Despite the position that sport occupies at the centre of public attention, and despite the billions of consumers and immense coverage which it attracts from around the globe, it seems that the media prioritise coverage of only a very small fraction of sporting events, and a few prominent athletes. It goes without saying that sport in the media is dominated by men - they are a large majority among athletes, consumers, journalists, and producers. This book will shed new light on the long discussed question of gendered sporting coverage, in an era when the Olympics can be dubbed the 'women's games'. Some of the contributions present new perspectives such as: the relationship between media and sport in Poland; media presentations of men and women in gender 'adequate' and 'inadequate' sports; competition between women and men participating in the same events; the presentation of celebrities; and the framing of doping within the context of gender relations. Furthermore, the book focuses not only on athletes, sports and events, but also on consumers, such as hooligans and their brand of masculinity, and on journalists, such as Mike Penner, who attempted to transgress gender boundaries. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Do video games cause violent, aggressive behavior? Can online games help us learn? When it comes to video games, these are often the types of questions raised by popular media, policy makers, scholars, and the general public. In this collection, international experts review the latest research findings in the field of digital game studies and weigh in on the actual physical, social, and psychological effects of video games. Taking a broad view of the industry from the moral panic of its early days up to recent controversies surrounding games like Grand Theft Auto, contributors explore the effects of games through a range of topics including health hazards/benefits, education, violence and aggression, addiction, cognitive performance, and gaming communities. Interdisciplinary and accessibly written, The Video Game Debate reveals that the arguments surrounding the game industry are far from black and white, and opens the door to richer conversation and debate amongst students, policy makers, and scholars alike.

Sport, gender, and sexuality emerged as a field of serious academic interest in the 1970s and 1980s, and has now developed into a subject widely studied across the world. Now, this new four-volume collection from Routledge explores how sport was shaped historically as a gendered institution, and closely examines the gender and sexuality of mediated sport, specifically sport's role in the creation and contestation of embodied gender and sexual categories.

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.

Since 1990, Britain has seen a period of unprecedented public investment in, and political commitment to, sport. In this book, Iain Lindsey and Barrie Houlihan examine and analyze sport policy since the appointment of John Major as leader of the Conservative Party in 1990. John Major's period as Prime Minister was a watershed in British sport policy marking the beginning of a prolonged period of public and lottery investment and relatively high political salience. The text also locates Labour sport policy not only in relation to the previous government of John Major, but also in relation to the Labor government's broader concerns and ambitions related to modernization of British institutions, its ambition to tackle the 'wicked issues' epitomized by its focus on achieving greater social inclusion, and its interest in facilitating greater stakeholder involvement in the policy process. Lindsey and Houlihan provide the first analysis that examines sport policy as a field of government and that discusses how the various sectors (e.g. youth/school sport, mass sport, etc.) have been affected by government policy and the competition for public resources.

This book is designed to reflect both our current knowledge regarding sport, globalisation and '"encounters" with several important "post-colonial" or non-western societies and to draw together scholars from a range of different disciplines. Case studies of cultural encounters in Central, South-East Asia, Asia Minor and the Arabian peninsula capture the paradoxical processes of emulation, resistance and transformation that are at work in the diffusion and development of "sport" and body cultures. These case studies bring together insights from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, law, sociology, various area and post-colonial studies.

Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production addresses the complex entanglements of science, technology, and sporting cultures. The collection explores themes around human and non-human actants, knowledge formations and processes, and the materiality and multiplicity of bodies through an engagement with the interdisciplinary fields of Sport Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Representing a range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary approaches, contributors interrogate the social, cultural, political, and historical intersections of an ever-expanding techno-scientific sporting landscape - from true bounce and brain trauma to exercise physiology, metrics, and esports, and from feminist technoscience, whey protein, and epigenetics to sickle cell screening and testosterone regulation.

The influence of professional, adult sport on youth sport is now a global concern. Children are involved in high-stakes competitive sport at national and international levels at an increasingly young age. In addition, the use of sport as a medium for positive youth development by governments and within the community has fuelled ambitious targets for young people s participation in sport at all levels. In this important study of ethical issues in and around youth sport, leading international experts argue for the development of strong ethical codes for the conduct of youth sport and for effective policy and pedagogical applications to ensure that the positive benefits of sport are optimized and the negative aspects diminished.

