In the modern era, sport has been an important agent, and symptom, of the political, cultural and commercial pressures for convergence and globalization. In this fascinating, inter-disciplinary study, leading international scholars explore the making of modern sport in Europe, illuminating sport and its cultural and economic impacts in the context of the supra-state formations and global markets that have re-shaped national and trans-national cultures in the later twentieth century. The book focuses on the emergence and expansion of media markets, high-performance sport's transformation by, and effects upon, Cold War dynamics and relations, and the implications of the Treaty of Rome for an emerging European identity in sport as in other areas (for example, the influence of soccer's governing body in Europe, UEFA, and its club and international competitions). It traces the connections between the forces of ideological division, economic growth, leisure consumption, European integration and the development of European sport, and examines the role of sport in the changing relationship between Europe and the US. Illuminating a key moment in global cultural history, this book is important reading for any student or scholar working in international studies, modern history or sport.

Entertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works.

Entertainment is audience-centred culture. The Entertainment Industries are a uniquely interdisciplinary collection of evolving businesses that openly monitor evolving cultural trends and work within them. The producers of entertainment central to that practice are the new artists. They understand audiences and combine creative, business and legal skills in order to produce cultural products that cater to them.

Entertainment Industries describes the characteristics of entertainment, the systems that produce it, and the role of producers and audiences in its development, as well as explaining the importance of this area of study, and how it might be better integrated into Universities.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Architects, landscape designers, builders, gardeners and teachers have all at some time been called upon to design a play area. Unfortunately, this diversity has not resulted in a similar diversity of design solutions for this very problematic task. Despite a proliferation of 'how to' books on this subject, playgrounds have remained virtually the same throughout the world since their creation over a century ago. This is not a 'how to' design book. Instead, based on thirty years' experience as a specialist play area designer, Barbara Hendricks details a radically new approach, applying cutting-edge thinking from child development and child psychology to find innovative design solutions, challenging the established notions of play provision. Covering key sociological, public policy, environmental and design issues, this book provides designers with an exploration of and guide to, designing from a 'child's eye' view of the world. Beautifully crafted and copiously illustrated with numerous examples of recently designed playgrounds, this book is not only stimulating and informative, but fun to read and seriously playful in itself. This second edition brings the text up to date from 2001 to 2010 with added discussion about new ideas for play area designs and what has not worked in the past decade.

"We can reach far more people through sport than we can through political or educational programmes. In that way, sport is more powerful than politics. We have only just started to use its potential to build up this country. We must continue to do so." - Nelson Mandela Nelson Mandela's statement reflects a widely held view that sport can contribute in unique and far-reaching ways to the delivery of important social outcomes. But is this really the case? Can sport bring people from different backgrounds together, and in so doing act as a force for social transformation and change? In the language of policymakers and practitioners, can sport contribute to social inclusion or could it be argued that sport acts to marginalize and disadvantage some groups in society? In other words could sport reinforce, rather than challenge, social inequality? Focusing on youth sport as a touchstone sector of sport in society, this book examines the theoretical and empirical bases of arguments for the role of sport in social inclusion agendas. Authors are drawn from around the world and offer critical perspectives on assumptions underpinning the bold claims made about the power of sport. This book represents the most up-to-date and authoritative source of knowledge on inclusion and exclusion in youth sport. As such, it is essential reading for those who want to use sport to 'make a difference' in young people's lives. It is, therefore, recommended for students, researchers, policy makers and practitioners working in sports development, sports coaching, sport studies or physical education.

Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the phenomenon of people visiting locations from popular novels, films or television series. Places of the Imagination presents a timely and insightful analysis of this form of media tourism, exploring the question of how best to explain the increasing popularity of media tourism within contemporary culture. Drawing on extensive empirical and interview material, this book examines the representation of landscapes in popular narratives that have inspired media tourism, whilst also investigating the effects over time of such tourism on local landscapes, and the processes by which tourists appropriate the landscape, experiencing and accommodating them into their imagination. Oriented around three central case studies of popular television detective shows, famous films and classic literature, Places of the Imagination develops a new theoretical understanding of media tourism. As such, it will appeal to sociologists and cultural geographers, as well as those working in the fields of media and cultural studies, popular and fan culture, tourism and the sociology of leisure.

