This book aims to further academic debate within the leisure and tourism studies community about the role of 'families' in contemporary life and the experiences of families and their children in the leisure environment. It is based on the recognition of the diverse nature of the family in the contemporary era and the position of children in families and society in general as active and knowing social agents rather than as passive objects. The family is on the one hand our first community with its own special kind of human attachment and on the other a little world on which the larger society is modelled. Families form the closest and most important emotional bond in humans. This relationship is what drives humanity and society, and positions families at the centre of leisure activities. This international and multi-disciplinary compilation of recent research into children and families examines progress made and challenges ahead for leisure studies. It extends the academic discourse to a wider understanding of what families, children and their leisure behaviour mean in today's societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of Leisure Research.

This book examines the exclusion of British Asians from the football industry, drawing on a wealth of empirical work with players, coaches, scouts, managers, fans, anti-racist organisations, community officers, and key stakeholders. It adopts a critical race theory (CRT) perspective to offer a platform for excluded communities to discuss their experiences and offer their advice, guidance and criticisms. Notions of whiteness, intersectionalities and gender are explored and filter throughout. This book highlights historical and contemporary reasons for the British Asian exclusion from football, critically examines a number of tried and tested inclusion strategies, and offers recommendations for reform to help achieve equality and inclusion. The research aims to: dehomogenise British Asian football experiences offer the counter-narratives of British Asian male and females to challenge master-narratives comprehend the importance of intersectionalities understand identity shifts and cultural changes challenge socio-cultural stereotypes and racial myths highlight contemporary manifestations of racisms in football at all levels examine the role 'parallel football' environments have played in the exclusion cast a critical eye over inclusion initiatives promote recommendations for reform which are born out of empirical research As long as marginalized groups, such as British Asians, are excluded from a field of popular culture, in this case football, it is a topic that demands attention, deserves investigation and requires solutions. It is hoped that this book can be of use to students, researchers and policymakers who share an active interest in football, exclusion and equality.

The Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality brings together important new work from 68 leading international scholars that, collectively, demonstrates the intrinsic interconnectedness of sport, gender and sexuality. It introduces what is, in essence, a sophisticated sub-area of sport sociology, covering the field comprehensively, as well as signalling ideas for future research and analysis. Wide-ranging across different historical periods, different sports, and different local and global contexts, the book incorporates personal, ideological and political narratives; varied conceptual, methodological and theoretical approaches; and examples of complexities and nuanced ways of understanding the gendered and sexualized dynamics of sport. It examines structural and cultural forms of gender segregation, homophobia, heteronormativity and transphobia, as well as the ideological struggles and changes that have led to nuanced ways of thinking about the sport, gender and sexuality nexus. This is a landmark work of reference that will be a key resource for students and researchers working in sport studies, gender studies, sexuality studies or sociology.

This book evaluates why cities choose to bid for the Olympics, why Olympic bids fail, and whether cities can benefit from failed bids. Attention is shifted away from host cities (or winners), to consider the impact of the bidding process on urban development in losing cities. Oliver and Lauermann show that bidding is often a politically strategic exercise, as planning ideas are recycled from one bid project to the next. As Olympic bids become more deeply embedded in urban development and bid teams engage in legacy planning, Oliver and Lauermann demonstrate that bid failure is rarely definitive and is often a desirable result. This volume adds a new and innovative perspective to Olympic Studies and mega-events more broadly, with appeal to a variety of other disciplines including geography, urban planning, spatial politics and sport and civic policy.

This is still the only textbook to introduce the principles of diversity and inclusion in sport management Diversity and inclusion is an essential component of the sport management curriculum Strong focus on how to implement diversity and inclusion strategies in practice Includes a brand new chapter on researching diversity in sport Includes additional material on intersectionality Includes international cases and examples in every chapter Includes useful teaching and learning features in every chapter, and ancillaries include a full test bank and PowerPoint slides

Today, an increasing number of people from all over the world travel to Buenos Aires to dance tango. To accommodate these intimate voyagers, tourist agencies offer travel packages, including classes in tango instruction, dance shoe shopping, and special city maps pointing out the tango clubs in town. Some of these agencies even provide "taxi dancers" - mainly Argentine men, who make a living by selling themselves as dance escorts to foreign women on a short term stay. Based on a cheek-to-cheek ethnography of intimate life in the tango clubs of Buenos Aires, this book provides a passionate exploration of tango - its sentiments and symbolic orders - as well as a critical investigation of the effects of globalization on intimate economies. Throughout the chapters, the author assesses how, in an explosive economic and political context, people's emotional lives intermingle with a tourism industry that has formed at the intersection of close embrace dances and dollars. Bringing economies of intimacy centre stage, the book describes how a global condition is lived bodily, emotionally and politically, and offers a rich, provocative contribution to theorizing today's global flows of people, money, and fragile dreams. As the narrative charts a course across a sea of intense, immediate emotional sensations, taken-for-granted ideas about sex, romance and power twist and turn like the steps of the tango.

