Peter Donnelly

THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL: GLOBALIZATION IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT:

This article sets the stage for this Journal of Sport & Social Issues special issue on sport and globalism. As a preface to the more detailed treatments that follow, the author considers the development of inquiry on sport and globalization in the social sciences. Key definitional terms such as modernization, cultural imperialism, and cultural hegemony are framed in the context of debates over Americanization and globalization. Refinements in recent scholarly developments in sport and globalization are linked to the collected efforts found on the pages that follow in this issue.

Canadian minor hockey participants' knowledge about concussion

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES In Canada and the USA, ice hockey is a cause of traumatic brain injury. Post-concussive symptoms are the most important feature of the diagnosis of concussion in sports and it is recommended that athletes not return to play while still symptomatic. Lack of knowledge of concussions could therefore be one of the main detriments to concussion prevention in hockey. The purpose of this research is to describe what minor league hockey players, coaches, parents and trainers know about concussion and its management. METHODS A questionnaire to assess concussion knowledge and return to play guidelines was developed and administered to players at different competitive levels (n = 267), coaches, trainers and parents (total adults n = 142) from the Greater Toronto Area. RESULTS Although a majority of adults and players could identify mechanisms responsible for concussion, about one-quarter of adults and about a quarter to a half of children could not recall any symptoms or recalled only one symptom of a concussion. A significant number of players and some adults did not know what a concussion was or how it occurred. Almost half of the players and a fifth of the adults incorrectly stated that concussion was treated with medication or physical therapy. Nearly one quarter of all players did not know if an athlete experiencing symptoms of concussion should continue playing. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrated that a significant number of people held misconceptions about concussion in hockey which could lead to serious health consequences and creates a need for better preventive and educational strategies.

Sport participation and alcohol and illicit drug use in adolescents and young adults: A systematic review of longitudinal studies

Sport participation can play an important and positive role in the health and development of children and youth. One area that has recently been receiving greater attention is the role that sport participation might play in preventing drug and alcohol use among youth. The current study is a systematic review of 17 longitudinal studies examining the relationship between sport participation and alcohol and drug use among adolescents. Results indicated that sport participation is associated with alcohol use, with 82% of the included studies (14/17) showing a significant positive relationship. Sport participation, however, appears to be related to reduced illicit drug use, especially use of non-cannabis related drugs. Eighty percent of the studies found sport participation associated with decreased illicit drug use, while 50% of the studies found negative association between sport participation and marijuana use. Further investigation revealed that participation in sports reduced the risk of overall illicit drug use, but particularly during high school; suggesting that this may be a critical period to reduce or prevent the use of drugs through sport. Future research must better understand what conditions are necessary for sport participation to have beneficial outcomes in terms of preventing alcohol and/or illicit drug use. This has been absent in the extent literature and will be central to intervention efforts in this area.

Sport for Development and Peace: a public sociology perspective

Abstract In the increasing amount of published research and critical commentary on sport for development and Peace (sdp) two related trends are apparent. The first is a clear belief that, under certain circumstances, sport may make a useful contribution to work in international development and peace building; the second is that criticisms of it are frequently constructive, intended to support the work of practitioners in the field by outlining the limitations of what may be achieved through sport, and under what circumstances. Given these trends, public sociology provides a useful framing device for research and commentary and academics should now engage more directly with practitioners and provide more accessible summaries of their research to those engaged in sdp. We provide a brief introduction to public sociology, and outline its relevance in the sociology of sport, before making suggestions about the incorporation of public sociology into sdp research. Three main overlapping areas of research emerge from a public sociology perspective, and are needed in order to engage in a constructively critical analysis of sdp: descriptive research and evaluation; analyses of claims making; and critical analyses of social reproduction. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the dilemmas that may be encountered by those engaging in public sociology research, in both the academy and the field.

Sport and human rights1

Following a brief introduction to current problems and concerns with regard to international human rights, this essay is structured around three overlapping themes: 1) the right to participate in sports; 2) the achievement of human rights through sport; and 3) sport and the human rights of specific classes of persons. The first considers various charters declaring the right to participate in sport, and the widespread endorsement of these charters by nations around the world; and points to the ways in which such rights have either not been addressed, or have often been addressed in ways that are neo-colonialist, leading, for example, to the loss of aboriginal cultures, or to the establishment of systems of sport that emphasize the development of high performance athletes rather than broad-based participation. The second points out that the only major human rights victory that may be attributed, at least in part, to sport is that of the anti-apartheid movement. The third combines the right to participate with the achievement of human rights through sport by considering the various ways that sport has been involved in the achievement of human rights by specific classes of persons (women, persons with a disability, aboriginal people, etc.). The essay concludes with a consideration of international foreign policy initiatives, and the ways in which they have, and could, further human rights in and through sports; briefly considers the place of sport in achieving the Millennium Development Goals; and argues that the status of children should be the next major international foreign policy initiative in sport.