Television presenters are key to the sociability of the medium, speaking directly to viewers as intermediaries between audiences and those who are interviewed, perform or compete on screen. As targets of both great affection and derision from viewers and the subjects of radio, internet, magazine and newspaper coverage, many have careers that have lasted almost as long as post-war television itself. Nevertheless, as a profession, television presenting has received little scholarly attention. Personality Presenters explores the role of the television presenter, analysing the distinct skills possessed by different categories of host and the expectations and difficulties that exist with regard to the promotion of the various films, books, consumer and cultural products with which they are associated. The close involvement of presenters with the content that they present is examined, while the impact of the presenters' own celebrity on the tasks that they perform is scrutinised. With a focus on non-fiction entertainment shows such as game shows, lifestyle and reality shows, chat, daytime and talk shows, this book explores issues of consumer culture, advertising and celebrity, as well as the connection of presenters with ethical issues. Offering detailed case studies of internationally recognised presenters, as well comparisons between national presenters from the UK and Australia, Personality Presenters provides a rich discussion of television presenters as significant conduits in the movement of ideas. As such, it will appeal to sociologists as well as those working in the fields of popular culture, cultural and media studies and cultural theory.

Current approaches to drugs tend to be determined by medical and criminal visions that emerged over a century ago; the concepts of addiction, on the one hand, and drug control on the other, having imposed themselves as the unquestionable central notions surrounding drug issues and discourses. Pathologization and criminalization are the dominant perspectives on psychoactive drugs, and it is difficult to describe drug consumption in any terms other than those of medicine, or to conceive of regulation except in terms of control and eradication. Drugs and Culture presents other voices and understandings of drug issues, highlighting the socio-cultural features of drug use and regulation in modern societies. It examines the cultural dimensions of drugs and their regulation, with special attention to questions of how consumption of specific psychoactive substances becomes associated with particular social groups; the social dynamics involved in our coming to think of these phenomena as we do; and the factors that determine the political and policy responses to drug use. Adopting approaches from anthropology, sociology, history, political science and geopolitics to challenge the prevailing pathologization and criminalization of drug use, this book provides international and comparative perspectives on drug research, based on the latest research in Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Hong Kong.

Often seen as the host nation's largest ever logistical undertaking, accommodating the Olympics and its attendant security infrastructure brings seismic changes to both the physical and social geography of its destination. Since 1976, the defence of the spectacle has become the central feature of its planning, one that has assumed even greater prominence following the bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Games and, most importantly, 9/11. Indeed, the quintupled cost of securing the first post-9/11 summer Games in Athens demonstrates the considerable scale and complexity currently implicated in these operations. Such costs are not only fiscal. The Games stimulate a tidal wave of redevelopment ushering in new gentrified urban settings and an associated investment that may or may not soak through to the incumbent community. Given the unusual step of developing London's Olympic Park in the heart of an existing urban milieu and the stated commitments to 'community development' and 'legacy', these constitute particularly acute issues for the 2012 Games. In addition to sealing the Olympic Park from perceived threats, 2012 security operations have also harnessed the administrative criminological staples of community safety and crime reduction to generate an ordered space in the surrounding areas. Of central importance here are the issues of citizenship, engagement and access in urban spaces redeveloped upon the themes of security and commerce. Through analyzing the social and community impact of the 2012 Games and its security operation on East London, this book concludes by considering the key debates as to whether utopian visions of legacy can be sustained given the demands of providing a global securitized event of the magnitude of the modern Olympics.

Providing a unique analysis of current multidisciplinary research on the complex relationships between tourism and the imaginaries of tourist destinations, this book traces the links between tourism imaginaries and their religious (heaven) and political (utopia) antecedents. The substantive chapters are organised into three main thematic sections, the first explores the touristic production and consumption of place imaginaries, the second analyses the way places are practiced through imaginaries and the role imaginaries play in the tourist experience and the final section explores the way images and the media participate in the creation of tourism imaginaries.

