Sport, Power, and Ideology

Power and Resistance in Sport

Sport isn’t simply made from above and delivered to us… We play a role in creating what it is, what it means, and what it does

YOU - as both consumers and future producers of sports media - have a uniquely special role to play in defining what sport can be

Theories of Power

Dimensions of power

1. Coercion

   • A gets B to do something B would not otherwise do

   • Conflict, force, or threat is often observable

2. Consent

   • A creates, limits, or shapes the conditions of the decision being considered by B

   • Involved agenda setting (the power to shape what is within the boundaries of discussion)

   • Conflict/force often stifled before it even arises

Hegemony

Something is hegemonic if it is unquestioned, taken for granted, viewed as being natural or normal: Simply the “way things are and should be”

When something has a hegemony, the social forces and conflicts that created it are rarely questioned or understood

Ideology

Ideology = the ways that we are conditioned to understand the world

Louis Althusser’s Notion of Repressive State Apparatus (RSAs)

• Army, police, law, prison system → A dominant political national order created, upheld, and reinforced through physical force and/or violence

Hard Power → Coercive Politics

Soft Power → Consensus Politics

Military/Police as RSA → The use (or threat) of violence to impose views and values of dominant political order

Constructing Political Consent

Political system: Types and structures of governance and rule

Political Ideology: Values, beliefs, and ideas related to the political system

Hegemony: Winning of the masses consent to/support of normalizing the political system

• Cultural Osmosis: The - often unrecognized - learning of DOMINANT political STRUCTURES AND VALUES, simply by EXISTING within a SOCIETY

Mass Media is an important ISA structured by (and thus reinforcing) dominant views and values, which contributes to the manufacturing of consent (support) for the dominant political order

• “The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society”

News, Pop Culture: Manufacturing Consent for the Dominant Social Order?

Louis Althusser’s Notion of IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS (ISAs)

• Politics, Education, Mass Media, Religion, Sport → Institutions which express and normalize the ideology (values and beliefs) of the dominant political order

Sport as ISA: Reproducing U.S. Political Status Quo

• A Site for Expressing and Normalizing: U.S. Democratic System

• A Site for Expressing and Normalizing: U.S. Individualism and Work Ethic

• A Site for Expressing and Normalizing: U.S. Neoliberal Capitalism

It is through ideology that people perceive themselves, their world, and society, and their place within it.

Sports and/as Politics

Sport is always, and always has been unavoidably political

Sport is, and has never been, “just a game”

What do we define as “political”?

• Certainly, the past decade has seen a rise in the explicit insertion of politics into sports, and sports into politics

• However, this week we are more interested in the subtle and implicit ways that sport is innately political: structured to communicate and reproduce certain political ideologies

Sport: Expressing and Reproducing

• State Communism

• State Capitalism

Why would the US be any different?

• Expressing and reproducing neoliberal democracy

The Political Utility of Sport

“Most presidents wrap themselves in the flag and the patriotic glow and uplifting feeling that sports provides.”

• Male Politicians using sport/fandom to appeal to the masses: positioning themselves as a “regular guy”

Sport as a Political Metaphor: Football and Soft America

Make Football (America) Great Again

• “Football has become soft like our country has become soft”

  • Football → Too much league/referee/intervention/regulation

  • America → Too much government intervention/regulation

The “Culture Wars” over Transgender Athletes

Bottom-up Politics

Sport is a political battleground

• While many political usages of sport occur from the top-down, other political usages (mostly progressive and resistive) come from the bottom-up (fans, athletes, sport, workers, community members)

Protesting the Existing Power Structures in and Through Sport

• USWNT Pay Gap Politics

• Alejandro Bedoya’s Gun Violence Protest

• Portland Soccer’s Anti-Fascist Politics

• Know Your Rights Camp: Sport and Community Education’

So What?

Whether we realize it or not, we passively (or actively) hold, express, and interpret the world through the political ideologies we are exposed to… some of which are communicated to us through sport, and some of which we communicate through sport

• You may not engage politics, but politics will engage you

Neoliberalism: The West’s Hidden Ideology

Neoliberalism: A Hidden Politics?

• “Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?”

1. Economic Project

   • Primary of corporations

   • Individuals primary role is to consume

   • Free market solves all problems

2. Political project

   • Limited government

   • Government should support rather than regulate business

   • Eliminate social safety net, reward “winners” and punish “losers”

3. Social Project

   • Meritocracy

   • Rugged “bootstraps” individualism

Basic definition of Neoliberalism:

A political philosophy for governing societies and managing economies, based on the belief that:

• The influence/interference of government on all aspects of life should be kept to a minimum

• Societies growth, development, and problems are best left for free market, corporate, and privatized forces and institutions to solve

• The primary role of the government is to create policies and conditions through which for-profit, private corporations can thrive

According to Neoliberalism…

• Private and for-profit institutions (corporations) are the engines of the neoliberal capitalist economy

• The assumption is that economic profit and growth “trickles down” from corporations to rest of society

• What benefits the “individual” should be prioritized over what benefits the “collective”

Social Welfare Politics → Primary role of government to support/protect citizens from the potentially exploitative influences of capitalism

Neoliberal Politics → Primary role of government to support/protect business interests in order for capitalism to thrive

The Neoliberalized Individual Tax Code → The income tax rate for the top 1% earners

Neoliberalism: Economic Project

Improve the capital supply at top of economic pyramid creates wealth that (theoretically) trickles down to the rest of the population

