Does national pride from international sporting success contribute to well-being? An international investigation

The sports industry is viewed as being of growing economic significance, reflected in its promotion in public policy. One specific aspect of this policy is to argue that investment in international sporting success creates pride from sporting success, which contributes to subjective well-being (SWB). However, though it has been argued that indicators of sporting success, such as the number of medals won at major sports events like the Olympics, act as a proxy for pride from sporting success, there have not been any direct tests of this hypothesis. Controlling for the impact of physical activity, attendance at sports events and other standard covariates, this paper addresses this hypothesis by focusing on a variable which directly measures pride felt from sporting success (Pride) by individuals. Because of the possibility that a latent characteristic such as nationalism, or overall national pride, might be linked to both Pride and SWB, i.e. an endogeneity problem is present, an instrumental variable technique is employed. The findings do not support the hypothesis that pride following from sporting success can contribute distinctly to SWB. Moreover, the hosting of events may be more important than success at them, a point suggested by the positive association between attendance at sporting events and SWB. As such the goals of public sector investment in both hosting major sports events as well as investment in sports development to achieve international sporting success are shown to be more distinct than implied in much of the policy announcements and require more careful scrutiny.     

Club Identity/Class Identity: Negotiations of Popular Memory by Followers of the Australian Football League

A lot of the fun in contemporary sports talk relies on shared understandings about the culture of competitive sporting teams. The purpose of this paper is to explore how often humorous discourses are negotiated by sport fans as they narrate a sense of their own history and identity as followers of professional sports teams. This analysis draws on research conducted with followers of the Australian Football League (AFL), which included 21 life story interviews. As an oral historian, I was interested in how individuals negotiated popular ideas about Australian football in the ‘composition’ of their memories. This attention to the dynamic between the public and personal is described as a ‘popular memory approach’ to oral history. In this paper I explore the place of class in popular understandings about AFL club cultures. I argue that the role class plays in popular discourse around sporting club cultures is revealed more fully when we examine the ways in which individuals – in this case followers of AFL teams – make sense of it.     

Competition,cooperation, and an adversarial model of sport

In this paper, I defend a general theory of competition and contrast it with a corresponding general theory of cooperation. I then use this analysis to critique mutualism. Building on the work of Arthur Applbaum and Joseph Heath I develop an alternative adversarial model of competitive sport, one that helps explain and is partly justified by shallow interpretivism, and argue that this model helps shows that the claim that mutualism provides us with the most defensible ethical ideal of sport is false. By replacing that view with an understanding of sporting adversarial ethics we can appreciate that the ethics of sport are more complex than has been commonly recognized.     

Rattle Running,Dry Wrestling,and Boxing in … Opera,or Regional Sports and Games in the Historical and Cultural Tradition of Eastern Europe

Abstract

The article is a heartfelt plea to both Western and Eastern European sports historians to take full account of the rich sporting history of the eastern part of the continent of Europe. After describing how most of Eastern Europe fell under the domination of foreign empires, and how this lead to a disparaging attitude towards its peoples and cultures, the author specifically details how Western authors of both general cultural histories and sporting histories and encyclopaedias have ignored Eastern Europe to a quite astonishing extent. The author then goes on to argue that Eastern Europe has a sporting tradition which is at least as rich, if not richer than that of the West. To illustrate this, the phenomena of medieval Polish horse racing, Bulgarian dry wrestling, Russian folk pugilism, Polish religious games, and Asian-influenced archery are explained in some detail. It is hoped that these examples will inspire sports historians from all parts of Europe to tap the rich resources of the East, and to treat this part of Europe as central rather than peripheral to European cultural history.     

