Kin 2250
Chapter 1
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Introduction
o Society definition
 the structured social relations and institutions among a large community of
people which cannot be reduced to a simple collection or aggregation of
individuals”
o Democratization
 the “process of change towards greater social equality”—with a “fully
democratized sport environment” including “both the right to participate,
regardless of one’s particular set of social characteristics, and the right to be
involved in determination of the forms, circumstances and meanings of
participation”
o Canadian Heritage (2013), there are clear patterns associated with sports participation
that point to much broader structural issues that set decisive limits and pressures on
who participates in sport and physical activity across the country:
 1. Sport participation rates across the country continue to decline. 2. The
gender gap in sport participation has increased, and men are more likely to
participate in sport than women.
3. Sport participation rates decrease as Canadians get older, yet the
participation rates of young Canadians are declining faster than that of older
Canadians.
4. Higher income earners are more likely to participate in sport than less
affluent Canadians, and household income decisively influences children’s
participation in sport.
5. Sport participation of non-Anglophones is declining, and established
immigrants participate in sport less than recent immigrants do.
Sociology as a Social Science
o Sociology Definition
 It is “the disciplined study of human social behaviour, especially the
investigation of the origins, classifications, institutions, and development of
human society on a global level
o Important interests of Sociologists
 social interactions that take place between humans, groups, and societies
 They examine the ways in which social structures, power relations, and
institutions enable and constrain individuals and groups; they are concerned
with the social rules and ideologies that not only bind people together, but also
separate them.
o Sociology of sport refers to
 a field of research concerned with relationships between sport and society, and
especially the role of sport in social and cultural life.
o Sociologists of sport study what?

o
o
o
o
humans/agents involved in sport (athletes, coaches, fans, team owners), the
institutions and social structures that affect their sport experiences (education,
media, economics, politics), and the processes that occur in conjunction with
sport (social stratification and mobility, deviance, violence, inequality).
Some of the aims of the sociology of sport include:
 1 to examine critically the role, function, and meaning of sport in the lives of
people and the societies they form;
 2 to describe and explain the emergence and diffusion of sport over time and
across different societies;
 4 to investigate the values and norms of dominant, emergent, and residual
cultures and subcultures in sport;
 5 to explore how the exercise of power and the stratified nature of societies
place limits and possibilities on people’s involvement and success in sport as
performers, officials, spectators, workers, or consumers;
 6 to examine the way in which sport responds to social changes in the larger
society; and
 8 Sociologists of sport are also concerned with how the structure of organized
sport and the dominant cultural ideologies that are also associated with sport,
including the oft-promoted links between hockey and “being Canadian,” are
relevant to differently positioned people—with respect to, for example, class,
race, age, and sexuality.
A particular compelling role of sociologists
 Disentangle the complex relationships between individuals and their social
world
 When we attend to long-held myths and taken-for-granted assumptions
about the world of sport, we are in a better position to begin the work
of “disentangling” these relationships.
Activities that sociologists of sport actually do
 1 Serve as experts to government agencies, public enquiries, and commissions
in areas such as drugs, violence, and health education, thus contributing to their
reports
 2 Act as advocates for athletes’ rights and responsibilities by providing research
for groups who seek to challenge inequalities of gender, class, ethnicity, age,
and disability, particularly with respect to access, resources, and status.
3 Promote human development as opposed to performance efficiency models
within physical education and sport science.
Little comparison made (Sociologists vs Psychologists)
 Sociologists of sport look at a range of structural and historical explanations to
help them make sense of social behaviour and social issues, on the one hand.
On the other hand, psychologists examine intrinsic explanations to explain
individual behaviour.
o
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Practical Consciousness
 By practical consciousness we mean your accepted beliefs—all of the things
about sport and Canadian society that you may be tacitly aware of without, at
times, being able to directly express or explain.
 Your practical consciousness is shaped by your experiences of “doing,”
“consuming,” and “interacting” with various social structures, institutions, and
ideologies; these are the experiences that frame the possibilities you can
imagine in sport and beyond.
 However, your practical consciousness is far from simply reflective of dominant
interests and beliefs—it is also subject to ongoing refinement (hence, practical),
especially as you encounter new experiences, ideas, and information. As such,
practical consciousness is never static. Actions and experiences supporting
practical consciousness strengthen it, while new actions and experiences can
challenge our assumptions and make us question various “truths” about what
we once took for granted.
 For example, an adult-controlled and increasingly professionalized
“power and performance” model based on competition, domination of
opponents, rationalized rules, and scorekeeping is widely understood as
a common sense and normal way for children and youth to play sport in
the eyes of many administrators, coaches, and parents, who themselves
often grew up playing similarly structured sports. Indeed, your own
practical consciousness may have been reinforced over years of
engaging in these types of sporting experiences that have now simply
come to seem natural (and, of course, regularly pleasurable, thrilling,
and fun).
Origins of the Sociology of Sport
o The sociology of sport
 a sub-discipline of sociology that examines the relationships between sport and
society, and studies sport as a central part of Canadian social and cultural life
o Canadian life and culture, and sport continues to play a significant role in providing a
range of symbolic meanings and values that are important to Canadians and are part of
the ongoing story that we tell ourselves about who we are and what it means to be
Canadian.
 For example, winter sports are often thought of as distinctly Canadian cultural
forms, especially sports like hockey, curling and, perhaps to a lesser extent,
cross-country and alpine skiing and snowboarding.
 when the weather gets cold enough, the boards go up for outdoor ice
rinks, and surfaces and backyards are flooded to make rinks for
thousands of Canadians to play shinny on. Sport has, moreover, the
capacity to represent our communities and indeed our nation on the
world stage.
 The sheer popularity and visibility of these sporting events and physical
activities that bring together more groups of Canadians than other
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aspects of culture sug-gest that they are important features of everyday
life in Canada and contribute to a distinctive Canadian cultural identity
Defining Sport: Power at Play
o Sport is defined as
 any formally organized, competitive activity that involves vigorous physical
exertion or the execution of complex physical skills with rules enforced by a
regulatory body.
 competitive activity
o In order for the activity to be competitive, the organizational
and technical aspects must become important, including
equipment and systematic training protocols.
 Regulatory body
o The rules of the activity must become standardized and
formalized by a regulatory body that oversees rule
enforcement. “What we are talking about, in short, is the
institutionalization of sport and the rationalization of both
sports training and the sports organizations that sponsor
training, and under whose auspices competition occurs”
 Institutionalization
 represents how particular forms of sport come
to be taken for granted, and often
unchallenged.
