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This chapter adopts a reflective approach exploring and setting out the contrasting factors that led to the establishment of the subdiscipline in both countries. The factors included the role of key individuals and their respective academic backgrounds and specialisations within each country’s higher education system. Furthermore, attention is given to the particular circumstances in a case analysis comparison of the oldest programs in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia. This sheds light upon the factors linked to the disproportionate success profile for the sociology of sport in Aotearoa/New Zealand. An analysis of scholars and programs within each country reveals important differences aligned with the politics of funding and the variety and extent of systematic structures. Additionally, scholars’ specialisations and preferences reveal a broad offering but are primarily linked to globalisation, gender relations, indigeneity and race relations, social policy, and media studies. This work has been undertaken variously via the critical tradition including Birmingham School cultural studies, ethnographic and qualitative approaches and, more recently by some, a postmodern poststructuralist trend. Lastly, along with a brief discussion of current issues, future challenges are set out.

Purpose – To explore the contested nature of masculinity through an examination of contemporary promotional culture associated with a predominantly masculine commodity – beer. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the representations of masculinity in two New Zealand beer advertisements spanning a 25-year period.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter is divided into four sections: (1) a brief overview of the contemporary crisis of masculinity; (2) the role of the media and promotional culture in representing and reproducing crises of masculinity; (3) The Holy Trinity: Sport, Beer and Masculinity and (4) analysis of two promotional campaigns for New Zealand beer brand Speight's. Here, the original series ad from 1992 is compared and contrasted with the 2019 instalment using Strate's (1992) framework which conceptualizes beer advertisements as ‘manuals of masculinity’, in order to track potential changes over time.

Findings – The results highlight the enduring value of Strate's (1992) framework of beer advertisements as manuals of masculinity. In addition, the results reveal that while the representation of masculinity in Speight's beer advertising has changed over time, key themes related to exclusive male spaces, physical labour and the core value of ‘mateship’ remain.

Research limitations/implications – Within the context of globalization, promotional culture operating at both the global and local level can cultivate images of masculinity that represent and reproduce the existing gender order, but it can also confront and disrupt it.

Although the commodification of black bodies amid state violence and widespread racism is nothing new, considering the histories of Hollywood, jazz, minstrelsy, or even athletes enslaved on plantations (Rhoden, 2006), the hyper commodification of the contemporary black athlete, alongside expansive processes of globalization, growth in the profitability of black bodies, and their importance within colorblind discourse, demonstrates the importance of commodification within our new racist moment. Likewise, the shrinking opportunities afforded to African American youth, alongside clear messages about the path to desired black masculinity (Neal, 2005; Watkins, 1998; West, 1994), push black youth into a sports world where the possibility of striking it rich leads to a “win at all costs” attitude. Robin Kelley argues that African American youth participate in sports or engage in other cultural practices as an attempt to resist or negotiate the inherent contradictions of post-industrial American capitalism (Kelley, 1998). Patricia Hill Collins describes this process in the following terms: “Recognizing that black culture was a marketable commodity, they put it up for sale, selling an essentialized black culture that white youth could emulate yet never own. These message was clear – ‘the world may be against us, but we are here and we intend to get paid’” (Collins, 2006, p. 298). Celia Lury concurs, noting that heightened levels of commodification embody a shift from a racial logic defined by scientific racism to one centering on cultural difference. She argues that commodity racism “has contributed to shifts in how racism operates, specifically to the shift from a racism tied to biological understandings of ‘race’ in which identity is fixed or naturalized to a racism in which ‘race’ is a cultural category in which racial identity is represented as a matter of style, and is the subject of choice” (Lury, 1996, p. 169; as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). In the context of new racism, as manifested in heightened levels of commodification of Othered bodies, racial identity is simply a choice, but a cultural marker that can be celebrated and sold, policed, or demonized with little questions about racial implications (Spencer, 2004, pp. 123–125). Blackness, thus, becomes little more than a culture style, something that can be sold on Ebay and tried on at the ball or some something that needs to be policed or driven out-of-existence. Race is conceptualized “as a matter of style, something that can be put on or taken off at will” (Willis as quoted in Spencer, 2004, p. 123). Collins notes further that the process of commodification is not simply about selling “an essentialized black culture,” but rather a particular construction of blackness that has proven beneficial to white owners. “Athletes and criminals alike are profitable, not for the vast majority of African American men, but for people who own the teams, control the media, provide food, clothing and telephone services, and who consume seemingly endless images of pimps, hustlers, rapists, and felons” (2006, p. 311). bell hooks, who describes this process as “eating the other,” sees profit and ideology as crucial to understanding the commodification of black bodies. “When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races…affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the other” (Hooks, 1992, p. 23). She, along with Collins, emphasizes the importance of sex and sexuality, within this processes of commodification, arguing that commodification of black male (and female) bodies emanates from and reproduces longstanding mythologies regarding black sexual power.