Why Roger Federer is a GOAT: an account of sporting genius

Why is Roger Federer a GOAT (‘Greatest of All Time’) of tennis? I argue that the correct response goes beyond statistics and style of play; instead, it is due to the fact that Federer embodies the qualities that typify sporting genius. More than merely being a developed or refined form of expertise, sporting genius relies on the notion of performative fit; that is, the capacity to express viable ways of succeeding within a given sport in virtue of one’s cultivated history of biological and socio-cultural existence. In other words, a genius such as Federer perfectly fits the requirements of his sport and, moreover, is able to safeguard and shape this fit through his unique disposition to perform in certain ways. Performative fit provides the foundations for received traits of genius such as creativity, self-belief and risk-taking.     

National identity and sporting mega-events in Brazil

Soft power is a two-step process. First, countries need to possess national cohesion and international credibility. Second, they can then project certain marketable images to other countries. When transferred into a discussion of sports, it can be argued that sporting mega-events have become important arenas through which to exercise aspects of this soft power matrix. This article considers Brazil’s hosting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympics Games. I seek to understand whether they successfully promoted national cohesion by renewing a Brazilian national identity and healing social divisions. The result, I argue, is largely negative. Neither the World Cup nor the Olympics spread the message of national cohesion hoped for by the political establishment that successfully bid for the events. Instead sporting mega-events in Brazil provided a unity of protest and only the hope, that in time, the periphery can be heard over the centre.     

Agent-regret and sporting glory

ABSTRACT

When sporting agents fail through wrongful or faulty behaviour, they should feel guilty; when they fail because of a deficiency in their abilities, they should feel shame. But sometimes we fail without being deficient and without being at fault. I illustrate this with two examples of players, Moacir Barbosa and Roberto Baggio, who failed in World Cup finals and cost their teams the greatest prize in sport. Although both players failed, I suggest that neither was at fault and neither was deficient. I argue that we can fail through no fault of our own because our abilities are always fallible. This fallibility means that to succeed – to achieve sporting glory – we must run the risk of failure. The appropriate emotion to feel over such failures is agent-regret. Sporting agents and observers should not take up what I call the ‘critical position’: the idea that someone who fails must be deficient or must have been at fault. This allows for a softer, but also more accurate, attitude towards our own failures and the failures of others. I end by suggesting that the fallibility of our abilities is made clear through playing or watching sport, and this can illuminate life more broadly.     

中国体育用品制造业产业集聚程度变动趋势的定量研究

基于市场行业集中度指标(CRn)与产业空间集聚指数(β),对中国7大类体育用品制造行业2002-2007年的产业集聚水平进行测定及动态分析.结果表明:2002-2007年我国7大类体育用品制造行业的产品销售收入排名前6位的省(市)主要是广东、江苏、山东、浙江、福建和上海,该6个地区均隶属东部,中、两部则榜上无名,说明中国体育用品制造业产业集聚程度的区域差异非常明显.2002-2007年我国体育用品制造业、球类制造业、训练健身器材制造业、运动防护用具制造业、文教体育用品制造业与其他体育用品制造业的产业空间集聚指数均呈增长趋势,而体育器材及配件制造业的产业空间集聚指数却呈下降趋势.按其增幅大小顺序依次为:运动防护用具制造业>文教体育用品制造业>球类制造业>体育用品制造业>其他体育用品制造业>训练健身器材制造业.2007年运动防护用具制造业、球类制造业和其他体育用品制造业的产业空间集聚指数分别位居前三甲(β>0.1),其余4大类体育用品制造行业也均大于0.05,产业空间集聚指数位于0.05及以下的体育用品制造行业则为无,表明我国区域体育用品制造行业的空间集聚程度已非常显著.同时,就国内7大类体育用品制造行业的产业空间集聚指数与工业生产总值展开相关分析发现,中国工业总产值和体育用品制造业空间集聚程度存在较高的正相关关系.     

