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This chapter brings the book to a close by summarising the overall argument and looking to the future of commodified lifestyle sports and post-industrial cities under an ailing capitalist economy. Most importantly, it calls upon academics to abandon concepts of resistance and social scientific approaches rooted in symbolic interactionism and discursive meanings in order to return to a critical analysis of the real generative mechanisms of political economy. This chapter closes with a brief epilogue that returns to the traceurs and the parkour community in this study one year after the ethnographic fieldwork ended.

Purpose – Building on the work of Wenner (2011) and Messner and Montez de Oca (2005), this study provides an updated critical stocktaking of the narrative tendencies in sport-related alcohol advertising on television. Set in contemporary understandings of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ and in the political economy of the alcohol industry, this study anchors a critical reading of masculinity, the sporting context and alcohol advertising in Wenner's (2007, 2013) ‘dirt theory of narrative ethics’.

Design/methodology/approach – Our theoretical and methodological approach is grounded in a dirt theory of narrative ethics. Set at the intersection of reader-oriented literary theory (Iser, 1978) and ethical criticism (Gregory, 1998), we ‘follow the dirt’ to understand how contagion from imported communicative meanings (McCracken, 1990) exerts power (Leach, 1976) by influencing reading and interpretation. We draw upon a diverse sample of 20 television ads representing a balanced cross-section of sport-dirtied beer commercials produced between 2010 and 2019. To balance this sample, we divided the ads by their opposing tendencies to characterize men as either ‘real men’, drawn in mythical masculinity terms, or ‘himbos’, drawn as ‘losers’ or slackers. To address the dominance of Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) in the American market, we further divided our ‘real men’ and ‘himbo’ samples, contrasting five ads produced for ABI brands with five ads produced for beer brands not held by ABI.

Findings – We contend that contemporary sports-dirtied beer ads combine to form a schizophrenic picture of American manhood. Male sports fans are alternatively hailed through mocking and misandry, through playfully saluting the norms of ‘bro culture’, and through encouraging men to understand themselves as proud keepers of tradition. We critically consider the ethical implications of building brand affinities through staking disparate positions in contemporary cultural and political debates about the place of men and masculinity in contemporary society.

Research limitations/implications – We discuss the difficulties involved in holding advertisers accountable for balancing ethical and market demands. Nevertheless, we call on the industry to engage in a more reflexive and responsible approach to crafting sports-dirtied alcohol advertising.

This explores the evolution of leisure in post-industrial consumer capitalist society, specifically the relationships between work, leisure and identity. It begins by suggesting that in contemporary society the association of leisure with freedom, autonomy, voluntarism, enjoyment and its distinction from work are all obsolete. In doing so, it uses ethnographic and interview data to outline how the popular cultural lifestyle sport of parkour and freerunning conforms to the contemporary values of consumer capitalism and is a product of tectonic changes in the global economy in the latter part of the twentieth century. This goes a long way to dismantle the prevailing wisdom that such forms of spatial transgression are a mode of performative resistance against contemporary capitalism.

Nowadays, several processes help organize scholarly work about sport and physical activities in France. These include professional development activities of sport and leisure organizations; cultural innovations within sports and physical activities, which involve new spaces with new technologies; questions of public health; and questions of inclusion for marginal groups such as handicapped persons. Questions of power are important to understand each sport situation and each sport sociocultural, economic, and ecologic system. Behind the political and institutional instrumentalization of sport, the reality of social and cultural changes is rarely clear. Strong social, cultural, and economic forces continue to govern sports and seem to be more and more prominent. When sport scandals emerge, the media reveal the case, notably but not exclusively in the context of commercial interests. The possibility for a caring and respectful physical education experience and to improve inclusion for all (Gardou, C. (2012). La société inclusive, parlons-en! Toulouse: Erès) seems like an uphill battle.

This chapter offers insight into Italian sociology of sport. It first describes the fragmented history from the 1990s to the present of a discipline that has never developed as a truly mature field in the academic environment, and then outlines some main areas of research strengths and outcomes. Four strands can be highlighted: fandom and organized soccer supporters (Ultras); changes in sport through the forces of television, new media, sponsorship, and globalization; hybridization of sport, mass media, and politics with Berlusconi’s entrance into the Italian political scene and the advent of the era of “football politics”; and lastly, the body, bodywork, formal/informal sport activities, and gym culture with a microsociological perspective. However, despite their sociological relevance, these topics have had no regular, substantial development. They constitute separate fields of knowledge appearing in the sociological landscape in conjunction with social alarms, mainly related to soccer violence, or the emergence of new mass sport events or trends. It is difficult to predict what the future will hold. There is currently emerging attention to new urban sports and some sporadic in-depth ethnographic investigations of sport in micro arenas, such as soccer pitches, fitness gyms, and dance schools. Otherwise, Italian sociology of sport is folded into physical education science and is only considered as a field of inquiry for physical health and wellbeing.