{"title":"The changing structure and culture of english rugby union football","authors":"D. Malcolm, K. Sheard, Andy White","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721879","url":null,"abstract":"In 1995, the International Rugby Football Board (IRB) declared rugby union an 'open' sport and thus formally legitimized professionalism in what had previously been a 'shamateur' game. Whilst others have examined what this has meant in individual clubs,' our aim here is to attempt a broad examination of the ways in which the game has since changed in response to full professionalism. Our analysis of this modern period is partly an extension of work conducted in the 1970s which dealt with earlier crisis periods in the game. It draws, too, upon work presently being conducted into the socio-historical development of Gloucester RFC, and also upon the results of a survey carried out by the authors during the summer of 1997. This survey, which was initiated after the first season of 'open' rugby, was based on a postal questionnaire (with a response rate of 41%) sent to the head coaches/directors of rugby of the 68 clubs who had formed the 1st, 2nd and 3rd National Divisions and the 4th North and South Divisions of the English Courage League in the 1996/7 season. The purpose of this questionnaire was to ascertain how the game of rugby had changed at the top levels during the preceding 12 months and, more specifically, to examine those changes which had been introduced concomitantly with the advent of 'open' rugby.","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115466579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"At the centre of the web: The role of Sam Ramsamy in South Africa's readmission to international sport","authors":"M. Keech","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721878","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122647823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The discourse ethics of sports print journalism","authors":"R. Holt","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721880","url":null,"abstract":"Relationships between sport, nationalism, militarism and violence have often been alluded to by exponents of various social-scientific disciplines. Faure, for example, defines sport as 'the euphemistic representation of the latent violence of the Western mind' and sport's role as a socializing agent is viewed as the creation of 'agonistic personalities' whereby: 'It does not create the conditions for war, but it does maintain the possibility of those conditions, and adds its own efficiency to the other forces which produce a social order in which trials of strength are seen as part of the natural course of things.' Particularly since the 1985 Heysel Stadium soccer massacre, even some sports journalists have begun to view violence in sport as problematical. Dwyre, for example, reflecting on a long career as a reporter of sporting events in the US, concluded: 'Sportswriters tend to view sports-related violence such as fights between opposing team members, vicious boxing matches, and assaults on players as part of the game rather than an intolerable and offensive incident. Violence in sports should not be so easily tolerated'. Writing in Sports Illustrated, Wulf, in similar vein, lambasted the president of the US national ice-hockey league for denying that the league was too prone to violence while at the same time marketing videos with titles like: 'Brand New. Part 4. Hockey's Bloodiest Fights and Knockouts', or '165 Hours of Good Quality Hockey Fights'. Likewise, Weisman referred to American professional football in the title of an article as 'The Maiming Game', which goes on to report two studies: one by academics which estimated that 66 per cent of National Football League players who played after 1970 retired with some form of debilitating injury, and another by an actuarial consultant who found in a survey of 1,800 players who spent at least five years in the same league between 1921 and 1959 that their group life expectancy was 12 years below the national average for men. Such expressions of disquiet and ethical concern remain, however, relatively rare. In particular, the linguistic medium itself of sports reporting has been largely ignored.","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129690788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian public school: A semiotic analysis of J.A. Mangan's approach to historical knowledge","authors":"S. Votre","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721876","url":null,"abstract":"With specific reference to J.A. Mangan's approach to historical knowledge within the cultural history of sport in the period referred to by Prothero, this essay will address Mangan's style of historical writing in the early 1980s. It will use a semiotic-based approach to identify, classify and relate the complex cultural objects depicted by the author such as imperialism, athletocracy, sexual identity, morality and cohesion. A full exploration of Mangan's extensive contribution to the history of sport is beyond the scope of this piece. This essay tries simply to offer argument and evidence in support of the hypothesis that his robust 'revisionist approach', his theoretical scope, and, most of all, the synthetic power of his imagination make Athleticism a singular work in intellectual history, in literature, and in the cultural history of modern sport. The primary objective is to demonstrate that Mangan's rhetorical approach to, and semiotic perspective of the history of sport represent the working out of the imagetic possibilities contained in poetic language in the discipline of history. Operating in this way, in terms of H. White, means describing and analysing a chronic pluralism and the chronic recurrence of certain tropes with their attendant linguistic protocols, frames, formal arguments and ideological implications. This essay will also approach the rhetorical nature of historical knowledge in order to establish and analyse the deservedly prominent position occupied by Mangan in the context of a semiotic-oriented analysis of history. As mentioned earlier, since it is impossible, in the space available, to identify fully and wholly analyse the socio-constructional nature of the","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127678198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The engineered athlete: Human rights in the genetic revolution","authors":"A. Miah","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721877","url":null,"abstract":"The genetic revolution is characterized by a host of ethical and social issues that are drawing attention across a multitude of disciplines. Not least of these is how knowledge about the human genome will impact upon the application of human rights. It is becoming increasingly apparent that conventional human rights do not suitably protect the new kinds of human that are emerging as a result of a plethora of new and prospective genetic techniques. Moreover, the very sanctity of the human species is often deemed to be under threat as a result of such technology. The significance of this is made explicit in the recently drafted Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Within this document, UNESCO urges for the application of such technology to respect human dignity and to ensure the protection of individuals from such effects as genetic discrimination that might derive from being engineered. Additionally, emerging literature is endeavouring to address how human rights can be sustained in an age of genetic engineering. Most notably, this discourse has been informed by the recent text edited by Justine Burley, which comprises the 1998 Amnesty International lectures of Oxford University. However, the situation remains a moral minefield through which genetic technologies must navigate if they are to gain any kind of legitimacy.","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129986674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Current developments in media sport, and the politics of local identities: A ‘postmodern’ debate?","authors":"N. Blain, H. O’Donnell","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721867","url":null,"abstract":"Norbert Elias notes that the complex development of the history of a sport leads, over time, to a 'specific stage of tension-equilibrium' which he calls the 'mature stage', albeit that he sees it as provisional. After this, though the form may falsely appear finalized, the whole structure of its further development changes. Though Elias has in mind the manner in which individual sports have developed, his observations may be applied more widely and radically to the 'mediatization' of sport. The notion of 'mediatization', conceiving as it does of a powerful change in the way that our culture is produced in the media age, bears upon sport in a very obvious manner, since it proposes that more and more of our cultural life is centred around our consumption of the mass media. A major new phase of the development of many sports, arguably of sport generally, was inaugurated with the television age, and now sport culture and media culture are for many sports fans, and media consumers, closely related. As will be seen below, the transformative power upon sport and mass media alike, especially television, of their economic relationship, has been enormous. But the notion of 'mediatization' suggests that sport, as a form of culture, will not merely interact with media culture but increasingly figure as one of its aspects.","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117287682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performance‐enhancing drug use in amateur and professional sports: Separating the realities from the ramblings","authors":"Bryan E. Denham","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721870","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721870","url":null,"abstract":"This article is based on a programme of research addressing mass-mediated portrayals of drugs in sports, in addition to relevant academic literature and recent articles from the popular press. Among the central issues discussed are the impact of newspaper and magazine journalism on the formation of public policy, the reporting of erroneous information, the capacity of highprofile individuals to affect and build the news agenda, and some of the assumptions journalists make about athletes where drugs are concerned. Through both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the author has observed an agenda-building function on the part of specialized media and famous athletes to affect the manner in which: (a) policy-makers consider legislation on performance-enhancing drugs; and (b) mainstream journalists tend to follow suit regardless of whether rigorous examinations or causeand-effect relationships have been identified. This article has at its core, then, the concept of press hysteria namely, how that hysteria leads news consumers and policy-makers to become 'true believers' without evaluating hard evidence.","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125905262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘A carnival of cricket?’: The cricket world cup, ‘race’ and the politics of carnival","authors":"T. Crabbe, S. Wagg","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721871","url":null,"abstract":"The 1999 Cricket World Cup will be 'A Carnival of Cricket' -with this application form you too can join the Carnival. The adoption of carnival imagery by the English Cricket Board to market the World Cup of 1999 was savagely ironic. International cricket had grown out of the British Empire where it had been, among other things, a site of struggle, on which colonial peoples, especially in India and the Caribbean, sought to beat the British at 'their own' game. After the Second World War, various Test-playing colonies successively accomplished this aim and did so with their own styles of cricket. None was more spectacular in this regard than the West Indies, where cricket culture was most obviously touched by elements of carnival. Little was made by the British press of England's first defeat by the West Indies (at Lords in 1950), but since the 1960s English cricket has been widely perceived to be in crisis and increasingly characterized by malign and gloomy introspection. English cricket officials and commentators were wont by the 1980s to view the ex-colonial teams with suspicion and hostility: the 'real quick' fast bowlers of the West Indies were seen as 'intimidators', their Pakistani counterparts as ball tampering 'cheats' and so on. Most importantly, in this context, an inward looking nationalism entered English cricket discourse, bringing with it a preoccupation with 'the enemy within'. Within cricket there were mutterings about 'too many overseas players' in the county championship, whilst in 1995 the prestigious Wisden Cricket Monthly gave an obscure malcontent called Robert Henderson a platform from which to argue that the England team was failing because too many of its members were born abroad. Beyond the game itself, in 1990, the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit invoked an image of black cricketlovers from all over South London flocking to the Kennington Oval to see the West Indies play England. 'Which side', he had asked in sinister fashion, 'Do they cheer for?'. Furthermore, throughout this period the banners,","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115871858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Football, ressentiment and resistance in the break‐up of the former Soviet Union","authors":"J. Sugden, A. Tomlinson","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721872","url":null,"abstract":"The former Soviet Union, within its post-war boundaries and through its potent influence over nations around its borders, held together a commonwealth which contained all of the subjugated kingdoms of the old Russian Empire and most of the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian dominion.' The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was, at least in part, precipitated by the reassertion of nationalism in some of these former republics and satellite countries and the creation of new forms of nationalism in others. Within a context of considerable conflict, without Moscow's enforced leviathan, nationalist sentiment in and around the former Soviet Union has been given free rein, with both geographical and ethnically based claims to sovereignty leading to a proliferation of 'new' nations and yet another redrawing of the map in eastern Europe. In this article we argue that, rather than being a passive follower of political trends, association football played an important, proactive role in the reformation of the former Soviet Union and the redrawing of eastern Europe's boundaries.","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125764464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘It's a game between Jews and Arabs’: Soccer journalism, otherness and abjection in the Israeli context","authors":"Y. S. Carmeli, R. Grossman","doi":"10.1080/14610980008721868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14610980008721868","url":null,"abstract":"These are the voices. Years of cautious and deliberate existence, the living memory of the trauma of 1948, and the sight of their brothers rotting in the refugee camps have taught the Palestinians in Israel not to go to extremes in anything and not to take any irreversible position. Every acrobat knows the secret of walking a tightrope over an abyss; the Arabs in Israel have learned something even more difficult to stand still on the wire. To abstain, for years, from any hasty movement. To live a provisional life that eternally suspends and dulls the will. Thus, for many long years, has the Palestinian acrobat in Israel stood in place on a high wire one foot in the air, never set down. He glances out of the corner of his eye to the audience below, which never stops shouting its warnings and its anger. Jewish shouts, Arab shouts he dares not make a false move.","PeriodicalId":105095,"journal":{"name":"Culture, Sport, Society","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126630498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}