| John Wilson |
Spring 2000
|
Voicemail:
660-5622
E-mail: jwils@soc.duke.edu
Sociology 153: Sport and Society
The
course is designed to teach you how to think about sport sociologically. Sports
are activities we give shape and meaning to as we interact with one another.
Sociologists ask questions about why particular groups and societies have
selected certain physical activities and designated them as sports, why sports
are organized in certain ways, why different groups and societies associate
different meanings with sports and sport participation, and who benefits from
the organization and definition of sport in society. The course will help you
think critically about sports so that you can identify and understand social
problems and social issues associated with sports in society, looking beyond
game scores and performance to the social patterns that underlie them.
The
readings for the course, identified in this syllabus, are on electronic reserves
in Perkins Library [www.lib.duke.edu/access/reserves].
There
will be three examinations. Each of the first two exams, to be held during
normal class period, will be worth 20% of your final grade. The final exam, to
be held during the final examination period, will be worth 30% of your grade.
The rest of your grade (30%) will be determined by a term paper (8-12 pages) to
be selected from the list of topics attached to this syllabus. The paper must be handed no later than the
April 21st class period.
Perspectives and Motivation.
Issues:
What is the sociological perspective on sport? How do sports and games
institutionalize play? What is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation? How do we get "in the flow"? In what sense does
"dis-play" interrupt the flow? The reading here is MacAloon and
Csikszentmihalyi=s "Deep Play and the Flow Experience
in Rock Climbing". As you read this
chapter, ask yourself: What is Adeep play@
and how is it not Autilitarian@?
How can it be said that rock climbers Aplay
deeper@ than mountaineers? Why do rock climbers
consider their sport pure? How does the activity provide intrinsic rewards?
What is the function of the rating system? Is a perfect climb conceivable? How
are control and uncertainty balanced? What evidence to climbers give of being
in the flow state? How is climbing different from Areal
life@?
Meaning: Values, Myths, Heroes.
Issues:
What does sport mean to us? What values do sports teach us? How do we explain
the power of sports figures to inspire us? Why are athletes idolized? Are
they heroes, or merely celebrities? The readings here are Michael Isenberg=s "The Unfinished
Hero: John L. and the Gilded Age" and Leah Vande Berg’s “The Sports Hero
Meets Mediated Celebrityhood.” As you
read these chapters, ask yourself: How did the AGilded
Age@ make it possible for athletes to become
heroes? How was Sullivan=s heroism related to the emerging
Acult of masculinity@?
To whom was Sullivan a hero? Why was it so important that he be seen as a
Anatural
man@, with flaws? Why does Isenberg call him
Aunfinished@?
Is it possible for athletes to be heroes in an age dominated by electronic
media? Is Michael Jordan a “hero” in the same way that Sullivan was?
Sports Socialization.
Issues:
How do we learn sports? How can we explain why some children take up sports and
others reject it? What causes children to drop out of sports? What does Aburnout@
mean in the context of
athletics? What is “positive” and
“negative” deviance in sport?
Sports Excellence.
Issues:
Sports achievement makes demand on both mind and body. Are differences in
sports achievement the result of physiology or psychology? Why some groups in
the population better athletes than others? For example, what ideas have been
used to account for race and gender differences in sports interest and
achievement?
The
relevant reading on race differences
in sports achievement is Donal Carlston=s. "An Environmental Explanation of
Race Differences in Basketball Performance". As you read this article ask yourself: Which side of the fence is
Carlston on, Anature@
or Anurture@?
Does he think there are Arace@
differences in basketball ability? If he does, what does he mean by Arace@?
Do you think Carlston provides a convincing explanation for differences in
achievement in college and professional basketball?
The
relevant readings on gender differences
are Donna Eder and Stephen Parker=s "The Cultural Production and
Reproduction of Gender", Douglas Foley=s
"The Great American Football Ritual", and Duncan and Messner’s “The
Media Image of Sport and Gender”.
As you
read Eder and Parker ask yourself: how are the extra-curricular activities of
the typical high school and the priorities given to them Agendered@?
What are the Amasculine values@
high schools teach outside the classroom and what is the designated role of the
female? Do you think the conclusions drawn in this study (conducted in the
early 1980s) hold true today? As you read Foley ask yourself: why does he call
football a Agreat American ritual@?
