Negotiating violence: Mixed martial arts as a spectacle and sport

Drawing on qualitative interviews with Mixed martial arts (MMA) athletes and stakeholders, this study aims to investigate the relationship between, on the one hand, MMA as a spectacle and imaginary world, and on the other, the fighters’ experiences of violence, pain and ‘the real’. Analytically, we are influenced by the literature on the spectacle and on hyperreality. The results show that athletes’ negotiations concerning the sport largely connect to a particular way of approaching violence – culturally and in terms of physical experience. On the one hand, there is a desire to portray MMA as a civilized and regulated sport. The athletes develop different strategies by which to handle or renegotiate the physical force and violence in the cage. On the other hand, however, the fighters’ bodily control and management of their fear sometimes breaks down. When the spectacle of the octagon becomes ‘real’, the legitimacy of the sport is questioned.     

If sport's the solution then what's the problem? The social significance of sport in the moral governing of ‘good’ and ‘healthy’ citizens in Sweden, 1922–1998

All over the westernised world, sport has been promoted as a ‘solution’ to many of the social ‘problems’ and challenges that face modern societies. This study draw on Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine the ways in which Swedish Government Official Reports on sport, from 1922 to 1998, define social problems and legitimate governing, and sport as a solution, in the name of benefiting Swedish society. The analysis shows that citizens' ‘good’ and ‘healthy’ behaviour and bodies are in focus of problematisation throughout the studied period. In relation to this, sport is seen as an important tool and solution. Parallel with increased critique of sport in contemporary times, a neo-liberal governmentality is embraced which in turn affect how ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ are thought of in individualistic and rational ways.     

A Response to Vamplew and Some Comments on the Relationship Between Sports Historians and Sociologists of Sport

This article seeks to refute Wray Vamplew's contention that my work on cricket is flawed by a failure properly to define violence, by the presence of factual errors and misinterpretations of evidence stemming from unchecked secondary sources and because there are limited examples to support my argument. In responding to this critique I point to Vamplew's own errors, misinterpretation and argument by limited example. I further discuss the criteria by which we might judge an ‘over-reliance’ on secondary sources and conclude that, again, Vamplew fails to substantiate his criticism. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationship between sports historians and sociologists of sport, arguing that debates such as these should recognise the interdependency of, and the considerable developments in, the respective sub-disciplines in recent years.     

Chinese Desires? Olympism and Dominance,Guangzhou and Missed Opportunity,Major Leagues and Isolation on the Pacific Rim

Understanding the situation of China's self-promotion via Olympism requires us to connect two patterns. China is successful at Guangzhou and in Beijing Games at sponsoring and competing in Olympic-style sports festivals, but also surrounded by highly popular professional team sport leagues in baseball, rugby and cricket from Japan to India. China is successful in the promotion of its new capitalist economy but is critically short of energy sources and its aggressive diplomacy in pursuit of energy by land and sea has led to confrontations from Japan to Burma and even to the US ‘pivot’ to Asia. Review of theories of situation demonstrates that while a Debord-style spectacle theory might seem to explain the sporting spectacles and a realism in the tradition of Clausewitz might seem suited to the military situation, in fact approaches to situation combining realist and constructivist elements are stronger; a Deleuzian emphasis on will to power needs to be supplemented by Weberian attention to ends and ideas. Neither pattern explains the other; they connect. China makes history and its internal debates over state and middle class values can be tracked observing promotion of professional team sport in urban China and the scale of state sponsorship of Olympic-style games.     

Sport,Technique and Violence: The Technical Modes for Generating Sport Violence

Norbert Elias makes technical progress one of the markers of the state of civilisation. It is from this viewpoint that we would like to return to the question of sport, a fundamental part in Elias' civilising process, which also constitutes, a contrario, one of the most ambiguous aspects of ‘technical progress’ and its relation to violence, to the articulation of a double abuse of instrumental rationality. On the one hand the infinite improvement of human possibilities (records, performance) which leads to the recognised risks of exploitation and the ultra-sophisticated controlling of athletes (extreme pressure, over-training) as a corollary of the temptation to over-stimulate athletic potential as a result of the uncontrolled use of victory techniques (cheating, doping, violence). On the other hand, the stakes involved in the production of a vast spectacle with ideological, sociopolitical and socio-economic overtones which lead to technological manipulations. Both these tendencies overlap, and furthermore cannot be isolated from, a more general context of the technification of the social, at the heart of which instrumental rationality constitutes the first example of violence. This three-fold observation constitutes the basis of the argument set out in this paper.     

