Is baseball a global sport? America's ‘national pastime’ as global field and international sport

Abstract A myriad of organized sports and physical leisure activities took shape in the nineteenth century and spread quickly from the West to the Rest through imperial and mercantile circuits. Among them, the competitive team spectator sports of soccer, cricket, and baseball were perhaps the most consequential in reach and influence, adopted and adapted in what I have called elsewhere ‘uncanny mimicry’. The differences in the world histories of the three sports are as significant as their commonalities, and in this article I focus on some of the distinctive features of baseball's development in the USA and its move through the Caribbean and the western Pacific regions. Unlike soccer and cricket (and American football), baseball developed outside elite schools; it was fully commercialized and professionalized early on; it never had antagonisms or rivalries with amateur or school forms of the sport; and it never had very strong ideological associations with a ‘character’ ethic. On the other hand, it was quickly ‘nationalized’ as the American pastime, and in that image it was emulated and resisted in the locations in which it took root. The argument is extended through a case study of ‘samurai’ baseball in Japan and its uncanny mimicry.     

The trickle‐down effect of ethical leadership in nonprofit soccer clubs

Nonprofit soccer clubs are currently facing many ethical challenges, such as abuse, doping and match fixing. While research suggests that organizational (board) ethical leadership may be effective to tackle these ethical issues, empirical support in the context of sport remains limited. Drawing on the perceptions of a sample of nonprofit soccer players (n = 438) and coaches (n = 106), we indicate that the coaches play an important mediating role regarding the associations between board ethical leadership and ethical climate. The theoretical underpinnings of ethical leadership—formed by social learning theory and social exchange theory—and the social distance between the board and the players in nonprofit soccer clubs provide support in this regard. In sum, our results demonstrate that the influence of board ethical leadership in nonprofit soccer clubs partly trickles down to the players via coach ethical leadership. Finally, practical implications for nonprofit soccer club management are discussed.     

Talking Up the Game: Football and the Reconstruction of Liberia,West Africa

Most people will accept the contention that sport has an ideological site. Indeed sport might be considered as the broadest cultural denomination in many nations, capable of creating and sustaining a sense of identity and belonging crucial to national integration. Expressions around sport and, in this instance, specifically Association Football (soccer) appeal to individuals supportive of a variety of ideological perspectives. Thus, the pursuit of any understanding of the game has to be sought with reference to culturally specific power relations. The role that football can play in both the construction of national identity and the rehabilitation of the former militia in a war-damaged society is the focus of this ethnographic inquiry. The location is Liberia, West Africa, beginning in 1998, a year after the election that marked the end of almost a decade of civil conflict.     

‘We Have Certainly Saved Ourselves’: Popular Views of Masculinity during the Korean War, 1950–53

This article addresses the ways in which the American popular media, particularly middle-brow magazines, novels, and films, created a gendered interpretation of the Korean War. On the US home front, cultural commentators linked the purported 1950s crisis of masculinity to concerns that “coddled” and “overmothered” American military personnel would lack the manly vigor necessary to prevent South Korea from falling to communist forces. Ultimately, though, most of these observers insisted that in the crucible of war lay an antidote for America’s flagging masculine spirit. The so-called “police action” served as a critical terrain — both real and imagined — for debating masculinity during the Cold War. Although such optimism proved short-lived, this martial vision for boosting manliness resonated in post-war US policy and culture well beyond the three short years of the conflict.     

Identity,beliefs and community: LDS (Mormon) pre‐service secondary teacher views about diversity

Research shows that pre‐service teachers must engage in a self‐examination of identity, attitudes and assumptions concerning such issues as privilege, group membership, religion, gender and language before entering a classroom. However, this is no easy task for students with little experience of living in or learning about diverse communities. Such a state is Utah in the US, a region whose historical roots are rural and—unlike any other American state—whose citizens, political leaders and educators are predominately Euro‐American and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), commonly known as Mormons. While some teacher educators encourage their predominantly LDS secondary pre‐service teachers to utilize critical pedagogy, it becomes clear that students' religious identity comes into conflict with issues associated with race, class, language and gender. The following qualitative case study examines how the theology of the LDS Church informs the identity and educational belief systems of six female, LDS pre‐service secondary educators as they prepare to teach in diverse communities across the US.     