As the first edited collection dedicated specifically to race, ethnicity and British football, this book brings together a range of academics, comprising both established commentators and up-and-coming voices. Combining theoretical and empirical contributions, the volume will addresses a wide variety of topics such as the experiences of Muslims, the recruitment of African players, devolution and national identities, case studies of minority ethnic clubs, "mixed-race" players, multiculturalism and anti-racism, sectarianism, education, and foreign club ownership. Covering the both amateur and professional spheres, and focusing on both players and supporters, the book elucidates the linkages between race, ethnicity, gender and masculinity.

Can sport serve as a vehicle for social mobility of disadvantaged social groups? How and to what extent are different forms of social capital created through sport participation? Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries takes up these questions through a critical examination of the ways in which sport facilitates or inhibits upward social mobility. Drawing on four case studies, the book provides a rich sociological analysis of people 's lived experiences of sport in diverse social, cultural and political contexts, ranging from sport-for-development programs in Brazil and the Netherlands to rural communities and the Somali diaspora in Australia. The first international comparison of and critical reflection on the relationship between social mobility and participation in non-professional sport, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in sport 's potential for social inclusion.

In recent years, there has been an increased engagement throughout the social sciences with the study of extreme places and practices. Dangerous games and adventure tours have shifted from being marginal, exotic or mad to being more than merely acceptable. They are now exemplary, mainstream even: there are a variety of new types, increasing numbers of people are doing them and they are being appropriated and have infiltrated more and more contexts. This book argues that hazardous sports and adventure tourism have become rather paradoxical. As a set of activities where players and holidaymakers are closer to death or danger than they would otherwise be, they are the complete opposite of normal games or vacations. Adventure sports and tours reverse the general definition of a holiday as being an escape from the seriousness of everyday life, as in most cases, they are innately serious, requiring as they do 'life or death' decision-making. Beginning with the rise in colonial explorations and moving on to consider the Dangerous Sports Club of Oxford, this book examines the increasing phenomena of adventure sports such as bungy jumping, cliff jumping or 'tomb-stoning', surfing and parkour within a framework of positive risk. It explores how certain assumptions about knowledge, agency, the body and nature are beginning to coalesce around newly developing spheres of social relations. Additionally, extreme games have become activities that are germane to the dawning of green social thought and so the book also addresses issues that deal with the intimate connections that exist between pleasure and the moral responsibility towards the environment.

This book examines the local, regional and transnational contexts of video games through a focused analysis on gaming communities, the ways game design regulates gender and class relations, and the impacts of colonization on game design. The critical interest in games as a cultural artifact is covered by a wide range of interdisciplinary work. To highlight the social impacts of games the first section of the book covers the systems built around high score game competitions, the development of independent game design communities, and the formation of fan communities and cosplay. The second section of the book offers a deeper analysis of game structures, gender and masculinity, and the economic constraints of empire that are built into game design. The final section offers a macro perspective on transnational and colonial discourses built into the cultural structures of East Asian game play.

Children's and Families' Holiday Experiences is based on the recognition of the active social role of children in shaping the nature of their holiday experiences and those of their parents and other adults. The volume provides significant insights into the holiday desires, expectations, and experiences of children and their families that offer the potential for the tourism industry to plan, develop, and market products that provide a higher quality of service to these populations. This book traces the modern history of the demand for and provision of holidays for children and families. As part of this it examines the nature of the holiday desires of parents and children and the roles society and the tourism industry play in influencing these. It provides an analysis of the changing nature of the holiday desires and experiences of children as they evolve through different life stages and the influence this has on the shape of family holidays. Given increasing concerns about child safety and education, this book examines both issues within the tourism experience. Finally, the book analyses how the tourism industry caters to the needs of children and families and offers insights into how this could be improved in the future. This thorough investigation will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the areas of Tourism, Geography and Child and Family Studies as well as the tourism Industry.

