Assessing the sociology of sport: On media and power

Reflections

Meditative articles of this kind often display contrasting, perhaps incommensurate tones – the triumphant versus the elegiac. The former narrates stories of struggle, of barriers overcome and progress made, while the latter laments what has been lost and the regrets that accompany failure and thwarted ambition. The reflections here will be tinged with both analytical moods, taking on an inevitably autobiographical character that is intended to demonstrate that the field and its history looks rather different according to vantage point, and that omniscient claims to encapsulate it all should be treated with appropriate scepticism.

In short, this is a commentary by a self-identified sociologist of sport who also identifies as much else besides, who came to the field through academic happenstance, and who is acutely aware of the particularity of his experience. Following that textual disclaimer, some generalizations about the sociology of sport can be advanced. When I came into the field – stumbled would be a more accurate description – in the early 1980s, sport was only on the fringes of sociology. Whole texts on society and its institutions, social groups, practices, values and power relations could be written without reference to sport, or with only cursory reference to sport among epiphenomenal examples of leisure and entertainment. To engage seriously with sport was to invite not just incomprehension or scepticism, but sometimes hostility and even ridicule. This response came from a variety of directions, including from peers who objected to what they saw as ‘pop sociology’ or from sports journalists seeking to exercise their territorial rights against the perceived pretentiousness and obscurantism of academe (an attack also often mounted against media studies). There were black comedy quips about sport being the province of downwardly mobile sociologists.

The immediate task, then, was to get sport on the sociological agenda, to emphasize its historical and developmental importance, and to redress its neglect. There has been progress on all these fronts. The sociology of sport has built up, over the last four decades and in various locations, a significant body of research and scholarly work bordering on a canon, established strong professional associations, dedicated journals and conferences, a large (especially undergraduate) university teaching presence, a role in policy development, and a place in public and media discourse. It has also made limited inroads into the wider discipline, often ‘on the back’ of mega sport events in particular locations. For example, the London 2012 Olympics stimulated the production of special issues of both the leading general disciplinary journals Sociology (2011) and British Journal of Sociology (Giulianotti and Brownell, 2012). In this regard an earlier weakness has become a comparative advantage. As sociology has been forced to re-affirm its relevance in the face of neo-liberal and conservative-inspired assaults on the public university (Holmwood, 2011) and, especially, on social sciences and humanities, it can point to substantial social, political, cultural and economic investments in sport as requiring systematic attention from sociologists. The accusation of populism carries, then, rather less weight when professional and institutional hierarchies begin to crumble, and the discipline at large feels under siege.

Nonetheless, some of the deployment of sport within general sociology may be regarded only as gestural and instrumental. Regarding its limited integration with, and influence in, the general discipline, the sociology of sport shares a similar position to that of other sub-disciplines (such as media and youth), as well as applied interdisciplinary studies areas, including leisure (see, for example, Stebbins, 2011), media, cultural and sport studies. The sociology of sport is now a well-established sub-disciplinary formation, with all the advantages and limitations that such status entails. Like the institution of sport that it analyses, it is also still substantially West-, White- and male-dominated and so demands a progressive de-Westernization, de-Anglicization and de-masculinization that will reconfigure and renew the sociology of sport in a dynamic global environment (Rowe, 2011) of perpetual institutional re-invention and transformation.

Challenges

The sociology of sport shares the challenges of the general discipline, as well as those that relate to its specific remit and concerns. These are predominantly a matter of survival within the main institution (the university) that has nurtured it, while retaining the critical ethos of understanding the complexities and dilemmas of social life that provided the impetus for its efflorescence since the 1960s. To an important extent the sub-discipline’s opportunities are tied to the fortunes of the institution of sport itself. If sport were in decline, then the sociological attention paid to it would also wane. Patently, the reverse is the case – sport and its derivatives (among which can be included a range of cultural forms, such as ‘reality TV’, that prioritize ‘liveness’, rule-bound competition and outcome uncertainty) are flourishing because of the mass mediation of sport through what I call the ‘media sports cultural complex’ (Rowe, 2004). The cultural pervasiveness of sport means that the questions that animate sociology are necessarily prominent in the lives of the human subjects of the world. These concern whether sport should be played and, if so, which sports and by whom, and to what ends, as well as how it should be represented, and which practices and values should sport be expected to promote, and which to subdue.