• Corporate and individual tax breaks

• Corporate subsidies

Neoliberalism: Social Project

• Neoliberalism is based on the premise that society is a meritocracy

  • In a meritocracy, it is thought that each person’s position on the socioeconomic ladder is a direct result of their merit (their skills, talent, choices, and hard work)

Yet, the scholarly consensus is clear: Society is not a meritocracy

• Although it is comforting and inspirational to believe that society is organized by hard work, the evidence is clear the meritocracy is a myth

• From our literal birth, we enter into a society that is embedded with inequalities

• These inequalities lead to advantages for people atop the socioeconomic ladder, and disadvantage for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder

• The choices we make are important, but so are the social structures that determine the choices we are presented it with

Neoliberalism’s ideology of competitive individualism:

• Neoliberalism argues that social context is irrelevant

• Individual self-interest, responsibility, and competitive drive becomes the primary determinant of social and economic advancement

Neoliberalism’s Individualism: The Argument

“there is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first'.”

Ideal or not, meritocracy and competitive individualism have long been central aspects of American ideology

• The American Dream: The ideal that every individual US citizen has an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper if they simply work hard enough

American neoliberalism advances/normalizes that importance of: Individual moral responsibility and personal culpability

• Culpability: the blame for a fault or wrongdoing

The idealized neoliberal subject is one who embodies the following values:

• Competitive

• Tough

• Resilient

• Self-Reliant

• Win-at-all-costs

An “entrepreneur of the self”

According to neoliberal ideology, individual success is attributable to personal choices

In other words, neoliberalism has no sociological imagination

Individual lives are removed from their social context, which implies that society is an equal playing field

Neoliberalism and meritocracy does not acknowledge any impact of disparities based on:

• Class

• Race

• Gender

• Sexuality

• Disability

• Nationality

Society being a meritocracy would imply that…

• The richest and most powerful people in the world are the most talented and qualified people in the world

• Talk Tuah would ascend to the #1 podcast in America because it is the best podcast in America

• LiAngelo Ball was asked to perform “Tweaker” during the Commanders-Lions game because it is the highest quality (and most deserving) song

Example of the Myth of Meritocracy: NFL Coaching Hires

• Rather than pure “merit” coaches are predominantly hired through the “good old boy” network

• Increasingly, coaching hires are being made based on who shares the same agent

The rugged individualist assumption of neoliberalism claims that we are:

• Post-race

• Post-class

• Post-gender

They are not considered to have any impact on people’s lives, or are simply cast off as “excuses”

Ideologies in Media-Sport

1. Sport implicitly reflects, and reinforces, the values of neoliberalism

2. Sport is one of the venues through which the values of neoliberalism are presented to us as “common-sense”

3. Sport is also one of the venues through which neoliberalism is contested and resisted

Sport, Ideologies, and Urban Industrial Capitalism

• Competition

• Profit

• Discipline

• Patrician Benevolence

Mediasport as ISA

• Private, For-Profit Corporations dominate, structure, and define mediasport

Mediasport and the Core Values of the U.S. Nation

• Democracy

• Freedom

• Individualism

• Neoliberal Capitalism

Agree with them or not… Sport implicity reproduces the ideologies and dominance of the U.S.’ Constitutional representative political system

The State Capitalist Olympians

• State-funded athletes

The Social Democratic Olympians

• Largely State and publicly funded athletes

The neoliberal olympians

• Private and corporate funded athletes (no direct state funding)

As such, corporate sport as a normalizing agent of the prevailing neoliberal consensus…it subtly naturalizers and legitimizes neoliberal hegemony

Most of sports linkages with politics are not orchestrated or contrived… but some are:

• Post 9/11 and militarized national politics/state

Sporting Individualism and Meritocracy

Sport, even team sports, represent a meritocratic site where we are - seemingly - witnessing the embodiment of individual competitiveness, ability, and/or determination

The common belief that sport is a “level playing field” leads us to ignore all the off-the-field factors that influence what happens on the field

High profile sporting figures thuse embody and normalize neoliberal competitive individualism

• Sport celebrities and Rugged Individualism: Demonstrating the hardwork and perseverance needed to realize the opportunities afforded within neoliberal American sport/society

• Celebrating the rags to riches story

Our sporting celebrities, the stories we celebrate about them, and the myths we create about them are often underpinned by the following (neoliberal) values

• Competitive

• Tough

• Resilient

• Self-reliant

• Win-at-all-costs

As such, they educate us about the role of the individual in a meritocracy

Popular engagement with sports and sports media (as spectator/viewer/consumer) subconsciously yet effectively reproduces the: neoliberal hegemony

Evaluating Neoliberalism

Is Neoliberalism working politically? Culturally? Economically?

• Stock market growth

• Concentration of Wealth

• Differential Income Gains

• Stagnating Average Wages

• Increased Poverty Rates

Sport as a sit for counter-hegemonic anti-neoliberal resistance and opposition

• Because sport is one of those “meaningless things we take seriously” … it can be - and has been - used to expose and highlight some “serious things we render meaningless”

Recap

So What?

Whether we realize it or not, we passively (or actively) hold, express, and interpret the world through the political ideologies we are exposed to… some of which are communicated to us through sport, and some of which we communicate through sport

• You may not engage in politics, but politics will engage you

Power & Resistance in Sport

Sport isn’t simply made from above and delivered to us… we play a role in creating what it is, what it means, and what it does

YOU - as both consumers and future producers of sports media - have a uniquely special role to play in defining what sport can be