrating, and directions of study we should be pursing. Scholars also consider research gaps that exist in leisure research, issues we should be thinking about, and where we are now in relation to where previous projections expected. Topics in this book include: race, ethnicity, immigration, and leisure; 'risky' leisure research; critical leisure studies; leisure and social isolation; radical leisure; and post-qualitative radical ontology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Leisure Sciences.

There have been a number of social, political and economic shifts that have played a major role in constraining, enriching, mediating and altering everyday family interactions and family practices. These include globalization, economic instability, neoliberal government paradigms, a culture of consumerism, technological advancements, shifting demographics and changing parenting ideologies. This book considers what advancements have been made in family leisure research over the past two decades within the context of a rapidly shifting society and examines potential new directions for scholarship. The book begins with an emphasis on the need for scholarship that explores diverse constructions of family and provides a call to action for family-centered scholars to engage with broader social issues. A collection of authors argue the importance of expanding the understanding of family to include older adults, highlight the missing perspectives of recreation and leisure agencies in family scholarship, and examine the ways in which information communication technology may alter family leisure. Authors also consider the dominance of particular theoretical perspectives, and the limitations and consequences of such perspectives, to understand the complexity, diversity and richness of the lived family experience. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Leisure Sciences and an invited commentary in the Annals of Leisure Research.

The story of global sport is the story of expansion from local development to globalized industry, from recreational to marketized activity. Alongside that, each sport has its own distinctive history, sub-cultures, practices and structures. This ambitious new volume offers state-of-the-art overviews of the development of every major sport or classification of sport, examining their history, socio-cultural significance, political economy and international reach, and suggesting directions for future research. Expert authors from around the world provide varied perspectives on the globalization of sport, highlighting diverse and often underrepresented voices. By putting sport itself in the foreground, this book represents the perfect companion to any social scientific course in sport studies, and the perfect jumping-off point for further study or research. The Routledge Handbook of Global Sport is an essential reference for students and scholars of sport history, sport and society, the sociology of sport, sport development, sport and globalization, sports geography, international sports organizations, sports cultures, the governance of sport, sport studies, sport coaching or sport management.

Real Women Run is an innovative feminist ethnography that consists of a series of linked essays and presentations about women who run at the intersections of queer, feminist, and running identities. Faulkner uses feminist grounded theory, poetic inquiry, and qualitative content analysis to examine women's embodied stories of running: how they run, how running fits into the context of their lives and relationships, how they enact or challenge cultural scripts of women's activities and normative running bodies, and what running means for their lives and identities. During a two-and-a-half-year ethnography with women who run, Faulkner engaged in an intersectional qualitative content analysis of websites and blogs targeted to women runners, a grounded theory poetic analysis of 41 interviews with women who run, and participant observation at road races. Real Women Run speaks to the call for a more physical feminism. This ethnography sees women's physical and mental strength developed through running as a way to embrace the contradictions between a deconstructed focus on the mind/body split and the focus on individuals' actual material bodies and their everyday interactions with their bodies and through their bodies with the world around them.

Take a breath.... Read "slow"ly.

How often in the course and crush of our daily lives do we afford ourselves moments to truly relish-to truly be present in-the act of preparing and eating food? For most of us, our enjoyment of food has fallen victim to the frenetic pace of our lives and to our increasing estrangement, in a complex commercial economy, from the natural processes by which food is grown and produced. Packaged, artificial, and unhealthful, fast food is only the most dramatic example of the degradation of food in our lives, and of the deeper threats to our cultural, political, and environmental well-being.

In 1986, Carlo Petrini decided to resist the steady march of fast food and all that it represents when he organized a protest against the building of a McDonald's near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Armed with bowls of penne, Petrini and his supporters spawned a phenomenon. Three years later Petrini founded the International Slow Food Movement, renouncing not only fast food but also the overall pace of the "fast life." Issuing a manifesto, the Movement called for the safeguarding of local economies, the preservation of indigenous gastronomic traditions, and the creation of a new kind of ecologically aware consumerism committed to sustainability. On a practical level, it advocates a return to traditional recipes, locally grown foods and wines, and eating as a social event. Today, with a magazine, Web site, and over 75,000 followers organized into local "convivia," or chapters, Slow Food is poised to revolutionize the way Americans shop for groceries, prepare and consume their meals, and think about food.

"Slow Food" not only recalls the origins, first steps, and international expansion of the movement from the perspective of its founder, it is also a powerful expression of the organization's goal of engendering social reform through the transformation of our attitudes about food and eating. As "Newsweek" described it, the Slow Food movement has now become the basis for an alternative to the American rat race, the inspiration for "a kinder and gentler capitalism."

