Sports Commerce, Media and Identity
Lecture 1. Key concepts: a critical exploration
of sports commerce
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Aaron McIntosh, Module Leader
Department of Cultural Business
This lecture…….
• Module introduction: core content
• Explaining sport: some key issues and theories
Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
Core Content
• Module handbook
– Introduction: “critically explore modern sport, in all its forms, and
understand its significance and position within contemporary
society........ debates how social processes and issues of culture and
consumption affect this increasingly mediatised sector............sport, as
both recreational practice and commercial spectacle, continues to
provide meaning and differentiation in a consumerist age.”
– Teaching and learning strategy
– Assessment: 3000 word essay and final written examination
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
Syllabus
• Week 1. Key concepts: a critical exploration of sports business
• Week 2. Global consumer culture and the impact of commercialism
– Globalisation
– Who is the consumer? Maffesoli’s ‘neo-tribes’ (1996)
– Mainstream or minority sports
– Change?
– Winners and losers from commercialism
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
• Week 3. Economics of sport and physical activity
– Earnings and income
– Motives: sporting v profit
– Competitive balance and franchises
– The media
• Week 4. Sport and entertainment: role of the mass media
– Content and the audience
– Commercial factors, identity, and inclusion
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
• Week 5. Consuming media: sport, new technologies and representation
– Audience and product
– Commercial opportunities
– Stakeholders: real or imagined communities (Anderson, 1983)
• Week 6. Politicisation of sport
– Role of the state
– Politics ‘in’ sport
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
• Week 7. Governance and ethics
– Fair play
– Financial corruption
– Violence
– Standards
– Technology
– Drugs
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
• Weeks 8 and 9. Markets and social division
– Class
– Gender
– Race
– Disability
– Religion
• Week 10. National identity
– International competition
– Global labour markets
– Patriotism
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
• Week 11. Sporting spaces
– From the park to the stadium
– Use and abuse of space?
– Meaning and importance
– Design: form and function
• Week 12. Body, lifestyle and lifecycle
– Display or decay
– Sports science
– Sport and ageing
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
Key ideas
• History?
– Sport as modern and traditional (Guttman,1992; Horne, 2006)
• Contested?
– Sport has diversity of “radically different types of activity, which defies a
watertight definition” (Hargreaves, 1986, p14)
– Sport as: play/governed/uncertainty of outcome/drama and
discourse/development of morals and rituals/using the body (Hargreaves, 1986)
– Wider definitions include Gratton and Taylor (2000), being more inclusive of
casual and recreational sport
– Sport as entertainment and competitive but also personal and physical
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
Key ideas
• Consumption
– Modern society increasingly organised around consumption (Abercrombie et al,
2000)
– Impact and value?
• Theories of sport
– Importance of sociology: “critical activity” to “achieve an understanding of
social behaviour and social institutions” (Burns, 1995, p74)
– Established perspectives such as Functionalism, Rationalisation, Marxism,
Feminism, and Figurational Sociology (Cashmore, 2010)
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
Key ideas
• Agency v structure
– Agency (behaviour not determined by outside forces: individualism; free will)
– Structure (actions determined by social forces and social structure)
– Some approaches attempt to reach some synthesis of the two (Donnelly, 2008)
– Can demonstrate both political and methodological standpoints
– Looking to explore direct, ‘real’ activities, and the symbolic meanings which
can be attached to these
– Examining intended and unintended consequences of policies, practices and
actions
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Sports Commerce, Media and Identity: Lecture 1
Conclusions
•
Some suggest that sport is a vehicle for understanding
society more generally (e.g. issues of commerce, gender ,
or race)
•
More contemporary analyses look to the ways in which
sport is ‘actively’ used in creating and maintaining the
status quo, or in resisting this situation (Donnelly, 2008)
•
REFLECTION>REPRODUCTION >RESISTANCE
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References
• Abercrombie, N & Warde, A et al (2000) Contemporary British Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Anderson, B (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
• Burns, T (1995) Description, Explanation and Understanding: Selected Writings, 1944 – 1980.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Cashmore, E (2010) Making Sense of Sports. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Gratton, C & Taylor, P (2000) the Economics of Sport and Recreation. London: E & FN Spon.
• Guttmann, A (1992) ‘From Ritual to Record’, in: Hoffman, S (ed.) Sport and Religion.
Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, pp.143-151.
• Hargreaves, J (1986) Sport, Power and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Horne, J (2006) Sport in Consumer Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Donnelly, P (2008) ‘Sport and Social Theory’, in: Houlihan, B (ed.) Sport and Society. London:
Sage, pp.11-32.
• Maffesoli, M (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society.
London: Sage.
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