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This article contributes to an emerging body of research that examines the transformation of sport, journalism and media practice in the digital era as part of what Raymond Williams has called the 'long revolution' of communications, culture and democracy. In so doing, we explore how Canadian sports journalists have attempted to make sense of, and negotiate their roles within, the practice of convergent sports journalism and the ascension of new online journalism values in the Postmedia Network. We examine the institutionalization of 24/7 digital sports departments within which Postmedia's sports journalists labour to produce a continuous flow of coverage of major league sport - at the expense of local amateur events and women's sport - to secure a digital audience commodity of male readers. We also explore Postmedia's embracement of outsourced labour and production processes that have further altered the work routines of sports journalists and have undermined quality standards. Finally, we underscore how the expansion of the digital promotional networks of major league sport has contributed to the ongoing historical erosion of the status and influence of sports journalists in the sports-media complex and has spurred the rise of derivative analytical and opinion-driven content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport is now mobilized as a novel and effective means of achieving international development goals, leading to an increasingly institutionalized relationship between sport and development. While there is recent evidence of the effectiveness of Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) programmes and policies, research has also drawn attention to the relations of power that underpin the movement and, in particular, to colonizing tendencies in SDP initiatives. This article explores this critical research and considers it against the insights and importance of a development praxis concerned with decolonization. We argue that SDP scholars and activists would be well served to consider the main tenets of a decolonizing framework and we put forth some theoretical and methodological imperatives for decolonizing sport for development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government support for major sporting events is usually predicated on their assumed economic benefits. Yet there has been little parallel consideration of their potential environmental costs, at a time when the same governments are citing the importance of sustainable development. Environmental performance of major sporting events has hitherto been judged, if at all, on qualitative, activity and procedural criteria, rather than by attempting to estimate the overall impact of an event on measurable externalities. This paper examines the UK round of the 2004 World Rally Championship, using environmental accounting techniques to estimate its economic and environmental impacts on its host region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era when traditional engines - or suppliers - of development are being increasingly criticized, sport is being seen by some as a vehicle that can reach communities with messages in a way that politicians, multilateral agencies and NGOs cannot. The list of development-through-sport initiatives is impressive, spanning many aspects of international development, from national development strategies to HIV/AIDS awareness. Those that favour the use of sport in such a manner are quick to point out its qualities. However, the traditional field of development is taking longer to warm to the idea that sport might be an engine that drives development initiatives forward. This paper, the first of three, begins by outlining some of the ways that sport is being used for development. It concludes by noting that these schemes receive insufficient evaluation. The following two papers discuss how these initiatives might be evaluated, and share the results of the evaluation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the psychological reasons for reporting by the media of football-related disorders or violence. Sports hooliganism or disorderly conduct in sports as reported in different forms of media provides the viewers a channel to experience the disorderly spectacle vicariously. Watching the said kind of media reports is a form of sublimation for the viewers to satisfy violent tendencies lurking in their subconscious. The study calls for contextualizing and identifying the role of media within the complicated array of putative causes of media offense and harm.

This article considers sport as a locus for US Latino ethnoracial identity formations. To suggest a dialogue between everyday practices and academic discourses, it first examines professional boxing on a theoretical level as a network of spatio-bodily power dynamics; it then discusses the life story and legal case of world champion Jesus 'El Matador' Chávez. A Mexican national who grew up in the USA, Chávez was twice deported before winning his legal case against the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in November 2000. Through his story, the article problematizes identity formations within various spatial frameworks – such as the city, the prison, the ring and USA–Mexico national borders. It also considers how the boxing body is both linked to power relations and how, through its own agency, it contests those relations. Ultimately, Chávez's case exemplifies the fluidity of identity formations, the incongruency of many identity signifiers, and how, simultaneously, identity formations have a necessary strategic and political function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on examples of mainstream sport and the philosophy of the Gay Games, this article uses sporting bodies to rethink the links between sexuality, pride and shame. The contrast between the two highlights the ways in which the Gay Games downplays the dynamics of shame and competition in favour of its project of pride. Against the domestication of the body in some theories of embodiment, it is argued that shame may provide a productive ground for revitalizing the study of the body in terms of affect, politics and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the book "Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process," by Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning. The important contribution to the development of the sociology of sport and leisure by Norbert Elias and his former student, colleague and devotee, Eric Dunning is centred upon their demonstration that the rise of modern forms of sport and leisure, with their emphasis on both tension release and the control of emotions, provide an ideal exemplification of the working out of the "civilizing process" from stress-tensions. What Elias and Dunning see their focus on leisure as achieving is a study of human beings in the round, in opposition to the work dominated perspectives hitherto conventional in sociology. One outcome of this is that they also present their work as an attempt to lay the foundations for a sociological theory of the emotions. Since Elias in his general work, What Is Sociology? (1970) also selects sports and games such as football or cards - to illustrate in a simplified form the basic character of social `figurations' as well as the claimed analytical `distinctiveness' of the figurational approach, it will be obvious that Elias and Dunning's entry into the sociology of sport is not merely an excursus.

