Association football is the richest, most popular sport in history with a multicultural global following. It is also riven with corruption, racism, homophobia and a violence that has for decades resisted all attempts to tame it. Cashmore and Cleland examine football's dark side: the unpleasant, sleazy and downright nasty aspects of the sport.

Contemporary sport is shaped by wider society. Today those managing sport must be aware of the broader social and cultural context within which it exists if their effectiveness is to be established and their careers defined. This book is the first of its kind to contextualise the wider social and cultural environment of sport management and explain the key issues and practical implications of this for those working, or intending to find employment, in the field. Written by a team of leading international experts on sport management, the book explores important topics such as corporate social responsibility in sport, race, gender and sexuality, sport and the media, globalisation, populations with individual needs, social class, social capital social exclusion. As part of a comprehensive coverage of these and many other social issues, the reader is reminded of the fundamental requirement to properly appreciate the cultural sensitivities of the managerial environment in which they intend to operate. Each issue is examined from the perspective of the manager or sport practitioner, and each chapter includes a range of useful features, such as case-studies and self-test questions, to encourage the reader to think critically about the role of sport in society and about their own professional practice. This is the first sports management textbook to be based on the thesis that a more socially aware manager is a more effective manager and thus should be regarded as essential reading for all sport management students.

This book examines Australia 's sporting relationships with the Asian region during the interwar period. Until now, Australia 's sporting relationships with the Asian region have been neglected by scholars of Australian and Asian sports history, and the broader field of Australia 's Asian context. Concentrating on the period of the 1920s and 1930s when sporting relationships between Australia and a number of Asian nations emerged in a variety of sports this book demonstrates the depth of these previously under-examined connections. The book challenges, and complicates, the broader historiography of Australia 's Asian context a historiography that has been strongly influenced by the White Australia Policy and the Pacific War. Why, for example, did white Australia so warmly welcome visiting Japanese sportsmen at a time when the Pacific region appeared to be inexorably sliding into a war that was informed by racial antagonisms?

This book examines sporting relations between Australia and seven Asian countries (China, Japan, India, Netherlands East Indies, Philippines, Malaya and Singapore) and a range of sports including rugby, football, swimming, hockey, boxing, cricket and tennis. The significance of the collection is drawn together in a concluding chapter by prominent historian David Walker.

This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

As football clubs have become luxury investments, their decisions increasingly mirror those of any other business organisation. Football supporters have been encouraged to express their club loyalty by thinking business - acting as consumers and generating money deemed necessary for their clubs to compete at the highest levels. In critical studies, supporters have been portrayed as passive or reluctant consumers who, imprisoned by enduring club loyalties, embody a fatalistic attitude to their own exploitation. As this book aims to show, however, such expressions of loyalty are far from hegemonic and often interface haphazardly with traditional ideas about what constitutes the loyal fan . While there is little doubt that professional football is experiencing commodification, the reality is that football clubs are not simply businesses, nor can they ever aspire to be organisations driven solely by expanding or protecting economic value. Rather, clubs hover uncertainly between being businesses and community assets."

Football Supporters and the Commercialisation of Football" explores the implications of this uncertainty for understanding supporter resistance to, and compromise with, commodification. Every club and its supporters exist in their own unique national and local contexts. In this respect, this book offers a Euro-wide comparison of supporter reactions to commercialisation and provides unique insight into how football supporters actively mediate regional, local and national contexts, as they intersect with the universalistic presumptions of commerce.

This book was previously published as a special issue of "Soccer and Society."

