Page 163 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

152 • Sport, Media and Society

the purview of the weak. De Certeau’s (1984: 25) example of la perruque brings
together the joyful trickery of the tactic and its manipulation of time over place.
The French term la perruque translates literally as ‘the wig’ and refers to employ-
ees doing their own work on the company’s time, sending personal email on the

company computer, checking the latest score or booking a flight on the Internet. De
Certeau observed that the worker engaging in la perruque is not stealing anything of
material value, but instead is diverting time towards his or her freedom and creativ-

ity and away from profit. This illicit work is done in the full glare of the disciplinary
mechanisms of the workplace (although occasionally, employers attempt strategies
to stop it, like banning access to certain Internet sites) and in the official place of

employment. Tactics, therefore, involve waiting for propitious moments to arrive,
when the chance can be taken to recreate the situation to one’s own advantage.

The Visual Culture of the Sport Stadium

Sport stadia represent a space for observing the strategies associated with providing
a desirable experience to a large number of consumers and the tactics of those who
engage with the space. The sport geographer Bale (1994: 67) argued that the ratio-
nalisation at the heart of much sport architecture expressed the principles of modern-
ism: ‘modern space is objective space . . . nowhere more apparent that in sportscape’.
Boundaries are everywhere in sport space—demarcating space between sport and
nonsport spaces. The enclosure of the field of play by straight lines separating the

playing space from the spectators was a marker of the emergence of modern sport.
Spatiality is inherent to sport. The distinction between sport and other recreational
activity is to be found in the spatial designation of where sport can take place, the re-
strictions on behaviour and circumstances, the exact measurement of distance. Bale
(1994) suggested that there were parallels between Foucault’s (1979) account of the
disciplinary architecture of the prison and the way power and control are inscribed
into the spatial segmentation of the modern stadium. Bale (1994) argued that the
increasing spatial rationalisation of sport can be seen in the changing architecture
of the baseball stadium. Modern ballpark design typically employs geometric stan-
dardisation, compared to classic asymmetrical stadiums such as Fenway Park.

A greater degree of segmentation of spectators, not just from the field of play,
but from each other, has also occurred during the development of the stadium. Bale
(1994: 82) referred to this as the ‘increasing territorialisation of the spectating areas

of sports grounds’ resulting in the confinement of individuals to specific spaces, sep-

arated from each other. The placing of each person in a seat and subjecting the person
to close-circuit television has led to the ‘stadium analogue to Foucault’s panopticon’,
in Bale’s (1994: 83) terms. Bale cites the historical use of stadia as secure places of
containment (e.g. the Parisian Vélodrome d’Hiver was used to incarcerate Jews in
1942) as testament to their effectiveness in the discipline of society.