At the heart of the discussion are the prevailing standards and expectations of youth sport in developed societies, typically consisting of the development of motor competence, the development of a safe and healthy lifestyle and competitive style, and the development of a positive self-image and good relationship skills. The book examines the recommendations emerging from the Panathlon Declaration and the debates that have followed, and covers a wide range of key ethical issues, including:

Ethics in Youth Sport is focused on the application of ethical policy and pedagogies and is grounded in practice. It assumes no prior ethical training on the part of the reader and is essential reading for all students, researchers, policy makers and professionals working with children and young people in sport across school, community and professional settings."

Despite the mythology of sport bringing people together and encouraging everyone to work collectively to success, modern sport remains a site of exclusionary practices that operate on a number of levels. Although sports participation is, in some cases at least, becoming more open and meritocratic, at the management level it remains very homogenous; dominated by western, white, middle-aged, able-bodied men. This has implications both for how sport develops and how it is experienced by different participant groups, across all levels. Critical studies of sport have revealed that, rather than being a passive mechanism and merely reflecting inequality, sport, via social agents' interactions with sporting spaces, is actively involved in producing, reproducing, sustaining and indeed, resisting, various manifestations of inequality. The experiences of marginalised groups can act as a resource for explaining contemporary political struggles over what sport means, how it should be played (and by whom), and its place within wider society. Central to this collection is the argument that the dynamics of cultural identities are contextually contingent; influenced heavily by time and place and the extent to which they are embedded in the culture of their geographic location. They also come to function differently within certain sites and institutions; be it in one's everyday routine or leisure pursuits, such as sport. Among the themes and issues explored by the contributors to this volume are: social inclusion and exclusion in relation to class, 'race' and ethnicity, gender and sexuality; social identities and authenticity; social policy, deviance and fandom. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This volume draws together scholarship across a number of disciplines - history, sociology, media and cultural studies, political science, Slavonic studies - to examine the significance of the sport of football within Southeastern Europe, with an especial focus on countries of the former Yugoslavia. The volume is timely as there is growing recognition inside and beyond the academy that football is a key cultural site in which the tensions within the region have been, and continue to be, reflected. Important issues such as resurgent nationalism, ethno/religious identity construction, and collective masculine identity are played out in relation to the sport of football. The papers within the volume explore these and other themes in detailed case studies that will be of interest to academics and policy makers concerned with wanting to know more about how football should be considered within agendas focused on reconciliation and a socially inclusive future. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

This book traces international developments in the hooligan phenomenon since the Heysel tragedy of 1985. The authors make special reference to the troubled European championships in West Germany in 1988 and look critically at political responses to the problem. The authors used 'participant observation' in their research on British fans at the World Cup in Spain, and at matches in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, and capture the authentic voice of football hooliganism in their interviews. In this analysis of patterns of football violence the authors suggest some short-term proposals for restricting seriously violent and disorderly behaviour at continental matches and put forward a long-term strategy to deal with the root causes of hooligan behaviour.

Very little research exists on organisation and leadership of elite sports in the Nordic countries. This book is both an attempt to start filling this gap and to stimulate further research in the area.

This volume explores sporting mega-events, their social, political, and cultural characters, the value systems that they inscribe and draw on, the claims they make on us and the claims the organisers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create, and the responses of civil societies to them.

This book looks back at the meaning and purpose of leisure in the past. But this is not a simple social history of leisure. It is not enough to write a history of leisure on its own in fact, it is impossible without engaging in the debate about what counts as leisure (in the present and in the past). Writing a history of leisure, then, entails writing a philosophy of leisure: and any history needs to be a philosophical history as well. That is the purpose of this book. It provides an account of leisure through historical time, how leisure was constructed and understood by historical actors, how communicative reason and free will interacted with instrumentality at different times, how historians have reconstructed past leisure through historiography, and finally, how writers have perceived the meaning and purpose of leisure in alternative histories. Providing a sweeping overview of the field, Karl Spracklen charts how the concept of leisure was understood in Ancient history, through to modern times, and looks at leisure in different societies and cultures including Byzantium and Asian civilizations, as well as looking at leisure and Islam. Spracklen concludes with a chapter on future histories of leisure.