Realpolitik as a component of the Olympic Games held in East Asia has been largely ignored by historians. However, sport was an integral part of cultural diplomacy and the expression of national prowess for the three Games held in East Asia: 1964 Tokyo, 1988 Seoul and 2008 Beijing. It is time this was recorded. The Olympic Games had transformational political, economic and cultural effects for the host cities and countries. This also is a neglected topic. The Triple Asian Olympics: Asia Rising explores the realities of global transformation, regional ascendancy and metaphorical modernity of the East Asian Olympics and, by extension, East Asia. As the axis of global geo-political and economic power shifts to the East, analyzing the significance of the Olympic Games in East Asia becomes significant to an understanding the shifting nature of the nations of East Asia. The Triple Asian Games are harbingers of dramatic geopolitical change. This is the first study to record, confront and examine this contemporary phenomenon. For this reason, this unique collection promises to attract a wide readership. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the United States has used sport as a vehicle for spreading its influence and extending its power, especially in the Western Hemisphere and around the Pacific Rim, but also in every corner of the rest of the world. Through modern sport in general, and through American pastimes such as baseball, basketball and the American variant of football in particular, the U.S. has sought to Americanize the globe's masses in a long series of both domestic and foreign campaigns. Sport played roles in American programs of cultural, economic, and political expansion. Sport also contributed to American efforts to assimilate immigrant populations. Even in American games such as baseball and football, sport has also served as an agent of resistance to American imperial designs among the nations of the Western hemisphere and the Pacific Rim. As the twenty-first century begins, sport continues to shape American visions of a global empire as well as framing resistance to American imperial designs. Mapping an Empire of American Sport chronicles the dynamic tensions in the role of sport as an element in both the expansion of and the resistance to American power, and in sport's dual role as an instrument for assimilation and adaptation. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The "Handbook of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games" is an authoritative and comprehensive account of the world s greatest sporting and cultural event. It tells the complete story of the 2012 Games from inception, through the successful bidding process and the planning and preparation phase, to delivery, the post-Games period and legacy. Written by a world-class team of international Olympic scholars, the book offers analysis of the full social, cultural, political, historical, economic and sporting context of the Games. From the political, commercial and structural complexities of organising an event on such a scale, to the sporting action that holds the attention of the world, this book illuminates every aspect of the 2012 Games, helping us to better understand the vital role that sport and culture play in contemporary global society.

The book is divided into two volumes. "Volume One: Making the Games, " examines the build-up to London 2012, covering key topics such as:

Richly illustrated with the personal accounts of key stakeholders, from sports administrators and politicians to athletes and spectators, and including essential data and evocative visual material, this book is essential reading for anybody with a personal or professional interest in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, global culture or the development of sport.

This edited collection explores the important connections between sexualities, geographies and leisure studies. Chapters consider aspects of sport, leisure and tourism and show how sexualities are produced and reproduced within these spatial realms. The critical and interdisciplinary analyses-which are evident in the collection-focus on sexuality and the socio-cultural power relations produced through and in the spaces of leisure. These theoretical discussions are all informed by recent research findings and, importantly, extend existing debates within the fields of geography and leisure studies. A range of appropriate and relevant topics are covered, including critical debate on sexism, homophobic, heterosexism and heteronormativity as well as specific LGBT experiences of sport spectatorship, socialising, Mardi Gras and skiing. This book offers a unique collection and it is the first of its kind. This book was published as a special issue of Leisure Studies.

Sport generates some of the most intense feelings and levels of commitment. It is big business globally, but also the source of the most powerful personal identifications and individual and collective pleasures. Sporting events are routine and embodied, whether in the gym, on the field or at the training ground, and they are also spectacular, for example in mega events at the stadium or, for followers at a distance, through the media of television, radio and the Internet. Large numbers of people are caught up in personal and collective investment and public engagement with sport. Why does it matter so much?

In this book, Woodward demonstrates why sport matters and how, arguing that we should take sport seriously, and explore what is social about it. Sport is not just another domain to which social theories can be applied; it is also distinctive and generates new ways of thinking about social issues and debates. Sport is affected by the global economy and social, political and cultural processes but it also shapes the wider social terrain of which it is part. Sport reproduces inequalities as well as offering opportunities. It is not always a level playing field. Sport is more than play.

Planet Sport is an engaging and concise introduction to some of the big issues in contemporary debates about sport in globalised societies, and will appeal to students, academics and general readers alike.

This volume addresses a range of philosophical and ethical issues in adapted physical activity and disability sports participation more broadly. It is comprised of a range of essays by international scholars whose backgrounds embrace different traditions of philosophy, pedagogy and adapted physical activity. The principal aim of the symposium was to open up and critically explore a range of conceptual and ethical issues and perspectives that have arisen with respect to the engagement of persons with dis/abilities in a range of physical activity contexts including, but not exclusively located in, mainstream sporting activities. This book was published as a special issue in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. This book explores the carnal experience of fighting through a sensory ethnography of MMA, and how it transgresses the cultural scripts of masculinity in popular culture. Based on four years of participant observation in a local MMA club and in-depth interviews with amateur and professional MMA fighters, Spencer documents fighters' training regimes and the meanings they attach to participation in the sport. Drawing from the philosophical phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book develops bodies-centered ontological and epistemological grounding for this study. Guided by such a position, it places bodies at the center of analysis of MMA and elucidates the embodied experience of pain and injury, and the sense and rhythms of fighting.