How does the structure of activities surrounding Friday football Areplicate
the social order@? How does football
reproduce gender and race hierarchies?
What is the role of booster clubs? Are all males equally affected? As you read
Duncan and Messner ask yourself: what
is the media’s role in perpetuating stereotypes about female athletes? They
describe three “categories of attributions” and compare descriptions of male
and female athletes. Do they notice any change between 1990 and 1994?
The Impact of Sports Participation.
Issues:
Many people believe sports “build character”. It is assumed that sports
participation can pay off in other spheres of life, such as education and jobs
and that it keeps children (and adults?) out of trouble. The first two readings
in this topic deal with the possible connection between sports and delinquency.
As you read Stark, Kent and Finke’s “Sports and Delinquency” pay careful attention to the method they use to untangle this relationship. How convincingly do they demonstrate a connection between sport and delinquency? Why do they stress the importance of longitudinal data? What do “interaction effects” mean and why are they so important to this study? As you read Larson’s “Youth Organizations, Hobbies, and Sports as Developmental Contexts” ask yourself what role the concepts “social integration” and “self-concept development” play in this study. Do high school athletics keep kids out of trouble, or do kids who get into trouble avoid athletics?
The
second set of readings in this area has to do with the connection between
athletics and academics. What is the impact of participation in sports on
academic achievement? Whose academic achievement is most affected?
The
first reading is Marsh’ “The Effects of Participation in Sport During the Last
Two Years of High School”. This article is quite technical but its essential
points are easy to understand. As you
read it, ask yourself: What is the problem this author is trying to solve? What
kind of data is he using and why? What is the effect of athletic participation
on the various measures of academic achievement he uses? And what links (or
“mediates”) these two phenomena?
The
second reading, by Peter and Patricia Adler, "From Idealism to Pragmatic
Detachment", shifts attention to the connection between academics and
athletics in college. It also uses a very different sociological method. As you
read this chapter, ask yourself: Why do they use the Aparticipant-observation
method@ rather than the statistical methods used
in the previous article? How would you explain the title of their chapter? What
social forces lead athletes to change? How do the athletes Aaccount
for@ (or justify) this change? Do you think
the authors Ablame the victim@?
Do you think recent reforms in college athletics (e.g. banning athletic
dormitories) would change the results of this study were it repeated?
Race and Gender in College Sports
Issues:
How are opportunities for college sports participation distributed? What has
been the impact of ATitle IX@?
What has been the effect on the distribution of athletic resources of recent
efforts to reform college athletics? How are these two issues linked?
The Sports Industry.
Issues:
How has the sports business changed over the past few decades? What are we to
make of the Disney Company buying MLB and NHL franchises? How can the marketing
successes of different sports be explained? How do leagues and individual firms
make their money, and where do they spend it? Is the sports business unique or
is it just like any other business? Are professional sports leagues single
entities or collections of firms? Why is this question important for
understanding what goes on in professional sports? We will watch, and learn, from a videotape contrasting the business
success of the NBA and the NHL.
The
relevant readings are Walter Neale=s "The Peculiar Economics of
Professional Sports" and Stephen Ross=s
"Break Up the Sports League Monopolies". As you
read Neale=s article, ask yourself why
he thinks Amonopoly@
is justified in the sports business. What is the difference between a business
firm and a sports franchise? How do
leagues provide Autility@?
Does he rule out business competition altogether? What is a Anatural
monopoly@? As you read Ross=
chapter, ask yourself what criteria he uses to declare a sports league a
monopoly. How does his treatment of free agency differ from Neale=s?
Does he accept the view that leagues are natural monopolies?
The Labor Market.
Issues:
What is the current state of free agency in the major team sports and what has
been the effect of recent changes in free agency on the owners and players?
What is the role of unions in structuring the labor market? Quirk and Fort=s "The Reserve Clause and Antitrust
Laws" gives a good overview of the history of free agency in professional
sports. As you read this chapter ask
yourself what have been the major turning points in the fight for free agency.
What social forces helped players achieve more freedom? What differences in
free agency are there between the four major team sports and why do they
exist?.
Players=
Earnings.
