Globalization and Sport: Playing the World

by Toby Miller, Geoffrey A Lawrence, Jim McKay

Sport is the most universal feature of popular culture. It crosses language barriers and slices through national boundaries, attracting both spectators and participants, to a common lingua franca of passions, obsessions and desires. This book brings to light the connections between sport and culture. It argues that although sport is obviously a source of pleasure, it is also part of the government of everyday life. The creation of a sporting calendar, movements of rational recreation and the development of physical education in the public sector, are read as ways of disciplining and shaping urban-industrial populations. In addition, sport is examined as a principal front of globalization. The sports process draws t

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Chair of the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside. His research interests include film and TV, radio, new media, class, gender, race, sport, cultural theory, citizenship, social theory, cultural studies, political theory, cultural labor, and cultural policy. He is editor of Television & New Media and Social Identities, editor of the book series Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Lang); he has also been chair of the International Communication Association Philosophy of Communication Division; editor of Journal of Sport & Social Issues; and co-editor of Social Text, the Blackwell Cultural Theory Resource Centre, and the book series Sport and Culture (Minnesota) Film Guidebooks (Routledge) and Cultural Politics (Minnesota). Miller has taught media and cultural studies across the humanities and social sciences at the following schools: University of New South Wales, Griffith University, Murdoch University, and NYU.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is four, interwoven, interdependent essays by some of the world's leading and most innovative sports sociologists. They don't give us simple answers, but they do give us important answers and even more important questions. So much writing about globalisation presents it as in absolute; so much writing about sport presents it as some sort of pure beauty: these authors clearly like their sport – but they see both it and globalisation as a place of important social changes and vital social struggles. The best kind of sociology is the kind that shakes up our grasp of the world and our lives – this book does that by the spadeful.