Professional Bodybuilding and the Business of ‘Extreme’ Bodies: The Mr Olympia Competition in the Context of Las Vegas's Leisure Industries

Since 1999, the pinnacle of bodybuilding as professional sport, the Mr Olympia competition, has been held in Las Vegas. The present paper explores how the event has been produced materially and symbolically in this context. More specifically, an attempt is made to trace connections with other well-developed leisure industries that thrive there: in packaging the Mr Olympia as a lifestyle weekend in ‘Sin City’, bodybuilding entrepreneurs capitalize on Las Vegas's reputation and the various networks and infrastructures of its show, event, tourism and night-life entertainment industries. Through this discussion, a comparative picture will emerge between, on the one hand, the Mr Olympia and the bodybuilding industry and, on the other hand, those other industries prominent in Las Vegas. I argue that, although the former may be viewed as a niche enterprise that addresses a relatively closed audience of ‘insiders’, it shares fully the logic and practices of corporate entertainment that define the latter. This is both a reflection of and a force in the late-modern transformation of bodybuilding as organized sport towards ‘extreme’ spectacle and relentless competition that can, in turn, be situated in a wider system of cultural forms and activities operating on a similar model. In treading upon this largely unexplored territory, the discussion and arguments are based on a combination of methods and original research, including archival, online media and ethnographic research involving in-depth interviews with key figures in the for-profit promotion of bodybuilding.     

‘This dark world’: the blindfold chess-player in Victorian literary and urban culture

George Walker's March 1840 article for Fraser's Magazine entitled ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’ outlined the history and method of blindfold chess (or chess-play without sight of the board and pieces). Arriving as chess was becoming increasingly visible within nineteenth-century literary and urban culture, Walker's essay covered familiar issues on the topic concerning spectacle, utility, and bodily and mental damage, as well as furthering his own concerns with the history of the game and the possibility of expanding participation. This assessment of ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, part of wider research concerning chess in urban and literary modernity, complements research published in the author's monograph on the cultural chess-player and previously within Sport in History. Prominent themes of Walker's article include the multiple identities of the blindfold chess-player and the game’s ever-changing relationship to standards of respectability. ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, offering a lengthy ‘how-to-play’ to the beginning player and outlining the national prestige and celebrity of historical blindfold chess-players, also presents a potentially disreputable reading of practice and player, denying any wider social utility.     

Guangzhou 2010: Singapore at a Global Crossroads

This essay is an analysis of the reality of Singapore's Asian Games' aspirations and achievements and the responses to the challenges it faced in Guangzhou in 2010. How did ‘Team Singapore’ respond to the challenges that they met at what represented a crossroad in their sporting history at which they met the vehicle carrying China's sporting and soft power products. How did they react and were the effort, industry, hyperbole and not insignificant government financial outlay and policy initiatives worth it? The analysis constitutes a critique of articles relating to the Guangzhou Asian Games of 2010 that appeared in the three major English language newspapers in Singapore, The Straits Times, The Sunday Times and The New Paper before, during and after the Games. From the analysis, major themes emerged which characterised the environment of elite sport in Singapore and revealed that it is very much part of the nation's inimitable social, political and diplomatic schema; sport, as with all other socio-cultural institutions in Singapore, has not and does not evolve accidentally.     

Sport as a drama

Argument of this text is that: to develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life; to start with aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful of ‘pure aesthetics’ but with the dramatic; to analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance; to get at the meaning of sport as a drama, we have to discuss different meanings ‘drama’ has in theory and everyday communication; to map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first, and its potential as spectacle later. To proceed with the argument, we have to take into account contemporary state of aesthetics, recent development of aesthetics of everyday life, and theory of performance, together with Bernard Suits’ definition of game, Gadamer’s idea of play, and Lévy-Strauss’ account on conjunctive and disjunctive ritual.     

‘You Had to Cover Nadia Comaneci’: ‘Points of Change’ in Coverage of Women’s Sport

Abstract

In the 1970s, women’s sport underwent significant change in the United States resulting in an increase of participation opportunities and funding at the interscholastic, intercollegiate, professional and international levels. Yet, media outlets continued to ignore women and, at best, portray them in gender stereotypical ways. Considering the lack of progress for women in sports media coverage, this study employs sport historian Jaime Schultz’s ‘points of change’ framework in order to identify those moments that constituted an ideological shift in the process of covering women’s sport. Drawing upon oral history interviews with journalists who wrote about women’s sport in the 1970s and 1980s, this research provides a deeper look into how journalists experienced and addressed the shifting gender ideologies of the time period. Journalists’ memories, accompanied by their articles, reveal how media practitioners negotiated meanings about femininity and athleticism in response to events that challenged deeply embedded assumptions about gender and its intersections with ethnicity, race and sexuality. This exploratory research, thus, identifies several ‘points of change’ – or points of struggle, conflict and resistance – and calls for a re-periodization of the history of women’s sports coverage.     

