Welcome to the first post from this week! We begin by introducing an important collection on the sociology of sport.
At a critical moment in time when the British Sociological Association has marshalled an impressive cast of luminaries to orchestrate the ‘sociology and the cuts’ blog and the Con-Dem coalition continues its relentless assault against public service provision, Susie Scott reminds us of the need to explore and elucidate the mundane and habitual aspects of everyday social life.
Making Sense of Everyday Life is a lively and informative deconstruction of three strands of quotidian sociology: ‘rituals and routines’, ‘social order’ and ‘challenging the taken-for-granted’. Scott brings much analytical insight and empirical clarity to these disparate strands across ten relatively short but highly illuminating chapters. Its contents range from the explanatory ‘theorising the mundane’ to the instructive ‘researching everyday life’. In doing so the reader is introduced to the founding ideas of ethnomethodology, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. It is to Scott’s immense credit that Making Sense of Everyday Life discloses the underlying rules, routines and regularities of everyday life through the prism of an eclectic mix of sociological examples and observations drawn from less rarefied fields. Scott is particularly strong on the sociology of emotion and in discussing health, illness and disability. There is, though, perhaps a casual over-reliance on the pop anthropology of Kate Fox’s Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour and a similar reticence to critique sociology’s drift towards what the amateur pugilist and MacArthur foundation ‘genius’ Loic Wacquant has described as its neo-romantic current.
Scott has produced a clear and concise introduction to the sociology of everyday life. It will appeal most directly to undergraduate students or the ‘lay’ reader with an interest in the overlap between micro and macro levels of social analysis. The book’s weakness, if it is one, is that it is curiously apolitical at the very time when public intellectuals should be striving to expose and make sense of political manoeuvres that seek to radically reengineer the role of the state and recalibrate the rhythms and routines of community life.
Martin Whiteford, University of Liverpool
The reconstruction of Manchester’s city centre after the IRA’s 1996 bomb stood as the background to my teenage years and, as is often the case with such things, I never really scrutinised or questioned the direction it took. I was 11 at the time of the bombing and had been watching cartoons on a Saturday morning before driving into the city centre with my mother. I vaguely remember us being stopped in the car by a hastily erected police cordon on the outskirts of the city but it was only later in the day, while at my grandmother’s nursing home, that we found out what had happened. At the time the impact of the bombing seemed to be expressed solely in the immediacy of the destruction wrought; yet many years later, as I read Ground Control, it became clear quite how the events of that morning paved the way for a radical and, at the time, unprecedented experiment in city-centre governance.
Race, Sport and Politics is an intense sociological engagement with the intersection of- as the title suggests- race, sport and politics in twentieth century Britain and USA. Ben Carrington is a well-established and well-respected author in the areas of sociological theory, ‘race’, culture and sport and this book reflects his passion for the study of ‘race’ and sport.
Race, Sport and Politics opens with a thrilling account of the black American boxer Jack Johnson who, in 1908, defeated the white Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney to become the World Heavyweight Champion. It was a pivotal moment in history. In 1908, at the peak of imperialism, social Darwinism, eugenics and ‘Muscular Christianity’, boxing epitomised all that was brave, courageous and physically strong in the white ‘race’. As a result, Johnson’s win greatly alarmed the white ruling elites around the world from his native USA to Australia where the epic event transpired (Carrington informs us that Johnson enjoyed the support of the Aborigines of Australia). Johnson’s win was seen as a potential trigger for a ‘black revolution’ having huge implications for imperialism which was based on a white supremacist ideology.
Taking this event as the starting point, Ben Carrington’s latest book, then, ‘is an account of the political meanings and the global impact of ‘the black athlete’ over the past century, the role of sport in the making and remaking of western ideas about racial difference, and the position of sport in the forging of gendered, national and racial identities within the broader African diaspora. …………….throughout the twentieth century and into the present there has been a continuous struggle over the meaning of ‘the black athlete’………….. The loss of political power, and the concomitant fears of sexual impotency, finds [sic] its corollary in the rise of the black athlete’.
Having established this, the book moves to a theoretical engagement with sport, ‘race’ and the human body in the wider social and political contexts of the day. Here Carrington engages with and invokes a broad range of social, cultural and literary theorists, among others, Gramsci on hegemony, Frantz Fanon, Césaire, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Allen Guttmann, John Hargreaves, Richard Gruneau, Anne McClintock, Paul Gilroy as well as a number of present-day writers on sport history and postcolonialism.