小小男子汉

在北京奥林匹克森林公园，每周末总能看见一群小男孩，身穿专业装备全身心地投入美式橄榄球的训练。接球、投球、冲撞……一招一式学得有模有样。     

Patterns of economic attainment of foreign-born male workers in the United States

In 1980, only 3% of the US population was at least partly indigenous. Most of the present population of the US, except for the American Indians, Eskimos, Aleutian Islanders, and Hawaiians, has its ancestral roots outside of the US. The US is therefore a nation of immigrants. Although a nation of immigrants, the ancestral origins of most Americans are in the countries of Europe. In recent decades, however, the composition of the immigration stream to the US has changed dramatically with respect to origin. Most immigrants now hail from Asia and Latin America; Europe is no longer the main embarkation point. Given these recent changes in the points of origin of immigrants, the author investigated the economic attainment patterns and their determinants of the foreign-born male immigrant population in the US. The economic attainment patterns of males born in 92 countries are examined and compared among themselves, as well as among the principal US-born groups of Anglos, Afro-American, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians. For all foreign-born groups, the article examines the degree to which such individual-level factors as educational attainment, labor market experience, and other factors account for their variation in economic attainment. It is concluded that although microlevel characteristics are not the complete answer, they help explain the variations in earnings among most foreign-born populations.     

Breaking the Silence: Lesbian Fans, the Internet, and the Sexual Politics of Women's Sport

Women who play sports are often conflated as lesbian. Thus, athletes, coaches, and administrators in women's sport are constrained to never speak of the lesbians who play and work in sport. The injunction against speech keeps lesbians in the closet and controls all women in sport who must constantly monitor their appearance, behavior, and speech to ensure that they project an appropriately heterosexual image. The code of silence is, typically, justified by the assertion that fans and sponsors would abandon women's sport if lesbian participants were vocal and/or visible. Traditional media support the injunction to silence. They rarely speak of lesbians, and when they do, they typically marginalize and sensationalize lesbian participants. The authors analyze two threads of discussion on an Internet newsgroup devoted to women's basketball. The results indicate that the Internet offers fans a chance to challenge the code of silence and that contributors to this newsgroup are supportive of lesbians in sport.     

Immigration reform,American style

This article reviews the background of the proposed Immigration and Reform Act (also known as the Simpson-Mazzoli bill), which seeks to overhaul US immigration law for the first time since 1952. This bill is consistent with President Reagan's hard line on border enforcement and mandates stiff penalties for those who transport illegal aliens for commercial advantage or private profit. It further offers Mexico preferential treatment in immigration (40,000 additional visas/year). It includes an amnesty program to offer legal status to qualified illegal residents. The bill directs the President to develop a secure national worker identification system and would create a large-scale temporary foreign agricultural program for perishable commodities. Agricultural workers' families would not be eligible to accompany them unless they also obtain temporary visas. Foreign temporary workers, employable only in cases where local domestic workers are not available, must be provided with wages and working conditions equal to those prevailing among domestic workers. Stiff penalties are stipulated for employers who fail to abide with the terms of the program. In the author's opinion, this bill fails to appreciate the global character of international migration and its complexity. It relects a fundamental ambivalence about a strictly controlled main gate versus a back door approach to immigration as well as the conflicting images of the US as a nation of immigrants versus the historical reality of American nativism and xenophobia. Needed are comprehensive initiatives whose mutually reinforcing components can address the multiple dimensions of the immigration problem within a framework that does not ignore workers who have contributed to the economic well-being of the US, regardless of their legal status.     

