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Copyright of Sociology of Sport Journal is the property of Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Sociology of Sport Journal is the property of Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper maps the current ownership patterns of North American major professional sports franchises in order to assess the extent to which they are interconnected with media/entertainment conglomerates. First, the 120 franchises are classified according to owner's industrial sector. Second, five models of linkages between franchises and media/entertainment corporations are followed by case studies representative of each. The paper concludes that indeed empirical evidence supports the alleged increasing control of North American pro sport franchises by large media/entertainment conglomerates. However, the paper also demonstrates that the phenomenon involves much more diversity than the major conglomerates commonly identified in the current literature. Finally, the paper discusses the impacts of this trend on sport, as well as on fans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines epistemological and ontological issues in ethnographic research and texts. Based on my experiences as a subject in an ethnographic study of pro wrestling. I present an ethnography of the ethnographer. In this paper, I discuss problems arising from a hierarchy of understanding that privileges the ethnographer, the primacy of visualism, and a desire to penetrate and uncover hidden truth. I propose that a performative approach to ethnography recognizes the agency of the ethnographic object and opens access to other sensorial phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role that the pursuit of hallmark events and of major league sports franchises has played in the growth strategies of western Canadian cities. Literature on civic boosterism illustrates the vigorous competition that developed among regional elites to establish their own cities as perceived growth centers. These competitions are sharpened today by the contemporary mobility of capital, by media/information networks that focus unprecedented attention on ``world-class" events, and by the growth of event-related tourism. The predictions of the benefits from investment in sports and tourism are typically optimistic, and gloss over significant differences of interest between local elites and others who are less likely to benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three arguments concerning the ownership of professional sports are advanced in this paper. First, sports team owners do not maintain the social and cor- porate linkages found among capitalists in other industries. Second, these owners participate in the sports industry because it is both profitable and secure (a) through tax incentives and (b) because it is a self-regulating mono- poly. Finally, the workings of a self-regulating monopoly and the popularity of sport enhance the reproduction of capitalist social relations and ideology. Sport is seen to represent the mythical ideal of meritocracy where hard work can lead to ownership and participation in America's games. This ideal ignores the reality that sports team ownership is based on enormous wealth, not merit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the role relationship between professional athletes and sports journalists. After a brief historical review it discusses (a) the current conflicts between players and sports writers in light of changing role definitions for both athletes and journalists, (b) ethical guidelines for writers covering athletes as personalities, and (c) how the emergence of superstar athletes has intensified the potential for conflict in player-press relations. The major conclusion is that conflict in player-press relations is likely to continue, its intensity will vary with the players' understandings of the role of the press in professional sport, the knowledge and empathy of the sports writers themselves, and the sophistication of the consumers of sport publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the home team wins more than half its games is well-established. One factor said to produce this home advantage is travel between venues, which is seen as disruptive for the visiting team. Unfortunately, the media and athletes have been more supportive of travel effects than the research literature. While players continue to speculate that travel matters, empirical results find little support for travel factors. In the present paper we demonstrate that, at least for some professional sports, team travel can exert a very small influence on the outcome of the contest even after the quality of the teams competing is controlled. We conclude, however, that the belief that some factors confer an advantage to the home team is more the product of social forces than the influence those factors regularly have on game outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors provide a Deleuzoguattarian tracing of a specific set of relationships between traditional Chinese medicine, life, death, and football (soccer). More specifically, the authors examine political, economic, and cultural associations formed in and around the Quanjian Group, a major traditional Chinese medicine company once located in the burgeoning industrial hub of Tianjin. The authors follow Aihwa Ong in abductively examining (de)territorializations of life, sport, and death; examining how the media publics' (in China and beyond) awareness of the death of a young girl in 2015 destabilized a network of capital, state, medicine, and sport and in the process revealed how the vitality of major professional sport in China is situated within, and contingent upon, a vast array of material and nonmaterial (bio)political formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply to sociologist Norman R. Yetman's comments on the author's paper "Positional Segregation and the Economic Hypothesis." The economic hypothesis argues that the sport or position a potential player selects before entering professional sports is primarily dictated by the training and development costs required to obtain the requisite sport skills. Clearly, certain sport positions require skills that can be developed only through expensive developmental costs. Since blacks have a lower socioeconomic status than whites, the economic hypothesis argues that blacks will tend to specialize in those positions that have relatively less expensive skill and development costs. The author argues that the increase in representation of blacks at central positions is due to increased school integration and a secular increase in the relative real income of blacks. Yetman argues that such a conclusion is unwarranted because the increase of black players at central positions was not substantial. Yetman also contends that the data most appropriate to test a change in black socioeconomic status is black median family income over the sample period 1970-1984, rather than the period 1960-1984 which the author used.