Despite a growing interest in the sociology of the body, there has to date been a lack of scholarly work addressing the embodied aspects which form a central part of our understanding and experience of sport and movement cultures. Researching Embodied Sport explores the political, social and cultural significance of embodied approaches to the study of sport, physical activities and dance. It explains how embodied approaches fit with existing theory in studies of sport and movement cultures and makes a compelling case for incorporating an embodied approach into the study of sporting practices and experience. The book adopts a multi-disciplinary lens, moving beyond the traditional dualism of body and mind, and incorporating the physical with the social and the psychological. It applies key theories that have shaped our thinking about the body and sport, and examines both the personal, subjective experience of sporting activities and those experiences involving engagement and contact with other people, in team sports for example. The book also explores the methodological implications of 'doing' embodied research, particularly in terms of qualitative approaches to sports research. Written by a team of leading international sports researchers, and packed with vivid examples from sporting contexts as diverse as surfing, fell running, korfball and disability sport, Researching Embodied Sport is fascinating reading for any advanced student or researcher working in the sociology of sport, physical cultural studies, physical education, body studies or health studies.

Sport and Violence takes a critical look at the culture of 'sports rage' and aggression in the sporting industry, covering ethical, historical and sociological causes and impacts. It examines international examples of sport violence, including: the father of a tennis competitor placing a drug in the drinks of her competitors; a player's neck broken after being attacked from behind by an opponent in an NHL game; hooliganism in international soccer and more. The book not only attempts to explain how and why such violence originates, it examines its impact on society outside sport and suggests potential remedies for the problem. This book: Examines the culture of violence that permeates and surrounds sport, including the sociological causes of that violence, and what can be done to mitigate them Features an international perspective with examples of sport violence from throughout the world Offers a historical view on the evolution of violence in sport Its up-to-date and in-depth coverage of a controversial issue makes this book a valuable asset to both sports students and professionals working in sports management.

Sport celebrates basic human values of freedom, justice and courage. This collection of essays probes beneath those assumptions in order to illuminate how sport is intimately related to power and domination. Topics include the media treatment of sport, drug-taking in sport and the controversial and problematic relationship between sport and politics in Russia and South Africa.

This volume traces the rise and transformation of organized sport and its impact on social patterns and gender roles. Stressing the essential continuity of the sporting experience, the author shows the changing tempo of sport through the ages and explores the broader effects of the time element on the nature and style of sporting activities. The book covers current issues such as soccer hooliganism , government intervention in sport, and the influence of television on sport.

This systematic historical and sociological study of the phenomenon of football hooliganism examines the history of crowd disorderliness at association football matches in Britain and assesses both popular and academic explanations of the problem. The authors' study starts in the 1880s, when professional football first emerged in its modern form, charting the pre and inter-war periods and revealing that England's World Cup triumph formed a watershed. The changing social composition of football crowds and the changing class structure of British society is discussed and the genesis of modern football hooliganism is explained by tracing it to the cultural conditions and circumstances which reproduce in young working-class males an interest in a publicly expressed aggressive masculine style.

Videogames are a unique artistic form, and to analyse and understand them an equally unique language is required. Cremin turns to Deleuze and Guattari's non-representational philosophy to develop a conceptual toolkit for thinking anew about videogames and our relationship to them. Rather than approach videogames through a language suited to other media forms, Cremin invites us to think in terms of a videogame plane and the compositions of developers and players who bring them to life. According to Cremin, we are not simply playing videogames, we are creating them. We exceed our own bodily limitations by assembling forces with the elements they are made up of. The book develops a critical methodology that can explain what every videogame, irrespective of genre or technology, has in common and proceeds on this basis to analyse their differences. Drawing from a wide range of examples spanning the history of the medium, Cremin discerns the qualities inherent to those regarded as classics and what those qualities enable the player to do. Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari analyses different aspects of the medium, including the social and cultural context in which videogames are played, to develop a nuanced perspective on gendered narratives, caricatures and glorifications of war. It considers the processes and relationships that have given rise to industrial giants, the spiralling costs of making videogames and the pressure this places developers under to produce standard variations of winning formulas. The book invites the reader to embark on a molecular journey through worlds neither 'virtual' nor 'real' exceeding image, analogy and metaphor. With clear explanations and detailed analysis, Cremin demonstrates the value of a Deleuzian approach to the study of videogames, making it an accessible and valuable resource for students, scholars, developers and enthusiasts.