Linger a while then, with the story of what Alice Waters in her Foreword calls "this Delicious Revolution," and rediscover the pleasures of the good life.

Bidding contests for sporting and cultural events are attracting increasing media and public attention. Yet, despite the cost, size and scale of these bidding contests, relatively little academic attention has been paid to the strategies and tactics used to develop successful bids. Event Bidding: Politics, Persuasion and Resistance develops a comprehensive, critical understanding of the bidding processes surrounding the award of major peripatetic events. This is achieved by drawing together existing knowledge on the subject of event bidding, combining this with historical and contemporary examples to enable a critical commentary on the bidding process itself and the struggle for power that it represents.

The text draws on case studies of ‘mega events’ including the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games as well as a range of smaller peripatetic events from across the world to analyse the bidding process and some of the increasingly controversial issues which emerge during often lengthy and expensive bid campaigns. Finally, the text reflects on a range of critical issues of contemporary significance in bidding contests, including the growing ethical and governance issues surrounding the development and award of events as well as the impact of growing oppositional movements surrounding each contest.

This timely volume brings theory and practice together in one place to produce a critical appraisal of a phenomenon with a relatively recent history and is particularly suitable for students, researchers and academics of sports, events, tourism and related subject fields focusing on the strategic and political dimensions of major events.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I:

Politics - Contexts and Concepts

A history of bidding

Motivations to bid

PART II:

Persuasion - Competencies and Campaigns

Bidding infrastructure: Demonstrating technical competency

Bidding narratives: Positioning through storytelling

Bidding tactics: Campaigning and lobbying

PART III:

Resistance - Corruption and Contestation

Governance, ethics and impropriety

Resistance and alternative campaigns

PART IV:

Case Studies in Event Bidding

Rio's 2016 Olympic Bid: Putting South America on the map

Marseille-Provence 2013: "The unquenchable thirst for creative destruction"

Conclusions: The future of event bidding

　

Index

　/

This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the interface between family care and employment. Utilizing an innovative family care model, it provides an in-depth look at the prevalence and types of care provided, the impact of multiple responsibilities, and the programmes and benefits utilized in alleviating conflicts between work and family.

Greyhound racing emerged rapidly in Britain in 1926 but in its early years was subject to rabid institutional middle-class opposition largely because of the legal gambling opportunities it offered to the working class. Though condemned as a dissipate and impoverishing activity, it was, in fact, a significant leisure opportunity for the working class, which cost little for the minority of bettors involved in what was clearly little more than a 'bit of the flutter' , This book is the first national study of greyhound racing in Britain from its beginnings, to its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and up its long slow decline of the late twentieth century. Much of the study will be defined by the dominating issue of working-class gambling and the bitter opposition to both it and greyhound racing, although the attractions of this 'American Night Out' will also be examined. -- .

This is the latest book on leisure from one of the leading figures in the field of leisure studies. It makes a major contribution in considering leisure as a primary aspect of cultural life. Rojek treats modern culture as performative. That is, there are strong pressures on us to keep busy, even if we are busy doing nothing. Leisure is analysed as a status-placing activity. The implications of the post-work thesis for leisure, the role of inequality in leisure practice, are explored in interesting and novel ways. Perhaps the most notable feature of the book is the discussion of the abnormal forms of leisure and the attack on the medicalized model of society. This book will be required reading for anyone interested in leisure studies and cultural studies.

On the surface, fishing is all about casting, catching and communing with nature, but on a deeper level, the sport is filled with mysteries and contradictions. Why do people fish? How does a desire to return to nature go hand in hand with high-tech gadgetry? How is it possible to see other people's fishing as despoiling nature but not one's own? What does the long and complex history of the sport reveal? Like so much else in life, what fishing says about society and the people in it -- both past and present -- is hidden from view and almost never discussed.
This book is a considered foray into the leisure sport of fishing by an avid fisherman who is also a professional anthropologist. Those who enjoy the sport tend to extol its naturalness - fishing enables them to commune with nature at its most primeval. However, if it's called natural, it's probably a great spot to trawl for clues as to how people manage larger cosmic issues. 'Call it natural, ' the author quips, 'and the anthropologists will come.'
Is fishing an uncomplicated activity, or is it deeply meaningful? What does it say about culture? Is the recent resurgence of interest in the sport simply a reflection of more disposable incomes and more leisure time? What is the connection between fishing and Santa Claus? fishing and flamenco? And finally, what is the best way to kiss a trout? Unlike most books on fishing, which focus on the tale or on 'how-to', this book shows that there is much more lurking beneath the surface than fish.

