On the Need for an Anthropological Approach to Sport

Social relations of power are vital, embedded aspects of all sport. The Olympic credo of "Faster, Higher, Stronger" reflects the inherent ideological embodiment of power in sport. Sport, however, does not occur in a social vacuum, and therefore, who participates, and when, where, and how they participate, are all questions of socially embedded power critical to the study of sport. National states, across the entire ideological gamut, from fascist to Marxist, have tapped into the practices and symbolism of athletes and sport in order to aid in their legitimating discourses (Hoberman 1984). Yet the embedded power of sport is not limited to states and state-level societies, but is relevant to all societies. The relationships between sport and power extend from athletic bodies to social bodies in myriad, complex, intertwined patterns that penetrate and crosscut local specificities. This essay critically assesses recent contributions to the study of sport by suggesting how anthropological approaches to sport can complement existing sociological and historical perspectives within the burgeoning field of sport studies, while also making suggestions for other avenues of enquiry. With reference to four recent scholarly contributions, I will examine two general trends, globalization and sport and nationalism and sport that dominate the study of sport today. I also suggest ways in which these major themes incorporate perspectives on culture and power.     

Development and Validation of a Measure of Living Standards for Older People

Living standards are an effective way to assess socioeconomic status in relation to health but controversy remains about their assessment, particularly for older people. Sen’s capability framework shifts attention from material conditions to opportunities for choice enabled by material resources. To develop this promising approach, this paper reports on the development of a measure of living standards for older people based on Sen’s capability framework. Six living standards domains were established from thematic analysis of 143 interviews with people aged over 65 years in New Zealand. Questionnaire items were developed and tested to assess the extent to which older people had the freedom to pursue these domains. The 73 items were tested for face validity in interviews. Following this, a revised version was posted to 2,000 people aged over 65 years randomly selected from the New Zealand electoral roll and 1,064 completed questionnaires were returned. Item screening for response rates and spread reduced the items to 34. Confirmatory factor analysis of these 34 items suggested that the six theoretical domains were supported. Following model development, 25 items assessing the six domains were selected. Results to date show that this measure of living standards (LS-Cap) is a promising instrument to assess living standards as the freedom to access valued needs.     

The 100 Most Influential Contemporary Social Work Faculty as Assessed by the H-Index

The names of faculty employed by the 76 member social work programs of the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work were retrieved via a web-search. This resulted in a list of 2204 social work faculty. Their individual H-Indices were then obtained, using either the Publish or Perish software, or via manual calculations from Google Scholar. The top 100 most influential contemporary social work faculty were identified, resulting in a listing of individuals who have published relatively large numbers of scholarly works which themselves have been subsequently highly cited. Apart from recognizing these productive individuals, listing them and their home institutions will permit future researchers to examine the causes and correlates of high academic productivity.     

Cooperative Accounts: Avoiding Conflict and Repairing Social Relations

The analytical concept of accounts has long presented sociologists with an excellent tool for the study of talk. Nonetheless, studies of accounts often neglect the fact that cooperation is common when an account for untoward behavior is constructed. Many studies tend to flatten the process of how accounts are created by routinely describing them as being “offered” by offenders and then “evaluated” by reproachers. We assume that accounts are often negotiated between parties as a means of avoiding conflict and preserving a relationship. As such, this paper develops the concept of cooperative accounts that are offered to (or projected upon) offenders as a means of explaining their untoward behavior. While also examining hostile accounts, this paper concentrates on developing the cooperative account in order to investigate more fully Scott and Lyman's (1968) argument that accounts are crucial for managing conflict and maintaining social order. Because offering cooperative accounts to others is a routine social interaction their examination provides an opportunity to reanchor the study of accounts back into the symbolic interactionist tradition.     

Multiple business ownership in the farm sector: assessing the enterprise and employment contributions of farmers in Cambridgeshire

Multiple business ownership has become an important theme within the small firms research literature. While early studies emphasised its role in reducing business risk, more recently portfolio entrepreneurship has been recognised as an important growth strategy, particularly in sectors where economies of scale can be achieved at a relatively low level. Research studies specifically examining multiple business ownership are still scarce, but the parallels between portfolio entrepreneurship in non-farm sectors and farm pluriactivity have been noted. Although pluriactivity has been subject to extensive investigation in recent years, analysis has generally focused on farm-centred diversification, rather than the wider entrepreneurial activities of the farmer. Using a survey of nearly 300 farm owners in Cambridgeshire, this exploratory study analyses the incidence of portfolio entrepreneurship in the farm sector and assesses its contribution to enterprise and employment creation. The results demonstrate that a core of farmers have multiple business interests and that these additional business activities make a substantial contribution to both numbers of enterprises and employment creation. While previous studies of pluriactivity have generally used the farm business as the main unit of analysis, it is argued that including the wider business activities of the farm owner enables a more precise estimation of the total contribution of farmers to rural economic development.     

Estimating the variance of estimated trends in proportions when there is no unique subject identifier

Summary.  Longitudinal population-based surveys are widely used in the health sciences to study patterns of change over time. In many of these data sets unique patient identifiers are not publicly available, making it impossible to link the repeated measures from the same individual directly. This poses a statistical challenge for making inferences about time trends because repeated measures from the same individual are likely to be positively correlated, i.e., although the time trend that is estimated under the naïve assumption of independence is unbiased, an unbiased estimate of the variance cannot be obtained without knowledge of the subject identifiers linking repeated measures over time. We propose a simple method for obtaining a conservative estimate of variability for making inferences about trends in proportions over time, ensuring that the type I error is no greater than the specified level. The method proposed is illustrated by using longitudinal data on diabetes hospitalization proportions in South Carolina.     

Emerging Hispanic English: New dialect formation in the American South

Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries, other regions, including the mid‐Atlantic South, are just experiencing the emergence of permanent Hispanic communities. This situation offers an ideal opportunity to examine the dynamics of new dialect formation in progress, and the extent to which speakers acquire local dialect traits as they learn English as a second language. We focus on the production of the /ai/ diphthong among adolescents in two emerging Hispanic communities, one in an urban and one in a rural context. Though both English and Spanish have the diphthong /ai/, the Southern regional variant of the benchmark local dialect norm is unglided, thus providing a local dialect alternative. The instrumental analysis of /ai/ shows that there is not pervasive accommodation to the local norm by Hispanic speakers learning English. There is, however, gradient, incremental adjustment of the /ai/, and individual speakers who adopt local cultural values may accommodate to the local dialect pattern.