 Institutionalism refers to the process by which
one dominant set of patterns, rules, and ways
of playing has emerged to define and regulate
our contemporary sense of what sport is and
how it should be played. More precisely, a way
of playing has come to be seen as the way of
playing. This has involved certain necessary
conditions, such as written rules and the
creation of formal organizations capable of
establishing and regulating preferred conditions
and standards of play for the modern era.
o This definition reveals how particular
versions of sport become dominant; it
also invites us to consider a broader
range of possibilities of how sport can
and should be played, and the range of
ways in which sport could be
understood or re-defined in the future.
 For example, are chess boxing
(an 11-round match consisting
of alternate rounds of boxing
and “blitz” chess sessions) or
competitive rock-paper-scissors
contests sporting events?

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informal sport
 physical activities that are self-initiated with no fixed start or stop times.
Informal sport has no tangible outcomes such as prizes or ribbons, and
victory and reward are not dominant features in this form of activity:
o for example, children getting together after dinner to play a
game of pickup baseball
 The informal and formal sport is?
 Socially Constructed as are all of the shared meanings about social life
that shape the world in which we live. That is, sport has been invented
and reinvented by generations of men and women for a wide range of
purposes through historical social processes and social interactions.
o The idea of social construction, thus, invites us to raise
questions about what is seemingly under-stood as simply
“natural” and “normal,” and, in turn, underscores that society
and all of its institutions—including sport—are always in
process and “under construction,” and that the task of
sociologists is to investigate this process.
o sport shapes and is shaped by the social world around us and
through our social interactions, and because sport is a social
construct it can be changed and given different forms and
meanings over time, and from place to place: it can be socially
reconstructed.
o a certain activity that is considered to be a sport in one culture
or subculture may simply not be considered a sport in another
culture or in another era.
Defining Physical Culture
o The study of physical culture
 the study of “the way [the body] moves, is represented, has meanings assigned
to it, and is imbued with power”
 topics like racism, gender, media representation, performance
enhancement, violence, technology, surveillance, colonization,
deviance, and violence—all topics covered in parts of this book—are
relevant to our understandings of what bodies can do and “should” do,
our bodily experiences, and relationships between power and the body.
o Sociologists of sport who focus especially on corporeality emphasize (Physical)
 the physical body is not only a biological entity, but also a social and cultural
one.
 Seeing the body in this way means also attending to the role of bodies in
relations of power and forms of domination (for example, forms of abuse in and
around sport and how bodies can also be tools for resistance (think of
subcultural activities, like parkour, that symbolically challenge the logic that
underlies the design of urban spaces, and most forms of competitive sport
o
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Culture
 On one hand, culture refers here to a “way of life”—to the activities, norms,
customs, values, symbols, and shared meanings and materials that we might
refer to when describing how a group or society operates day-to-day. On the
other hand, but relatedly, culture also implies the terrain of symbols and
practices that not only bring people together but are also used to disrupt and
contest.
 sport is itself a form of culture—and one that commonly features active
bodies—it is not difficult to see how these concepts are integrally linked too.
o “physical” and “culture”
 work well together here in the sense that their meanings are conjoined and
interdependent—which is to say, physical bodies are shaped by culture at the
same time that culture itself includes and is shaped by physical bodies.
o The Sociological Imagination
The Sociological Imagination
o Coined by C. Wright Mills
o Refers to
 refers to a way of thinking about the world—a way for ordi-nary people, using a
set of reflective, sociological tools, to more broadly understand “what is going
on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves”
 Mills recognized that most people, understandably, see and interpret the world
from their own personal and individualized perspectives—perspectives that are
grounded in the private orbits of their families, neighbourhoods, jobs, and
friendships. Nearly everyone, for example, attributes their successes and their
fail-ures to their own personal initiatives and abilities, and to their immediate
life circum-stances. “The well-being they enjoy,” Mills (1959, p. 3) wrote, is
often not attributed “to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they
live.”
 Mills invited readers to embrace a sociological way of thinking as a way of
helping them make sense of how their lives—their opportunities and their
challenges—are pressured, shaped, and directed by broader social and historical
forces, and to move beyond individualized and personalized ways of seeing and
understanding the world. This quality of the mind—the ability to “grasp history
and biography and the relations between the two within society”
 is the sociological imagination.
o Mills explores the troubles and problems that individuals experience from two
approaches: “personal troubles of milieu” and “public issues of social structure.” Upon
first glance, those perspectives appear to be distinct and separate entities. However, as
a sociological way of thinking reveals, they are in fact intimately connected.
 personal troubles of milieu
 Mills, personal troubles can be addressed and resolved by an individual
within the scope of a specific social setting, and often within the scope
of their own character.
o
o
for example, face numerous personal challenges to ensure that
their children are able to participate in organized minor hockey:
adjusting hectic schedules to accommodate practices, games,
and tournaments; negotiating increased sets of pressures and
expectations as a child moves up the hockey ranks; dealing with
difficult parents or coaches,
 Individuals and families are often able to resolve these types of troubles
in a specific milieu with their own resources and ingenuity.
 Not all troubles that families face in participating in hockey are,
however, simply personal.
 Mills, public issues of social structure
 Public issues of social structure transcend personal troubles and are
related to the organization and to the larger structures of social and
historical life.
 much broader issues that cannot be resolved by simply making changes
to one’s life or immediate circumstances, or by reference to an
individual’s character.
o For example, if the entire structure of opportunity to participate
in the sport of hockey has collapsed for thousands of working
and middle-class families because of an economic downturn or
simply because of the increased costs associ-ated with highly
professionalized minor hockey leagues, we are dealing with a
public issue that will require much broader political and
economic solutions. These will include solutions that address
income inequality and sport participation; the struc-ture of
minor hockey itself; and, at a larger level, the structure of
unequal class rela-tions in Canadian society.
three kinds of sensitivities associated with the sociological imagination:
 historical, comparative, and critical.
 Historical sensitivity
o an awareness that brings even the smallest details of personal
experience into the larger frame of history and of the historical
and changing dynamics of social relations.
o an awareness that to truly understand the sporting present, we
must also understand the past.
o However, by neglecting our history and an analysis that stresses
the reality of sociohistorical change, we also risk accepting
present “realities” and social relations as natural and
unchangeable, as opposed to social and historical constructs
that have been continually made and remade by generations of
men and women against the backdrop of a range of cul-tural
and ideological struggles.
 Comparative Sensitivity
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how both society and sport have been socially constructed
according to different meanings and forms in various cultures.
o Not only do we learn about other cultures, but as a result of
comparative sensitivity, we come to appreciate and respect
diversity and the range of ways that sport and physical activity
have been institutionalized and socially constructed around the
world.
o grants us the perspective to be open to new ideas and
possibilities and encourages us to recognize, once again, that
there is nothing natural about the structure of sport or of
broader social relations in Canadian society.
 critical sensitivity
o is a willingness to think and act critically about relation-ships of
power and social change, and to try to develop wide-reaching
solutions to broader public issues of social structure.
o examine sport from a critical and analytical perspective, and to
make connections between personal biography, history, and
public issues of social structure.