大型赛事对中国经济和社会发展的影响论纲

中国的许多政府部门和省市政府正在制定“十一五（2006-2010年）计划”,不少城市的这个计划中已经越来越多地把体育赛事,尤其是大型国际体育赛事纳入了思考范畴当中。这是国际体育赛事的经济和社会价值逐步被中国认同和接受的结果,也是中国的国家政策追求科学和可持续发展的表现形式。21世纪的前10年是中国大力申请和筹办国际大型体育赛事的高潮期。大型体育赛事对于中国经济和社会发展的影响主要体现在：刺激各项相关产业快速发展：国际体育赛事拉动建筑、旅游、金融、保险、信息技术、交通、通信等产业获得强大的推动力,进而带动整个经济发展;加快各项事务与国际的接轨：中间社会或民间社团的广泛参与推动社会结构的有序运作,民间企业和资本获得参与重大事务的机会,民众的开放意识和国际意识逐步增长,国际先进规则逐步被中国理解和接纳。     

The Development of Sport in Museums

Sport as a topic for museum collection, display, and interpretation has gradually developed over the last 100 years. However, until recently, there has been very little discussion or examination of the material culture of sport within the literature. Consequently, there is a misconception that sport in museums is relatively new, little is understood about the role and value of sporting heritage, and sporting collections are rarely used to inform historical study. In turn, the museum sector would benefit from more opportunities to work with sports historians whilst developing and delivering their sporting provision. Therefore, this paper examines the development of sport in museums, explores the current activity being developed in the field including the work of the Sport in Museums Network and the National Sporting Heritage Day, and offers practical information about how partnerships between academics and museum practitioners can be established to create a better understanding of the history and heritage of sport.     

‘Being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’: the dancing body-subject and inhabited transcendence

Sports studies is currently dominated by the intellectualist approach to understanding skill and expertise, meaning that questions about the phenomenological nature of skilled performance in sport have generally been overshadowed by the emphasis on the cognitive. By contrast, this article responds to calls for a phenomenology of sporting embodiment by opening up a philosophical exploration of the nature of athletic being-in-the-world. In particular, the paper explores the conceptualisation of immanence and transcendence in relation to the embodied practice of dance, engaging with Merleau-Ponty’s important insight that the body can be a source of transcendence. I also draw on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with professional contemporary dancers to explore dancers’ concepts of ‘being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’, and to suggest that during the actual embodied practice of dance, dancers do not experience transcendence and immanence as they are conceptualised in philosophy. Rather, I argue, dancers experience a third mode of being that is somehow in-between these two binary terms. I have called this ‘inhabited transcendence’.     

Reconceptualising elite athlete programmes: ‘undoing’ the politics of labelling in health and physical education

High-performance sport is a big business, with nations such as Australia and New Zealand dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of facilities and in creating sporting centres of excellence. Historically, high-performance sport and elite athlete programmes (EAPs) were regulated to an extra-curricular space in schools or local communities, but over the last couple of decades, schools in Australia and New Zealand have introduced EAPs into health and physical education (PE). Recent work has begun to explore the rationale for these programmes and their educational priorities, but little research has explored how the elite athlete body is being constructed within this curriculum space. In this paper, I consider two interrelated problems. The first concerns the conflicting discourses of winning in high-performance sport versus getting everyone healthy and active in health and PE. The second involves an explanation of how the elite athlete body is being constructed in these programmes. I argue the juxtaposition of the elite athlete body as disciplined, attractive and healthy to other bodies as lazy, unattractive and unhealthy renders the other bodies as pathological or resistant to disciplinary institutions of the school. In particular, I focus on the ways in which young people's bodies are conceptualised within EAPs in relation to recreation, health, PE and other curriculum spaces. Throughout this paper, I provide examples to illustrate how EAPs may perpetuate normative ways of thinking that legitimatise elitism in schools. I propose that under radical reform, EAPs may have the potential to provide educational value and opportunities to students. I conclude by offering the cultural studies curriculum model that retains sport and desirable educational outcomes for health and PE as an alternative to elite athlete or talent development models.     

