Wilbert M. Leonard

Immortalizing the Self Through Sport.

The processes through which Americans seek to leave their mark through achievements in sport are explored. The postself is conceptualized as an idealized role-identity that links the present to the future and to the past. Various media forms indicate that athletes and their others frequently become concerned about how they will look to future audiences. The characteristics of the social world of sport that foster concerns about immortality as well as the reactions of individuals to these factors are discussed. The emergence of the postself through sport contributes to our understanding of selfhood, time, social worlds, social structure, and social process.

Successful Aging: An Elaboration of Social and Psychological Factors.

The purpose of the present research is to assess and elaborate the empirical relationships between a life satisfaction index (LSI) developed and validated by the author and a selected number (23) of social/demographic/psychological factors, using a multistage probability sample of noninstitutionalized adults sixty years of age and older living in the continental U.S. in 1973. The data analysis indicated that marital status, occupational prestige, years of formal education, race, annual income, and a variety of specific satisfaction with life measures (p < .01) were related to successful aging. These associations were elaborated by systematically introducing test factors, i.e., control variables. This statistical-methodological technique produced instances of replication, suppression, explanation, interpretation, and specification, all of which are reported in the body of the text.

Sport-Identity as Side Bet — Towards Explaining Commitment from an Interactionist Perspective

The symbolic interactionist perspective is used to demonstrate that the substantive area of sport can be conceptually elevated to a more formal level. Beckers formulation of identity as a commitment mechanism is: ( I ) conceptually extended to include more active, diverse, and complex lines of activity, and (2) applied to sport behavior. Sport commitment appears to be an effective tool for the recasting of sport. Directives for future investigations of: (1) sport as side bet and (2) identity as a commitment process are delineated.

Twenty-Five Years of Stacking Research in Major League Baseball: An Attempt at Explaining This Re-Occurring Phenomenon

Abstract The longest continuous thread in sport sociology research is the study of stacking. Briefly put, the phenomenon of stacking discussed and analyzed in this essay means the placement of African-American baseball players in non-central positions more often than they are placed in core positions. Most American research studies have been concentrated on the sports of football, soccer, basketball and, to a larger extent, baseball. While discussions of stacking are often severed from the structural changes in the larger economy and society, this research provides a different perspective by concentrating less on primary empirical research and concentrating more on addressing theoretical issues that have been only peripherally addressed in the empirical studies. We hypothesize that the interrelated set of phenomena captured by the term stacking are primarily issues of social isolation, marginalization and the systematic discrimination against African American athletes on and off playing fields.

Academic Representation and Substantive Concerns of Five Annual Meetings of the North Central Sociological Association

This paper involves two objectives. Firstly, a descriptive analysis of the institutions represented at the 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973 an nual meetings of the North Central Sociological Association is presen ted. Although the sociology convention has occasionally been the object of study (e.g., Higbie and Hammond, 1966; Mintz, 1967; Hammond and Hibgie, 1968; Lin, Garvey, and Nelson, 1970, Leonard and Schmitt, 1973), it has not been examined extensively. In view of the increasing in terest in the sociology of sociology, the intrinsic concern of sociologists with formal organizations, and the role of regional, and especially, national psychology conventions in the early dissemination of research findings (Garvey and Griffith, 1971:355-58), this neglect is un warranted. Secondly, an analysis of the substantive concerns, as reflected in session, panel, topic etc. titles, is contained herein. It seems reasonable to conclude that some of the dominant and pressing considerations of the discipline are mirrored in these entries.