Key sociological concepts
o Social structure and agency
 social structure
 the patterned relationships that connect different parts of society to
one another (from individuals to the entire society of economic
structures, political structures, structures of gender and race/ethnicity,
and structures of sexual relations)
 Social structures set powerful limits and boundaries within which we
live our lives that often appear to be quite “natural”—they become
limits and boundaries when individuals and groups give meaning to
them and interact with them. Structures in this sense can facilitate or
restrict the capacity of individuals or groups (either consciously or
unconsciously) to act.
 The term “structure” is itself a somewhat misleading concept simply
because it implies a sense of permanence—like the foundation or frame
of a building. However, while structures need to be understood as
enduring entities that work to constitute a society, they are neither
permanent nor unalterable.
 structures are also transformed when we interact with them; our
actions are enabled and constrained by structures and those actions
can, in turn, reproduce and maintain those structures or transform and
produce new structures via social change.
 Structures, thus, imply agency
 social structures are often categorized as rules and resources.
o rules
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o
o
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o
both the internal assumptions and ideologies embraced
by men and women as common sense—your practical
consciousness—and the external laws, regulations, and
policies that set limits and possibilities with respect to
how we can act in our social lives.
Resources
 the capacities that enable individuals or groups to
engage in various practices and are divided into three
main components: financial (money), material
(equipment, property, etc.), and human (other agents,
status).
Rules and resources enable social practices, relations, and
institutions to be reproduced by groups and individuals over
time, albeit unequally.
Agency
 ability of individuals and groups to act independently in a goal-directed
manner and to pursue their own free choices to both act and shape
society.
Power
 Definition
 “the capacity of a person or group of persons to employ resources of
different types in order to secure outcomes”
 Power can be understood as
 a level of control or prestige of one group over another as an exercise of
agency, or “the ability of an individual or group to carry out its will even
when opposed by others”. And implies existence of power relations and
inevitably resistance.
 Groups and individuals differ in terms of power with respect to access to
resources (financial, material, and human) and to benefits derived from rules
(internal and external).
 Occupy Movement drew our attention to unequal power relations along the
lines of social class and the growing gap between the wealthiest 1% of
Canadians, and the influence they wield at political and economic levels, and the
other 99% in our country.
 The Idle No More movement, meanwhile, cast a critical spotlight on the
continuation of unequal power relations between Euro-Canadians and
Indigenous peoples and the historical significance of colonization in Canada
 Despite significant gains by the women’s movement, feminists continue to draw
our attention to the unequal power relations between men and women,
including the underrepresentation of women in positions of economic, political,
religious, and military power, and in the world of sport.
 Rick Gruneau “three notable measures of the ‘power’ of different social groups”
that need to be fully considered in the sociological analysis of sport. They are
the capacity to:

o
1. structure sport in preferred ways and to institutionalize these
preferences in sports rules and organizations;
2. establish selective sports traditions; and
 3. define the range of “legitimate” practices and meanings associated
with dominant sports practice
 It’s important to emphasize, again, that sport is a social practice shaped by
broader power relations and that it benefits some individuals and groups more
than others. Indeed, to have power and achieve a result or social change, one
needs access to a range of resources and favourable rules.
Hegemony and Ideology
 Hegemony
 Means leadership
 Theory was developed by Antonio Gramschi to draw attention to some
of the effects of dominant ideologies and ideas in the maintenance (or
challenging) of various power relations in society
 Ideology
 common sense “ideas and widespread beliefs in a society that serve,
often indirectly, the interests of dominant groups and legitimize their
position”
 Gramsci was interested in
 understanding how various societies with obvious unequal power
relations and inequalities (class, race, gender, etc.) were consensu-ally
held together, and how those uneven social relations were normalized
and made to appear as natural and unchangeable
 For Gramsci, the ability of dominant individuals and groups (with more
power and resources) to establish and rationalize ideological systems of
meanings and values as “common sense”—thus smoothing over
uncomfortable contradictions and unequal power relations—was a vital
step in the maintenance of their positions of moral and intellectual
leadership in democratic societies.
 Hegemonic Masculinity
o Indeed, to this day, a particular vision of masculinity based on
aggression, violence, and emotional stoicism, what the
Australian sociologist R.A. Connell (1990, 2005) has called
hegemonic masculinity is culturally exalted in competitive sport
and in broader Canadian society in a way that reinforces
unequal power relations between men and women.
o It is a dominant vision of masculinity that many boys and men
consent to as something that is entirely “natural” and “selfevident,” even while hegemonic masculinity is being perpetually
challenged, reinforced, and reconstructed in relation to other
forms of masculinity and femininity.
 the value in Gramsci’s approach is that it

politicizes our analysis about culture and sport in Canadian society—and
thus forces us to recognize that what we understand as our practical
consciousness “cannot really be understood without reference to social
structures within which particular cultural practices are privileged, and
particular vocabularies or motives are presented not just as right but as
natural”
Key Terms:
Agency: The ability of individuals and groups to act independently in a goal-directed manner to shape
society.
Culture: The activities, norms, customs, values, symbols, and shared meanings and materials that are
part of the day-to-day lives of those in groups and societies—as well as the symbols and practices that
not only bring people together, but also used to disrupt and contest.
Hegemony: The process through which dominant individuals and groups are able to exert moral and
intellectual leadership to establish ideological systems of meanings and values as “common sense” in
democratic societies.
Ideology: Common sense ideas and beliefs that serve the interests of dominant groups and that work to
legitimize and sustain their positions of power and influence.
Institutionalization: The process of established dominant sets of patterns, rules, social norms, and
relations in society.
Physical culture: How the physical body (i.e., how it moves, is represented, is treated, and under-stood)
is embedded in and shaped by the activities, norms, customs, values, symbols, materials, shared
meanings, and power relations that are part of day-to-day life in groups and societies.
Power: The ability of an individual or a group of individuals to employ resources to secure out-comes
even when opposed by others.
Practical consciousness: Tacitly accepted and taken-for-granted beliefs that are shaped by experiences
of and interactions with various social structures, institutions, and ideologies, and are subject to ongoing
refinement.
Resources: The various capacities that enable and constrain individuals or groups to engage in practices
and social relations.
Rules: The internal assumptions and ideologies embraced by men and women as common sense and the
external laws, regulations, and policies that set limits and possibilities with respect to how we can act in
our social lives.
Social construction: The historical process through which people collectively invent and reinvent their
shared understandings of the social world and its institutions.
Social structure: The patterned relationships that connect different parts of society to one another and
that simultaneously enable and constrain social action.