Copyright of Sociology of Sport Journal is the property of Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The restrictive covenants contained in the professional baseball player's standard contract can be justified on grounds of being the most efficient solution to the problem of transaction costs in an industry where the difficulty of selecting and managing talent is acute. Contract law legitimates these restrictive covenants. Closer scrutiny of the history and sociopolitical context of the employment relationship in baseball underlines the role of power differentials in determining the parameters within which transacting for labor takes place. Not only the reserve clause but also the negative covenant in the player's contract has been important in providing the conditions for the efficient trading of players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the implications of the entrance of Renee Richards, a constructed-female transsexual, into the women's professional tennis circuit. The purpose of our analysis is to show how our culture constructs woman and produces particular notions of gender, sex, and difference by examining a case in which these ideological processes are literally enacted: the construction of a "woman," Renee Richards, from a man. We do this by exploring the cultural meaning of transsexualism in the U.S.; by examining critically how issues of transsexualism, sex, and gender are framed by the media in the Renee Richards case; and by exploring the particular problematic posed by Richards' entrance into the highly gendered world of professional sport. Although Renee Richards appears to challenge fundamental cultural assumptions about sex and gender, closer analysis reveals that the various media frames invoked to explain the meaning of Renee Richards reproduce rather than challenge dominant gender arrangements and ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study contributes to and extends the literature on sport and social mobility by refining the computations for the odds of attaining professional athlete status in the U.S. Using 1980 U.S. census data, 1986 and 1987 team rosters, and 1986 lists of money winners, rates for achieving "entry level" professional sport careers were computed for males and females, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian/Pacific Islanders in the sports of football, baseball, basketball, hockey, men's and women's golf, men's and women's tenths, and auto racing. The methodological contribution of this research is that refined norming variables are employed in the statistical calculations; that is, they are age, race/ethnicity, sport, and sex specific. This inquiry contains the most systematic, extensive, and precise measures for assessing the likelihood of achieving the ultimate in sport upward social mobility-professional athlete status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines positional segregation in light of recent data documenting the increased participation by black players in professional football and describes the relationships between positional segregation and experience and positional segregation and career length. The primary sample was composed of 1,508 professional football players from the 1982 season. A secondary sample of 1,371 professional football players was used to study career length. The results indicate that positional segregation is still prevalent in professional football. The recent increase in participation by black players has occurred in positions that have been primarily black in the past and at linebacker. Whites are likely to have more experience in professional football than blacks, which is explained in part by the positions in which blacks and whites are most likely to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The various biological, psychological, and sociological hypotheses and the economic hypothesis provided possible explanations of why blacks will be underrepresented at central positions in professional sports. The economic hypothesis attributes this phenomena to the inferior socioeconomic status of blacks and differential skill and development costs. Over the time period 1970-1984, when the psychological and sociological factors remained relatively constant but blacks' socioeconomic status and access to facilities increased, the data showed that in major league baseball the recruitment of blacks in central positions increased and declined at the noncentral outfield position. This finding was consistent with the economic hypothesis but inconsistent with the alternative hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]