Inge Claringbould

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Constructing (non-)atheletic bodies.

In this article we explore body norms Dutch youth create in their discursive constructions of athletic and (non-)athletic bodies and how these norms are enforced by the Panopticon and the Synopticon. Our methodology consisted of auto-driven photo elicitation group interviews with 42 secondary school students. The results indicate the complexity of the discursive constructions that youth use. We created seven visual metaphors to illustrate the various narratives that emerged from the data: the Male Soccer Player; the Field Hockey Girl; the Female Boxer; the Male Dancer; the Fatty; the Sumo Wrestler; and the Computer Nerd. These visual metaphors show these teenagers conflated dominant discourses about health and appearance and how their discursive constructions of athleticism intersected with notions about gender, sexuality, social class, and race. Furthermore, our data illustrate how our participants reproduced and resisted dominant discourses that are produced by visual media.

Young athletes and their coaches : disciplinary processes and habitus development

Sport scholars have paid relatively little attention to meanings that participants in recreational youth sport may give meanings to their participation and how those meanings are informed by coaching practices. In this study, we draw on Bourdieu’s notions about the development of the habitus, symbolic capital and the positions youth take in the field of sport, and on Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary power to explore meanings 29 children, aged 7–18 years, participating in tennis, soccer, swimming or hockey in Dutch sport clubs assigned to their experiences with their coaches. The data from the semi-structured interviews show how the dispositions these youth developed during their sport participation shifted as they gradually became involved in a disciplinary process directed towards improvement, success and winning. When these youths joined a sport club their goal was to learn how to play the game and have fun. As they participated in organised practices over time, they learned that in order to have fun they had to conform to informal rules about behaviour during the practices. Specifically, we show how the logic of discipline, as described by Foucault, shaped this learning process, and contributed to the development of the habitus of these young athletes.

Gender equality in sport leadership: From the Brighton Declaration to the Sydney Scoreboard:

This study investigated the development of the legacies of the five World Conferences on Women and Sport that have been convened by the International Working Group on Women and Sport from 1994 to 2010. In particular, it examined the ways in which gender is constructed in these legacies in relation to gender equality in sport leadership. The theoretical framework was drawn from Connell’s four-dimensional gender model, which suggests that gender relations can be characterized in terms of four interwoven dimensions of social life: production, power, emotion and symbolism. The method used was a comparative case study of five legacies. We conducted a content analysis of documents relevant to the five legacies. Findings show that, in all five legacies, gender in relation to sport leadership was mainly constructed on the dimension of production and power relations (more women in leadership positions) and symbolic relations (creating a sporting culture that values women’s participation at all levels). By contrast, the gendered dimension of emotional relations – collaboration between men and women – received limited attention. The implications of these findings for the acceleration of gender equality in sport leadership are discussed.

Bodies Matter: Professional Bodies and Embodiment in Institutional Sport Contexts:

Bodies are always present in organizations, yet they frequently remain unacknowledged or invisible including in sport organizations and sport management research. We therefore argue for an embodied turn in sport management research. The purpose of this article is to present possible reasons why scholars have rarely paid attention to bodies in sport organizations; to offer arguments why they should do so; and to give suggestions for what scholarship on bodies and embodiment might look like using various theoretical frameworks. Using the topic of diversity as an example, we explore what insights into embodiment and bodily practices the theoretical frameworks of Foucault, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty and Butler have to offer researchers and how these insights may lead to better understandings of organizational processes in sport.