Sport and Civilisation: Violence Mastered? From Civilising Functions to Pacifying Functions

Explaining that it is not possible to divide human activity (political, economic, social, sport, etc.) into different sectors, as they all originate from the same actors, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning thus came to formulate the central hypothesis of a network which linked the process of pacification of customs, the development of a parliamentary system for society, the state monopoly of violence, the euphemisation of violence in the aristocracy, the genesis of sport and, by recursion, the roles and functions of modern sports in the state control of violence and the learning of self-control. Elias and Dunning contrast modern sports with the ancient games, euphemisation and the persistence of violence, ‘sport’ leisure characteristic of ‘modern’ societies and traditional games in the ‘ancient’ societies, which accompanied the religious calendars and rites of passage. But do they really question society? This paper shows how the problems posed by Elias' theory are, essentially, of three types: first, those linked to the methodology used; second, those related to the limits imposed by the notion of self-constraint; and, finally, those concerning the pacifying function attributed to sport.     

Olympic Engagement and the Use of Olympic Solidarity Programmes by Gulf Cooperation Council States

This paper seeks to address the extent to which Olympic Solidarity (OS) funding patterns are consistent with the organisation's explicit mission, namely to serve the interests of National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and in particular those in greatest need. In addition, the paper reviews the extent to which Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have been able to avail themselves of such resources. While OS funding has tended at the level of the World Programme, to reflect a tendency to favour NOCs from less affluent economies, this tendency towards progressive funding has been weakening and to some extent reversed, since the mid-2000s. Funding of GCC states has tended to be well below that of other NOCs of comparable dimensions, reflecting the fact that Gulf States have not followed a ‘linear’ path to ‘modernity’ in sport. Such a linear path might be characterised as in an initial concern with growing participation, improving governance (through issues such as women's role in sport) and enhancing performance, but GCC states have instead focused on elements of a what might be characterised as a post-modern approach in the form of hosting of major events and the celebration of spectacle, and thus drawing relatively modestly on OS resources.     

People's Daily: An Evolutionary Narrative on Asia in Its Coverage of the Asian Games

Amid the complex international situation and entangled interests, news narration is usually conducted by the government, media and the public together by copying mainstream ideas and concepts. In covering the Asian Games, People's Daily takes on a periodical change in its narration about Asia during the history of China's participation in the Games: in the stage of ‘alienation and struggle’, the narration is focused on politics; in the stage of ‘participation and competition’, the narration becomes two dimensional, touching on both politics and sport; in the stage of ‘hosting the Games and taking the lead’, the narration is further diversified and incorporates politics, sport and culture. Such an evolution takes place in a profound international and historical context, reflecting the changes not only in China's sporting events coverage but also in the ‘mindset and insight’ of Chinese media in covering sporting events and Asia.     

Last Man Picked. Do Mainstream Historians Need to Play with Sports Historians?

This polemical essay explores whether ‘mainstream’ political and social historians need to engage with the history of sport. It recounts the coercive nature of the author's encounters with sports and sports history and suggests that greater integration of the history of sport into histories of Britain relies on a mutual understanding of the imperatives of academic historians, not least in the world of the Research Excellence Framework and the ‘impact’ agenda.     

To be a Jew and Champion in Vichy's France: Alfred Nakache – From the Swimming Pool to the Nazi Camps (1940–44)

Set against the background of France's cultural history during the Second World War, this biographical study concerns Alfred Nakache, a swimming champion of Jewish origin. Through his conditions of existence, the study amply demonstrates the exclusion, followed by the extermination, of Jews in France. At a time when the ‘Révolution Nationale’ (National Revolution) had been established as political dogma, it also demonstrates the bipolarity of the swimmer's identity, as both an emblem standing for the ‘New Man’ in the eyes of the ‘Commissariat Général à l'Education Générale et aux Sports (CGEGS)’ (commission for general education and sport) and a member of an inferior race for the Nazi occupiers and the ‘Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ)’ (administrative body concerned with French policy towards Jews). Although temporarily protected by his rank as an athlete and his network of contacts, the hardening of German policies, together with widespread collaboration during 1943, led the leading actors of the sport world to curtail his sport achievements, thus marking the beginning of progressive anonymization which, in turn, finally ended in his deportation in January 1944.     

