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Sporting citizens 154Conclusion 155Essay questions 156Exercises 157Further reading 15710 The labour market158Introduction 158Sport, work and the economy 159Rewards in sports work 161Equal opportunities in sport? 166Labour relations in sport 168Individual sports 173Conclusion 174Essay questions 175Exercises 175Further reading 17611 Sport, commercialisation and commodification177Introduction 177The economic development of sport 177Sport celebrities: commodifying the self 184Political economies of sport 184Advertising and promotional culture 187Economic relations 190Alternatives and resistances 192Essay questions 192Exercises 193Further reading 19312 Global transformationsIntroduction 194Interpreting globalising processes 195The globalising media sport industries 197Television, sport and the globalised audience 200Globalising sport 202Resistances 1: American and other exceptionalisms 204Resistances 2: alternative responses to globalisation 205Conclusion: alternative ways of theorising sport and globalisation 208xcontents194

Essay questions 210Exercise 210Further reading 21013 Sport spaces, sites and events211Introduction 211Why do governments and cities want to host sports mega-events? 213What are the commercial underpinnings of hosting sports mega-events? 219How do mega-event ‘boosters’ and ‘sceptics’ portray the ‘legacies’, economicand otherwise, that are proclaimed for the events? 222Architecture and sport space 223Conclusion 226Essay questions 227Exercises 227Further reading 22714 Conclusion: methods for understanding sport culture228Introduction 228Methods, methodology, interpretation 229Histories 231Media analysis 232The puzzle of sport 234Conclusion 235BibliographyIndex236265xicontents

ILLUSTRATIONSFIGURES5.1 Four approaches to socialisation and the social construction of identity10.1 The Sunday Times Sport Rich List 2011 Top 1010.2 The Sunday Times Young (aged 30 and under) Sport Rich List 2011 Top 213.313.413.5Guttmann’s characteristics of sports in various agesThe structural properties of folk games and modern sportsParticipation in golf, by socio-economic group, 1987, 1990 and 1993Sports interest, ideology and political formationKey concerns of sport and leisure policy in Britain and the USA (nineteenthcentury onwards)Rewards in English Professional County Cricket, 1999 and 2009The formation of the national governing bodies of British sportThe formation of international organisations, 1851–1945Summer and Winter Olympic Games hosts, 1960–2020The population size of the four BRICsBRICs and sports mega-events, 2008–2018TOP sponsors (The Olympic Programme/Partner Programme), 1988–2012Examples of selected Olympic Games and architectsxiilist of illustrations5653126134163179198214215216220223

PREFACEThis book is a revised, second, edition of Understanding Sport: An Introduction to theSociological and Cultural Analysis of Sport, first published by Routledge in 1999. The subtitleof this second edition – ‘a socio-cultural analysis’ – retains the interdisciplinary focus of thefirst edition, combining scholarship and research from history, politics, sociology, and culturalstudies. The first edition’s authorial team has been expanded, with the addition of thecontributions of Kath Woodward on sporting bodies and governance. The new edition is alsoframed not just in terms of the study needs of students on the sport studies courses that havegrown so successfully in the last third of a century; it is also revised in the light of a broadeninginterest in the cultural profile and social significance of sport in contemporary society, asmanifest in the book’s place in the ‘Culture, Economy and the Social’ series of CRESC (Centrefor Research on Socio-Cultural Change).In the late 1970s, only a very few colleges or universities offered degree programmes in sportrelated subjects. Over the following three decades, more than a hundred institutions havemoved into this field. The importance of the field was also recognised in its research profile.In 1996, the higher education funding bodies of Britain (in their Research Assessment Exercise)recognised sport-related subjects as a discrete and distinct area of research activity. In 2011,these bodies confirmed ‘sport and exercise sciences, leisure and tourism’ as a specialist subarea within the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). In this context, the teaching baseestablished so strongly over recent decades has been matched by the recognition of the qualityand importance of sport-related research. This growth in the academic study of sport, and thevolume of research into specialist aspects of sport, culture and society, have produced aburgeoning literature, in books and specialist journals.We commented in 1999 that there were good books – both readers (collections of seminalor original articles) and textbooks – on sport in the USA and in other societies and countries,and on sport in cross-cultural and political contexts; research monographs, including detailedand illuminating social historical studies, also enhanced our understanding of sport in modernsociety. But, we added, there was a surprising lack of books attempting to produce an integrated socio-cultural analysis of sport in modern Britain. The first edition of this book offeredsuch an analysis, in accessible yet simultaneously rigorous and scholarly form, aimed explicitlyxiiipreface

