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This article is an attempt to provide an alternative view of sports science and future sport worlds. For reasons to do with fundamental science, involved advocacy and committed service, and in a period of intensified globalization, it is necessary to reconfigure the nature and scope of teaching and research within the subdiscipline of sports sciences. However, just as the military-industrial complex dominates aspects of broader global processes, and of the academy in particular, advocates of the sports-industrial complex may well seek to thwart such alternative possibilities. As a result, the role of academics will be confined to the production of world and Olympic medals--sports scientists will be the technicians, and student-athletes the cogs, in the machine. In contrast to the performance efficiency ethos, a human development model is advocated. (Contains 3 notes.)

This paper provides a development from previous conceptual frameworks related to the risk/pain/injury nexus in sporting subcultures (Hughes & Coakley, 1991; Maguire & Roberts, 1998; Nixon, 1992; Young, 1991). To do this, we have developed a model of factors contributing to injury risk in sport. In outlining our framework we seek to trace the enabling and coercive social forces that combine to act upon athletes and consequently promote participation to the extent of risking injury. This paper is grounded in a two-year study of female rowers in the United Kingdom. Several dimensions of sporting activities are mapped out, including the physical and structural settings, or "stage" upon which the sport takes place; preparation and participation in the sport itself; and the athletes' attitudes toward, and actions on, receiving an injury. The themes identified in the model are used to "make sense" of the substantive insights drawn from the rowers' stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, a version of which was written in 1986, seeks to be iconoclastic in nature. Firstly, it undermines the notion that England in general and the terraces of football stadia in particular enjoyed, until recently, a way of life that stressed harmony and peace. This task was accomplished by a substantive analysis of the development of football as a spectator sport. By so doing an alternative conceptualization is proposed. It is contended that the emergence of football spectating as a social problem was an articulation and reflection of competing definitions of codes of conduct and ways of living evident in English society. Crucial in this regard has been, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more recently in this century, a more or less progressive narrowing of the limits of behaviour that would be tolerated in public. More adequate studies need to examine both the ‘objective condition’ and ‘subjective definition’ of football hooliganism and football hooligans, and indeed of ‘riots’ more generally – and do so in an interdependent manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Football hooliganism is deeply rooted in British society. Pioneering work investigating this area was done at the University of Leicester during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Both the social roots of such behaviour and the perception by powerful outsiders of supporters in general, and Millwall fans in particular, were examined. This essay seeks to revisit this period and to see, to what extent, such work has stood the test of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns the role of mediated sport in local reconfigurations associated with globalization. The increasing worldwide transmission of sport raises questions regarding the cultural presence of 'global' sports. We combine elements of figurational sociology, cultural studies and critical political economy to examine the production and textual presence of the North American National Basketball Association (NBA) on United Kingdom television. Interviews with two media personnel were used to provide insights into the dynamics of production. Subsequent textual analysis revealed the dominant interpretive framework presented to viewers. This included the establishment of local-global hierarchy, education of local consumers, indigenous referencing, and caricatured representations of US culture. Observations regarding the nuanced complexity of the televisual discourse, and the scope for contradictory readings are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the movement of Nordic/Scandinavian players into English professional soccer. The frequency and form of this sport labor migration is mapped out from season 1946/1947. The presence of these migrants in England has increased considerably during the 1990s. Interview and questionnaire data provide insights into the migrant's motivation and objectives, migration preparation, and choice of England as a destination. The impact of migration on family relationships is highlighted. Particular personal and professional characteristics of the Nordic/Scandinavian soccer migrant are examined. These players' experiences and views are considered in the context of a sport migrant typology and the emergence of global professional migration more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the development of British ice hockey and the role of Canadian migrants in the sport. Several interconnected issues that frame both the migrants' and people from the host culture's experiences of ice hockey in the global sports arena have been examined. These issues, which have both intended and unintended features, center on issues of recruitment, retention, and release and are closely connected to problems of motivation, adjustment, dislocation, and foreign sojourn. Questions of labor rights, work permits, and salary caps also impinge on the migrant experience. It is intended here to examine the broad pattern of Canadian male ice hockey labor migration and then to focus on the experience of these migrants in Great Britain. Tracing the development of British ice hockey in the recent past, the author uses the events involved as a critical case to highlight the issues, problems, and tensions associated with migrants in global sport processes. The migration of talented athletes as athletic labor currently is a pronounced feature of European, and indeed global, cultural interchange.

This article focuses on football hooliganism in Great Britain. Over the past two decades, football hooliganism has come to be regarded as one of Great Britain's more serious social problems. It has been the subject of an enduring moral panic and has recurrently drawn forth demands from the media, politicians and a variety of self-appointed moral entrepreneurs for tough action. A number of attempts have also been made to explain it but, so far, popular theories on the subject have tended to outnumber their academic counterparts. Discussion of what has been written will show why the author regards an analysis of football hooligan violence before the First World War as an important precondition for moving towards an adequate sociological understanding of the present-day phenomenon. The author shall outline some of the common features of the early theories first and then summarize what he takes their central arguments to be. After that, and before discussing some of the research findings, the author shall examine the work of three historians who, without claiming to make a direct contribution to the understanding of football hooliganism today, have begun to undertake work on its late 19th and early 20th century counterparts.