Prolympism: Sport Monoculture as Crisis and Opportunity

The two dominant sport ideologies of the 20th century are Olympism and professionalism. This paper documents the recent articulation between these formerly alternative codes of sport into a single organic hegemony termed prolympism; examines the manifestations and consequences of this articulation; and considers the limitations and opportunities presented by the emergence of a global sport monoculture.

The Disappointment Games: Narratives of Olympic Failure in Canada and New Zealand

This article provides a comparative analysis of news narratives of ‘disappointment’ in Canada and New Zealand in response to the 2000 Olympics. The theoretical framework draws on Luhmann’s distinction between cognitive and normative orientations to expectations, contingency, and disappointment. The analysis examines how disappointment was thematized similarly as a decline in relation to past performance, but explained somewhat differently in the two countries. In New Zealand, disappointment was explained in more normatively inflected terms. Although various causal factors were mentioned, the explanatory frame was dominated by claims that athletes lacked a competitive attitude and the ‘will to win’, and this was generalized to New Zealand society and the educational system in particular as indicative of a broader loss of moral values. The Canadian response, on the other hand, was framed in more cognitively oriented terms. Athlete blaming was quickly dismissed as misplaced, and attention was directed to the lack of government funding and organizational problems in the ‘sport system’ as the principal reasons for disappointing results. In both cases, however, these explanations of disappointment were not fully exclusive of one another; each continued to contain subsidiary elements of the other, which indicates how the normative and cognitive remain mutually implicated.

Reproduction and Transformation of Cultural Forms in Sport A Contextual Analysis of Rugby

This paper provides an examination of the cultural development of Rugby football in England and North America, and an account of the simultaneous transformation of the game since 1965 in both settings. At a time of active cultural exchange across the North Atlantic, English Rugby began to adopt the trappings of rationalized North American spectator sports; while the simultaneous reappearance of Rugby in North America - replete with the traditional cultural characteristics of the English game - is interpreted as a form of resistance to those same rationalized spectator sports. Suggestions for the contextual analysis of sport are made, using Rugby as a specific example.

Workers' Playtime? Child Labour at the Extremes of the Sporting Spectrum

Workers’ Playtime was a BBC Radio lunchtime variety programme, broadcast live from factory canteens around Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Its title recognized lunchtime as a break from work, a time when workers might play. When applied to children, when children are workers, this title takes on a more sinister connotation. Play is supposed to be characteristic of childhood, and play is considered to be intrinsic to healthy child development – physical, mental, and social. When applied to children who work at sport, and in the industries that supply sporting goods, ‘workers’ playtime’ has a cruel irony. This article is about those children. The vast majority of the world’s nations have ratified the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). By their signature, nations have committed themselves to the best interests of children (defined as all humans under 18 years of age). Forty of the 54 Articles in the CRC deal directly with children’s rights, and four refer directly or indirectly to children’s participation in sport and physical activity. For example, Article 24 affirms ‘the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health . . .’, Article 28 ‘recognize[s] the right of the child to education . . .’, physical education being implicit in this right since it was previously affirmed in the 1978 UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Charter of Physical Education and Sport, and Article 29 states that education involves ‘the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest’. However, it is Article 31 that directly recognizes:

Effectiveness of an educational video on concussion knowledge in minor league hockey players: a cluster randomised controlled trial

Background With the heightened awareness of concussions in all sports, the development and implementation of effective prevention strategies are necessary. Education has been advocated as an effective injury prevention intervention. Purpose To examine the effectiveness of the ‘Smart Hockey: More Safety, More Fun’ video on knowledge transfer among minor league hockey players. Study Design Cluster-randomised controlled trial. Methods A total of 267 participants from two age divisions and competitive levels were assigned to either a video or no-video group. The video was shown (or not shown) to the entire team as a result of random assignment. To evaluate the effectiveness of the educational video, questionnaires specific to concussion knowledge and players’ attitudes and behaviours were completed. Results There was a significant increase in the players’ concussion knowledge scores immediately following exposure to the video (F(1,103)=27.00, p<0.001). However, concussion knowledge at 2 months was not significantly different between the video and no-video groups, after controlling for prior knowledge level, age and competitive level (F(1,115)=0.41, p=0.523). Similarly, players’ attitudes and behaviour scores at 2 months did not differ between groups (F(1,115)=0.41, p=0.507). Conclusions We were able to show that a single viewing of an educational video in hockey could immediately improve knowledge about concussion but that this effect was transient and lost at 2-month follow-up. Future prevention endeavours in hockey and other sports should attempt to incorporate strategies and modalities to enhance knowledge retention.