Search results

This chapter describes the disordered eating in sport problem and provides a critical overview of research in the area. It offers specific insights into how cultural practices in elite sport may be implicated.

In contrast to dominant medical perspectives, disordered eating in sport is discussed as a product of high-performance cultural contexts. The ways that practice commonplace in elite sport might contribute to disordered eating onset and maintenance are described. In turn, I also consider the experiential struggles of athletes with eating disorders and how this relates to dominant discourses in elite sport.

Elite sport culture, with its emphasis on surveillance, sacrifice, and success, reinforces disordered eating practices. Much of what is conventionally considered disordered eating, can be normalized when situated in the context of high-performance sport. Nevertheless, when functional disordered eating slides into mental illness, the mental toughness ethos works to silence and stigmatize athletes.

Research must broaden its focus to explore how social practices in elite sport normalize disordered eating and how prevention approaches can become more culturally informed and less individually driven.

To examine the ways in which sports-related brain injury (concussion and subconcussion) is both similar to and different from other injuries and to set out a sociological understanding of the injury, its manifestation and management.

There is a broad contextualization of the ‘issue’ of concussion and the processes that have brought this to the fore, an examination of the ways in which concussion has been figuratively clouded from plain view, and an outline of the main contributions of the social sciences to understanding this injury – the culture of risk and the mediating effect of social relationships. The chapter concludes by questioning whether the emergence of concerns over chronic traumatic encephalopathy has stimulated a fundamental change in attitudes towards sport injuries, and if this has had a significant impact on the social visibility of concussion.

The two available sociological studies of the lived experiences of concussion are situated within a broader analysis of the politicization of sports medicine and the emergence of a particular social discourse around sports-related brain injury.

The difficulties emanating from the dominance of a biomedical approach to concussion are discussed along with the need for further research, incorporating a more holistic view of concussion, as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon.

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.

Pain is demonstrated as a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon that is interdependent and connected between people. The author proposes that social scientists use a “total model” of pain to better understand pain epistemologically and ontologically and people’s “pain lives.” Through this model, and drawing from the author’s own research on mixed martial artists, new ways to conceptualize, study, and talk about pain within the sporting context have been outlined.

In the first part of this chapter, pain is discussed with respect to how it has been researched and understood within the fields of medicine, sport psychology, and the sociology of sport. In the second part of this chapter, the total pain model developed by Dame Cicely Saunders is explored as a revolutionary development for the ways in which pain is understood and treated within the health field. Lastly, the author proposes a reconstructed methodology for the study of pain.

Pain should be studied not from one tradition, but using an amalgamation of the medical, sport psychology, and sociology of sport traditions and perspectives. In this way, the many dimensions of the phenomenon, social, cultural, political, material/physical, spiritual, existential, emotional, and cognitive must be explored from all systems and languages of pain in order to achieve a more robust understanding of pain in sport.

The dualistic relationship between theory and method currently present in most qualitative research does not fully account for the complexity of bodies in pain. Therefore, it is critical to adopt an interwoven methodological and theoretical approach that enables scholars to relate to, and feel with, people in pain.

The intent of this chapter is to examine the historical and present-day intersections of injury, impairment, pain and risk-taking in the Paralympic Movement. While much has been written about injuries that end an athlete’s career, far less consideration has been given to how an injury might launch a sports career. In this chapter, I explore the experiences of athletes for whom injury and sports participation are fundamentally entwined.

To accomplish this, I draw on sociological literature on sport and injury, psychological literature on identities and sport retirement and feminist disability theories. The discussion is further enriched by interviews with Paralympic athletes and informed by own experience as a researcher, guide and volunteer in the Paralympic Movement.

This work illustrates how systems of representation intersect to (re)produce identities. This includes demonstrating how some individuals use sport as a means of claiming an athletic identity while distancing themselves from devalued disabled identities and the subsequent impact this can have on their psycho-social well-being.

This chapter demonstrates how sociologists of sports can engage with critical disability scholarship to deepen understandings of how and why individuals with impairments enter into sport and their experiences therein.

This chapter draws upon the sociological concept of rationalization to explore the role and practice of sports medicine. It highlights attempts by the profession to create a rationalized model of health care for sports participants – particularly those involved in high-performance sports settings and the enabling and constraining elements of its enactment.

The chapter explains how changes in the organization of sports medicine have dovetailed with the increasing rationalization of sport which has been significant in enacting changes in sports medicine that are aligned with a more rationalized model of care.

Key findings from the literature highlight the difficulties of implementing rationalized health care policy into practice. Specifically, the chapter examines macro-organizational changes to the structure of sports medicine and the extent to which sports medicine represents a rationalized model of health care by virtue of micro-organizational constraints.

While the discussion draws upon a breadth of research by sociologists of sport who have examined sports medicine practices, the chapter draws heavily on the UK model of sports medicine care in high-performance sport and thus the conclusions may not be wholly transferable to non-UK and non-sports contexts.

Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to share our thoughts and observations about some of the ethical issues that arise when researching sport-drinking cultures. In particular, the chapter focuses on what researchers should do when they witness potentially harmful and risky drinking behaviour.

Approach – The chapter is written mainly from an ethics disciplinary background. We use philosophical methods to analyse, evaluate and interrogate certain claims, assumptions and judgements about moral action and inaction in the research context. We employ ethical concepts in general and research ethics concepts in particular to make and defend value judgements about what is reasonable or unreasonable, right or wrong, and good or bad in relation to witnessing risky and harmful behaviour.

Findings – The chapter argues that in some situations there are good and perhaps compelling moral reasons for researchers to take action when they observe certain problematic drinking behaviour. Researchers who fail to notice and/or act may be morally blameworthy and culpable in other ways, e.g. in breach of contract or code of conduct.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the presence of abuse enacted through virtual mediums with a specific focus on how athletes can become the targets of online hate. The chapter introduces social media and explores the role it has played in the increasing reliance on virtual worlds. The impact of digital technology on sport in particular is framed in order to demonstrate how digital technologies are now a vital component in our consumption of sport. The primary focus of the chapter is on how virtual spaces can pose significant risk(s). Freedom of speech, shifting power and the lack of safety and regulation in virtual spaces are all presented. Finally, recommendations are made for future research in the area in order to develop understanding of abuse augmented by virtual environments and to develop the focus on virtual safeguarding in sport and beyond.

This chapter synthesises and discusses existing literature from the disciplines of sport, social media and abuse, with a view to understand and address prominent issues encountered by athletes in the virtual world.

By examining abuse through a sociological lens, this chapter focusses on the factors that promote or enable abuse to occur online (often without regulation). The types of abuse experienced in virtual spaces are legion and this adds to the complexity of policing and/or safeguarding online environments.

The chapter makes recommendations for a number of future areas of study that will extend the current understanding of abuse in virtual environments.

The chapter provides a synthesis of the emerging area of virtual abuse and its links to sociology as a discipline. It offers insight into power in virtual spaces as a critical frame of reference for understanding virtual interactions and parasocial relationships.