Page 236 - Sport Culture and the Media

GLOSSARY || 217

Myth: wide-ranging cultural beliefs and meanings that are usually so familiar that
they appear to be natural, universal and eternal elements of society. Sport, which
generates strong emotions, antagonisms, hierarchies and romantic ideals, is par-
ticularly prone to be mythologized.
Narrative: the outcome of the organization (or narrativization) of events which might be
turned into a ‘story’, involving a plot, scenes, characters, narrators, and so on.
Neo-Fordism: see Fordism.
Political economy: an analytical approach that links socio-economic power (for
example, ownership of a major newspaper chain) with politico-cultural power
(such as the promotion of conservative values through the owner’s newspapers or
the shaping of newspaper stories by commercial rather than cultural or ethical
considerations). The master concepts in political economy are class and class con-
flict, although there is often substantial departure from elements of Marxism that
have often underpinned it (such as the inevitability of a proletarian revolution).

Post-Fordism: see Fordism.
Postmodernity: logically, the ‘condition’ that has superseded modernity, the rather
imprecise term for societies that have undergone the process of modernization
(which includes the development of industries and markets; political institutions
that represent the citizenry; tolerance of dissenting opinion and different values,
and so on), usually on the basis of a general belief in ‘progress’. Postmodernity
arrives after modernity has become ‘exhausted’ or begins to disintegrate under the
weight of its own contradictions, which include the accelerating pace of global
economic change, the fragmentation of social experience and identity, and a loss
of faith in ‘grand narratives’ (like socialism, free enterprise and technological
liberation). The more restricted terms modernist and postmodernist are applied to
the cultural trends and texts (see below) of their respective epochs, although there is
disagreement over the extent to which they might co-exist, and also over how they
may reflect or affect the entire condition of society.
Sign: see text.
Sport: recreational and professional competitive, rule-governed physical activity. While
physical play and game contests have clearly existed in many societies and epochs,
sport of a regular and organized kind is the product of a modernist (see above)
social institution with its origins in Victorian England.
Sub-genre: see genre.
Text: the outcome of a specific combination of elements (signs) which takes on or
produces meanings (through the process of signification) governed by systematic
rules (codes). The concept of text was once dominated by the written form, but
it is now common to describe and analyse a wide variety of visual, musical and
other textual forms. References to other texts or relations between texts are known
as inter-textual.