Bringing together many of the most influential scholars in sport and media studies, this book examines the diverse ways that media influences our understanding of the world's most important sport events, dubbed sports mega-events. It sheds new light on how these events have been changed by the media, and have, in turn, adapted to media to further their brand's cultural influence. Focusing on the central concept of "mediatization" - the permeation of media into all spheres of contemporary life - the book presents original case studies of major events including the Olympics, FIFA, rugby and cricket World Cups, Tour de France, Super Bowl, World Series, Monaco Grand Prix, Wimbledon, and many more. Written from a truly international perspective, this is a seminal work in sport and media studies that reveals the growing political, economic, and cultural influences of sport mega-events in contemporary society. Sport, Media and Mega-Events is an essential text for any course on the sociology of sport, event management, sport marketing, or featuring a cultural, communication or media studies approach to sport.

The global professionalisation of women's football has gathered momentum in the twenty first century, and professional women footballers are now more prevalent and evident in cultures around the world. Despite increased professionalisation and record-breaking viewing and participation figures for women's football, there are persistent challenges for women in the game. Professional football is now a viable career opportunity for women globally; however, as Women's Football in a Global, Professional Era demonstrates, there are pressing issues and unanswered questions that remain in the game. In this collection, a range of scholars contribute research covering three key areas as women's football shifts into a global, professional era: issues surrounding the historical development of professional women's football, documentation of the lived experiences of women in an emerging professional space and, finally, discussions around commercialisation and media coverage of the sport. Women's Football in a Global, Professional Era is an important addition to discussions on sport as work for women, and an essential reference point for students, researchers and sports professionals interested in the debates around the professionalisation of women's football internationally.

This is the first volume exploring spiritual tourism as a phenomenon in Western cultures of travel, discussing the relationship between contemporary tourism and secular approaches to religious practices. This book investigates spiritual tourism - tourism characterised by an intentional search for spiritual benefit - from a contemporary religious studies perspective. Using field research gathered from spiritual tourism locations in Asia and Europe, and utilizing contemporary scholarship on practices concerned with meaning and identity, it explores the phenomena of journeys that are taken for self transformation, tracing the history of transformative ideas in Western cultures of travel, including the modes in which the travel experience has been communicated. "Spiritual Tourism" provides an important opportunity to comment on the role of tourism in contemporary conceptions of spirituality and spiritual practice in Western society. This groundbreaking series offers original reflections on theory and method in the study of religions, and demonstrates new approaches to the way religious traditions are studied and presented. Studies published under its auspices look to clarify the role and place of Religious Studies in the academy, but not in a purely theoretical manner. Each study will demonstrate its theoretical aspects by applying them to the actual study of religions, often in the form of frontier research.

This provocative collection brings together some of the leading historians, sociologists, political scientists, and cultural theorists on an ambitious range of topics dealing with sport, diversity and difference. The book is both diverse and inclusive, for it considers race, ethnicity and aboriginality in tandem; too often these themes are segmented into separate studies. The collection features vibrant examples from different eras, places and spaces - wherein co-themes like post-colonialism, gender and media representation are embedded.

Sports coaching is a social activity. At its heart lies a complex interaction between coach and athlete played out within the context of sport, itself a socio-culturally defined set of practices. In this ground-breaking book, leading international coaching scholars and coaches argue that an understanding of sociology and social theory can help us better grasp the interactive nature of coaching and consequently assist in demystifying the mythical 'art' of the activity. The Sociology of Sports Coaching establishes an alternative conceptual framework from which to explore sports coaching. It firstly introduces the work of key social theorists, such as Foucault, Goffman and Bourdieu among others, before highlighting the principal themes that link the study of sociology and sports coaching, such as power, interaction, and knowledge and learning. The book also outlines and develops the connections between theory and practice by placing the work of each selected social theorist alongside contemporary views on that work from a current practicing coach. This is the first book to present a critical sociological perspective of sports coaching and, as such, it represents an important step forward in the professionalization of the discipline. It is essential reading for any serious student of sports coaching or the sociology of sport, and for any reflective practitioner looking to become a better coach.

Although there is growing interest from governments in participation levels in sport, the extent to which governments actively promote 'sport for all' and their motives for doing so vary greatly. This is the first book to examine the sport participation policies of national governments across the world and to offer a comparative analysis of the motives for, and successes and failures of those policies. Organized around a series of sixteen national case studies, including the UK, the US, Australia, China and India, the book enables students and practitioners to compare and contrast the development, implementation and impact of sport participation policies throughout the world. An introductory chapter provides a framework for understanding and interpreting those case studies and each chapter then addresses the following key themes: national structures for sport national sporting cultures participation levels in organized sport the nature and extent of government intervention implementation of governmental policy the impact of government policy. With contributions from many of the world's leading experts on sport policy and sport development, this book is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the role of governments in relation to supporting and regulating their citizens' involvement in sport.