Society: The structured social relations and institutions among a large community of people which
cannot be reduced to a simple collection or aggregation of individuals.
Sociology: The disciplined study of human social behaviour, including the analysis of the ori-gins,
classifications, institutions, and development of human society.
Sociological imagination: The ability to go beyond personal issues and to make connections to social
structures, history, and broader power relations.
Sociology of sport: A sub-discipline of sociology that examines the relationships between sport and
society, and studies sport as a central part of social and cultural life.
Sport: Any formally organized, competitive activity that involves vigorous physical exertion or the
execution of complex physical skills with rules enforced by a regulatory body. Informal physical
activities, on the other hand, are often self-initiated, may or may not have fixed start or stop times, and
generally have some agreed upon rule system.
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Chapter 2
The most important determinant of participation in sport and physical activity
- “Social class, both on its own and in combination with gender, race/ethnicity, and other major
social characteristics
Statistics from Canada, and many other countries as well, consistently demonstrate that whether kids
participate in sport is greatly determined by
the social class into which they were born
One myth that has been perpetuated over time is that sport is as “old as the hills.” In other words,
people have always practised “sport” in the same way over time;
- people “naturally” competed against one another in the past, as they continue to do today, for
example. An important corollary to this is that the Olympic Games—likely the most important
and influential example of organized sport in modern times—was based on the model of ancient
Greece when it was revived by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin in the 19th century
o However, historical evi-dence, informed by theory, has shown that sport in ancient
Greece had far more differences than it did similarities to sport today. The ancient
Greeks adopted a “winner takes all” approach that far outweighs our own today. In
ancient Greece, extremely violent acts in wrestling were commonplace, and victorious
athletes—despite, and often in fact because of their violence—were held up as almost
the equivalent to gods themselves.
- some students may consider themselves very competitive and may have in fact used phrases
like “I was always just naturally competitive” to refer to themselves.
o However, notions of “competitiveness” vary wildly over time and across cultures, and so
understanding the historical and cultural environment is at least as important as the
individual one in explaining experiences such as being “competitive” in sport.
Putting Theories in Context
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Sociologists of sport also recognize that social theories change and adapt simply because sport
itself is dynamic and constantly changing.
- Identifying problems, however, is a necessary step in making the positive aspects of physical
activity and sport available for as many people as possible.
Functionalism
- structural functionalism views society as a
o complex system in which all of the different elements of its structure work to promote
stability and solidarity within that system.
- The essential elements of the theory’s view of society can be seen in the two terms in the name
of the theory.
o First, society has a structure, which means it has a stable and persistent pattern of
elements, including institutions, patterns of interpersonal behaviour, and values and
norms. In terms of function, all elements function or contribute to the overall stability of
the structure of society.
- The Functions of Sport
o According to the structural functionalist analysis, sport functions to
 develop group bonds, to encourage a sense of community, and to integrate
people into society’s dominant values. Sport also acts as a significant agent of
socialization and helps children develop solid social skills. In addition, sport
functions as positive entertainment and as an “escape valve” from some of the
more laborious aspects of everyday life.
 it is often argued that sport functions to deter youth and others from deviant
and antisocial behaviours.
o Following Durkheim, Alan Ingham (2004) refers to public sporting events as serialized
civic rituals
 in other words, sport acts as quasi-religious events in which ideals of
communities become represented and reaffirmed. “Regardless of whether our
team is winning or losing,” Ingham says, “the faithful seem compelled by an
abstract force, larger than themselves, to go and worship at the shrine” (p. 27).
Sport, in other words, acts symbolically to represent what is important for
communities and ties the people in them together.
 We don’t have to look further than the ritualistic way fans of the
Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens worship at their
respective “shrines” to understand Ingham’s point.
o In Canada, we can think of the many ways in which sport plays a crucial role in the
construction of a common sense of nationhood and in which sport helps to socially
construct and reinforce public identifications with urban and rural communities alike as
“representational collectives.”
 Students only have to observe the national fervor that emerges during each
Olympic Games as headlines abound with successful Canadian athletes touted
as “doing Canada proud” to understand this point.
 Many Canadians can vividly recall the outpouring of nationalism following
Sidney Crosby’s final goal to give Canada the gold medal in men’s hockey at the
2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.
o
o
athletes supported under the Canadian government’s sport system function as
international ambassadors in more formal ways.
 Following Ben Johnson’s world-record medal performance at the World Track
and Field Championships in Rome in 1987, Minister of State for Fitness and
Amateur Sport Otto Jelinek said (ironically, in retro-spect, given that Johnson
would test positive for steroid use one year later) that “Ben Johnson, doing
what he’s doing for Canadians in Rome, is probably worth more than a dozen
delegations of high-powered diplomats”
Today, Canadian athletes
 are consistently touted not only for their victories but also for their ability to
help integrate Canada and represent the country on the inter-national political
stage.
 In a Twitter message just before the start of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter
Olympic Games, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote that “When Team Canada
marches into the PyeongChang Olympic Stadium, young Canadians can look at
our team and see themselves.
 And, when Justin’s father Pierre first came into power in the late 1960s, he
realized that it was exactly this integrative power of sport that could help build a
strong sense of nationalism and ease political tensions both domestically and
internationally, and he built up Canada’s sport system as a result
Class and Goal-Rational Action: Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Conflict Theory
- Max Weber
o goal-rational action
 or human action involving the most calculated and rationalized means toward
achieving a particular end (goal).
 High-performance athletes—the ones the public tends to look up to as the
epitome of athleticism and what sport is supposed to “be about”—undertake
daily, weekly, monthly, and year-by-year training regimens in which virtually
every movement and workout is carefully calculated in relation to other ones to
achieve ultimate, long-term goals, such as winning Olympic gold. But in placing
such great emphasis on goal-rational action, other possibilities for sport, such as
emphasizing the play element in physical movement and the sheer joy and
liberation that “uninhibited” movement can provide—movement we often see
in children’s spontaneous play—get pushed to the side.
- Conflict Theory and Sport
o A first major strand is: How does sport contribute to or reinforce class and other power
structures in society?
 Labour conflicts between team owners and players serve as one among many
examples. Major professional sport organizations, like the “big four” in North
America (Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National
Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League) have a long history of
labour conflicts, caused in part by the original economic foundation of the major
leagues.

o
o
All the leagues created versions of economic cartels—team franchises were
independent but organized centrally in order to monopolize the market,
maximize profits for owners, and, importantly, to control player wages. The
cartel structure and the control owners sought over players’ labour resulted in a
long history of players fighting back against powerful owner groups.
 The National Hockey League, for example, had its cartel structure
o mid-20th century and owners were making “windfall profits,”
although the players themselves saw little of those revenues.
