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It is unclear from Canadian case law what the appropriate legal standards of care and regulation should be in athlete injury cases. This chapter provides an overview of existing legal standards and explores the question of participant liability in sport, especially ice hockey. It reviews the applicability of tort law, including both intentional torts and unintentional torts, and considers the applicability and impact of the notion of ‘volenti non fit injuria’ (or voluntary assumption of risk).

The chapter is based on a review of Canadian case law.

Canadian courts have adopted varying standards whereby it is seemingly easier to prove negligence in certain provinces than others. We discuss the implications of these conflicting jurisdictional standards and the need for clearer and more consistent legal guidelines. Further, we show why appropriate legal standards should extend beyond purely objective and legalistic interpretations to more subjective and sociological factors that place sports violence and sports injury in social context.

This study examines how Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) events are marketed in order to understand the role of violence in promoting events. Researchers examined 134 pieces of promotional artwork and 57 promotional news releases by MMA organisations across North America, Asia and Europe and found that 18 (13.4%) pieces of promotional artwork used violent text or imagery. Violent text was found in 12 (21%) of the 57 news releases. Violence was typically limited to smaller or European organisations. Results illustrate an evolution of the sport, suggesting violence may no longer be necessary to promote events.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of “the” accounting entity, demonstrating how it is a contestable socio-political construction informed by a nexus of market, state and community actors.

A case study method is utilised to follow debate relating to Swedish football clubs’ responsibility for the payment/non-payment of policing costs between 1999 and 2014. The case study uses documentary and interview data, focusing on one of the high-risk Stockholm clubs.

The paper makes four main contributions: first, demonstrating how the accounting entity is a changeable and contestable construction; second, outlining how distinctions informing contests about the accounting arena are materialised through accounting calculations and other devices; third, showing the importance of community in a coordinated sense in mediating accounting practices; and fourth, contributing to the literature on accounting and sport, highlighting the importance of state actors in this arena.

This research draws on original empirical data providing unique insights into debates regarding the responsibility for the payment of police costs in the context of sports-related violence. The authors show the importance of characterising accounting for sporting organisations as a shifting and contestable nexus of market, state and community actors.

Purpose – To outline the arguments and consequent legislation that prohibited and then allowed alcohol consumption by fans in Brazilian sports arenas since 1996.

Design/methodology/approach – We present the social and political debates regarding alcohol consumption by sports fans having the Brazilian legislation as a starting point and using the multiple streams framework (Kingdon, 1995). We identify the problems, policies and politics streams on three phases: the prohibition of sale and consumption of alcohol in sport stadiums, the exceptional allowance for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and its consequences on state laws five years after the 2014 event.

Findings – Violence among football supporters was the focal event to approve laws prohibiting alcohol consumption in sports arenas. For the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the sport governing body demanded the opposite, so Brazil and some states approved an exception to their laws. Since then, states see an opportunity to allow the sale and consumption of alcohol in and around the stadiums, questioning the relationship between alcohol and violence. These state laws are under examination by the Supreme Court because they may counteract a national law.

Research limitations/implications – Public safety is the key justification to uphold the laws, but a lack of empirical data and research delimit the arguments on how beneficial alcohol prohibition is to suppress supporters' violence. Lawmakers and groups of interest may also include beer industry lobbying strategies and health-related issues as relevant variables in the debate, although they are not discussed in this chapter.

To explore what suffering is, how suffering is embedded within the sociology of sport literature, and what suffering can do to athletes in sport. In addition, to discuss the value of an interdisciplinary approach and co-presence when researching athletes in suffering.

In the first part of the chapter, the concepts of pain, violence, and suffering are separated, and a justification for the study of suffering in sport is given. The second part of the chapter details sport and social problems, and the suffering body in sport is discussed, pulling from interdisciplinary theories and methodologies of suffering external to the sociology of sport.

Social inequalities and hidden forms of suffering may be reproduced in sport. Sport is questioned as a force of social mobility for vulnerable people. The context of sport can offer ‘healing’ properties for people in suffering. The impact of using an interdisciplinary approach and considering co-presence and relational suffering when researching suffering is discussed.

The difficulties understanding the complex, multi-dimensional nature of suffering are shared. New ways of engaging within the research act and specific theoretical approaches are suggested for improving the understanding of suffering within sport.

This study compared the motives and media consumption behaviours of American and South Korean spectators of Mixed Martial Arts. Significant cross-national differences were noted in sport interest, vicarious achievement, aesthetics, national pride and violence. Backward regression analyses indicated that sport interest, fighter interest and drama predicted media consumption at the American event, while sport interest, drama and adoration were significant predictors at the Korean event.

The message to international marketers has long been “think global, act local”, but the complexity of the issue has rarely been explored empirically. This analysis examines the notion of disjuncture herein defined as points of ambiguity, incongruity and conf lict that emerge when global sport-advertising campaigns are released within local cultural settings. The purpose of the paper is to move beyond the “think global, act local” adage by examining the politics and contradictions associated with local regulatory control of global sport advertisements in a specific national context, namely New Zealand.

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.

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.