Sport annually mobilizes millions of people across Europe: as practitioners in a wide variety of competitive, educational, or recreational contexts, and as spectators, who are physically present or following events through the mass media. This book presents original research into modern sport funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Its aim is to examine the distinctive contribution made by this complex phenomenon to the construction of European identities. Attention is focused on sport's social significance, as a set of mass-mediated practices and spectacles giving rise to a network of images, symbols, and discourses. The book seeks to explore, and ultimately to explain, the processes of representation and mediation involved in the sporting construction, and subsequent renegotiation, of local, national, and, increasingly, global identities. It offers a survey of key developments in sporting Europe - from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and from the Atlantic to the Urals - presenting findings by acknowledged international experts and emerging scholars at the level of individuals, communities, regions, nation-states, and Europe as a whole, in both its geographical and political incarnations. Its focus on representation offers a broadly conceived, and consciously inclusive, approach to issues of 'Europeanness' in modern and contemporary sport.

Exercise for women is a heavily-laden social and embodied experience. While exercise promotion has become an increasingly visible part of health campaigns, obesity among women is rising, and studies indicate that women are generally less physically active than men. Women's (lack of) exercise, therefore, has become a public concern, and physiological and psychological research has attempted to develop more effective exercise programs aimed at women. Yet women have a complex relationship with embodiment and physical activity that is difficult for quantitative scientific approaches to explore. This book addresses this neglect by providing a much-needed feminist, qualitative social analysis of women and exercise. The contributors, drawn from across Europe and North America, investigate the ways women experience exercise within the context of the global fitness industry. All the authors take a specifically feminist perspective in their analysis of the fit, feminine body, exploring media images and the global branding of fitness products, the relationship between exercise and fat, the construction of physical activity within health discourse, and the lived experience of the exercising body. The collection explores the diversity of women's experiences of exercise in relation to age, ethnicity and body size. The book is essential for anyone interested in health promotion, sport and exercise or the social and cultural study of gender and embodiment.

Although New Zealand exists as a small (pop. 4.3 million), peripheral nation in the global economy, it offers a unique site through which to examine the complex, but uneven, interplay between global forces and long-standing national traditions and cultural identities. This book examines the profound impact of globalization on the national sport of rugby and New Zealand's iconic team, the All Blacks. Since 1995, the national sport of rugby has undergone significant change, most notably due to the New Zealand Rugby Union's lucrative and ongoing corporate partnerships with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas. The authors explore these significant developments and pressures alongside the resulting tensions and contradictions that have emerged as the All Blacks, and other aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity, have been steadily incorporated into a global promotional culture. Following recent research in cultural studies, they highlight the intensive, but contested, commodification of the All Blacks to illuminate the ongoing transformation of rugby in New Zealand by corporate imperatives and the imaginations of marketers, most notably through the production of a complex discourse of corporate nationalism within Adidas's evolving local and global advertising campaigns.

The image of surfing is everywhere in American popular culture - films, novels, television shows, magazines, newspaper articles, music, and especially advertisements. In this book, Kristin Lawler examines the surfer, one of the most significant and enduring archetypes in American popular culture, from its roots in ancient Hawaii, to Waikiki beach at the dawn of the twentieth century, continuing through Depression-era California, cresting during the early sixties, persistently present over the next three decades, and now, more globally popular than ever. Throughout, Lawler sets the image of the surfer against the backdrop of the negative reactions to it by those groups responsible for enforcing the Puritan discipline - pro-work, anti-spontaneity - on which capital depends and thereby offers a fresh take on contemporary discussions of the relationship between commercial culture and counterculture, and between counterculture and capitalism.

First Published in 1998. This is Volume VIII, of nine in the Sociology of Culture series and discusses how to approach the area of a sociology of music, looking at scope, definition, evaluation methods such as philosophical, idealist and aestheticism and then looking at socio-musical groups, their behaviours and functions.

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.