Only through long struggles—labour conflict—including the
fight to form player unions, did players realize their share of the
“pie”
o Fans today will be aware of the lucrative contracts some players
sign with their teams, but through much of professional sport’s
history that was not the case; the very fact that players today
negotiate at all has come from long and often bitter struggles
between players, their unions, and the team owners.
A second strand is the way conflict and change occur within and between sporting
organizations and practices.
 When the federal government first passed bills to formally involve itself in sport,
in the 1960s, the government’s policies had two objectives:
 to create an environment in which Canadians could become more
physically active and to build a high-performance sport system to make
Canadian athletes more competitive internationally. However, because
the visibility of a successful high-performance sport system met certain
political objectives for the government, combined with the fact that an
emerging cadre of sport professionals felt high-performance sport could
better meet their own interests, the federal government’s sport system
has—and continues to—greatly privilege high-performance sport over
mass participation or grassroots levels of sport
The third strand stems both from Marx’s idea about the alienation of the worker in the
capitalist mode of production and Weber’s analysis of goal-rational action
 Throughout the 20th century, there was an unyielding drive toward winning
medals and pushing the boundaries of human performance in international
sport. The result has been spectacular performances by athletes, to the thrill of
admiring fans around the world. But the drive to push the boundaries of human
performance has come with some serious, unintended consequences. From the
mid-20th century on, more and more countries developed increasingly
sophisticated sport systems that included, for the first time in human history,
young children and youth as full-time athletes. Coined“child athletic workers” in
the early 1980s, to refer to this new category of athletes. From the 1990s to the
present, more and more serious problems have been identified in the various
clubs in which children train, often full time and in some cases (especially in the
sport of gymnastics) from extremely young ages: authoritarian and sometimes
abusive coaches, high injury rates, psychological damage, and severe cases of
-
burnout sexual assault cases in women’s gymnastics Sociologists inspired by the
conflict tradition identify problems in sport such as this trace out the historical
roots of those problems to help identify the causes, and often propose solutions
to overcome those problems.
Understanding Everyday Experiences: George Herbert Mead and Symbolic Interactionism
o Microsociology and Sport
 For sport studies, two major themes have emerged.
 The first is the study of socialization and the processes through which
people are socialized both into and through sport.
o Socialization into sport means
 the active process of learning sport’s rules, codes,
values, and norms.
o Socialization through sport
 on the other hand, refers to the lessons that are learned
from sport that have some application to wider society.
 The second theme is sport subcultures.
 Here, research has attempted to understand the process through which
subcultural groups form their own unique language, belief system,
normative structure, and general inner-group identity.
o Some so-called alternative sports, such as surfing, rock climbing,
extreme sports, skateboarding, ultimate Frisbee, and others
provide interesting and accessible contexts to under-stand the
process through which members develop subcultural identities.
 Subcultural studies
 demonstrates how hockey reproduces dominant notions of “manliness”
or of what it means to be “properly” masculine through everyday
interactions with other players and coaches, alongside the rough and
sometimes violent aspects of the game.
o Far from what many consider to be the common sense idea that
masculinity emerges from within players, that it is just “how
they are,”
 Robidoux points out that social factors such as day-today rituals play important roles in producing
masculinity:
 “initiation rituals are not only symbolic
representations of the player’s transformation
on entering professional hockey, they are also a
means of divesting the young player of
undesirable (that is, unmanly) qualities so as to
ensure his new status within the group”
 Robidoux’s work is relevant to one of the most public issues related to
the health of athletes today: concussions. It is well known that for years
the impact of concussions was hidden because injury in men’s sport in
general was hidden—it was considered “unmanly” to reveal one’s injury
or pain; it was considered a sign of weakness.
-
Critical Social Theories
o Critical Theories
 Gramsci believed that the power of dominant classes is maintained through a
process of developing consent among the populace. This can occur in a
structural sense
 in that groups at different levels of social organization make
compromises with ruling classes, such as is the case when labour
organizations concede to wage or salary increases, or when volunteer
organizations compensate for social inequalities by fundraising.
 Amateur sport leader Henry Roxborough commented in Maclean’s magazine in
1926 that “A nation that loves sport cannot revolt.” However, his position could
not have been more politically opposite to one from a workers’ rights paper the
following year
 The whole capitalist class profits by a system that keeps workers
excitedly interested in trivial matters remote from true concerns. The
brain-numbing narcotic of the sporting page is perhaps more deadly to
the average worker than the more active poison of the editorial page
 In these words, we see the dual parts of power at play, as critical
theorists see it, with sport being used both as a means of social control
but at the same time the workers’ rights paper demonstrating that a
certain degree of agency, or in this case resistance, is possible.
 Importantly, the workers’ rights paper here is recognizing the
particularly powerful role that sport can play in controlling—and
bringing agency to—the life of workers, precisely because sport is
thought to be separate from “real” politics.
o Gender Relations and Sexuality
 A second strand within critical social theories is gender relations and sexuality,
and central to this strand is feminist studies.
 Fundamentally, feminism champions the belief that women have rights
to all the benefits and privileges of social life equally with men. For the
purposes of those concerned with sport, this means that girls and
women have the right to choose to participate in sport and physical
activity without constraint, prejudice or coercion, to expect their
participation to be respected and taken seriously, and to be as equally
valued and rewarded as sportsmen
 While male power and privilege certainly played an important role in women’s
sport historically, Hall recounts in her text the various ways in which women—
and some-times men—resisted that power and privilege to create
opportunities. An important example from history verifies Hall’s point.
 Alice Milliat was fighting for greater recognition of women in sport.
Realizing that the Olympic Games, the biggest sporting event at the
time, was exclusively run by men and almost exclusively for male
o
participants, Milliat decided to take matters into her own hands and
organized the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale in 1921 and
subsequently the first Women’s Olympic Games in Paris in 1922. While
only a one-day event, it was considered a success, so Milliat continued
the women’s Olympic movement. The second Games in 1926 included
participants from 10 countries, and some started to make comparisons
with the “other” Olympic Games.
o With the prestige of the women’s movement increasing, the IOC
threatened Milliat over the use of the term “Olympic,” claiming
it legally as its own.
 Challenging Sex Testing
 While Semenya’s and Chand’s cases are important, they reflect
something much more widespread in modern sport: Female athletes at
high levels of competition have had to undergo some form of “sex test”
or “gender verification” procedure, literally since the start of modern
sport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, for the last half of
the 20th century, almost all female athletes in major competitions,
including the Olympic Games, had to undergo a physical chromosome
inspection to “prove” they were women. The reason for this goes to the
core of modern sport: the dominant forms of sport and the organization
of major competitions were created by men, for men. As women
entered the arena of competition, they were treated with distrust, and,
now in the second decade of the 21st century, hyperandrogenism policy
is the latest iteration of this distrust.