体育赛事组织者的传播权如何实现——从域外经验到中国实践

体育赛事组织者是指组织、策划体育赛事,享有相关权利并承担相应义务的个人或组织。传播技术的发展使体育赛事的观众规模迅速扩大,在带来巨大收益的同时,也让体育赛事组织者面临权利保护的难题。鉴于我国当前无明确保护体育赛事组织者传播权的法律,以往的相关判决中常用体育赛事组织的章程证明体育赛事组织者对其体育赛事享有传播权。体育赛事组织的章程具备一定的法律效力,但由于赛事传播权属于绝对性权利,而体育赛事组织不具备立法主体资格,其章程规定不能作为体育赛事组织者享有赛事传播权利的法律依据。对比他国采取的保护模式,认为我国可在《体育法》《著作权法》上明确对体育赛事组织者传播权的保护,同时权利人还可借助《合同法》《物权法》的相关规定,主张其对体育赛事节目享有的控制权。     

The Case for Inter-national Sport: A Reply to Gleaves and Llewellyn

In their recent contribution to JPS, Gleaves and Llewellyn argue on lusory and ethical grounds that elite sporting competition should cease to be predicated on competitions between nations. From a lusory perspective, they argue that inter-national sports’ limitation on who can compete (due to it being based on national and cultural criteria) undermines some of the central principles of elite sport, such as athletic supremacy and merit. From an ethical perspective, they argue that inter-national sport is categorically unethical because the national and cultural narratives that frame such contests are inherently untruthful and inauthentic. In this article, we challenge Gleaves and Llewellyn on both these grounds and argue that national identity and representation are worthy values that can be achieved through sport, and that inter-national sport, far from being categorically unethical, has the potential to stimulate meaningful cultural conversations, both within and between national communities.     

试论普通高校体育理论教学与终身健身意识的培养

普通高校体育学习不仅着眼于运动技术的范围 ,考虑到终身体育观念的确立和价值追求 ,还应对学生的心智发展施加影响 ,体育理论课教学可以充分发挥其作用     

Why Olympia matters for modern sport

From the modern scientific perspective, Olympia is a ruin at the far end of a fading sense of history that represents little more than the origins from which sport has continuously evolved. Quantitative measurements show continued increases in human performance, equipment efficiency and funding. But some question this athletic evolution. We worry about qualitative issues, such as virtue, meaning and beauty. The source of this contrast is a difference in values: Olympic vs. Efficiency values. Such values establish an ethos in sporting communities that influences how we behave, explain and even conceptualize our activities. I argue from the perspectives of metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and politics, that Olympic Ethos is needed to balance out the modern Efficiency Ethos, which threatens to dehumanize sport.     

The Tendential Theory of Sporting Prowess

The results of sport would not interest us if either they were necessitated or they were a matter of pure chance. And if either case were true, the playing of sport would seem to make no sense either. This poses a dilemma. But there is something between these two options, namely the dispositional modality. Sporting prowess can be understood as a disposition towards victory and sporting liabilities a disposition towards defeat. The sporting contest then pits these net prowesses against each other. The stronger will tend to beat the weaker but no more than tend. This makes sense of the sporting contest in which the weaker knows they still can win. The stronger team can lose though they do not tend to do so. The dilemma is thus escaped.     

我国体育用品制造业国际转移的趋势及动力机制——基于全球生产网络视角

我国体育用品制造业国际转移呈现出网络化、多元化、集群化、主动化的新趋势,其动力来源有三点,一是寻求我国体育用品制造业价值链的重构,二是试图跨越后发国家可能面临的价值链固化的"网络陷阱",三是追逐包括竞争优势和网络权力等隐形收益在内的综合利益最大化。但是,这种自觉行动和主动作为可能受到价值链上端发达国家的阻击。因此,我国体育用品制造业要利用研发设计和品牌营销价值链的发育突破门限效应,积极开展跨境并购和逆向投资活动弥补比较劣势,并逐步回归到研发本土化,利用国内中小体育用品企业构建由自己主导的价值链,以全球布局应对潜在的贸易风险。