at the needs of undergraduates. We invited students who may have studied sport studies atschool or college to develop their understanding in greater depth, and to encounter andengage with original sources, and polemic and debate within the field. That invitation isrepeated in relation to this new edition. The book takes a predominantly sociological perspective, but draws too upon a number of complementary approaches and frameworks. Theauthors’ own backgrounds embrace critical social science and interdisciplinary humanities.Although sport has been a subject for degree level study in its own right for more than thirtyyears, some still express surprise that the subject is considered appropriate for academicanalysis. It is seen by some as too trivial, marginal or epiphenomenal to warrant seriousattention. Others view sport as a hermetically sealed world of its own, apart from the rest ofsociety. Indeed, for participants and spectators, this perceived apart-ness may well be preciselypart of its appeal. Yet by any standards, sport is a set of cultural practices with significanthistorical and sociological resonances. To give some examples: sport in nineteenth-centurypublic schools was seen as a vital form of moral character training that produced the leadershipand teamwork skills required by the dominant class, both domestically and in governing theEmpire; while the structure of amateur sport served the interests of elite groups, football, inits professional form, had by the 1920s become the major leisure interest of the male workingclass, and an important expression of community identity; during the 1930s the governmentwas disturbed enough about the poor physical condition of its citizens to mount a NationalFitness Campaign; in post-war Britain, National Sport Centres were established as part of apursuit of elite-level success; and in a potential chemistry of elite success and popular passion,the London 2012 Olympics brought the global audience to that city’s third staging of theworld’s highest-profile sporting event.Sociologically, sport and fitness loom large in the media. Sport programmes, dedicated sportchannels, sports pages and sport supplements in newspapers, specialist sport magazines, andsport-related websites have become increasingly prominent. Although only a small minorityof the population are active participants, a great many more have some degree of interest infollowing sport. The images derived from sport play a significant role in constituting our notionsof the body and how it should, ideally, look. In both representational forms and in lived practices, sport is one of the cultural spheres that most distinctively marks gender identities anddifferences. The activities of top sport stars are highly publicised, and debate rages about theextent to which they are role models who have a responsibility to set a good example. Manypoliticians are fond of sporting metaphors, and former UK Prime Minister John Major spearheaded a drive to regenerate sport in schools, couched in terms that echo the Victorianconfidence in its capacity to train character and instil moral values. Alongside this, sport hasconsistently provided a forum for the expression of national identity.Sport studies courses have a strong scientific element – physiology, psychology and biomechanics are quite rightly regarded as integral elements in the multi-disciplinary approachcharacteristic of such courses. But the historical formation of sporting practices and institutions,and their place in the wider social formation, are also of great importance to a full under-xivpreface

standing of sport. All the scientific understanding of the sporting body and mind in the worldis of little use to sports development unless the nature of the wider social and culturalenvironment is understood. This book is designed to offer a framework for those seeking aconceptually informed but empirically grounded understanding of the place of sport in themodern world.This book will not offer any simple essentialist definition of sport. An historical and sociologicalunderstanding of sport and its place in processes of social change and cultural reproductionmakes it clear that ‘sport’ has no such fixed meaning – it has had different meanings in differentsocieties, and refers to different activities at different historical moments. Most people wouldnot now regard cruelty to animals as a sport, but until the early nineteenth century, cruelty toanimals was a central aspect of sport. Hunting and shooting are now seen as rather marginalsporting activities, yet in the eighteenth century they would have been at the heart of themeaning of the term, indeed, the very notion of the sporting man referred to the huntingman. The meaning of the term sport, therefore, involves a form of social construction, whichcan be analysed from a socio-cultural perspective.Sociologists and social-cum-cultural historians have been demonstrating for some time nowthat sport’s role in society is an important one, and is becoming still more important withinsocial and cultural formations; that in some important respects the phenomenon of sport canbe seen to lead or shape society. In 1997, Martin Jacques, academic and journalist, and formereditor of Marxism Today, recognised that sport had become more than a mere pastime orhobby, that it might be seen as a symbol of a changing society, or even as a pervasive metaphorand rationale for mainstream sections of society such as business and the media; and that sportis critical in terms of contemporary conceptions of the body: ‘It would be an exaggeration tosay that society is being refashioned in the image of sport, but there is a kernel of truth in theproposition’ (‘Worshipping the body at altar of sport’, Observer, 13 July 1997, pp. 18–19).Any such proposition must be subjected to informed evaluation and rigorous analytical scrutinythat fits well with the CRESC mission to stimulate ‘theoretically directed, inter-disciplinaryempirical research on socio-cultural change in the UK’, also placing this in ‘comparative andhistorical perspective’. This revised edition of Understanding Sport brings together relevantevidence, scholarship and theoretical debate in order to allow such evaluations to take place,and to indicate – to the beginning student, the more general social scientist, or the curioussports enthusiast – where one might look to find out still more about the social bases andcultural characteristics of the sport phenomenon.The book is simple to use. The chapters are designed to be read, either in whole or in part,and reviewed in group discussions. They are designed, too, as foundations and introductions,which should stimulate interested and committed students to explore further sources. Somefurther reading is indicated after each chapter, and all references cited in each chapter arelisted in the Bibliography.The book has been produced collaboratively, although initial authorial responsibility wasas follows: Chapters, 1, 2, 3 and 4, Tomlinson; Chapters 5, 8, 10 and 13, Horne; Chapters 6,xvpreface

