'After the Dust Settles’: Foucauldian Narratives of Retired Athletes’ ‘Re-orientation’ to Exercise

One aspect of sports retirement that has been overlooked until recently is the manner in which retired athletes relate to, and seek to redefine, the meaning of exercise in their post-sport lives. In this article, three Foucauldian scholars present and analyze a series of vignettes concerning their own sense-making and meaning-making about exercise following their long-term involvement in high-performance soccer (authors one and two) and distance running (author three). In doing so, this paper aims to underline the problematic legacy of high-performance sport for retiring athletes’ relationship to movement and exercise, and to highlight how social theory, and Foucauldian theorization in particular, can serve to open new spaces and possibilities for thinking about sports retirement

Learning to problematise ‘the way things are’ when coaching female athletes: 135‘Gender effective coaching’ in sport

On 23 January 2018 former Manchester United, Everton and England player Philip Neville was appointed as the England Women’s national football team Head Coach. It is not only the physical make up of women that has been measured and categorised by sport scientists and therefore ‘known’ by everyone else; indeed, the psychological characteristics of females have also been identified as different to those of their male counterparts. Clearly the cumulative effect of the large body of sports research has significant implications for coaching women – namely that it reinforces and solidifies even, the general belief that female bodies cannot be exposed to and are simply not capable of completing the same training practices as male bodies. Established and contemporary research that has focused on the social context of women’s sport has explored how the ‘different nature of women’ continues to be reinforced in sports settings

Examining the discursive production and deployment of diversity and inclusion in a UK-wide outdoor organisation

Linda Allin - ORCID: 0000-0002-8101-6631 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8101-6631This study draws on a Foucauldian lens to examine how diversity and inclusion are produced, understood, experienced, and managed within the context of a UK wide outdoor non-profit organisation that recently began steps to increase the diversity of its workforce. Qualitative semi‐structured interviews were undertaken with 16 adult members of staff (8 male and 8 female), from different levels, roles and leadership positions, and across different locations. Analysis highlighted tensions between historical and cultural legacies of exclusion in the outdoors and diversity and inclusion organisational values and practices. It also highlighted the privileging of certain discursive articulations, rationalities, and diversity management practices over others. These included the need for workforce diversity to better represent the client base, leading to a focus on front-facing staff and instructors, and a project-based approach. Findings suggested there may be a generational shift in talking about diversity and inclusion within the outdoor sector, but alternative voices are not yet powerful enough to provoke meaningful and sustainable change. We propose a critical perspective to challenge unproblematized discourses of progress and call for diversity and inclusion to be embedded within core organisational cultures and working practices to avoid it slipping down the ladder of competing organisational priorities.https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2023.226453143pubpub

‘Lines of Flight or Tethered Wings?’ A Deleuzian Analysis of Women-specific Adventure Skills Courses in the United Kingdom

In this paper we examine women-specific adventure sport skills training courses in the UK utilising a feminist new materialist approach. Drawing on Deleuze & Guattari’s (1987) concepts of ‘assemblage’. ‘lines of territorialisation’ and ‘lines of flight’, we apply a new lens to ask: what type(s) of material-discursive assemblages are produced through human and non-human, discursive and non-discursive intra-actions on women-specific adventure sport skills courses? To what extent do these courses enable participants to engage with an alternative praxis and ethics and to think, feel, practice, and become otherwise? Our Deleuzian reading showed that the affective capacity of these courses is currently limited by dominant understandings of these courses as bridges to the real outdoors and as primarily designed for women who lack the confidence to participate in mixed-gender environments. However, these courses also enabled productive lines of flight and alternative understandings and practices related to the self, the body, others, material objects, learning, movement, and physical activity to emerge. These were both characterised and supported by less instrumental and hierarchical flows of relations and an openness to not knowing

Beat the Game: A Foucauldian Exploration of Coaching Differently in an Elite Rugby Academy

Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of game-centred approaches in coaching contexts, this study explored the impact of a unique problem-based learning (PBL) informed academy-wide coaching approach to athlete learning and development known as Beat the Game within a top-level rugby union professional club. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ([1977]. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage) disciplinary framework, we specifically sought to critically examine whether, to what extent, and how a PBL informed academy-wide coaching approach challenges the dominant disciplinary logic of elite sport. Our data, based on observations and semi-structured interviews with three academy coaches and sixteen junior and senior academy players, showed a definitive loosening of disciplinary aspects in both training and game environments accompanied by a shift towards a less leader-centric, linear, and hierarchical understanding of leadership and decision-making. Despite these promising shifts, the application of a PBL-informed coaching approach within this elite development context also presented many challenges, not the least of which resulted from the non-alignment of academy and first team coaching approaches. Our analysis, therefore, indicated the need for more research which focuses on the short-term and long-term impact that such disconnects have on continued progression, performance, physical and mental wellbeing, and job satisfaction and longevity especially given the growing popularity of non-linear pedagogies in youth sporting contexts

Understanding Effective Coaching: A Foucauldian Reading of Current Coach Education Frameworks

Drawing on a modified version of Foucault’s (1972) analysis of discursive formations, we selected key coach education texts in Canada to examine what discourses currently shape effective coaching in Canada in order to detect what choices Canadian coaches have to know about “being an effective coach.” We then compared the most salient aspects of our reading to the International Sport Coaching Framework. Our Foucauldian reading of the two Canadian coach education websites showed that the present set of choices for coaches to practice “effectively” is narrow and that correspondingly the potential for change and innovation is limited in scope. Our comparison with the International Sport Coaching Framework, however, showed more promise as we found that its focus on the development of coach competences allowed for different coaching knowledges and coaching aims than a narrow focus on performance and results. We then conclude this Insights Paper by offering some comments on the implications of our Foucauldian reading as well as some suggestions to address our concerns about the dominance of certain knowledges and the various effects of this dominance for athletes, coaches, coach development and the coaching profession at large

“Good Athletes Have Fun”: a Foucauldian reading of university coaches’ uses of fun

Fun is deeply ingrained in the ways we talk about and understand sport: Having fun is what makes sport positive and healthy. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective, we problematize how fun, a psychological construct, informs coaches’ practices. Interviews with 10 varsity coaches from a Canadian university indicated that the coaches used fun to overcome the ‘grind’ of physical skill training. In addition, fun was used to develop and naturalize a need for athletes’ positive psychological traits and skills. In their training contexts, thus, the coaches clearly employed fun to reinforce their use of a number of dominant disciplinary training practices. As a result, instead of operating as a positive force for athlete engagement, the incorporation of fun further legitimized and perpetuated coaches’ ‘normal’ training practices