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This chapter examines the origins and institutionalization of sport sociology in Germany and Switzerland and provides an overview of the current state of research. It shows how academic chairs and research committees were established and how the first textbooks, anthologies, and journals appeared from the 1970s onwards. The institutionalization process of German-speaking sport sociology proceeded parallel to the establishment of sport science. With regard to its theoretical and empirical basis, German-speaking sport sociology is rooted in theories and concepts of general sociology. Studies using a system theory perspective, conceptualizing sport as a societal sub-system and examining its linkage with and dependence on economy, media, or politics are particularly common in the German-speaking region. In addition, actor theoretic perspectives are very popular, and French sociologists such as Bourdieu and Foucault have had a marked influence on German-speaking sport sociology. A large number of sport sociology studies are concerned with the changes in leisure and elite sports. In this context, the emergence of new trends in risk sports as well as the fitness boom and its implications on body perception are of special interest. Further areas of research refer to sport participation and the impact of social inequality, particularly with respect to gender differences and social integration. Finally, organization research focusing on change at the level of sport associations and clubs has a long tradition. Major challenges for the future of German-speaking sport sociology include its internationalization and an enhanced international linkage in order to improve the visibility of research results.

Despite the privatization of its various components, the bidding process and the preparations for the Olympics are still initiated and tightly managed by central governments. Moreover, intentionally and unintentionally, governments use mega sports events such as the Olympics as a soft power medium in which to pursue their goals such as economic development and social integration and a lot of literature has already reviewed the economic and sociocultural impact of hosting the event. This chapter argues that the Olympics have been used as the medium to assist in the formation of legitimacy for a weakened authoritarian leader in the early phase of democratization in Korea. In addition, the chapter tries to explain how the bureaucracy contributed to the success of the national event and how it eventually impacted political modernization and the attitude of bureaucrats. To these ends, first, this chapter explores the influence of soft power on international competition by providing an empirical statistical analysis. Specifically, the chapter analyzes the process by which countries compete with one another for the privilege of hosting the Olympic Games as an important field of global interaction between political actors Further, the chapter discusses which components of soft power can affect international competition. To investigate the explanatory power and concrete applicability of soft power theory, the chapter looks at the influence of democratic and government dimensions of soft power on the selection of Olympic host cities and the role of bureaucracy during that process.

This chapter coins the term Development through Mega-Events (DME) in order to propose a next step for developing social legacies in accordance with the principle of social development.

This chapter’s argument for DME is developed using quantitative, indicator-based data from the Olympic Games Impact (OGI) study as well as relevant literature from the sub-fields of Sport for Development and Peace and Sport Mega-Events.

We discuss the absence of a baseline understanding of the properties of sport mega-events. Also absent are progressive efforts to achieve sustainability by means other than competition among prospective bidders. We recommend that hosts tie social legacies to public policy objectives that are concomitant with the properties of the sport mega-events. Retrospectively applied, OGI data from 2010 reveals social inclusion as one potential social legacy that reflects the nature of the Olympics and the policy realm in the host region.

This chapter is original work. It would be of interest to potential host communities, policymakers, and researchers.

How do institutional settings and their embedded policy principles affect gender-typed enrolment in educational programmes? Based on gender-sensitive theories on career choice, we hypothesised that gender segregation in education is higher with a wider range of offers of vocational programmes. By analysing youth survey and panel data, we tested this assumption for Germany, Norway and Canada, three countries whose educational systems represent a different mix of academic, vocational and universalistic education principles. We found that vocational programmes are considerably more gender-segregated than are academic (e.g. university) programmes. Men, more so than women, can avoid gender-typed programmes by passing on to a university education. This in turn means that as long as their secondary school achievement does not allow for a higher education career, they have a higher likelihood of being allocated to male-typed programmes in the vocational education and training (VET) system. In addition, social background and the age at which students have to choose educational offers impact on the transition to gendered educational programmes. Overall, gender segregation in education is highest in Germany and the lowest in Canada. We interpret the differences between these countries with respect to the constellations of educational principles and policies in the respective countries.

This chapter focuses on what we know about the intersections of gender, doping and sport and addresses the history, complexities and nuances of how gender impacts perceptions of and research on doping in sport. After establishing briefly what the physiology, psychology, media studies and sociology literature demonstrates with respect to the intersection of doping and gender, this chapter addresses how and why gender was neglected in the creation of anti-doping policies. The lack of thought toward gender in the creation of the current anti-doping system, combined with the conflation of drug testing and sex testing issues by the International Olympic Committee's medical commission in the 1960s, has led to persistent gender stereotypes associated with anti-doping rule violations. As a result, unintended overlap between sex testing and drug testing continues, with implications for the eligibility of intersex and transgender athletes.

The conception of markets as interfaces connecting semi-autonomous systems of producers and customers has led to an extensive use of social network analysis. So far, the network focus has been on connections among people, paying less attention to the crucial role played by connections between cultural elements (e.g., concepts, representations, ideas) in the way markets are formed and sustained. Such connections constitute “semantic networks” and are the focus of the present article. We attend to them by developing a network view of the cultural dimension of markets and apply it in an empirical setting where culture plays a crucial role – luxury watchmaking – to illustrate the impact of market semantic networks on a major outcome: price.

To examine some of the complex relationships that exist between sports work and mental health and illness.

This chapter draws upon prevalence data, athlete testimonies, and theoretical works to examine: (1) the prevalence of depression and suicide in professional sport and the wider society; (2) athlete experiences of depression and suicidal ideation, particularly among men; and (3) some of the key sociological ideas which might help to explain experiences of mental health and illness in professional sports work.

Although there are plentiful data on the societal prevalence of depression and suicide, increasing interest in the mental health of professional athletes (and other types of sports workers) has occurred largely in response to individual or clusters of often publicly known, sometimes high profile, cases rather than in response to systematic empirical grounded data. Athlete experiences of mental illness are shown to be related in complex ways to various constraints associated with their public and private lives, to the constraints of their interdependency networks, and to experiences of shame which can have a series of deleterious acute and chronic health costs.

Since much of what is currently known about the links between sports work and mental health and illness is derived from largely psychological studies and media-led or autobiographical accounts, more sociological research is needed to better understand the costs of mental health of working in often very public and highly pressurized, medicalized, scientized, and performance-focused performance sport settings.