11 and 12, Whannel; Chapters 7 and 9, Woodward. Tomlinson drafted the Introduction andConclusion (with Woodward). Horne and Tomlinson completed final editing work on theentire manuscript. We are grateful to our publisher, Routledge, for its patience in awaitingdelivery of the manuscript, to the anonymous readers/reviewers for their perceptive commentsin response to the proposal; comments that confirmed our plans for the reworking andreshaping of this revised edition. We hope too that the book will make a mark beyond specialistsport studies readership and constituencies, through its location in CRESC’s book series.Finally, we would be pleased to receive comments and responses on the book, individuallyand collectively, on matters of both accuracy and interpretation.John Horne, University of Central LancashireAlan Tomlinson, University of BrightonGarry Whannel, University of BedfordshireKath Woodward, Open UniversityFebruary 2012xvipreface

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe authors would like to thank their families, friends, colleagues and former students forcontributing in so many different ways to this book and members of the editorial team atRoutledge for their efficient professionalism in bringing the book to completion.xviiacknowledgements

CHAPTER ONEINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, SOCIAL CHANGEAND SPORTS CULTUREINTRODUCTIONModern sports have exhibited some core characteristics that make them specifically modern,and these can best be understood in contrast to earlier forms of sports. These earlier formshave been described and classified as popular recreations (Malcolmson, 1973), mediaevalsports (Guttmann, 1978), or folk sports (Dunning and Sheard, 1979). To clarify the differencesbetween the older and modern forms of sports, it is necessary also to understand the changingnature of the society of which these sports forms are a part. Therefore, in the first two chaptersof this book we review important elements of social change and their cultural implications;outline on a general level the primary features and characteristics of those sports forms,comparing the modern forms with older types of games; demonstrate the importance to theemergence of modern sports of athleticism in the British public schools, and its impact inspheres beyond the school, alongside the impact of reformers; provide case studies of majorteam sports and individual sports to illustrate the tensions at the heart of the amateur–professional dynamic in those sports, and the working through of these tensions into the latemodern period; and review the principal features of and trends in the development of modernsports in contemporary Britain up to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century (seeChapter 2).SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF CHANGEMalcolmson (1973) has argued that traditional recreation was rooted in a society that was, inits core features, vastly different to the society produced by the processes of urbanisation andindustrialisation. Popular recreations of a traditional kind were features of a society that waspredominantly agrarian, strongly parochial, and had a deep sense of corporate identity. Thechanging society – the inchoate modern industrial society – was very different indeed. It wasurban-centred, and generated uniquely congested cities; it was governed by contractualrelations, in spheres of life such as work and the family, and increasingly in leisure; it wasbiased towards individualism, prioritising the unit of the self or the individual rather than the1society, social change and sports culture

collective or the corporate; it was rooted in factory-labour discipline, rather than the socialrelations of the community or the inherited relations of the community; and it was based onfree enterprise, with all the concomitant volatility that the release of the entrepreneurial spiritimplies. Societies so different would obviously generate cultural, leisure and sports forms withvery different characteristics. Culture does not change immediately in the wake of socialchange, however, and Griffin (2005) has identified the spatial dimensions of popular sportsthat persisted and developed at uneven historical rates. Malcolmson himself recognised aninterregnum between popular recreation and the growth of the sports of the industrial society,and suggested that, for many people, this interregnum ‘was filled by the public house’(Malcolmson, 1973: 170–171). Indeed, as the ‘new world of urban industrial culture’ (Holt,1989: 148) was established in nineteenth-century cities, the role of the pub was far fromdiminished, and social drinking around sport was an important dimension of male leisure: ‘thenew generation of publicans seemed to have taken over the role of sporting enthusiasts withas much gusto as the ale-house and tavern-keepers of the past. This was a powerful source ofcontinuity in popular culture’ (ibid.: 148). Holt’s work shows how ‘half hidden continuitiesbetween generations’ might be as significant as more dramatic transformations in understanding the growth of modern sport, and stresses the ‘gradual shift in cultural attitudes towardspopular recreation’ as much as ‘sudden changes or discontinuities brought about by theonset of industrialization’ (ibid.: 3, 4). In studying the emergence of a specifically modernsports culture in Britain, and the main effects wrought by the hugely influential process ofindustrialisation, it is important to bear in mind these insights from Holt’s authoritative andsensitive historical analysis.James Walvin, in the context of his study of the demise of the folk form of football, identifiedfour factors as the main influences upon the decline of the game (1975: 26–27). These were:(1) a growth in the policing powers of the state; (2) a tightening of labour discipline, based uponthe longer controllable working hours that were p

The politics of sport and sports policy 130 British sport policy: rhetoric and reality 131 . Further reading 139 9 Governance and sport 140 Introduction 140 Who makes the rules? 142 The governance of the Games 144 Paralympics: new sets of rules for the Games 145 Making the rules: key players 147 . The economic development of sport 177 Sport .