This anthology examines the "unfinished project of modernity" with respect to the unrealized potential for economic, social, and political development in Africa. It also shows how, facing the consequences of modernism, Africans in and out of the continent are responding to these unfinished projects drawing on (a) the customary, (b) the novelty of modernity, and (c) positive aspects of modernism, for the organization of their societies and the enrichment of their lives even as they contend with the negative aspects of modernity and modernism.

Social Issues in Sport introduces students to a sociological study of sport and is the first book to draw mainly from British sources for its material. It aims to describe the nature and extent of sporting issues prevalent in society, to analyse research studies in sport and offer explanations for sporting behaviour. Topics covered include: participation patterns in sport, health, women, social class, race, drug abuse, football hooliganism and commercialism.

This book examines the complex ways in which girls and women experience football cultures in Britain. It extends current debate surrounding women and football (namely, how gender has functioned to shape women 's experiences of playing the game), by focusing on organisational, administrative and coaching practices, alongside the particular issues surrounding sexuality, ethnicity and disability (not only gender).

The book analyses football and gender to reveal the subtle forms of discrimination that persist. It is important to highlight the many challenges and transformations made by girls and women but more importantly to consider the ways power continues to operate to devalue and undermine girls and women involved in the game. The UK-based authors make use of their recent research findings to offer critical debate on girls and women 's current experiences of British football cultures. Overall the book reveals the present day complexities of marginalisation and exclusion.

This book was published as a special issue of Sport and Society.

This handbook provides an original, comprehensive and unparalleled overview of feminist scholarship in sport, leisure and physical education. It captures the complexities of past, current and future developments in feminism while highlighting its theoretical, methodological and empirical applications. It also critically engages with policy and practice issues for women and girls taking part in sport and leisure pursuits and in physical education provision. The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education is international in scope and includes the work of established and emerging feminist scholars. It will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, gender studies, sport sciences, and sports business and management.

Over the past decade, European football has seen tremendous changes impacting upon its international framework as well as local traditions and national institutions. Processes of Europeanization in the fields of economy and politics provided the background for transformations of the production and consumption of football on a transnational scale. In the course of such rearrangements, football tournaments like the UEFA Championship or the European Champions League turned into mega-events and media spectacles attracting ever-growing audiences. The experience of participating in these events offers some of the very few occasions for the display and embodiment of identities within a European context. This volume takes the 2008 EUROs hosted by Austria and Switzerland as a case study to analyze the political and cultural significance of the tournament from a multidisciplinary angle. What are the special features and spatial arrangements of a UEFAesque Europe, in comparison to alternative possibilities of a Europe? Situating the sport tournament between interpretations of collective European ritual and European spectacle, the key research question will ask what kind of Europe was represented in the cultural, political and economic manifestations of the 2008 EUROs. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

This book provides an interpretation of sport in contemporary South Africa through an historical account of the evolution and social ramifications of sport in the twentieth century. It comprises chapters which trace the growth of sports such as football, cricket, surfing, boxing and rugby, and considers their relationship to aspects of racial identity, masculinity, femininity, political and social development in the country. The book also draws out the wider geo-political significance of South African sport, placing it in the context of the development of sport both elsewhere on the African continent and internationally. The history of sport has seen significant international growth over the past few decades. For the most part, however, the history of sport in Africa has remained largely untraced. By detailing the way in which sport 's development in South Africa overlapped with major socio-political processes on the wider African continent, this volume seeks to narrow the gap.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This book explores the meanings and practices of vintage lives. It focuses on the non-mainstream subculture of vintage clothes and lifestyle, specifically that of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and asks how those engaged in the culture place themselves within the gendered and classed contexts of these eras. As a result, it also identifies the tensions involved in these identities connected to a past that offered little gain for women and narrow gender roles for both women and men. Modern Vintage Homes & Leisure Lives is based on original empirical international data about a group of people who wear vintage clothing all of the time and whose homes are styled entirely, or almost entirely, vintage. It aims to understand the meanings of vintage for them through their daily practices and accrued knowledge. Through interviews and direct observations of vintage events it also explores questions about the acquisition, display and curation of vintage clothes, homes and objects, about glamour and wardrobes, about the history of second-hand markets, and emotional durability and ideas about ghosts, hauntings and spectral remains. It will be of particular interest to students and academics of gender and women's studies, fashion and design, fashion history, cultural studies, the body and embodiment.