Critical Race Studies
 A final strand within critical social theories is critical race studies.
 This strand of critical social theories examines the important role that
race relations and racism have played in shaping sporting traditions in
Canadian history and how they continue to shape it today
 critical theorists of race and ethnic relations are interested in three things:
 1 the manner in which sport and physical movement play important
roles in the development of ethnic cultural beliefs and heritage;
 2 the manner in which certain ethnic traditions in Canada have been
privileged at the expense of others;
 3 the manner in which ideas about “race” have been naturalized or
reinforced through sport.
 An example in Canada’s history is the “two solitudes” account of the English and
French in Canada which, while certainly an important and real part of Canada’s
history and one that continues to influence the country’s social and political life,
is also an account of Canada’s history that erases Indigenous peoples from the
historical picture.
 in justifying funding for a new federal sport system in a campaign
speech he made in 1968, Pierre Trudeau claimed that sport could be
used effectively to promote nationalism and ease tensions between the
French and the English. However, the sport “system” that was
developed effectively ignored the many and varied sporting traditions of
people who were dispossessed, including Indigenous sport. Some
important Indigenous sporting events today represent resistance
against the traditional way “sports and physical activity have been used
as assimilative tools”
Key Terms
o Alienation: In general, alienation is a feeling of isolation or detachment from the social
world. However, the concept for Karl Marx was specific to workers’ detachment from
the fruits of their labour under the capitalist profit system—workers do not realize the
full potential of their labour and are therefore alienated.
o Conflict theory: General theory developed in sociology from the mid-20th century on,
based primarily on the work of Karl Marx and Max Weber, that recognized the
ubiquitous roll conflict plays in social life.
o Democratic revolutions: Social and political changes starting in the 1700s that led to
democratic forms of government, greater participation of citizens in the affairs of the
state and in society in general, and the idea that elected representatives are responsible
to their citizens.
o Feminist studies: General perspectives in sociology that attempt to understand and
change gender inequality, the social construction of gender, sexuality, and other issues.
o Goal-rational action: The concept developed by Max Weber to describe human action
involving the most calculated means toward achieving a particular end or goal. Weber
believed goal-rational action or “rationality” would come to be an all-encompassing
force in modern social life.
o Hegemony: Concept developed primarily in the work of Antonio Gramsci to describe
how power in society is maintained by developing consent among the general populace
through “common sense” ideas or common assumptions, which benefit and maintain
the power of dominant classes.
o I and Me: Concepts developed by George Herbert Mead to describe, first, the part of
people’s self that subjectively experiences and initiates people’s action in the world (I),
and second, the image people have of themselves based on how we believe others view
us (Me). The I and Me combine to form the self.
o Industrial Revolution: Widespread economic and social changes from the late-1700s
and 1800s onwards, brought about by the mass production of goods in the centrally
organized factory system and the replacement of goods made by hand tools to those
made through machine production. Capitalism as an economic system also grew
alongside the spread of industrial production.
o Macrosociology: General theoretical perspectives in sociology that emphasize sweeping
struc-tural processes as a way of understanding society and people’s roles in society.
Structural-functionlism and conflict are the main examples of macrosociological theories
in sociology.
o Microsociology: Perspectives in sociology that tend to emphasize the everyday
experiences of people, their behaviour, and interactions.
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Modes of production: Karl Marx’s concept to describe different economic forms in
various societies historically, upon which social systems emerge. While Marx studied
many modes of pro-duction throughout history, his primary interest was in
understanding the capitalist mode of production.
Predestination: The notion, studied by Max Weber, of 17th century Puritans, that God
predetermines whether followers are chosen to go to heaven or not. Followers sought
signs of God’s grace by leading lives of duty, hard work, and abstaining from worldly
pleasures.
Self: Concept developed by George Herbert Mead to describe the character and
personality of people that emerges out of a combination of individual psychological
forces, and social struc-ture and processes.
Social facts: French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined social facts as any phenomena
that operated according to social rules or laws independent of any one individual. His
most famous example was the act of suicide.
Social integration: Common ties or bonds that hold people together and give them a
feeling of solidarity. Émile Durkheim highlighted the impact that levels of integration
had on the chances of people committing suicide, and the concept would become
critical to the development of structural-functionalist theory in sociology in the 20th
century.
Sociological theory: A proposition or set of propositions about the nature of the social
world and people’s active engagement in that world.
Structural-functionalism (or Functionalism): Theory emerging out of the early work of
French sociologist Émile Durkheim, which came to dominate sociology by the mid-20th
century. The theory emphasizes the function of different elements, institutions, and
values and norms of a social system in terms of their ability to contribute to the stability
of the structure of society.
Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective in sociology that studies the everyday actions of
people, recognizing the importance of language as a symbolic system for understanding
the world, and patterns of interaction as a fundamental component of social life and the
development of the self
___________________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 3
Introduction
- In 2018, sports are played, discussed, and watched by millions of Canadians. All human
behaviour, decisions, actions, incidents, as well as larger social institutions and structures have
histories. They are rooted in socially constructed traditions, norms, customs, and cultural and
personal values that are, in some cases, constantly changing against the backdrop of broader
political and cultural struggles.
The Sociological Imagination and its Historical Significance
o Why a historical sensitivity matters to the development of your sociological
imagination—and for the sociological analysis of sport, physical culture, and Canadian
society.

-
The most basic explanation is that to fully understand how sport functions, how
it has been transformed, and how and why it exists as it does today, we need to
understand how it has developed and where it has come from. We need to
place sport at the intersections of biography, history, and social structure(s) to
fully understand its complexities and how sport has been socially constructed.
Sport has not developed in a vacuum—it has always been a reflection of or a
response to social, political, and economic issues taking place in Canada and
around the world. A historical sensitivity can help us see, in some instances,
how transformation happens—how things that seem impossible to change
have, in fact, been changed at different moments in time and over time, in a
range of ways.
Applying a Historical Sensitivity
o When applying a historical sensitivity to sociological research, we rely on documents
such as
 diaries, newspapers, census data, photographs, artwork, and correspondence to
place moments within their historical contexts. In some cases, we are also able
to speak to people who witnessed or were a part of events of the past and we
can con-duct interviews to better understand someone’s experience.
o When placing current moments in their social historical context, we need to ask critical
questions:
 How did the press cover this event/moment? What documents exist that can
tell us how and why these decisions were made? How can we bring together
different perspectives of the past to understand the power relations and social
structures shaping this moment?
o
Critical social theories
 Critical social theories, for example, provide helpful lenses through which to
explore the social change that has taken place in Canadian society and in
particular the range of political struggles related to class, gender, ethnicity, and
race for example, that have shaped sport and Canadian society, albeit unevenly.