Sports are the opiate of the people, particularly in the United States, Europe, and parts of South America. Globally, billions of fans feverishly focus on the summer and winter Olympics. In theory, international fraternalism is boosted by these "friendly competitions," but often national rivalries eclipse the theoretical amity. How the Olympics have dealt with racism over the years offers a window to better understanding these dynamics. Since their revival in 1896, the modern Olympics were periodically agitated by political and moral conundrums. Racial tensions, the topic of this volume, reached their apex under the polarizing presidency of Avery Brundage. Race in sports cannot be disentangled from societal problems, nor can race or sports be fully understood separately. Racial conflict must be contextualized. Racism and the Olympics explores the racial landscape against which a number of major disputes evolved. The book covers various topics and events in history that portray discrimination within Olympic games, such as the Nazi games of 1936, the black American protest on the victory stand in Mexico City's Olympics, as well as international political forces that removed South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics. Robert G. Weisbord considers the role of international politics and the criteria that should be used to determine nations that are selected to take part in and serve as venues for the Olympic Games.

This book explores the phenomenon of pole dancing as an increasingly popular fitness and leisure activity for women. It moves beyond previous debates surrounding the empowering or degrading nature of pole dancing classes, and instead explores the complexities of these concepts and highlights that women participating in this practice cannot be seen as one dimensional. Femininity, Feminism and Recreational Pole Dancing explores the construction, negotiation and presentation of a gendered and classed identity and self through participation in pole dancing, the meaning of pole dancing as a fitness practice for women, and the concepts of community and friendship as developed through classes. Using empirical research, the book uncovers the stories and experiences of the women who participate in these classes, and examines what the mainstreaming of this type of sexualised dance means for the women who practice it. Pole dancing is shown to be a practice in which female identities are negotiated, performed and enacted and this book positions pole dancing as an activity which both reinforces but also presents some challenge to ideas of feminism and femininity for the women that participate. Women's participation in pole dancing is described in a discourse of choice and control, yet this book argues that the decision to participate is somewhat constructed by the advertising of these classes as enabling women to create a particular desirable self, which is perpetuated throughout our culture as the 'ideal'. Exploring the ways in which women attempt to manage impressions and present themselves as 'respectable', the book examines how women wish to dis-identify with both women who work as strippers and women who are feminist, seeing both identities as contradictory to the feminine image that they pursue. The book explores the capacity of these classes to offer women some feelings of agency but challenges the idea that participating in pole dancing can offer collective empowerment. The book ultimately argues that women's participation can be viewed both in terms of their active engagement and enjoyment of these classes and in terms of the structures and pressures which continue to shape their lives. This timely publication explores the complexity of the pole dancing phenomenon and highlights a range of questions surrounding this activity as a leisure form. It will be a valuable contribution to those interested in women's and gender studies, cultural studies, feminism, sociology and leisure studies.

Ever since different communities began processes of global migration, sport has been an integral feature in how we conceptualise and experience the notion of being part of a diaspora. Sport provides diasporic communities with a powerful means for creating transnational ties, but also shapes ideas of their ethnic and racial identities. In spite of this, theories of diaspora have been applied sparingly to sporting discourses. Despite W.G. Grace's claim that cricket advances civilisation by promoting a common bond, binding together peoples of vastly different backgrounds, to this day cricket operates strict symbolic boundaries; defining those who do, and equally, do not belong. C.L.R. James' now famous metaphor of looking 'beyond the boundary' captures the belief that, to fully understand the significance of cricket, and the sport's roles in changing and shaping society, one must consider the wider social and political contexts within which the game is played. Contributions to this volume do just that. Cricket acts as their point of departure, but the way in which ideas of power, representation and inequality are 'played out' is unique in each. This book was published as a special issue of Identities.

