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In a stressful, turbulent world, sports can be an escape from reality. Yet sport actually mirrors the issues and problems of our world today, bearing the imprint of powerful forces of social change. This book offers a sociological perspective for seeing and understanding the place of sport in society and how it is affected by big business and by demographic, cultural, organizational, economic, political, and technological change. Nixon's main focus is "big-time" commercialized and corporate sport, from Little League Baseball, Inc. to youth club sports, high school and college athletics, and professional and Olympic sports. He writes vividly of the making and unmaking of heroes and celebrities. Throughout he shows how the combined influence of networks of major sports organizations, media corporations, and corporate sponsors is shaping sport around the world.
Along with an overview of major sociological concepts, perspectives and research on the subject of sport, this book includes discussions on various issues and debates in the field.
The unrivaled amount of cash poured into the college athletic system has made sports programs breeding grounds for corruption while diverting crucial resources from the academic mission of universities. This title clarifies the structure of this trap, describes how higher education institutions fall into it
Global coverage shows how sport is being shaped by influences that cross national borders; explores the relationship of sport to globalisation, culture, and the global cultural economy; and provides a lens for viewing sport in interesting new ways that are not apparent without a sociological perspective.
Startling revelations from the OSS, the CIA, and the Nixon White house Think you know everything there is to know about the OSS, the Cold War, the CIA, and Watergate? Think again. In American Spy, one of the key figures in postwar international and political espionage tells all. Former OSS and CIA operative and White House staffer E. Howard Hunt takes you into the covert designs of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon: His involvement in the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and more His work with CIA officials such as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms His friendship with William F. Buckley Jr., whom Hunt brought into the CIA The amazing steps the CIA took t...
With revisions and updates throughout, the fifth edition of Fair and Foul explores America s love of sport and also it s darker side. Updates include further attention to how race, class, and gender relate to the uneven playing field in sports; a new discussion of sexuality as a divisive factor in sport; and numerous new case studies and examples."
In this bestselling timeless classic, Peter Gzowski recounts the 1980-81 season he spent travelling around the NHL circuit with the Edmonton Oilers. These were the days when the young Oilers, led by a teenaged Wayne Gretzky, were poised on the edge of greatness, and about to blaze their way into the record books and the consciousness of a nation. While the story of the early Oilers embodies the book, The Game of Our Lives is much more than a retelling of one season in the life of an NHL team. Unlike any book ever written in the annals of hockey, Gzowski beautifully weaves together the anatomy of a modern NHL team with the magnificent history of the game to create one of the best books about hockey in Canada. Here are the great teams and the great players through the ages—Morenz, Richard, Howe, Orr, Hull—the men whose rare and indefinable genius on the ice exemplified the speed, grit and innovation of the game. The Game of Our Lives is the best book on the Canadian passion for hockey; a wondrously perceptive account of the hold the game has on Canadians. —Jack Granatstein, The National Post
Sport may teach people how to win gracefully, but it may also teach them how to win at any cost, even if this involves violence or cheating. Here, a sociological perspective is brought to bear on the topic of how sport operates.
Why do many athletes risk their careers by taking performance enhancing drugs? Do the highly competitive pressures elite sports teach athletes to win at any cost? In order to understand the complex relationships between sport and other aspects of society, it is necessary to strip away our preconceptions of what sport is, and to examine, in as detached a manner as possible, the way in which the world of sport actually functions. This fully updated edition of Ivan Waddington’s classic introduction to drugs in sport examines the key terms and key issues in sport, drugs and performance and is designed to help new students explore these controversial subjects, now so central to the study of mod...
Sports Histories draws on figurational sociology to provide a fresh approach to analysing the development of modern sport. The book brings together ten case studies from a wide range of sports, including mainstream sports such as soccer, rugby, baseball, boxing and cricket, to other sports that until now have been largely neglected by sports historians, such as shooting, motor racing, tennis, gymnastics and martial arts. This groundbreaking work highlights key debates in the analysis of modern sport, such as: the relative influence of intra-national class conflict and international conflict the relative prominence of commercially led processes in different contexts the centrality of concerns over violence differences between elite and mass-led sports developments. Above all, Sport Histories proves the distinctiveness of the figurational sociological approach and its usefulness in the study of the development of modern sport.