These perspectives recognize the agency of social groups and their ability to
challenge dominant social structures and relations of power.
The Humboldt Tragedy, Canadian Hockey, and The history of organized sport in Canada
-
The Development of Organized Sport in Canada
o Sport has had many purposes in Canadian society over the last 150 years.
 It brought people together; it was a means of social advancement and healthy
living; for some it was a job. But it was also used for political and strategic
purposes to control, regulate, and exclude certain groups of people. The history
of organized sport in Canada is a history of exclusion, regulation, and
discrimination
o Modern Sport and Industrial revolution
 The modernization of Canadian Sport






is a history of capital accumulation, unequal class and power relations,
commodification, and hegemony
Sport as a cultural form became characterized by competitive individualism and
achievement, privileging some social groups over others.
 Thus, the history of modern sport is a history of cultural struggle,
whereby some groups were privileged over others, and some sporting
practices were marginalized “or incorporated into more ‘respectable’
and ‘useful’ ways of playing as the colonizers.
Class, gender, racial, and ethnic struggles are woven into the fabric of the
history of sport in Canada. The period of industrialization that took place in the
mid-1800s brought to Canada (as it did to many Western countries) mass
changes in methods of transportation, communication, and technology.
 These changes greatly impacted the development of organized sport in
Canada, as it meant greater visibility of sporting contests, easier access
to events and games for players and spectators, and advances in
equipment and facilities.
Until the 19th century, getting to a sporting contest took a lot of time, as it
meant travelling by foot, horse, or canoe to reach one’s destination. This meant
that sport was often only the purview of elite members of society, as they were
the ones who had the leisure time needed for the necessary travel and
execution of the sport.
By 1900, 30,000 km of railway linked Canada from coast to coast
 For affluent sport enthusiasts, the railway promised wealth and
adventure. It meant access to the breathtaking scenery of the Rocky
Mountains and a way to travel to the coasts and oceans for those who
could afford the cost of the ticket. This meant a huge reduction in travel
time to reach events and competition with teams from much further
away. Thus, more people could compete in sport, as it took less time to
travel and was more convenient.
 Sport events could be regularly scheduled, leagues could be formed,
and multi-club events such as curling bonspiels and hockey, baseball,
and lacrosse tournaments, and international tours across North America
in urban and rural areas could take place
The invention of the telegraph revolutionized communication
 meant that the results of international sporting events in Europe, such
as the Rowing World Championships in 1867 when the Saint John, New
Brunswick, crew (a team that became known as the Paris Crew) won
first place, could be transmitted instantly to Canadians
o increasing fan interest at the local, provincial, national, and
international levels.
 Radio broadcasts and the emergence of dedicated sports pages in local,
regional, and national newspapers promoted and marketed sports
teams and brought people together through stories and play-by-play
action.
o
-
These developments in communication, the current prevalence
of social media and easy access to online information, can
perhaps also explain the quick and worldwide response to the
Humboldt tragedy. In 2018, we can access and respond to
events instantly
Hockey and Canadian Nationalism
o Hockey
 is firmly embedded (for better or worse) in discourses of Canadian nationhood.
 When Canadians travel and they are asked about Canada as a country
 many tell stories about hockey—our national winter sport.
o Although hockey was only formally recognized as our national
winter sport in 1994
o hockey has been linked to stories of the Canadian nation since
the 1870s, helping to develop a distinct national identity postConfederation
o The local hockey arena in towns and cities across the country
often serve as “focal point[s] of community spirit” and through
inter-urban competition and the development of league competition, sport helped shape community identities
 As a community practice, commercial product, and source of entertainment,
sport has emerged as a representational collective for urban and rural
communities and works to create a sense of an imagined community among
players and enthusiasts.
 However, this connection between Canadian hockey and Canadian
nationalism also works to create “a kind of cultural amnesia about the
social struggles and vested interests—between men and women; social
classes; regions; races; and ethnic groups—that have always been a part
of hockey’s history”
o Historically, it was mostly men’s hockey that was celebrated and
recognized in our national discourse, and arguably Canada’s
hockey identity is still firmly tied to the men’s game.
o Canadian sport is indeed a history of masculine hegemony.
o This positioning of Canadian identity through men’s hockey
reinforces that this is a “traditional,” embodied practice that
transcends time, linking boys to their fathers and to (mostly
white) Canadian men
o Further, given the nature of the sport, where fighting,
aggression, injuries, and violence are commonplace and
celebrated, a particular form of physical, powerful masculinity is
naturalized and celebrated on the ice, excluding certain bodies
from becoming part of the Canadian myth
o Popular Canadian hockey discourse is almost exclusively about
white male bodies, connecting notions of whiteness and
masculinity to what it means to be Canadian
-
Box 3.1 Two National Sports
o Canadian government passed the National Sports Act
 formally recognizing lacrosse as our national summer sport and hockey as our
national winter sport.
 The game of lacrosse
o has been a physical cultural practice in many Indigenous
communities for centuries
 Dakelh scholar Allan Downey (2018, p. 11), reminds us
that “the Creator’s game” was not invented by
Indigenous peoples but was established “here on Earth,
as a way to settle disputes.
 The word “lacrosse” first appeared in missionaries’
accounts in the mid-17th century, creating our first nonIndigenous accounts of the game.
 Non-Indigenous enthusiasts appropriated lacrosse by
the mid-1850s with the first white elite lacrosse club,
the Montreal Lacrosse Club, formed in 1856.
 Morrow and Wamsley (2017) suggest that the
institutionalization and expansion of lacrosse as an elite
white men’s sport can be attributed to one man:
George Beers.
o Beers
 He promoted the merits of lacrosse, albeit only for
certain groups
 Intent on establishing a cultural hegemony through
lacrosse, organizers such as Beers promoted the game
as part of Canada’s national identity, limiting Indigenous
players’ opportunities to participate and ignoring the
Indigenous origins of the game. By 1880, Canadian
organizations completely prohibited Indigenous
athletes from competitions
 It wasn’t until the 1980s, after decades of Indigenous
activism and agency, that Indigenous teams reclaimed
their rightful place in elite lacrosse
 Box 3.2: The Stanley cup
 Historical sensitive approach
o we see that the Stanley Cup has a much more complex history,
one that was not originally tied to the NHL. The Stanley Cup
quickly became a highly sought-after symbol of men’s hockey
hegemony in Canada. Since 1926, the Cup has been solely
awarded to NHL teams, making it the de facto trophy of the
NHL. It was not until 1947 that the NHL reached an agreement
with the Cup trustees granting the NHL control of the Cup, an
agreement that formally recognized the organization’s

monopoly. The Stanley Cup was not awarded for the 2004–2005
season due to the NHL lockout.During this labour dispute,
Governor General Adrienne Clarkson challenged the
stewardship of the Cup. Clarkson proposed that if the Cup was
not going to be used that season, it should be awarded to the
top women’s hockey teams. She suggested that given the
original intent of the Cup as a challenge cup to determine the
top amateur team in Canada, it should not be tied solely to the
NHL and to men’s professional hockey. The history of the
Stanley Cup reminds us that we must call into question our
taken-for-granted assumptions about myths associated with
Canadian sport.