Yellow bodies,black sweat: Yao Ming,Ichiro Suzuki,and global sport

This article focuses on the relationship between Asian and Black athletes, global multiculturalism, and sport internationalism. Ichiro Suzuki and Yao Ming represent in clear ways the figuration of the Asian male body as both cultural phenomena and transnational commodity. This article describes the marked turn from the Asian male body as an unattractive representative for marketing commodity exchanges to an imported spectacle reproducing National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball transnational capital. However, it does not simply offer a conventional study of the political economy involved in the global expansion of popular sports. Rather, it attempts to illustrate how Asian men in US sports presuppose and indeed attempt to produce Asian masculinity through inverting the bodily emasculation of Asian American men. Throughout this article, I detail the ways in which popular sports has been racialized as a “Black” space of colonial fantasy and fears, and how Asian male athletes break down the fixity of this raciological thinking. The Black male body came to dominate celebrity and hero worship, an identificatory process that Norman Mailer once coined as “the white negro” or to use a famous slogan from a popular sports drink: Everyone wants to “Be Like Mike.” This article describes the ‘fetishization” of the Black male body and how representations of Ichiro and Yao subvert the fixity of Afro-Asian racial hierarchy.     

Falling through the cracks: The paradox of post-release services for unaccompanied child migrants

Immigrant children who enter the United States unaccompanied by a parent or guardian and without legal status are defined by the US legal system as unaccompanied alien children (UAC). Limited data from advocacy organizations has found that UAC are leaving their countries of origin because of threats of violence and privation, but virtually no research examines how they integrate into their communities and families once they settle in the US. Drawing on interview data with UAC and case studies of four programs contracted to provide services for them, this exploratory study explores UAC's unique barriers to integration and the effectiveness of these programs to help them adapt. Findings emphasize the impact of geography and the uneven safety net in immigrant new destinations, such as suburbs and the American southeast. Implications for social work practitioners and policymakers are discussed.     

Managerial Hostility and Attitudes Towards Unions: A Canada-US Comparison

We use a cross-country survey of attitudes toward work and unions, which includes a sample of managers in both the US and Canada, to explore whether there is greater attitudinal hostility to unions in the U.S. Our estimates indicate that American manager’s attitudes towards unions are, perhaps surprisingly, less hostile than those of Canadian managers. We explain this first finding by the differential effect of perceived union power, which is greater in Canada than the US and which is correlated negatively with union approval. We also find that US managers are less likely to use extreme methods to oppose union organizing drives, implying that the lower union rates in the US as compared to Canada are not likely the result of greater negativity towards unions themselves but rather some other factor or combination of factors. The implication is that if Canadian managers faced the same labor relations playing field as their US counterparts, they would likely find it easier to thwart union certification drives as well. Alternatively stated, Canadian-style labor relations reforms (such as card-check systems or quicker certification votes) could perhaps tip the balance in favor of unions when organizing in the US.     

Making Sense of Muscle: The Body Experiences of Collegiate Women Athletes*

Using ethnographic research, this paper explores the experiences of elite women athletes on a Division‐I college soccer team. I draw on existing literature in the sociology of sport, sociology of the body, and interactionism to inform my analysis. With this approach, I illustrate the complicated relationship women athletes have with their bodies in relation to physical competition and dominant notions of femininity today. Key reference groups influenced the players’ self‐perceptions and encouraged the women to closely monitor their own appearances and actions. While undoubtedly affected by these inter‐actions as well as their place in the gender hierarchy, many women athletes subtly resisted notions of idealized bodies and constructed their own meanings about their bodies and experiences. Investigating the day‐to‐day body awareness and negotiations of women athletes reveals the gendered nuances of sport and the complicated relationship between cultural ideals and female embodiment.     

Theorizing the hemisphere Inter-Americas work at the intersection of American,Canadian, and Latin American studies

Abstract

This article advocates an 'inter-Americas studies' perspective that bridges the institutionalized fields of American, Canadian, and Latin American studies, which have traditionally provided separate means for studying the hemisphere. Since they encompass comparative orientations, Canadian and Latin American studies in particular have the potential to move existing work on the hemisphere beyond the currently dominant post-national assumptions of American studies. Our discussion of Canadian and Latin American studies emphasizes the different usage and degree of importance ascribed to critical terms like ethnicity, post-coloniality, post-nationality, and globalization. We argue that inter-Americas studies scholars will need to pay special attention to historically divergent forms of nation-state formation and intellectual analyses of nationalism in the Americas to arrive at more nuanced theories of continuing US domination in the hemisphere under conditions of globalization.     

