Page 17 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

6 • Sport, Media and Society

Duncan’s (1994: 50) analysis of Shape magazine employed Foucault’s frameworks
to understand the ways that media discourses served to encourage women to defi ne
and discipline their bodies according to normative frameworks of an idealised female
physicality. Foucault’s work, however, can also be used to illuminate the potential for
changing discourses of sporting femininity by pointing to the shifting and confl icting

significations of the female body. Media analysis provides an opportunity to inter-
rogate the coding of bodies and their associations with practices of self-monitoring,
social aspirations and lifestyle choices.

How to Use This Book

This book is about ways of unravelling the connections between sport, media and
society. Our experience of sport is inevitably informed by the sport media, and an
understanding of the way the media constructs meanings around sport and identities
among its audience is central to a critical engagement with sport. As a phenomenon,

however, media sport is forever moving, constantly reconfiguring sport in relation
to changing social contexts and values. Our aim here is to present students and re-
searchers with a conceptual toolkit to begin to unpack the richness of the sport media
in its emergent manifestations. This book will provide, in one place, the analytical
concepts and methodological approaches used in studying the sport media, along
with a demonstration of these approaches applied to original case studies. It avoids
an artifi cial separation of media sport analysis into dominant themes, which can re-

sult in a flattening out of the dynamism of the sport media. Instead, this book en-
courages readers to interact critically with media sport by drawing out the complex
intersections of social issues within a variety of sport media. In doing so, the book
aims to transform the experience of consuming media sport into an analysis of this
fascinating facet of culture.
This book should be read in conjunction with research in the sociology of sport.
While some classic studies have already been discussed, current research from around
the world is published in academic journals such as Sociology of Sport Journal, In-
ternational Review for the Sociology of Sport, Sport and Social Issues Journal and
Sport and Society. Some excellent literature is already available on media sport. For
example, David Rowe’s (2004a) Sport, Culture and the Media: the Unholy Trinity
presents the social context of media sport and discusses issues in media text analysis,
pointing to a range of examples from existing literature. Rod Brookes’s (2002) Repre-
senting Sport and Boyle and Haynes’s (1999) Power Play: Sport, the Media and Pop-
ular Culture introduce a range of issues relating to sport media such as globalisation,
national identity, race and gender. There are several edited collections which bring
together research articles on aspects of media sport, for example, Rowe’s (2004b)
Critical Readings: Sport, Culture and the Media, Blain and Bernstein’s (2002) Sport,
Media, Culture: Global and Local Dimensions, Birrell and McDonald’s (2000)