Bodies Matter: Professional Bodies and Embodiment in Institutional Sport Contexts

Abstract

Bodies are always present in organizations, yet they frequently remain unacknowledged or invisible including in sport organizations and sport management research. We therefore argue for an embodied turn in sport management research. The purpose of this article is to present possible reasons why scholars have rarely paid attention to bodies in sport organizations; to offer arguments why they should do so; and to give suggestions for what scholarship on bodies and embodiment might look like using various theoretical frameworks. Using the topic of diversity as an example, we explore what insights into embodiment and bodily practices the theoretical frameworks of Foucault, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty and Butler have to offer researchers and how these insights may lead to better understandings of organizational processes in sport.

Gendered discourses in coaching high-performance sport

“…Michel (2011Michel ( , 2015 has argued that professionals pass on the theories that form a regime of truth for them to those with whom they work. Similarly, coaches may transmit their notions about gender to their athletes and try to discipline them into those ideas (see also Claringbould et al, 2015;Van Amsterdam et al, 2017). This knowledge, including regimes of truth about gender, can therefore become generative through athletes who later become coaches.…”

Mind the gap: the presence of capital and power in the female athlete–male -coach relationship within elite rowing

“…This suggests that coaches can pass on their notions about gender to their athletes and try to discipline their athletes into those ideas. This knowledge, including regimes of truth about gender, can, therefore, become generative through athletes who later become coaches (Michel, 2011(Michel, , 2015Van Amsterdam, Claringbould, & Knoppers, 2017). Specifically, one of the most important sources of knowledge coaches draw on is their experience as a coach and as a former athlete (see Cushion, Armour, & Jones, 2003;Jacobs, Claringbould, & Knoppers, 2014).…”

Virtual bodies (avatars) and sport exercises: some important thoughts

“…In sport sociology, the idea of embodiment, in this case sporting embodiment, centres on the biological body which provides the link by which we simultaneously perceive the world and connect/anchor ourselves within it, in an ongoing dynamic of interrelations (Allen-Collinson, 2009;Tulle, 2007;Van Amsterdam et al, 2017). Summing up all views, we can ascertain that sporting embodiment refers to the multiplicity of the experiences, which are related to the lived sporting body.…”

“…Studies beyond sport show that the connections between the avatar and the physical body could take place in the same way that people experience various types of physical connections with artificial objects (Ratan & Dawson, 2016), such as the 'rubber hand illusion' (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998) or fake limbs in a virtual environment (Kilteni et al, 2013). Neuroscientific (and phenomenological) evidence indicates that perception and embodiment in a virtual environment are similar to those in a real environment (Slater et al, 2009;Van Amsterdam et al, 2017). By using Hesslow's (2002) arguments we can confirm that users controlling the motions of their sport avatars behind the screen perceive the structure of the virtual fitness place in ways or manners similar to those that construct the physical world, since perceiving through imagination is essentially the same as actually perceiving the virtual fitness place, as perceptual activity is generated by the brain itself rather than by external stimuli.…”