On the surface, fishing is all about casting, catching and communing with nature, but on a deeper level, the sport is filled with mysteries and contradictions. Why do people fish? How does a desire to return to nature go hand in hand with high-tech gadgetry? How is it possible to see other people's fishing as despoiling nature but not one's own? What does the long and complex history of the sport reveal? Like so much else in life, what fishing says about society and the people in it -- both past and present -- is hidden from view and almost never discussed.
This book is a considered foray into the leisure sport of fishing by an avid fisherman who is also a professional anthropologist. Those who enjoy the sport tend to extol its naturalness - fishing enables them to commune with nature at its most primeval. However, if it's called natural, it's probably a great spot to trawl for clues as to how people manage larger cosmic issues. 'Call it natural, ' the author quips, 'and the anthropologists will come.'
Is fishing an uncomplicated activity, or is it deeply meaningful? What does it say about culture? Is the recent resurgence of interest in the sport simply a reflection of more disposable incomes and more leisure time? What is the connection between fishing and Santa Claus? fishing and flamenco? And finally, what is the best way to kiss a trout? Unlike most books on fishing, which focus on the tale or on 'how-to', this book shows that there is much more lurking beneath the surface than fish.

This book looks at the potential of sport to contribute to wide-ranging development outcomes, which have been recognized across international policy declarations, most significantly in the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development. It provides a theoretical approach to sport and development. It begins by addressing the basic concepts of sport development and sustainability and then discusses the potential contribution of sport to five prioritized SDGs (SDGs 3, 4, 5, 8 and 16) and the environment as one of the sustainable development pillars that may contribute to SDGs 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15. This academic resource provides a macro view to students and researchers of sports sciences to know more about the fundamental concepts of sustainable development goals, and to enhance their knowledge about sport as a conduit that can help achieve wider development outcomes rather than being an end in itself. This book is of interest to students and researchers of sports studies, from sociology to management, and researchers and policy makers interested in sport and sustainable development.

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Trygve B. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance. Sports not only reflect or reverse social realities, but capture and keep our attention when we use and experience them as a means to reflect on social life, injustice, and hierarchy. More specifically, blending approaches from media studies with ethnography, Broch explores the women-dominated sport of handball in Norway, a country that considers gender equality a basis of democracy. As such, the analyses here show how broadly available meanings about sameness and equality are mediated and experienced through a performative feel for the game.

This book employs a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) framework to examine cycling mobility, marking a new turn in ecolinguistic discourse analysis. The author focuses specifically on environment-related arguments concerning the promotion of higher levels of cycling, mainly as a means of transport, and investigates the "US vs. "THEM" narratives present in many discourses about road users. Analysing newspaper articles, institutional documents and spoken interviews, the author searches for a positive new discourse that would inspire and encourage cycling as a habitual means of transport, rather than simply exposing ecologically destructive discourse. The book will be of interest to scholars of discourse and ecolinguistics, as well as contributing to the lively debate about how to increase cycling in fields such as sustainability, sociology, transport planning and management.

Slogans such as "Let's put Christ back into Christmas" or "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" hold an appeal to Christians who oppose the commercializing of events they hold sacred. However, through a close look at the rise of holidays in the United States, Leigh Schmidt show us that commercial appropriations of these occasions were as religious in form as they were secular. The rituals of America's holiday bazaar that emerged in the nineteenth century offered a luxuriant merger of the holy and the profane--a heady blend of fashion and faith, merchandising and gift-giving, profits and sentiments, all celebrations of a devout consumption. In this richly illustrated book, which captures both the blessings and ballyhoo of American holiday observances for the mid-eighteenth century through the twentieth, the author offers a reassessment of the "consumer rites" that various social critics have long decried for their spiritual emptiness and banal sentimentality.

Schmidt tells the story of how holiday celebrations were almost banished by Puritans and other religious reformers in the colonies but went on to be romanticized and reinvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Merchants and advertisers were crucial for the reimagining of the holidays, promoting them in a grand, carnivalesque manner, which could include gargantuan fruit cakes, masked Santa Clauses, and exploding valentines.