This article discusses the social production of gender relations in and through sport, by illustrating various models and theories given by various researchers. The article first focuses on the ideology of musculanity in sports from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It considers ways in which sport is supposed to be a site for cultural struggle. The article then briefly comments on feminist strategies in sport. Male hegemony has probably been more complete in sport than in most other social institutions and still is, in numerous instances, remarkably resilient and resistant to change. In all countries in the West sporting attitudes, values and images are products of a long and relentless history of male domination, linked to ideas about the body which have provided a theme of continuity until the present day. Traditional sporting models thus reinforce traditional male and female gender identities by supporting the idea that the existing sexual division of labour is the natural state of affairs. But sport has become a site where traditional male and female identities are both reinforced and undermined. The traditional models of male sport that celebrate the masculinity and pseudo-militarism, characterised in an article by John Carroll and Eric Dunning, have been a major focus of opposition expressed in this article.

This article discusses the theoretical significance of sport in understanding the contemporary social formation. It is comprised with a theoretical debate over the issue by various contributing authors and researchers. Each of these contributors aim to reconstitute the sociology of sport so that it could transcend its early pre-occupation with documenting phenomena within sport, and could address in some theoretically significant way the classical sociological questions; of agency and structure, of the conditions of social stability and change. Researchers A. Ingham and S. Hardy summarize the problematic by observing that sport, like other social institutions, is continually reconstituted, as successive generations both reproduce and transform the sporting traditions they have inherited. According to researcher Rob Beamish, the character of sport is determined necessarily by the mode of production of the society in which that sport is located. On the other hand, regarding the structure of sport, researcher Rick Gruneau's theory suggests that the forms of modern sport are not determined in any necessary way by the logic of capital accumulation; but neither is there anything in the nature of sport which transcends historically specific forms of social relations. Sport must be seen, rather, as a set of social practices and relations structured by the society in which they exist.

This article focuses on the commercialization of contemporary sports with exploring various sociological or conservative forces which are supposed to drive the process of commercialization. In this regard, the author of this article refers to an essay, titled "Sport and Cultural Reification: From Ritual to Mass Consumption," by John Alt. The author contradicts the view expressed in this essay by saying that sport is one of the few areas of modern society in which the demoralizing thrust of consumerism is not only resisted, but driven into retreat. There can be no doubt that the forces of commercialization are strongly at work in contemporary sport, and that they press in the direction that Alt suggests. However, according to author's view, they are countered by a battery of quite different forces. The author argues that the contrary forces are the more deeply rooted and hence more powerful and are suitably characterized as "conservative forces." The aim of this article is to demonstrate the nature of these conservative forces, to make clear just what it is that is at war with the progressive drive of commercialization.

This article focuses on social sources of masculine identity and its transformation in certain male-dominated sports or so-called "combat sports" such as boxing, wrestling, etc. All sports are inherently competitive and hence conducive to the arousal of aggression. Under specific conditions, such aggression can spill over into forms of open violence that are contrary to the rules. In some sports, such as; rugby, soccer, hockey and boxing; violence in the form of "play fight" or "mock battle" between two individuals or groups is a central and legitimate ingredient. In present-day society, sports of this kind are enclaves for the socially acceptable, ritualized and more or less controlled expression of physical violence. This article solely concern with such "combat sports," more particularly those involving a play fight between two teams. One of the central characteristics of such games, relative to modern sports, was the high level of open violence they involved. Games of this type evidently corresponded to the structure of a society where the levels of state-formation and of social development more generally were relatively low, where violence was a more regular and open feature of everyday life than it is today, and where the balance of power between the sexes was skewed more heavily in favour of men. In short, these folk games were expressive of a fairly extreme form of patriarchy.

This article focuses on a corrective to the sociology of sport's "isolationist" tendencies by showing how sporting practices dramatise both the logic of capitalism and the relationships between dominant and subordinate groups in the capitalist social formation. Sport is embedded in the social relations of capitalist, liberal democracy. They also reject the mechanical materialist thesis that sport is a mere epiphenomenon or abstractly determined by-product of infrastructural forces, the Marxist version of the reflection thesis. Thus, sport's structural principles interpenetrate with those of paramount social reality. Sport tends to aid in the reproduction of general social process and might be transformative when tied to extra-sporting struggles arising in the conflicts of interest and contradictions endemic to the capitalist mode of production. Sport is but one more example of the way in which capitalism seeks to remove barriers to the extraction of relative surplus-value by producing new wants and new consumption.

The present article examines a major cultural change associated with modern society--from culture as ritual of moral order to mass produced spectacles which channel the emotional needs of consumers in instrumental ways. It further adds that sport, much less at the center of the reproduction of a liberal moral order, is being decisively altered by its mass commodification and by the character of its bureaucratically-conditioned consumers. This analysis hopes to contribute to an understanding of those issues related to the anomisation of individual motivation and social justice in sport and everyday life, and those problems associated with corporate, competitive life violence, cheating, the cult of winning, etc., which are reproduced in competitive team sports at an alarming rate. It focuses on a model of ritual and spectacle, public and mass, which is analysed in terms of a theory of instrumental rationalisation. It also investigates normative sports theory and commodification of sports.