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PHYSICAL CULTURE: A CRITIQUE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF SPORT
Abstract
American sociology of sport has yet to achieve theoretical and academic acceptance. The dominant orientation, a Christian-Judaic tradition emanating from physical education, has had little impact on sociology, in large part because it has failed to conform to traditional scholarly conventions. A rival perspective, non-normative sport sociology, emerged in the 1960s, but is conformity to these conventions has yet to produce significant results in either sociology or physical education. A third perspective, a Marxist-Leninist approach emanating from European communist thought, is virtually non-existent in the U.S. The purpose of this project was to explore this third alternative as a means of overcoming macroscopic theoretical inadequacies of the field. In particular, this study attempted to investigate the validity of the prevailing concepts of American sport, amateur and professional. A major target of this investigation was men's intercollegiate athletics, programs labeled amateur but widely believed to be professional. I argued that American professional sport is capitalist sport, sport owned by capitalists so that they may profit therefrom. This profit orientation is manifested in both the production and marketing of the product of pro sport, the race. I contended, however, that the consumers of pro sport do not resent this capitalist operation because they are encouraged to see a coincidence between their own and the capitalists' interests, and are thereby encouraged to believe in American capitalism. To examine the nature of amateur sport, I began by investigating men's intercollegiate athletics. Given the long-standing controversy over these programs, I proposed a concept, "semi-professional sport," to circumvent this intractibility. Semi-professional sport I defined as sport undertaken to represent the sponsoring organization. I hypothesized that much of college sport is professional because it was previously conducted as semi-professional sport. I supported this hypothesis by arguing that colleges use especially football to advertise their school in the political economic competition for money and students and hire athletes to increase the likelihood of success. I argued, therefore, that the debate over intercollegiate athletics should be understood as an effort to identify which practices do not undermine the advertising credibility of these programs. After arguing that intercollegiate programs for women are now being incorporated into this competition, I contended that the struggle between schools was being displaced by the struggle between nations as the most important manifestation of semi-professional sport in the U.S. Having eroded the empirical foundation of "amateur sport," I attempted to determine if there were a way to define this concept so that it retained empirical validity. I proposed that amateur sport be defined as participation undertaken for recreation by the masses. To test this definition, I investigated the nature of physical education, programs intended to enhance physical recreation but also suspected of being recreation. I argued that while leaders in the field have recently begun to search for a discipline, they have failed to recognize that the discipline is physical culture, a form of culture in which movement is the medium of expression. I concluded, therefore, that amateur sport is recreation and that sport as part of a physical culture curriculum is "quasi-amateur," participation undertaken to learn more about and express expertise in the form. I concluded this project by constructing a new paradigm for the sociological study of sport, a paradigm which also articulated the complete domain of physical culture.
Subject Area
Sociology
Recommended Citation
ROSE, DAVID ARNOLD, "PHYSICAL CULTURE: A CRITIQUE OF THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF SPORT" (1980). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8101391.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8101391