Travel behaviour interacts in a deep way with how we work and play. Social, intellectual, economic and technological forces continually influence the spatial and temporal activity patterns of individuals and businesses. Developments in the production, dissemination, and consumption of information have important implications for how we use our time, and how we pursue the various work, sustenance and leisure activities of our daily existence. This book provides an authoritative assessment of the state-of-the-art in travel behaviour research and applications, and identifies the principal emerging trends, challenges and opportunities in this important area of transportation research.

This is the first book to address the link between culture and sport management. The aim is to demonstrate that culture profoundly affects how we research, teach and practice sport management. The book engages with the concept of culture both as an abstract analytical category and specific beliefs and practices. It recognizes that a single best way of managing does not exist; that the applicability of management theories may stop at national boundaries; and that fundamental cultural values act as a strong determinant to managerial ideology and practice. Culture makes the study of sport management interesting because it challenges many taken-for-granted assumptions about management, yet it reinforces our belief in the existence of common management problems.

The book offers a comprehensive review of the conceptualisations of culture and its relation with sport management by examining a range of issues: the emergence of multiculturalism as a policy issue; the impact of commonly shared cultural values within the fitness industry on managers and organisations behaviour; building cultural bridges in community sport organisations; cultural meanings attached to the consumption of Olympic merchandise, and culturally-informed interpretation through a reflective analysis of sport management texts.

This book was published as a special issue of European Sport Management Quarterly.

In 1995 rugby union finally became a professional sport following more than a century as an amateur game. This book offers a critical analysis of the sport in the professional era and assesses the relationship between the local and the global in contemporary rugby union.

Globally, we find ourselves in a novel set of circumstances where our individual and collective relationships with leisure have changed dramatically and are being dictated less by personal preferences or even affluence, but rather by health, legal, and societal factors. There is very little published work on changed practices in leisure due to the pandemic, especially focusing on activities that were previously considered ordinary and perhaps even mundane. Contribute to the compilation of a historic record of the way the pandemic has transformed various leisure behaviours in diverse cultural and national contexts at this unprecedented time.

This book focuses on the processes of documenting the Beijing Olympics ? ranging from the visual (television and film) to radio and the written word ? and the meanings generated by such representations. What were the ?key? stories and how were they chosen? What was dramatised? Who were the heroes? Which ?clashes? were highlighted and how? What sorts of stories did the notion of ?human interest? generate? Did politics take a backseat or was the topic highlighted repeatedly? Thus, the focus was not on the success or failure of this event, but on the ways in which the Olympics Games, as international and historic events, are memorialised by observers.

The key question that this book addresses is: How far would the Olympic coverage fall into the patterns of representation that have come to dominate Olympic reporting and what would China, as a discursive subject, bring to these patterns?

This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

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.

This book critically examines the ways in which sports contribute to, or inhibit, social well-being, the directions these changes take and the conditions necessary for sport to have beneficial outcomes. The themes addressed in the book demonstrate the diversity and versatility of the social impacts sport can potentially achieve as well as the variable benefits of sport in different social contexts. The contributions are focused around four major themes:

- Sport development and social change: intended and unanticipated consequences

- Empowerment and personal change through sport

- Sport participation, social inclusion and social change

- The impact of sport in society: historical and comparative perspectives

The volume constitutes the first scholarly attempt to locate, compare and conceptualize the social impact of sport in different local, national and international contexts. Through international comparison and empirically grounded case studies the book provides an important new departure in the study of the social meanings of sport in society, linking themes and areas that have previously been studied merely separately from one another.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.