Dr. David L. Andrews
Department of Kinesiology, University of Maryland (USA)

Late Capitalist Sport and the Corporatization of Leisure

This paper engages contemporary sport as a particular leisure phenomenon located at the intersection of consumer culture, the media-entertainment complex, and corporate capitalism. Such an approach problematizes the archaic, and largely redundant, understanding of sport that underpins much of the literature within this area. Thus, I seek to develop an innovative understanding of sport as a multifaceted aspect of commercial leisure culture that incorporates--and highlights the relationships between--sport spectacles, stars, signs, and spaces, within a variety of national sporting settings (i. e. the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Japan, China, and India). The various strands of sporting culture (spectacles, stars, signs, and spaces) represent the primary forms of engagement, which significantly contribute toward the shaping of individuals' understandings, identities, and experiences of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, and nation based differences. Hence, I am interested in both the socio-structural derivation of contemporary sport phenomena, and the manner with which they are consumed at the level of everyday leisure experience. As a consequence, my goal is to examine processes and practices of corporatized sporting production and consumption. This approach provide s a more holistic and insightful understanding of late capitalist sport culture, than can be gleaned from focusing exclusively on either productive or consumptive phases.

The theoretical and methodological stratagem adopted within this project is founded on the notion that an explicitly contingent understanding of sport should emerge as an outgrowth of contextually grounded and sensitive research practice. According to this approach, sport is engaged and interpreted as a fluid, dynamic category, whose definition and composition is contingent on the specificities of the context (both synchronic and diachronic) in question. Following Stuart Hall's "Marxism without guarantees", the structure and influence of sport in any given conjuncture is a product of intersecting, multidirectional lines of articulation between the forces and practices (including sport) which comprise the social context. The very uniqueness of the historical moment, or conjuncture, means there is a condition of no necessary correspondence, or indeed non-correspondence, between sport and particular forces (i. e. the economic): forces do determine the givenness of sporting practices, their determinacy just cannot be guaranteed in advance. So, sport oriented research demands a truly contextual sensibility premised on, and seeking to excavate and theorize, the contingent relations, structure, and effects that link sport forms with prevailing determinate forces: In effect, what I am suggesting is the mobilization of a sport without guarantees.