Amateurism and Professionalism
 Amateurism
o Athletes were expected to play the game for the joy, pleasure,
and honour of competition, for the game’s sake—not to win,
and certainly not for money
 Adopted in Canada in 1884, reflected the prevalent
class and gender prejudices of Canadian society, as it
was a class-based definition that sought to keep the
working classes off the field and mark sport as a middleand upper-class social space
 The definition explicitly explained who was
excluded from sport and it was “defined as the
absence of professionalism”
 By the turn-of-the-century, however, this class-based
definition was replaced by one that spoke more directly
to the tensions between amateur and professional
ideologies, as well as to racial prejudices
 An amateur is one who has never competed in
any open competition or for public money, or
for admission money, or with professionals for a
prize, public money or admission money, nor
has ever, at any period of his life taught or
assisted in the pursuit of Athletic exercises as a
means of livelihood or as a labourer or Indian”
 Sport leaders during this time worked to preserve sport as a social and physical space for a
small number of elite white men. They did not
tolerate athletes who wanted to treat sport as
work and who wanted to earn a living from
their athletic skills
 definition of an amateur, one staunchly upheld
by national governing bodies for decades,


speaks to the types of “common sense” social
structures of the era, and it is a powerful
example of the racist, classist, and sexist
discrimination that was a part of Canadian sport
in the 19th and early 20th centuries
NHL was already actively recruiting players from youth hockey, identifying
talented amateur players early and tying them to professional teams through
sponsorships for the duration of their playing careers
 By the late 1940s, these power relations had been institutionalized, and
minor hockey in Canada “functioned as a formal feeder system
o In 1947, the NHL, CAHA, International Ice Hockey federation
(IIHF), and the Amateur Hockey Association of the United States
(AHAUS) drafted an agreement that further strengthened the
NHL’s hegemony over elite amateur hockey
 In Canada, this meant that when players signed
registration cards with the CAHA, they were agreeing to
be owned by the NHL team that sponsored their local
junior league club
 This speaks to the growing reach of the NHL
monopoly and the ways that the
development of hockey for boys and young
men was a function of the commercialization of
the sport
Hockey for Girls and Women
 By the 1920s, women’s hockey was a fast, aggressive, competitive sport
that challenged the dominant Victorian ideology that cast women as
weak, passive, and fragile
o skilled athletes such as Hilda Ranscombe and Bobbie Rosenfeld,
while well known in women’s hockey circles of the era, did not
become household names as their male counterparts
 perhaps due to the absence of professional hockey
opportunities for women and national media shows
such as the illustrious “Hockey Night in Canada” on the
CBC that broadcast and promoted men’s professional
hockey as the “preferred” way of playing the sport.
o At a CAHA meeting in Port Arthur, Ontario in 1923, a vote was
taken as to whether women and the organizations that were
emerging to organize the women’s game should be officially
recognized by the CAHA.
 In a majority vote, women were denied this right
 Moments like this reinforced “ideological
boundaries that dictated the nature and form of
appropriate sport for women
o
The rationales put forward at the CAHA
meeting included that hockey as a
contact sport was too rough for women
and that women should be content with
participating in other competitive
sports such as tennis, swimming,
skating, and track and field events.
Prevalent attitudes such as these, along
with the late emergence of
institutionalized minor hockey for girls,
speak to gender and sexism in sport and
the ways that girls and women have
been historically excluded and
marginalized from Canada’s national
sport.
Aggression and roughness in men’s
hockey were accepted as a necessary
part of developing manly behaviour, yet
in women’s hockey, the players often
faced censure for playing the game the
same way. Media narratives about
women’s hockey suggest that when
women cross the imaginary but
palpable social line of what is
acceptable behaviour for a woman
athlete, they face potential criticism for
these actions
 In 1922, the Ladies Ontario
Hockey Association (LOHA) was
admonished for the actions of
some of their players. In 1922,
reporter for the Toronto Daily
Star, responding to acts of
aggression on the ice, wrote: If
the new Ladies’ Ontario Hockey
League is to be a permanency
the officials must start the
teams away on the grind under
competent referees specially
instructed to curb anything
which savours of rough or
unladylike play, and to enforce
the rules of the game to the
letter. Well conducted the
o
-
-
league will attract nice people
and nice players and will result
in a lot of excellent outdoor
exercise for the young women
of various towns. Any tendency
to rough play will start trouble
among both the players and the
spectators. An outbreak
between two players on the ice
would almost spell “finis” to the
game in any town on the circuit
(“Random notes on current
sports,”
There was a moral panic when women
played aggressive sports. When we hear
or read statements about the fragility of
women’s bodies invoked in
contemporary discussions of women’s
sport we must remember that women’s
sport has a long history of aggression
and physicality that has been
repeatedly censured by social and
moral critics. This censuring has worked
to ensure that women’s sports, such as
hockey and ski jumping, continue to be
constructed as secondary to men’s
sport time and again.
The Fight for Inclusion
o Histories of cultural resistance and agency are important to understand if we are really
going to understand how sports (and society) have been transformed over the years,
and if we are to fully understand current events, issues, and actions in contem-porary
sport.
o Using our sociological imaginations, it becomes clear that women have been ski jumping
in many countries for over 100 years and that systemic gender discrimina-tion that has
controlled and restricted women’s participation in the sport has impacted the
development of women’s ski jumping. By examining the past, we can see that the IOC’s
decision was not just about technical merit but was a product of a historical legacy in
women’s sport of discrimination and control that dates back to the 19th century
Indigenous People, Racism, and Hockey
o Yet, sport has also been a “powerful agent for change” when used by the settler society
in attempts to assimilate Indigenous peoples according to various racist ide-ologies
 In 1876, the Government of Canada created and passed the Indian Act. Janice
Forsyth (2013, p. 96) explains that “historically the Indian Act was established to
protect Aboriginal lands from the encroachment of non-Aboriginal settlers and
to establish Aboriginal autonomy, but it soon became interpreted by policymakers as an instrument to control, regulate and restrict every aspect of
Aboriginal life” including physical, cultural and spiritual practices.
 The Indian Act was imposed on Indigenous communities and positioned
Indigenous peoples as wards of the state. Church and government
officials attempted to replace traditional practices such as Potlatch (a
gift-giving feast practiced by Indigenous