Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender

Broch, Trygve B.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_1

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 86 publications

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“…Bourdieu’s sociology has been criticized because it does not reflect the complexity of meaning making (Alexander, 2003) which gives value to sports performance (Broch, 2020). Although the case of women’s football confirms the importance of narratives, the key issue is to understand how social and professional backgrounds, gender, positions and structural changes within and outside the journalistic field shape journalists’ use of their symbolic power.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symbolic power of sports journalists as challenged by external recognition of women’s sports performance

Guyot,

Ohl,

Schoch

2024

Media, Culture & Society

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This study examines journalists’ working experiences to understand how they hinder the recognition of female footballers’ performances. It relies on 16 semi-structured interviews with Swiss sports journalists on Swiss French-speaking television. Guided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, the study shows that advancements in the recognition of women’s football are promoted by a combination of external actors’ economic and political powers, while hindrances arise from internal factors within sports journalism. The embodied norms, routines and professional practices of journalists – that define performance as physical capital and naturalize hierarchies between women’s and men’s football – are disrupted by the credit (i.e. symbolic capital) given to women’s football by the Swiss football league and sponsors for political and economic reasons. This specific case of football enhances our understanding of the cultural and social factors that hinder the recognition and appreciation of performances by women in sports. Further, the study largely highlights how texts and their symbolic power are embedded in the social conditions of information production.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symbolic power of sports journalists as challenged by external recognition of women’s sports performance

Guyot,

Ohl,

Schoch

2024

Media, Culture & Society

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“…Applications in sport studies include Gerald Early's work on boxing and the construction of racial differences in the United States (1989, 1994), Joe Gusfield on sport as an agonistic form (1987), and Trygve Broch on gender in Norwegian sport (2020; see also Broch & Skille, 2019). Such dramaturgical perspectives insist that the social force of sport is not about changing hearts and minds, much less in changing behaviors or bringing about concrete social change, but rather, about encapsulating, reflecting, and reinforcing existing sociopolitical identities, ideologies, and interests by re-presenting them in cultural form—Geertz's (1973) famous “model of, model for” framing.…”

Section: Conclusion: Toward a More Critical Dramaturgical Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retheorizing the Cultural Politics of Sport After a Decade of Activism, Populism, and Polarization

Hartmann

2024

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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This article details three developments of the last decade that have had significant effects on the cultural status and sociopolitical functioning of sport in the United States: (1) an unprecedented wave of sport-based protest and athlete activism; (2) new norms and conventions in the sporting establishment for dealing with athletic protest and social issues, especially with respect to media coverage and commentary; and (3) recent Right-wing ethnonationalist engagements with sport, including targeted criticism of both activist athletes and sport as well as populist mobilizations around sport. I summarize these developments and argue that they have made social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. This new era of contestation and polarization, in turn, has destabilized longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about how lasting these changes will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself.

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“…In adapting social performance theory to sports, we need to conceptualize how culture enters games via the symbolics of play (Broch, 2020). Sports allow autotelic play (Huizinga, [1938] 1950) within rule-governed games where technical skills are central (Wacquant, 2004).…”

Section: Ritual Theory: Cults and Encountersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But play-states, immersion or flow in mastering rules and skill challenges (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) depend on communities imbuing games with symbols (Mead, [1934] 2015; Turner, 2012). In sports, technical and cultural mastery can be re-fused through social performances (Broch, 2020) aiming to ‘recover a momentary experience of ritual’ (Alexander, 2004: 548).…”

Section: Ritual Theory: Cults and Encountersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I update Durkheim’s ([1912] 1995) and Goffman's (1959, 1961) ideas of ritual as an opportunity structure (Smith, 1999) and dramaturgical efforts in fun, respectively, with a combination of social performance theory and the sociology of fun. This allows me to show how we use symbolic codes and narratives in action (Alexander, 2004) to shape sport's many contradictions, varied social compositions and contexts (Broch, 2020; DeLand, 2022; Ji, 2022). As we make fun a collaborative sequence of actions that delineates group identity (Corte, 2022; Fine and Corte, 2017), these symbolic efforts in social performances emerge as a vital, yet undertheorized, component.…”

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Ritual pathways and dramaturgical efforts: Negotiating the meaning of organized play in Norwegian children's sports

Broch

2023

Acta Sociologica

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This article joins Durkheim's theory of cult and Goffman's notion of an interactional membrane to show how rituals transform social life from mundanity to ritual, and back again. I update these classical theories with a cultural sociology of performance and the sociology of fun to emphasize diversity in social compositions, contextual transformations, and contradiction in meaning. With an abductive methodology, I leverage an ethnography of children's sports in Norway to show how we carry out symbolic work to set sports apart from the mundane and then meaningfully enact games either as an attractive play modality or as a constrained organizing of creative play. Dramaturgy, not athletic success, is key in this study. Children's sports, as an arena for tacit learning about symbolic modalities, show us how much effort it takes to create ritual-like encounters and fun. The study also reveals how broadly available codes about children's sports, and about play itself, are worked into sports through social performances where adult coaches and children manoeuvre the possible meanings of sports. The result is a theory of the multiple pathways for symbolic work we can travel to create ritual-like interactions.

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Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender

Cited by 3 publications

References 86 publications

Symbolic power of sports journalists as challenged by external recognition of women’s sports performance

Symbolic power of sports journalists as challenged by external recognition of women’s sports performance

Retheorizing the Cultural Politics of Sport After a Decade of Activism, Populism, and Polarization

Ritual pathways and dramaturgical efforts: Negotiating the meaning of organized play in Norwegian children's sports

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