Issues:
What determines how much a professional athlete earns? What are the differences
from sport to sport and within each sport? What role does race and gender play
in allocating rewards? Are highly paid athletes worth the money? Gerald Scully=s "Pay and
Performance in Major League Baseball" attempts the difficult task of
answering this question. As you read this
chapter, ask yourself how Apay@
and Aperformance@
are defined. Which factors contribute to players=
earnings? How successful is he in explaining salary? Which performance measure
in baseball has the most powerful effect on earnings? Is pay and performance
correlated for pitchers? What is the effect of salary arbitration on this equation?
Do you think this same pattern of results would be found in the other team
sports?
Field Management.
Issues:
Who becomes a coach or manager? Why is there such high turnover among coaches?
What is the effect does changing the coach have on team performance? The
reading here is John Loy, James Curtis and James Hillen, "The Effects of
Formal Structure on Managerial Recruitment". As you read this article, make sure you understand the Apropositions@
concerning recruitment to managerial positions guiding the study. Why would
these propositions apply more to the AAmerican
case@ than the AJapanese
case@? Does the comparison of baseball
management in the two countries support or invalidate Grusky=s
theory?
Sports and the Mass Media.
Issues:
Why is the relation between the mass media and sports so close? How have the
mass media changed sport? What is the difference between observing a game live
and watching it on television? As you
read the chapter by Gruneau consider what is meant by the phrase Alive
coverage@ of a sports event. Learn
why actually Alive sports@
do not necessarily make Agood television@.
Sports and City Politics.
Issues:
Why is it impossible to keep politics out of sports? Why have sports become
more politicized? Why do cities compete for major league sports franchises?
What is the effect of this competition? There are two readings on this topic.
As you read Schimmel, Ingham and Powell=s
"Professional Team Sport and the American City": ask yourself why the supply of franchises is
limited. Why do teams move? How are lucrative markets defined? How do owners
feel about franchise movement? Why do cities compete for teams? How do they
compete? As you read Sage’s “Stealing Home” as yourself how his perspective
on this topic is different from the first article. How is the awarding of
franchises and the building of stadiums re-interpreted? How does he explain
whose voice gets heard and whose is ignored?
Sports and Globalism
Issues:
How are sports used to mark national identities? What role does sport play in
international relations? Is there an emerging global culture, of which sport is
a part? The reading is Alan Klein=s “Baseball as Underdevelopment”. As you read this article, ask yourself how
the international market for athletic labor operates. What the flow patterns
for recruitment? What is the effect of labor migration on the country
contributing the Araw material@.
Does this analysis apply only to baseball or does it affect other sports?
Suggested Paper Topics
1. What happens
to athletes when they retire? Do they encounter problems not faced by other
retirees?
2. What evidence
is there that physical exercise - or participation in sports more generally -
has social psychological benefits (e.g. heightens self-confidence, self-esteem,
lowers depression, anxiety)?
3. Is there any
connection between sports participation and eating disorders?
4. Why is the
sport of women body-building so controversial? How do participants deal with
this controversy? What has the sport done to avoid controversy?
5. Why has the
distinction between amateur and professional been all but abolished in the
Olympic Games?
6. Why did
baseball's minor leagues nearly die in the 1950s, only to revive in the 1980s?
7. Which
theories do you think best explain Asoccer hooliganism@?
8. NASCAR is one
of the fastest growing spectator sports in the United States. What sociological
factors help explain this phenomenon?
9. Account for
the popularity of Aextreme sports@. Explain what they are, how they are different from sports
that are not Aextreme@,
who is attracted to them, and why, and what has happened to them now that they
can be seen on MTV and ESNP2.
10. Sports are
now one way nations establish an identity on the world stage. Examine how this
process works, taking two or three examples of sports that have become Aicons@ or markers of national identity. Why
these sports, what do they mean, and how were they Areconstructed@ to serve this purpose? Examples would be
cricket in the West Indies, rugby in South Africa, sumo wrestling in Japan,
soccer in Brazil, gaelic football in Ireland.