Because sport, especially during periodic mega media sport events, is almost impossible to avoid or ignore, it inevitably provokes debates between devotees and those who are neutral, indifferent or antagonistic towards it. Much discussion involves not just sport itself, but the uses to which it is put (Hughson et al., 2005). Sport obviously is also not monolithic, and so invites conversations about preferences and rivalries like any other cultural discipline, such as dramatic film, television current affairs or literary fiction. This omnipresence of sport is both a strength and weakness, because almost anyone can claim to be an expert on sport on the simple grounds of consistent exposure to it both in ‘live’ mediated form and as a subject routinely inscribed into news bulletins alongside such staples as economic data and the weather. Of course, sociology in general faces the same broad problem because its subject matter – persons assembled into a range of groups with other persons – is necessarily capable of reflecting on and responding to how it is theorized, conceptualized, empirically measured, analysed and, not infrequently, judged (Giddens, 1982). But the very ordinariness of sport at one level (quotidian physical play and display) and its propensity for collective self-mythologization (value-laden physical practice that is figured as transcending the banality of the everyday social) at another, can challenge the legitimacy of the sociology of sport from contrasting ‘lay’ perspectives.

Nonetheless, what might be called the ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ of sport presents a multitude of points of entry into debates about the sport-society nexus and the constitution of society. In the pedagogical context, it should not be unduly difficult for skilled sociologists to render the familiar world of sport strange for those who are yet to delve beneath its self-reinforcing myths. In extra-mural contexts, citizens and their elected representatives can be engaged, for example, in sociologically-informed debates about sport’s relationships to social class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, violence, and so on. In other words, sport and its mediations constitute ideal terrain on which a sceptical, critically attuned sociology can be practised. To do so, the sociology of sport must break decisively with the anodyne shibboleths generated by the ‘sports biz’ and those public organizations that seek to harness its rhetorics for questionable ends, while simultaneously appreciating the powerful regimes of pleasure and identification that sustain and propel sport as mediated popular culture.

On media and power

No plausible programme or manifesto for the sociology of sport can be imagined that fails to foreground both its intimate and intensifying relationship with formal media organizations and the proliferating mediated means and spaces in which sport is represented and articulated with the social. Structures and practices of mediation are inescapably insinuated within sport’s socio-cultural meanings and uses, and implicated in the processes by which relations of power are fashioned and exercised in and through the domain of sport. Similarly, a sociology that does not prioritize matters of power is not worthy of the name, but this does not mean that the concept is synonymous with that of oppression. For example, electronic media, especially live sport television, have the power to overcome limitations of time and space to enable many citizens to participate in (inter)national/global public rituals in a manner that would otherwise deny their rights of ‘cultural citizenship’ (Scherer and Rowe, 2014). But equally, such power that seems generally beneficial or at least innocuous can never be only that: for example, major sport events on television can crowd out and overshadow other expressions of culture, operate as vehicles for the exploitation of sport workers as well as viewers, or provide insidious means by which ideologies of dominance are projected and reinforced under the cover of harmless collective fun.

The first and most pressing question of power relations in media and sport historically involved concern that the former would dominate the latter, especially when television could remotely expose absent audiences to place-based sport spectacles. That problem was ‘fixed’ when sport broadcasts became so popular as to enable sport entities to exact very substantial rights from broadcasters, meaning that, with related sponsorship and merchandising income, the mediation of sport became its economic bedrock rather than its nemesis. The principal source of commodity value for commercial media sport was audience advertising exposure and subscription. But the mass mediation of sport also meant that on every occasion that sport was shown or discussed, an intersectional politics was called into being. Sport, through its combination of popular exposure and claimed political innocence, became deeply insinuated into the politics of discourse and representation, its treatment in the media always invoking, overly or covertly, regimes and mechanisms of power.

For example, a multi-ethnic national team may symbolically represent the power of unity in difference, but the unreflective attribution of racialized characteristics in sport commentary in turn reproduce racialized hierarchies, discrimination and prejudice. Images of athletically excellent sportswomen or queer sportspeople challenge the conscious and unconscious domination of sport by heterosexual men, but their relative scarcity and the proliferation of subordinate, sexualized imagery accomplishes the reverse. Sporting teams from small nations may gain strategically important global profile and internal cohesion, but the deep structural inequalities within them submerged, excused and reinforced. It is for this reason that the sociology of sport must always attend closely and flexibly to the complex cultural politics of representation. Sport would never have overcome its seminal place-based localism without the media, while the media have become deeply reliant on sport as an assembly point for its increasingly elusive audiences in the burgeoning world of networked media sport (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012). The sociology of sport, which has a significant record of critically analysing institutional print, broadcast and online media, must do no less regarding the new, hybrid spaces and practices constructed by so-called social media. Questions of power have not been rendered redundant in the midst of idealisations of universally free and empowered co-communication. They are, in fact, even more pressing, and require considerable theoretical reflexivity and empirical precision.

The media sports cultural complex is forever changing and expanding, and the entry into it of internet service providers and telecommunications conglomerates, alongside more traditional media corporations, means that relations of power are mutating in tandem. The sociology of sport must retain its conviction to search out and analyse power in the hybrid realm of ‘mediasport’ (Wenner, 1998) wherever it is found, and in whatever apparently benign empowering guise. It does not have far to look, as power in its many forms is enframed in every sport text appearing on each of the multiplying platforms that mediate sport for all who care to see.