Along the way Schmidt uses everything from diaries to manuals on church decoration and window display to show in bright detail the ways in which people have prepared for and celebrated specific holidays--such as going Christmas shopping, making love tokens, choosing Easter bonnets, sending flowers to Mom, buying ties for Dad. He demonstrates in particular how women took the lead as holiday consumers, shaping warm-hearted celebrations of home and family through their intricate engagement with the marketplace. Bringing together the history of business, religion, and gender, this book offers a fascinating cultural history of an endlessly debated marvel--the commercialization of the American holidays.

'It is rare for a book to be both erudite and amusing at the same time, and this book has succeeded. It has changed the common but unacceptable image of the Puritans as dull, solemn, melancholy misanthropes' - Horton Davies, author of The Worship of the American Puritans For over four centuries, 'puritan' has been a synonym for dour, joyless, and repressed. In Puritans at Play, Bruce Daniels reappraises the accuracy of this grim portrait by examining leisure and recreation in colonial and revolutionary New England. Chapters on music, dinner parties, dancing, sex, alcohol, taverns, and sports are presented in a lively style making this book as entertaining as it is illuminating.

This open access book adopts a cultural sociology of materiality to explore the hallmark of the female athlete: the ponytail. Studying a wealth of news articles about ponytails in sports and society, Broch uncovers this hairstyle's polyvocality and argues that it is a total social phenomenon. By separating his approach from the cultural studies tradition, Broch highlights how hair is imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to understand, maneuver, and criticize social gender relations in deeply personal ways. Using multiple theories about hair, bodies, myths, and icons, he creates a multidimensional method to show how icons are imitated and used. As women navigate their practical lives, health issues, and gendered expectations, the ponytail materializes their dynamic maneuvering of cultural and social environments. Sporting a ponytail-itself an embodiment of movement-is filled with a performativity of social movements: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical.

J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket. On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket. Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.

Can the boxing gym be recognised as an effective space for supporting desistance? Exploring the psychosocial manifestations of boxing, this enlightening study reviews conflicting evidence to determine boxing's place in the criminal justice system. Drawing upon the empirical insights, with case studies of participants' backgrounds and their motivations for taking up the sport, Jump measures the value of the discipline, as well as the respect and fraternity that some claim boxing provides for young men. This is a perceptive addition to the debate about sport's role in criminal desistance that delves deep into themes of masculinity and violence.

This innovative text's critical examination foregrounds the prime reason why so many people participate in or watch sport - pleasure. Although there has been a "turn" to emotions and affect within academia over the last two decades, it has been somewhat remiss that pleasure, as an integral aspect of human life, has not received greater attention from sociologists of sport, exercise and physical education. This book addresses this issue via an unabashed examination of sport and the moving body via a "pleasure lens." It provides new insights about the production of various identities, power relations and social issues, and the dialectical links between the socio-cultural and the body. Taking a wide-sweeping view of pleasure - dignified and debauched, distinguished and mundane - it examines topics as diverse as aging, health, fandom, running, extreme sports, biopolitics, consumerism, feminism, sex and sexuality. In drawing from diverse theoretical approaches and original empirical research, the text reveals the social and political significance of pleasure and provides a more rounded, dynamic and sensual account of sport.

Clare Holdsworth develops an account of everyday busyness by identifying busyness with a relational interpretation of time. She analyses a variety of secondary data sources - one-day diaries, self-help books on busyness and time management, accounts of a writing day and interviews about family work and time - and combines these analyses with personal observations. By revealing busyness as the point at which we negotiate our own responsibilities and those of other people, and by showcasing how experiences of busyness are very varied, Holdsworth concludes that the tactics we use to deal with excessive busyness and the habits we develop in relation to it need to recognise the relational status of busyness. Rather than assuming that busyness is an issue that should be resolved by helping individuals manage their time better, she argues that busyness should be thought of as a collective challenge. This book encourages us to understand that time-management solutions need to focus on the spatial and temporal distributions of responsibilities and how people manage these responsibilities. It represents a timely call for collective responses to busyness in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has intensified the unequal distribution of responsibilities.

Sport is often seen as an indicator of the civic maturity of a community, an aspect of the rights of citizens to health, education and social integration. This book examines the relationships between participation in sport and physical activity, and welfare policies across Europe. It argues that the success of campaigns for the promotion of sport depend on the existence of dedicated welfare policies promoted by the European states and explores variations in cultural models and structures of governance across Europe. Addressing the function of supranational institutions such as the EU as well as voluntary networks, the book illuminates key issues in European societies such as migration, financial austerity and Brexit as they relate to sport policy. This is important reading for scholars and students in the fields of European sport and physical activity, sociology, political science and organisational analysis, as well as operators and managers of the sport systems involved in advanced training programmes.