How to Write Your Research Paper
When
researching your topic, you should decide what is the sociological framework
for your paper. This will point you to more general sociological literature
helpful to you. For example, if you choose to write about athletes who retire
you should briefly acquaint yourself with the general sociological literature
on retirement. You should next try to find if scholars (not journalists) have written
specifically on your topic. You should be especially interested in sociologists
who have actually done empirical studies in your field and who can provide you
with data. For example, if you choose to write about soccer hooliganism, can
you locate an actual study of crowd behavior at sporting events?
You
can answer most of these questions by looking under the appropriate subject
heading (or trying a keyword search) for books in the library. You can find
articles by looking in the Expanded Academic Index or Sociofile. Both data
bases are accessible through the library=s Web Page. There are two specialist
journals in this field which might also prove helpful (Sociology of Sport Journal and Sport
and Social Issues). If you locate relevant articles, remember to use their
bibliographies for more leads. You can also use the Expanded Academic Index for
more journalistic treatments of your topic, as well as Lexis-Nexis, but you
should not rely primarily on these sources. Finally, you can use the resources
of the World Wide Web to help you with your paper - as long as you avoid
getting bogged down in false leads and useless information! For example, you
can certainly locate plenty of material on NASCAR on the Web, but most of this
is either self-promotional (i.e. marketing by NASCAR) or the rantings and
ravings of fans (some of whom like Dale Earnhardt and some do not).
Reading List
MacAloon and
Csikszentmihalyi: “Deep Play and the Flow Experience in Rock Climbing”.
Isenberg: “The
Unfinished Hero: John L. and the Gilded Age”.
Vande Berg: “The
Sports Hero Meets Mediated Celebrityhood”.
Carlston: “An Environmental Explanation
of Race Differences in Basketball Performance”.
Eder and Parker:
“The Cultural Production and Reproduction of Gender”
Foley: “The
Great American Football Ritual”.
Duncan and
Messner: “The Media Image of Sports and Gender”.
Stark, Kent and
Finke: “Sports and Delinquency”
Larson: “Youth
Organizations, Hobbies and Sports in Developmental Contexts”.
Marsh: “The
Effects of Participation in Sports During the Last Two Years of High School”.
Adler and Adler:
“From Idealism to Pragmatic Detachment”.
Neale: “The
Peculiar Economics of Professional Sports”.
Ross: “Break Up
the Sports League Monopolies”
Quirk and Fort:
“The Reserve Clause and the Anti-Trust Laws”.
Scully: “Pay and
Performance in Major League Baseball”.
Loy, Curtis and
Hillen: “The Effects of Formal Structure on Managerial Recruitment.”
Gruneau: “Making
Spectacle”
Schimmel, Ingham
and Howell: “Professional Team Sport and the American City”.
Sage: “Stealing
Home”.
Klein: “Baseball
as Underdevelopment”
Sociology 153 Schedule
January 12 : Introduction
January 14 : The Sociological Perspective on Sport
January 17 : MLK Birthday
January 19 : “In the flow” (McAloon)
January 21 : From play to sport
January 24 : Values and sport
January 26 : Athletes as Heroes (Isenberg, Vande
Berg)
January 28 : Socialization into sport
January 31 : Children’s Play
February 2 : Race and sports (Carlston)
February 4 : Video
February 7 : Race and sports
February 9 : Gender and sports (Eder and Parker)
February 11: Video
February 14: Gender and sports (Foley, Duncan and
Messner)
February 16:
MID-TERM EXAMINATION
February 18: Athletics and Deviance (Stark, Larson)
February 21: Athletics and Academics (Marsh)
February 23: Athletics and Academics (Adler and
Adler)
February 25: Title IX
February 28: The sports business
March
3: Video
March 6: The sports business
March 8: The sports business
March 10-17 SPRING RECESS
March 20:
Leagues and Monopolies (Neale, Ross)
March 22: Video
March 24: Free
agency (Quirk and Fort)
March 27: Free
agency
March 29:
MID-TERM EXAMINATION
March 31:
Salaries
April 3:
Salaries (Scully)
April 5:
Players’ Associations
April 7:
Coaches
April 10:
Coaches (Loy)
April 12: Mass
media and sports
April 14: Mass
media and sports (Gruneau)
April 17:
Politics and sports
April 19:
Politics and sports (Schimmel, Sage)
April 21:
Globalization and sports
April 24:
Globalization and sports (Klein)
April 26: review