With close attention to the spheres of sport and religion as important sites of moral currency, this book draws on media coverage of major cases of hypocrisy, attending to differing meanings and consequences of hypocrisy within the US, France and Iceland. Instances come from scandals within the established churches, as well as cases from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Tour de France, and the inquest into the Hillsborough Disaster in the UK. It considers the importance of the context within which moral conduct takes place and the relevance of this for the occurrence of hypocritical action, while exploring also the implications of advances in computer and information technology for controlling messages and monitoring deceit. Identifying the negative effects of the detection of hypocrisy at individual and institutional levels, the author engages with the work of Goffman to argue for the importance of trust in institutions, underlining the necessity of minimizing and correcting hypocritical acts by which this is undermined. A detailed study of hypocrisy and the need for trust, this volume will appeal to scholars and students of sociology with interests in social and moral conduct, sport, religion, Goffman and the notion of social life as artifice.

As sport has become more intense, professional and commercialized so have the debates grown about what constitutes acceptable behaviour and fair play, and how to encourage and develop 'good' sporting behaviour, particularly in children and young people. This book explores the nature and function of values in youth sport and establishes a framework through which coaches, teachers and researchers can develop an understanding of the decision-making processes of young athletes and how they choose between playing fairly or cheating to win. The traditional view of sport participation is that it has a beneficial effect on the social and moral development of children and young people and that it intrinsically promotes cultural values. This book argues that the research evidence is more subtle and nuanced. It examines the concept of values as central organizing constructs of human behaviour that determine our priorities, guide our choices, and transfer across situations, and considers the value priorities and conflicts that are so useful in helping us to understand behaviour in sport. The book argues that teachers and professionals working with children in sport are centrally important agents for value transmission and change and therefore need to develop a deeper understanding of how sport can be used to encourage pro-social values, and offers suggestions for developing a curriculum for teaching values through sport in differing social contexts. Spanning some of the fundamental areas of sport practice and research, including sport psychology, sport pedagogy, practice ethics, and positive youth development through sport, and including useful values and attitudes questionnaires and guidance on their use and interpretation, this book is important reading for any student, researcher, coach or teacher with an interest in youth sport or physical education.

Sports provide people around the world with unmatched entertainment, from the excitement of victory to the agony of defeat. Unfortunately, it also has become painfully clear that the agony of sports goes well beyond athletes losing games or competitions. Playing through concussions, the abuse of pain medicine, the use of performance-enhancing substances, and other health-related issues have become a constant reminder that being a professional athlete can be as dangerous as it is lucrative. In The Athlete's Dilemma: Sacrificing Health for Wealth and Fame, John Weston Parry examines the health-related transgressions and hot-topic issues in America's top spectator sports, particularly in football, baseball, hockey, soccer, cycling, tennis, and Olympic competitions. Parry delves into the unique health risks that pertain to each individual sport and scrutinizes how the various leagues and organizations have handled these issues. Controversies and scandals surrounding elite athletes are also included, highlighting the need for changes in how sports are governed and regulated in the United States and worldwide. From football and soccer players returning to the field too soon after concussions to Olympic athletes using performance-enhancing substances, The Athlete's Dilemma provides a broad perspective on the health risks prevalent in sports and what can be done to reduce these risks in the future. Accessibly written yet carefully researched, this book will be of interest to athletes of all levels, sports fans, academics, and health professionals.

This is the first edited collection of its kind to analyse the distinct but overlapping topics of dress, costume, sport and leisure history. For researchers of bodily adornment and movement, sport and costume history are both primarily concerned with industrial practice and embodied experience. The ways in which bodies are adorned, embellished and clothed (or revealed) highlights the hybrid nature of dress history, encompassing as it does the everyday clothing solutions of the mass of people and the unusual or more ceremonial aspects of costume, as well as elite high fashion. Although this is as yet an under-researched area, there are an increasing number of fashion and clothing undergraduate and postgraduate courses that specialise in sport and leisurewear. This publication is intended to give an introductory overview of the historical and contemporary issues as it does for the growing number of sport marketing and sports studies courses concerned with dress, costume history and branding. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in History.

Running is a fundamental human activity and holds an important place in popular culture. In recent decades it has exploded in popularity as a leisure pursuit, with marathons and endurance challenges exerting a strong fascination. Endurance Running is the first collection of original qualitative research to examine distance running through a socio-cultural lens, with a general objective of understanding the concept and meaning of endurance historically and in contemporary times. Adopting diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to explore topics such as historical conceptualizations of endurance, lived experiences of endurance running, and the meaning of endurance in individual lives, the book reveals how the biological, historical, psychological, and sociological converge to form contextually specific ideas about endurance running and runners. Endurance Running is an essential book for anybody researching across the entire spectrum of endurance sports and fascinating reading for anybody working in the sociology of sport or the body, cultural studies or behavioural science.