Performing blackness,forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film1

The ideological and indexical aspects of linguistic representation have been extensively examined in contemporary sociolinguistics both through investigations of language crossing in everyday interaction and through analyses of mediatized linguistic performances. Less well understood are the indexical meanings achieved when language crossing itself becomes the focus of linguistic representation. One prominent instance of this phenomenon is the use of African American English by European American actors in Hollywood films as part of what is argued to be a complex language‐based form of blackface minstrelsy. As mock language, linguistic minstrelsy in such films involves sociolinguistic processes of deauthentication, maximizing of intertextual gaps, and indexical regimentation of the performed language, but unlike earlier forms of minstrelsy these performances are typically problematized within the films as transgressions of the ideology of racial essentialism. In the two films analyzed in detail in the article, linguistic minstrelsy is shown both to reproduce and to undermine the symbolic dominance of hegemonic white masculinity.     

Anti‐American Resistance in Latin America: An Issue of Sovereignty,Militarization, and Neoliberalism

In recent years, Latin America has experienced a shift toward the left, bringing attention to the significance of US‐Latin America relations and the history of resistance that these dynamics have engendered. While the voices and faces of these resistance movements may be perceived as new, their roots date back to the turn of the 20th century. The emergence of an anti‐American narrative from diverse sectors in Latin America as part of a response to US policies – political, military, and economic – provides an opportunity for reflection on this history. By examining US policy towards Latin America, and the emerging forms of resistance from local sectors in response to policies on sovereignty, militarism, and neoliberalism, we can better situate the ‘anti‐American’ resistance movements of today.     

Preliminary observations on globalisation and the migration of sport labour

Focusing on sport labour migration, several broader issues regarding labour migration and globalisation are highlighted. The observations made, and the connections drawn, will be somewhat preliminary in nature. Several dimensions and issues of sport labour migration and globalisation are examined. A range of sports in different societies and across continents are also considered. This migration must be viewed as part of other global cultural flows. Discussion of these flows precedes the case study that focuses on the role of, and the resistance to, American sport labour migrants in the commodification of English basketball over the past two decades, the paper concludes by drawing together the strands of sport migration and global sport development.     

American-British Sporting Rivalries and the Making of the Global Sports Industry

Abstract

This article examines a key aspect of American sports history within a transnational context. Whilst the internal histories of American sport are exceedingly rich and voluminous, our general understanding of the nation’s contribution to the international, global scene is less well-known. The postcolonial rivalries between American and British sports communities fuelled the development of what became open, international cup competitions in such sports as tennis and golf which bolstered an emerging global industry in the first half of the twentieth century. The transnational process of initial American imitation and absorption of British models have been well documented within the scholarly literature and debates in American Studies for decades; however, the gradual reversal of this imitative process to a more reciprocal relationship has received far less attention (especially within sports history). The authors show how the Davis Cup competition is an example of the way in which Americans indigenised a cultural sporting import, namely tennis; created a nationalistic, international sporting competition; and effectively exported it back to Britain within the wider context of a burgeoning, imperial rivalry on the world stage between these two, rival sporting nations. This process not only expanded the worldwide consumption of sport but spreads a spirit of cultural emulation within twentieth-century global consumer culture. This transnational perspective also illuminates the thorough de-provincialising of the notion of “American Exceptionalism” within the field. When, for example, the respective imperial histories of the two nations are considered comparatively, the “American” story does not look so “exceptional” after all. Though American exceptionalism adapted some British sports to suit American sensibilities, the sporting cultures of the two nations and within their zones of influence remained similar in many respects. This was particularly true in amateur sports such as tennis, rowing and track and field (athletics to the Brits) as well as in the sport of golf. In the twentieth century, many sports adapted as focus shifted from nationalism and national worth towards professionalism and international spectacle.