You can invariably trust the Idle Ethnographer to come up with a refreshing pre-Christmas read.
So, it is the beginning of the XXI century? So, we’ve had the Holocaust in Europe, the Apartheid in South Africa, and racial segregation in the US (and elsewhere) – and learnt our lesson? Is biological reductionism gone? Not at all. In fact, it is as resilient as a GMO weed.
Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (2010) Exploring Disability – Second Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kayleigh A. Garthwaite is a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Geography at Durham University.
Just over a decade after the first edition of ‘Exploring Disability’ was published, the second edition (minus Tom Shakespeare’s presence) has emerged amidst a growing interests in disability studies from a sociological perspective. As a result of this, Barnes and Mercer felt it apt to produce a second edition of the text to include not only an updated and revised version of the previous text, but also two new chapters that focus upon; firstly, genetics and their implications for people with accredited impairments and long term limiting illness conditions. The second chapter looks at disability and impairment in poorer or underdeveloped countries.
From the outset, the book very much takes on a stance which prioritises the rights of disabled people, beginning with a detailed description of the grass roots mobilisation of disabled people. Through discussing the work of major disability theorists, starting from within traditional sociological approaches to disability and then moving on to those working from within the social model or rights based perspective, the authors ensure that they are very much distanced from the notion of disability as a ‘personal tragedy’. This topic is covered in depth by the first two chapters of the collection.
Chapter 3 is crucial to help us understand sociological approached to chronic illness and disability. A thorough review of illness and the social begins with Talcott Parsons’ (1951) classic functionalist analysis of the ‘sick role’ and finishing with post-structuralist analyses of illness. As the authors not win this chapter, above all what is clear is that ‘medical sociologists do not ‘hunt as a pack’’ (p. 69). This chapter recognises the diversity of approaches and further explores these issues in chapter 4, which dissects theories of disability in more depth.
Chapter 5 features an even more timely consideration of disability policy and the welfare state, given the recent Spending Review (20th October 2010) and its’ implications for disabled people and people who receive benefits due to a chronic illness or disability. Tracing back the historical roots of the relationship between the state and disability policy, Barnes and Mercer devote a separate subheading to New Labour and how their buzz term of social exclusion related to disability. Further subheadings relating to education, employment, transport and leisure and social participation provide an even more convincing case for the wide ranging multitude of barriers that can impact upon the disabled population. Continuing in the same vein, chapter 6 focuses upon routes to independent living and the impact of social policy. The authors conclude that progress has been uneven; therefore, independent living is not something that can be achieved for all disabled people. This chapter leads on fluidly to the political process and disabled people in chapter 7. The following chapter examines the place of disability in culture and the wider media, exploring various stereotypes and generalisations that are often associated with disabled people. The authors point out that public opinion towards prejudicial images directed at disabled people has become more sensitive; however, further work remains to be done to avoid the stigmatisation of disabled people.
Finally, chapters 9 and 10 represent the new chapters in this edition. The first chapter, ‘Disability and the right to life’, explores the minefield of ethics, euthanasia, eugenics and biotechnology. The authors conclude that often, the general view that living with an impairment is living with no life at all only seeks to reinforce the ‘personal tragedy’ view of disability, which in turn undermines the great strides taken in relation to the social and political rights of disabled people. Chapter 10 moves on to consider global perspectives of disability, given that the remainder of the book has focused upon Westernised culture and societies. Reflecting upon the growing internationalisation of disability politics and policies, this chapter identifies the differences between various countries and argues that ‘there is no globalized disability identity and culture’ (p. 264). However, the relationship between extreme poverty and disability are inseparable, with the chapter ending on the much emphasised point that disabled people have made progress through the establishment of their own organizations and through campaigning for social justice.
Overall, this second edition of Exploring Disability outlines the relationship between disabled people and disability theory, all underpinned by an emancipatory disability research model as the basis for a continued sociological understanding and analysis of disability, which very much focuses upon the campaigning and pursuit of social justice and equality for disabled people, by disabled people. As mentioned, the collection does focus upon Westernised culture and societies, so if that’s what you’re interested in, then great. This second edition is a must read for not only those who are interested in disability studies, but sociologists who possess an interest in fairness and equality should also make sure they don’t miss out on this one.
Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008. 144 pp.
$18.95 CAD paper.
Paperback ISBN: 9781552662816
Emma Battell Lowman
University of Warwick
In Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson sets out to describe and explain an Indigenous approach to research, and to demonstrate how this research paradigm can be put into practice. What Wilson contends is that “the shared aspect of an Indigenous ontology and epistemology is relationality” and that the “shared aspect of an Indigenous axiology and methodology is accountability to relationships.” (7) While these principles are simply stated, understanding the implications and challenges for researching in accordance with them is a complex undertaking. Drawing on “a combination of methods, including participant observation, interviews with individual participants and focus group discussions” (40) and working in relationship with others investigating similar questions and issues in Indigenous research (and whose voices play major roles in the text), Wilson has created a comprehensive study of the theory, history and practice of Indigenous research.
In an era in which the neoliberal tenets and conditionalities, after threatening to become the ‘lore’ of the so-called good governance, are also seeking to pervade popular imagination, voice as an articulation of critical insight has become all the more important for our survival. In the preceding era, from Hirschman to Habermas, and from Bakhtin to Foucault, voice has been problematised, though not exactly in the same epistemo-methodological way, in social theory. But somehow the theme needed a cutting-edge analysis in the aftermath of the steep ascendance of neoliberalism in the contemporary era. Indeed the volume under review serves that purpose well.
Judging from his experience of the UK and USA the author’s point of departure is the built-in mechanism of neoliberalism, which makes the offers of voice, as he points out, ‘unsustainable’ by either denying it or making it illusory. To add from the reviewer’s experience in India and in some other developing countries, perhaps the scenario is a bit more complicated and the mechanism a slightly more subtle— revealing a mixed dose of denial and construction of illusion, which in turn makes voice ‘unnecessary’ and ‘redundant’. Thus, in India the government adopting the neoliberal market reforms in 1991, notwithstanding its minority status in the then parliament, had proclaimed (in the strange logic of the then Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao) that any parliamentary debate on the issue would be ‘inimical’ to India’s positive image abroad. Such is the power of neoliberalism in silencing voice in the world’s largest democracy! No doubt, the author hits the proverbial bull’s eye when he associates neoliberalism with ‘self-harm’(p.135).
Globalisation and Football is an engaging, accessible and comprehensive sociological study of the political economy of the world’s most popular sport. The authors Richard Giulianotti & Roland Robertson fuse disciplines to trace the historical evolution of football, its interplay with processes of globalisation, all against the backdrop of the socio-economic and political developments of the day.
In a lot of ways, Giulianotti & Robertson pick up from their earlier works. Borrowing from Robertson’s work, Globalisation and Football begins by explaining to the reader the waves or phases of globalisation witnessed by human history: germinal, incipient, take-off, struggle-for-hegemony, uncertainty and millennial.
This six-phase model of globalisation is the framework for a historical analysis of football against the backdrop of major political, cultural and socio-economic events of that era. Unlike other studies that equate globalisation with western modernisation processes, the objective of the authors is to highlight the historical complexity and the myriad roles played by actors and institutions both in the global North and South in aiding the globalisation and development of football. Further, the authors use four elemental reference points: the individual, national societies, international relations, humankind. Every chapter dissects the role of each reference point in the evolution of football.
In the timely work, “The European Identity: A Faltering Project” by Jurgen Habermas, we find four principal concepts: Transnational authority, transnational public spheres, a European identity and normativity shaping the book together and yet each of them existing in conceptual isolation.
The need for different kinds of international organizations is the guiding light of the book. The weaknesses of nation states in an increasingly interdependent world society account for the growing need of another kind of world order. The roles of Human Rights in this new order as well as identity are paid tribute to: the sovereign national states that lost much of their autonomous decision making power are operating almost like structures which exclusively implement human rights within their national borders. It is at this point that public spheres come to play and a relation between public spheres and supranational institutions emerge. Habermas claims that the need for a transnational authority can only be attained by the empowerment of transnational public spheres. However, in our time, it is the nation states which are holding the national public spheres trapped within themselves. The main challenge in attaining a transnational public society is the lack of responsiveness of national public spheres to one another.