Annelies Knoppers

Dominant Discourses about Race/Ethnicity and Gender in Sport Practice and Performance

Although it is generally assumed that the (sport) media play an important role in the meanings readers/viewers give to gender and race/ethnicity, relatively little is known about the way ‘the public’ deals with hegemonic (media) representations about race/ethnicity and gender. The purpose of the present study is to describe the dominant discourses concerning race/ethnicity and gender and sport performance used by white and black Dutch students. We explore the extent to which their discourses overlap with each other and with dominant media discourses. The results are placed and discussed in a broader societal context.

`WE DO NOT ENGAGE IN PROMOTIONAL JOURNALISM': Discursive Strategies Used by Sport Journalists to Describe the Selection Process

Although the results of content analyses of television and newspaper sport coverage have shown quantitative and qualitative gender differences, such analyses do not reveal why some texts are selected and others not. Although this selection process is constrained by structural factors, there is room for agency since journalists decide what to include and how to write about that. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which agency is used in the discourses of sport journalists to describe the gendering of the selection process. The purpose of this study is to explore the discursive strategies and their gendered subtexts employed by Dutch sports journalists in explaining the selection process, especially the exclusion of women’s sports coverage. The results show that the journalists conceal issues of gendered dynamics of power by using an ideology of neutrality. This strategy allows them to be misogynist and resistant to the coverage of women’s sport while simultaneously allowing them to claim neutrality and fairness for themselves. We explore how their discourse is linked to a broader societal discourse and how it simultaneously strengthens that discourse.

Opportunity and Work Behavior in College Coaching

Opportunity for mobility and growth plays a large part in determining work behavior such as aspirations, satisfaction and work exit (Kanter, 1977). To have opportunity means to have many viable career and financial options, to have access to information on new job vacancies and to receive informal training. In this paper we explore the gendering of opportunity and of work behavior in Division I college coaching. The sample consisted of 947 coaches who responded to a questionnaire. Opportunity was assessed through access to positions, opportunities for income, channels to job information and frequency of feedback from supervisors. Career aspiration degree of satisfaction and likelihood of exit were the measures of work behavior. The results indicated that the work behaviors of the sample were those of people in low opportunity jobs and that the opportunities for women in college athletics were more circumscribed than those for men. The results were discussed in the context of Kanters (1977) theory of gendered work behavior in male dominated organizations.

Gay/Lesbian Sport Clubs and Events Places of Homo-Social Bonding and Cultural Resistance?

Over the last two decades the founding of sport clubs and organization of sport events specifically for gays and lesbians has increased in the Netherlands and most other western countries. For many policy-makers the popularity of playing sport ‘apart’ seems to be in contradiction to current liberal legislation concerning homosexuality and gay and lesbian rights. Gay/lesbian sport clubs and events like the Gay Games, which took place in Amsterdam in 1998 and Sydney in 2002, raise questions about the social integrative meanings and functions of sport. In this article different, often tenuous and ambiguous, integrative meanings are discussed in relation to mainstream and gay and lesbian sport clubs and events.

Race, ethnicity, and content analysis of the sports media: a critical reflection

Opinions about and attitudes towards the constructs of race and ethnicity in contemporary Western society are not only influenced by institutions such as those of academic institutions, politics, education, family or paid labour, but also by the media. Popular forms of media culture, varying from news broadcasts and talk shows to soap operas and music videos, can be highly influential in structuring ideas about race and ethnicity. Entman contended that the media ‘call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements’ (1993: 55). The media create dominant interpretations of reality that appeal to a desired or anticipated audience. According to Hall (1995, 1997), the media are not only a powerful source of dominant ideas about race and ethnicity, but should also be considered as sites of constantly shifting meanings and struggles over meaning. This is evident in the way that the media on the one hand celebrate successful African-Americans like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, while also confirming and reinforcing racist stereotypes. According to Jessica Rhodes, a scholar in ethnic studies and mass communication, racist stereotypes have been embedded in the US mass media since the 18th century, whether it be ‘the benign and happy slave figure’, ‘the black brute who rapes white women’ or the ‘promiscuous black woman’ (1995: 36–7). This stereotypical and one-dimensional framing of

Male Athletic and Managerial Masculinities: Congruencies in Discursive Practices?

The popularity and influence of sport in Western society have been steadily increasing. The most visible of such sports continue to be mens professional sports that dominate media coverage. Consumers of the sport media see primarily men in action. Similarly, management continues to be numerically dominated by men, especially in the senior ranks. Although professional/media sport and management continue to be two areas where cultures associated with men predominate and where masculinities are created and reproduced, little research has been done that explores connections between the two areas. In this article we use the literature about management and about sport to explore ways in which discourses about (white) managerial masculinities may be supported by and/or congruent with discourses about athletic masculinities and to provide possible directions for future research in this area.

Making Sense of Teaching Social and Moral Skills in Physical Education.