Though the ancient Greek philosophical concept of schole is usually translated as 'leisure', there is a vast difference between the two. Leisure, derived from Latin licere, has its roots in Roman otium and connotes the uses of free time in ways permitted by the status quo. Schole is the actualization of mind and one's humanity within a republic that devotes its culture to making such a choice possible. This volume traces the background in Greek culture and the writings of Plato of a daring proposal presented by Aristotle, that schole is a principle for political organization. The concept of schole by and large did not survive Aristotle. To sharpen our understanding of schole the book goes on to identify the concepts of leisure which we have inherited from the intellectuals of the Hellenistic and Roman empires and the early Church Fathers. Schole also had its contrary ascholia - busyness - which Plato described as a social and psychological pathology and his analysis suggests why, due to these ills, current visions of a leisure society are highly unlikely.

The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities presents a series of ethnographic studies, focusing on the local cultures of mobilities and immobilities, emphasizing the everyday sense of contingency and heterogeneity that accompanies them. Compensating for the excess of theory and criticism based on the notion of 'hypermobilities', this book sheds light on the nuanced differences and idiosyncrasies of mobility, with a view to rediscovering meanings and lifestyles marked by movement and immobility. Original, empirical and global case studies are presented by an international team of scholars, exploring the complex, negotiated and contingent nature of the social worlds of movement. By avoiding sweeping generalizations on the deeply connected and readily mobile nature of society as a whole, this volume sheds light on the diversity of mobility modes in an accessible and interdisciplinary form that will be of key interest, to sociologists, geographers and scholars of human mobility, communication and culture.

There is a looming existential crisis for competitive sport. We are witnessing a waning trust in the integrity of sport at all levels that stems from the win-at-all-costs culture that has become so pervasive, worldwide. Doping, fraud, corruption and inhumane high-performance systems as well as worrying levels of dropout, burnout and mental health problems among athletes, all points to the fact that sport has lost track of its true meaning and is increasingly out of touch with its core values. What is needed is a powerful counterpoint to this results-focussed culture, one which goes far deeper than the superficial realm of wins, losses, medals and fame, and that provides a roadmap for athletes to discover deeper meaning and achieve more in their sporting lives. The True Athlete Philosophy is that counterpoint. This is an approach that harnesses the best of sport - the persistent drive for excellence, constant innovation, unmatched opportunities for personal development - and puts it firmly in service of the participants and society as a whole. Sport can be a tremendous tool for unlocking potential and thriving in life, but currently it is not coming close to delivering on that promise. Drawing on a combination of ancient wisdom and modern psychology, The True Athlete Philosophy explores how athletes can harness their lived experience of sport to contribute to a healthy, meaningful and fulfilled life and be of greater benefit to their community.

For almost a century, big-time college athletics has been a wildly popular but consistently problematic part of American higher education. The challenges it poses to traditional academic values have been recognized from the start, but they have grown more ominous in recent decades, as cable television has become ubiquitous, commercial opportunities have proliferated, and athletic budgets have ballooned. In the second edition of his influential book Big-Time Sports in American Universities, Clotfelter continues to examine the role of athletics in American universities, building on his argument that commercial sports have become a core function of the universities that engage in them. Drawing on recent scandals on large-scale college campuses and updates on several high-profile court cases, Clotfelter brings clear economic analysis to the variety of problems that sports raise for university and public policy, providing the basis for the continuation of constructive conversations about the value of big-time sports in higher education.

This book provides a unique perspective on the behind the scenes planning of London's Olympic legacy. The author had unprecedented access to the legacy organisations, institutions, and individuals involved with the 2012 Games. This has allowed her, in a highly accessible and engaging style, to capture a sense of the unfolding drama as attempts were made in London to harness the juggernaut of Olympic development, and its commercial imperative, to the broader cause of meaningful post-industrial regeneration in East London. The book argues that London will become the test-case city against which the legacies of all future Olympic Games, and other sporting mega-events, will be judged. The author provides the first in-depth case study of a mega-event legacy planning operation, and sets out a constructive conclusion, which details the lessons to be learnt from London's experience. Exploring the relationship between mega event planning, and post-industrial urban regeneration, this book will appeal to scholars across Sociology, Sport and Olympic studies, Anthropology, Urban Studies and Geography as well as policymakers and practitioners in urban and sport planning.