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To explore the sociology of sport-related pain through an autoethnographic focus on the contiguous, 20-year participation of one professional athlete at the Ironman Triathlon World Championships in Kona, Hawaii; to address the “well heeded, long-standing and vociferous calls ‘to bring the body back in to social theory’” (Hockey & Collinson, 2007, p. 2) by allowing authorial reflection on the negotiations of pain during those decades of elite competition.

Negotiated sports pain is explored as the subject/author allows visceral memory over a two-decade arc of professional-level participation at the Ironman. The ethnographic study is a combination of self-reflection, phenomenology, supportive and correlative theory, and detailed peripheral aspects of one elite athlete as he discusses the roles, levels, types, applications, and meanings of pain during the training and racing of the Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Allowances are made for reflective and subjective narratives in service of introducing sensorial elements to this area of the sociology of pain.

This chapter addresses several calls for a focus on the “practical experiences of the body” (Wainwright & Turner, 2006, p. 238) or what Hockey and Collinson (2007) call the “lacking (of) a more ‘fleshy’ perspective, a ‘carnal sociology’ (Crossley, 1995) of sport.” The details provided by the author/athlete offer a more personal and intimate view of how sports pain is negotiated over the arc of two decades of high-level competition. A sometimes brutally honest and objective self-reflection reveals the inner workings of a professional athlete turned college professor as he reflects on the multiplicity of roles that pain served and played during his 20 years at the Ironman World Triathlon Championships.

With a dearth of “embodied” studies on the sociology of sports-related pain, particularly by elite athletes who lived much of their youth in a physical culture that requires the near-constant negotiation of pain, this chapter provides a deep inside-out look at one case with its sensorial, phenomenological, and temporal insight to pain management.

This paper investigates whether in the case of obesity medicalization implies transforming deviants into patients. First, a brief history is presented of the social construction of obesity as an epidemic. Since the turn of the millennium obesity experts claim that a continuously increasing proportion of the Western population is becoming overweight and that this trend is spreading across the globe. Other claims have been made as well, such as that fatter people die younger and add substantially to the cost of health care. Counterclaims have been made too, such as that in Western countries obesity no longer increases and that only extreme obesity increases the risk of dying young.

Furthermore, several explanations for the obesity epidemic are discussed. Public health experts all over the world prefer two explanations that suggest the obesity problem is amenable to intervention. Most basically, it is held that people become overweight because their intake of calories exceeds their expenditure. In addition it is proposed that modern societies are obesogenic, for example, offering food in abundance while removing the need for physical exertion. The first explanation leads to blaming overweight people for their own condition. The second offers opportunities for disciplining the food industry, which following the anti-tobacco movement is labeled “big food.” Especially with regard to individual citizens the conclusion seems warranted that medicalizing fatness adds opportunities for stigmatization and discrimination beyond those offered by conceptions of beauty and fitness. This causes a double bind for governments that want to fight both obesity and stigmatization.

In recent decades, oxytocin (OT) has been extensively studied across disciplines. Yet, the role of OT has been discussed little in the context of politics. This chapter proposes that studying the role of this hormone can enrich and advance the study of politics. The chapter reviews the previous findings on OT categorized into two sections: one that focuses on the biological mechanisms and therapeutic potentials and another that focuses on the effects on social behaviors. This review is not exhaustive but is intended to bring political scientists up to date with the progress in OT studies. Next, this chapter highlights that studying the role of OT in political context will benefit both the OT and political science literature, since there is currently a great interest in the context-dependent nature of OT. I highlight several research questions that can be answered at this intersection. Rather than waiting for other disciplines to complete unfolding the precise role of OT, students of biopolitics can make important contributions. Political science can further understand the biological underpinnings of concern for others and partisan behaviors, while OT applied to real-world settings would demonstrate how different contexts shape its effects.

The aim of this chapter is to examine and problematize the taken-for-granted conceptual understanding of risk practices in sport cultures. By inspecting the mainstay, and one might argue relatively stagnant, constructions of risk in the sociological study of sport, a case for attending to a wider range of risk-based ideologies and cultural practices is presented. The chapter ventures away from viewing risk as predominantly physical in sport settings and constructing athletes as oppressed agents who naively acquiesce to practices of self-injury and self-alienation in sport cultures. Emphasis is given to a broad spectrum of risks undertaken in the practice of sport, and the reflexive, personal nature by which risk may be understood by sports and physical culture participants.

In the first part of the chapter, the relatively simplistic or unidimensional construction of risk in sociological research in sport is reviewed. In the second part, the complexity of the concept of risk is then discussed alongside case examples that push the analytical boundaries of how risk is a multidimensional construct of athletes’ minds, bodies, selves, beliefs, values, and identities in a host of relational contexts.

Risk is best understood as a set of practices and belief that exists on a continuum in sport and physical cultures. Risk-taking in sport, however, can be personally injurious and detrimental along a number of lines but is also often calculated, personally/group satisfying and existentially rewarding at times. If the concept of risk is to be applied and interrogated in sport and physical cultures, it should be done so, therefore, in radically contextual manners.

This chapter illustrates the need for new and exploratory theoretical understandings of what risk means to athletes and other participants in sport and physical culture. New substantive topics are proposed, as are methodological suggestions for representations of the unfolding risk in the process of “doing” sport.

Within entrepreneurship literature, the conventional approaches inspired by Schumpeter's “creative destruction” have largely emphasized the role of human cognitive processes to come up with new business ideas. In contemporary studies, however, there is a recent research stream wherein creativity is aestheticized. As a research line of the aesthetic approach, there is an increasing interest for playfulness and other signals of enjoyment that can also stimulate the entrepreneur's creative acts.

This chapter is a reflexion about the liberating and creative role of play in the context of sport entrepreneurship, particularly, in the fitness industry. It aspires to give to the recent development of the sport entrepreneurship field a novel twist by relating it to a theology of play. Drawing on the work of one of the most influential twentieth-century theologians who has approached play theology, Hugo Rahner, we present how his theological approach may be used to widen our understanding of sport entrepreneurship. This theological perspective allows us to develop alternative thoughts based on concepts that transcend the typical rationalist business approach and its instrumental language.

This chapter focusses on the contribution of health professionals' communication competences to patients. We propose a model of communication to be used in the therapeutic relationship, supported by a literature review. The methodology is qualitative. Four focus groups (FGs) composed of Portuguese health professionals (N = 25), such as medical doctors, nurses and professors in health fields, were conducted during 2017 and 2018. All the participants of FGs validated a three-factor aggregated and interdependent model, which is composed of assertiveness, clear language and positivity (ACP model). The factors reinforce the therapeutic relationship and improve health literacy, thus reinforcing the patient's health and well-being. The argument is that health is wealth, so if the communication can improve health, then this has positive social implications. The study is a response to the lack of consensus in the literature on what specific and operative communication competences the health professional should perform in clinical encounters with the patients, and how these competences can improve, in the final instance, their health and well-being.