In recent decades ceremonies stood in Olympiads as both vehicles of cultural values and shows embracing the banal and the everyday. But how much do we understand them as forms of public art? This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover event to Rio for the 2016 Olympics as articulations of national and cosmopolitan belonging. It is argued that embodied and projected performances of Britishness and Brazilianness embraced both artistic styles and the contemporary digital turn, refinement and banality. Combinations of art and technology reflected a vision of humanity in motion complying with the Olympic values of fairness, beauty and embodied well-being. The three ceremonial performances supported imaginative travel on stage, on big screens and in musical genres. This travel, at once mediated, embodied and experiential, created an ideal form of 'human': a tornadoros. A creative worker and a tourist, the tornadoros manipulates audio-visual narratives of culture and identity for global Olympic audiences. Spanning Sociology, Sports Studies, Culture and Media Studies, Performance Studies and Tourism Studies, this is a highly interdisciplinary and original perspective on the Olympics.

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

Sport, Fun and Enjoyment explores the pleasurable aspects of sport within the context of everyday recreational and competitive physical activities. While much recent work has focused on the relationships between physical activity, health and wellbeing, much less attention has been paid to pleasure and fun, key aspects of our engagement with sport but not so easy to measure in terms of specific outcomes. By offering a critical exploration of what can be constituted as 'fun' in a sporting context, this book reveals the complex ways in which individuals approach sport and engage with it throughout the life course. The book considers the importance of pleasure and fun as a factor in our initial, formative experiences of sport activity, and as a factor in participation and continued participation. It explores the nature of fun as an embodied experience which incorporates a multitude of social, psychological and physiological components, and as a subjective experience which cannot be fully explained through simplistic binary formulations of pleasure and pain. Drawing on a wide research literature and original empirical research with children and adults, the book outlines a new theoretical framework for thinking about pleasure and fun in sport, highlighting the contrasting ways in which sport and physical activity is experienced and the interplay between individual and social contexts. Sport, Fun and Enjoyment is important reading for anybody with an interest in physical education, youth sport, the sociology of sport, physical activity and health, sport development or sport policy.

This interdisciplinary text examines the sports-Christianity interface from Protestant and Catholic perspectives. In addition to a "systematic review of literature," field-pioneering contributors such as Michael Novak, Shirl Hoffman, Joseph Price and Robert Higgs address a wide range of topics from the sporting world, including biblical athletic metaphors, disability, evangelism, professionalism and celebrity, humility and pride, genetic enhancement technologies, stereotypes, sport as art and British and American historical analyses of sport and Christianity. Insightful chapters from Scott Kretchmar, one of the world's leading philosophers of sport, and Father Kevin Lixey, the head of the Vatican's 'Church and Sport' office (2004-), add further depth and breadth to this book, making it accessible and interesting to academic and practitioner audiences alike. Within the context of this relatively new and rapidly expanding area of inquiry, this collection provides a unique and important addition to the current literature for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and serves as a point of reference for scholars of theology and religious studies, psychology, health studies, ethics and sports studies. The book may also be of interest to physical educators and sports coaches who wish to adopt a more "holistic" and ethical approach to their work. As modern sport is often intertwined with commercial and political agendas, this book offers an important corrective to the "win-at-all-costs" culture of modern sport, which cannot be fully understood through secular ethical inquiry.

Olympic Aspirations: Realised and Unrealised surveys more than a century of the Olympic Movement's promotion of Olympic ideals internationally. The idea for Olympic Aspirations emerged at the world-renowned annual Beijing Academic Forum just months after the city hosted the impressive 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. One section of the Forum was devoted to the impact of the Olympic Movement on China and on China's image in the world. The tone at times was too self-congratulatory for some present. The critical discussion that continued into late 2010 inspired this book. Olympic Aspirations is a companion volume to the well-received Olympic Legacies: Intended and Unintended and draws on expertise from academics in all parts of the world. Both volumes have a similar purpose: to record Olympic ideals achieved but more importantly, to stimulate reflection on those as yet unachieved. Both are constructive in approach, positive in tone and optimistic in attitude. Olympic Aspirations offers original and insightful arguments that address the actions the Olympic Movement has taken to improve the Games. It argues that these actions are as yet incomplete. In concert with Olympic Legacies, it presents two sides of the same coin minted to advance the purity of the Olympic 'coinage'. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.