Sports are an integral part of American society. Millions of dollars are spent every year on professional, collegiate, and youth athletics, and participation in and viewing of these sports both alter and reflect how one perceives the world. Beamon and Messer deftly explore sports as a social construction, and more significantly, the large role race and ethnicity play in sports and consequently sports’ influence on modern race relations. This text is ideal for courses on Sport and Society a...

A bracing call to arms for hockey fans, players, and coaches everywhere Those who have been lured by the the sound of skate blades slicing into fresh ice, by the incomparable speed, split-second decisions, and everything-or-nothing attitude of the game know that hockey can seem like its own world. It's all-consuming and exhilarating, boasting its own language and complex morality code. Yet in another light, that tight community can turn insular; the values of teamwork and humility can mani...

In just a few decades, sport has undergone a radical gender transformation. However, Cheryl Cooky and Michael A. Messner suggest that the progress toward gender equity in sports is far from complete. The continuing barriers to full and equal participation for young people, the far lower pay for most elite-level women athletes, and the continuing dearth of fair and equal media coverage all underline how much still has yet to change before we see gender equality in sports.The chapter...

Fair and Foul explores our love of sport, just as it reveals sport’s darker side—the influence of big business, corruption, price gouging, political maneuvering, gender bias, media grandstanding, and more. The sixth edition features a new chapter on mass media and sport, a revised introduction that lays out the two themes of the book with fresh examples, and a significantly revised chapter on college sport that asks whether or not big-time college sports are compatible with higher educatio...

Some of hockey’s fiercest and most passionate players and fans can be found among Canada's First Nations populations, including NHL greats Jordin Tootoo, Jonathan Cheechoo, and Gino Odjick. At first glance the importance of hockey to the country's Aboriginal peoples may seem to indicate assimilation into mainstream society, but Michael A. Robidoux reveals that the game is played and understood very differently in this cultural context. Rather than capitulating to the Euro-Canadian construc...

Previously published as part of HIGHER EDUCATION?A quarter of a million dollars. It's the going tab for four years at most top-tier colleges. But is it worth it?In this provocative work, the renowned sociologist Andrew Hacker and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus make an incisive case that American college athletics—which originally came into the campus as an innocent form of recreation—have overtaken academic pursuits, compromised the moral authority ...

Athletic contests help define what we mean in America by "success." By keeping women from "playing with the boys" on the false assumption that they are inherently inferior, society relegates them to second-class citizens. In this forcefully argued book, Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano show in vivid detail how women have been unfairly excluded from participating in sports on an equal footing with men. Using dozens of powerful examples--girls and women breaking through in football, ice hoc...

In today's culture, sports wield a weight influence; this influence, however, is rarely examined. Similar to the first edition, this second edition of Learning Culture Through Sports provides coaches, educators, parents, and others dealing with students and athletes with an engaging and critical context for probing the sociological basis of this influence. The book's sections each address a particular issue in sport: youth and sport; gender and sexuality; race and ethnicity; sport, media, ...

Everybody involved in sport, from the bleachers to the boardroom, should develop an understanding of ethics. Sport ethics prompt discussion of the central principles and ideals by which we all live our lives, and effective leadership in sport is invariably ethical leadership. This fascinating new introduction to sport ethics outlines key ethical theories in the context of sport as well as the fundamentals of moral reasoning. It explores all the central ethical issues in contemporary sport:...

Donald Sterling. Ray Rice. The Washington Redskins. The Miami Dolphins. NCAA Athletes.These names, among countless others, have blanketed the headlines as the media has brought global attention to several recent sports controversies. Now, Kenneth L. Shropshire, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Director of the Wharton Sports Business Initiative, uses these stories as a prism for exploring the lea...

The Olympics: The Basics is an accessible, contemporary introduction to the Olympic movement and Games. Chapters explain how the Olympics transcend sports, engaging us with a range of contemporary philosophical, social, cultural and political matters, including:peace development and diplomacymanagement and economicscorruption, terror and activismthe rise of human enhancementethics and environmentalism.This book e...

Honorable Mention - 2022 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book AwardSpecial Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide upward mobility opportunities. Kirsten Hextrum documents how white middle-class youth become overrepresented on college teams. Her institutional ethnography of one elite athletic and academic institution includes over 100 hours of interviews with college rowers and track & field athletes. She charts...