This book is an introduction to cosplay as a subculture and community, built around playful spaces and the everyday practices of crafting costumes, identities, and performances. Drawing on new and original ethnographic data, as well as the innovative use of arts-led research, this book adds to our understanding of a popular, global cultural practice. In turn, this pushes forward our understanding of play, fan practices, subcultures, practice-led research, and uses of urban spaces. Cosplay and the Art of Play offers a significant addition to key contemporary debates on the meaning and uses of popular culture in the 21st century, and will be of importance to students and scholars interested in communities, fandom, identity, leisure, participatory cultures, performance, and play.

Although there is significant interest in the social role of sport in fostering civil society from both policymakers and academics, there is a lack of evidence of the specific role of sport federations in this system. This book critically presents the mechanisms and structures in a selection of sport federations within a variety of European countries that illuminate the varied relationships between not-for-profit sport federations, their members, governments and the citizens they represent. The contributors explore the contrasts and synergies between core social capital theoretical perspectives, and how these may be informed by and/or shape the realities of governance from different perspectives within the sport system.

Sounds of the Borderland is the first book-length study of how popular music became a medium for political communication and contested identification during and after Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia. It extends existing cultural studies literature on music, politics and the state, which has largely been grounded in Western European and North American political systems. It also responds to an emerging fascination with the culture and politics of contemporary south-east Europe, expanding scholarship on the post-Yugoslav conflicts by going on to encompass significant social and political changes into the present day. The outbreak of war in 1991 saw almost every professional musician in Croatia take part in a wave of patriotic music-making and the powerful state television system strive to bring popular music under its control. As the political imperative shifted from securing national survival to consolidating a homogenous nation-state, the music industry responded with several strategies for creating a national popular music, producing messages about the nation and, in the ongoing debates over the origins of the folk music that inspired many songs, a way to define the nation by expressing what Croatia was not. The war on ethnic ambiguity which cut through individuals' social and creative lives played out across the airwaves, sales racks and gossip columns of a small country that imagined itself a historical and cultural borderland. These explicit and implicit narratives of nationhood connect many political phases: the months of fiercest fighting, the stabilised front, the uneasy post-war years when the symbolic frontline region of eastern Slavonia had still not returned to Croatian sovereignty, the euphoria and instability after the end of the Tudjman regime in 2000, and Croatia's fraught journey towards the European Union. Baker's book provides valuable insight into the role of music in a wartime and post-conflict society and will be essential reading for researchers and students interested in south-east Europe or the transformation of entertainment during and after conflict.

Pathways to Excessive Gambling draws upon extensive empirical research amongst young people and problem gamblers in Australia, comparing it with situations in other territories, to shed light on social, recreational gambling and the ways in which this can lead to excessive gambling. It highlights the relationship between the local community, sports clubs, governments, social recreation, economy and regulation of gambling venues, identifying the social indicators that typify situations which commonly lead to excessive gambling. By developing a 'society-based' perspective, this volume recognizes problem gambling as an issue for the whole society rather than just the individual, focusing on the availability of gambling and identifying its capacity, as a construct, to encourage or restrict the behaviour of the individual. As such, this book will be of significance to social scientists with interests in gambling, young people, social problems, and the sociology of leisure and culture.

1968 was a year of protest in civil society (Prague, Paris, Chicago) and a year of protest in sport. After a world-wide campaign, the anti-apartheid movement succeeded in barring South Africa from the Olympic Games, while US athletes from the Olympic Project for Human Rights used the medals podium to decry the racism of North America. Meanwhile, students in Mexico demonstrated against social priorities in Mexico, the host of the 1968 Games. These events contributed significantly to the rejection of the idea that sports are apolitical, and stimulated the scholarly study of sport across the social sciences.

Leading up to the Beijing Olympic Games, similar dynamics were played out across the globe, while a campaign was underway to boycott the ?Genocide Olympics?. The volume, To Remember is to Resist, came out of a three-day conference on sports, human rights and social change hosted by the University of Toronto forty years after Mexico and eighty days before the Beijing Opening Ceremony.

The contributions to this volume capture the memories of activists who were "on the ground" using sport as a site for the struggle for human rights and provide scholarly examinations of past and current human rights movements in sport.

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