Background: Education policies and curriculum documents in many European countries promote the social and moral development of young people as a cross-curriculum goal and place that goal at the center of the education process. All subjects, including physical education (PE) are required to contribute to the social and moral development of the children. Scholars have argued that PE and especially the PE teacher play a crucial role in the social and moral development of children. There is however little scientific evidence that underpins the positive contribution of PE to this development. Scholars also understand the social and moral domain in diverse ways. Little is known about how teachers themselves think about their responsibilities with respect to the social and moral development of their students through PE and how they understand and operationalize such curriculum goals. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how physical education (PE) teachers make sense of this formal curriculum goal and try to operationalize it. PE teachers tend not to be formally trained in didactics of social and moral development. In addition, the PE curriculum gives few guidelines that define social and moral development or how to accomplish this (if at all) but does require them to integrate this development into their teaching. We therefore used a social constructivist perspective with an emphasis on sense making to situate the study. Participants and setting: Participants teaching in different types of high school were recruited from Dutch urban, suburban and rural locations. In total 158 PE teachers participated in this study. Their teaching experience ranged from one to thirty-eight years. Data collection: Data were collected in three phases. Phase 1 was exploratory consisting of eight in-depth interviews. The results were used to construct an open-ended questionnaire that was answered by 55 participants (Phase 2). In Phase 3 we conducted 95 in-depth interviews with PE teachers to further explore themes that had emerged. Data analysis: The data were analyzed with the use of a qualitative data analysis package. We used a thematic analysis that was driven by both the data and the research questions to examine the combined data sets. Findings: The PE teachers unanimously constructed PE classes as places where social and moral skills should and can be developed. They equated social and moral development with the learning of social interactional skills. They differed however, in what they emphasized and the strategies they used to realize this curriculum objective. Conclusion: The PE teachers involved in this study actively worked to contribute to the social and moral development of their pupils by teaching and monitoring social interactional skills. The commonalities in curricular practices found in this study and the individual differences together possibly reflect a globalized socialization of PE teachers into and through sport accompanied by differences rooted in how they as individuals make sense of their upbringing. We recommend the use of a contextually-based bottom-up approach to explore the dynamics of social and moral development in PE classes.

It's Just the Way It Is... or Not? How Physical Education Teachers Categorise and Normalise Differences.

This article explores how Dutch physical education (PE) teachers discursively construct body differences between students related to gender, (dis)ability and health. Our results show how disciplinary technologies of categorisation and normalisation are embedded in two distinct discourses that our participants used: the discourse of naturalness for explaining and managing differences in gender and ability and the discourse of transformation for explaining and managing differences in health. Both these discourses produced body norms in PE as male, abled and slender. However, how the teachers managed deviance and normalcy varies per discourse. ‘Fat’ bodies that were produced as deviant through the discourse of transformation were disciplined in explicit ways. The use of the discourse of naturalness resulted in justification and naturalisation of perceived differences in gender and (dis)ability and practices such as differentiated teaching.

Discursive managerial practices of diversity and homogeneity

The concept of diversity as an organizational value has become an integral part of many organizational policies, yet women and minorities continue to be underrepresented as managers. Scholars have drawn attention to the paradox in which managers recognize diversity as an organizational value and yet top level managerial ranks remain primarily homogenous. How senior managers negotiate the use of the discourse of diversity and the underrepresentation of women and minorities at managerial levels has received relatively little scholarly attention. The purpose of this study is to interrogate the use of the organizational value of diversity by examining how constructions of diversity and of women and ethnic and sexual minorities by senior managers working in nonprofit organizations inform discursive practices of diversity and homogeneity. We assume managers use implicit and explicit norms to differentiate among individuals and assign them to groups, and draw on various discourses to justify these categorizations and related exclusion. In this study, we explore how senior managers in nonprofit organizations construct diversity and homogeneity and create categorical groups such as women and minorities.

The Role of Perceptions of Friendships and Peers in Learning Skills in Physical Education.

Background: Most research on how children learn when using the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach has focused on cognitive dimensions in teaching games models. A social constructivist perspective suggests, however, that learning also takes place during social interactions. Since the process of learning game skills tends to have a relational dimension, researchers need to understand childrens affective responses and how they situate their skill learning in games in relationship to their classmates. Purpose: To explore childrens perceptions of collaboration, group formations, and friendships while learning a modified baseball game situated in social constructivist learning. Specifically, we focused on how children perceived the role that the social context, especially friends and classmates, plays in learning skills and strategies. Participants and setting: The children (N = 25), aged 12–13, were in their first year of secondary school and were taught in a TGfU baseball unit. They participated in eight small focus groups to talk about their experiences in a modified baseball game. Data analysis: The constant comparative method was used to collect data in which drawings were used as cues for focus group discussions about interactions with peers during their learning of skills. Findings: Three themes emerged from the analysis: peers as necessary collaborators, friends as supporters and distractors, and peers as perceived critics. The results indicated that the presence of peers shaped the experiences of these children in contradictory ways. Findings were situated within social constructivism and compared with other research focusing on game-centered approaches and the role of the affective domain in learning.