The ‘British World’, other worlds,and the five rings: possibilities for trans-imperial histories and historical ‘what ifs’

In the early 1890s an ardent British imperialist proposed a ‘Pan-Britannic Olympics’ that included not only the British Empire but the USA in a plan to use sport to unite the English-speaking peoples of the globe into a world-ruling coalition. While that proposal was eventually bested by the Baron Pierre de Coubertin's movement that created an even more inclusive modern Olympics, the sentiments of the ‘Pan-Britannic’ scheme became in embroiled in debates over the national and imperial uses of international sport. Pondering the role of Coubertin's Olympics in forging a variety of imperial and national identities within the British Empire while also employing speculative alternative histories reveals the complex transnational and trans-imperial dimensions of the Olympics in modern global history.     

Sport and Civilisation: Violence Mastered. From the Lack of a Definition for Violence to the Illusory Pacifying Role of Modern Sports

Following the seminal works of Norbert Elias, with regard to the ‘civilising process’, modern sports are generally considered by the scientific community as being, on the one hand, a privileged means that has long facilitated and contributed to ‘the control and learning of the self-control of impulses’ and, on the other, as a political device, which has facilitated, by penetrating into the private sphere in a restrained and play-oriented fashion, the state's monopoly of violence. They are also considered to have facilitated the socio-genesis of modern states. But is this link so evident that this ‘new’ social configuration can be considered a new tool at the service of violence control? Acceptance is so strong that one can almost forget the contradictions, at least the questions, which can and should emerge from this proposition. It should in fact face up to criticism on a certain number of concrete points: definition of violence, rejection of the long-term view, sport be strictly considered in the light of the pacification of habits and social control, hooliganism, etc. This introductory article presents a series of reflections which aim to enrich Elias's theory by underlining both its accuracy and its weak points.     

Hooligans,Casuals, Independents: Decivilisation or Rationalisation of the Activity?

If there is one phenomenon which highlights the lack of role distance of certain sport actors, it is obviously hooliganism. In the mid-1980s, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning became interested in the role played by modern sports in the ‘civilising process’ and, analysing the violence of sport crowds, introduced a culturalist interpretation of the actions. They were considered to be the work of members of the ‘rough working class’, who were less advanced in the ‘civilising process’ and had still not achieved sufficient self-control. In these groups, characterised by social functioning in the form of a segmentary bond, violence was thought to be a traditional way of resolving conflicts, a significant aspect and essential part of their ethos. This is an over-determined interpretation of the violence of sports crowds which naturalises and socialises this violence. This vision poses a problem, that of the negation of any logic on the part of the actors involved. This viewpoint leads us to consider violence as a social product and a ‘practical accomplishment’, the result of the way in which supporters interpret and live in the world that surrounds them, and, as such, it is the individual and collective motives and purposes that should be investigated.     

Why ‘the best way of learning to coach the game is playing the game’: conceptualising ‘fast-tracked’ high-performance coaching pathways

At the beginning of the 2013/2014 season in England and Wales, 90 head coaches of the 92 men's national professional football league clubs and 20 of the 22 men's professional rugby union clubs had tenure as a professional elite player in their respective sports. Moreover, Rynne [(2014). ‘Fast track’ and ‘traditional path’ coaches: Affordances, agency and social capital. Sport, Education and Society, 19, 299–313] has claimed that many former elite athletes are ‘fast-tracked’ through formal accreditation structures into these high-performance coaching roles. The reasons why former elite athletes dominate head coaching roles in professional sports clubs and why a ‘fast-track’ pathway from elite athlete to high-performance coach is supported remain unclear. Thereby the present study sought to address this issue by investigating the basis for ‘fast-tracked’ head coaching appointments. Eight male directors of men's professional football and rugby union clubs in England were interviewed to examine how particular coaching skills and sources of knowledge were valorised. Drawing upon Bourdieu's conceptual framework, the results suggested that head coaching appointments were often based upon the perceived ability of head coaches gaining player ‘respect’. Experiences gained during earlier athletic careers were assumed to provide head coaches with the ability to develop practical sense and an elite sporting habitus commensurate with the requirements of the field of elite sports coaching. This included leadership and practical coaching skills to develop technical and tactical astuteness, from which, ‘respect’ could be quickly gained and maintained. The development of coaching skills was rarely associated with only formal coaching qualifications. The ‘fast-tracking’ of former athletes for high-performance coaching roles was promoted by directors to ensure the perpetuation of specific playing and coaching philosophies. Consequently, this may exclude groups from coaching roles in elite men's sport. The paper concludes by outlining how these findings might imply a disjuncture between the skills promoted during formal coaching qualifications and the expectations club directors have of elite coaches in these sports.