0000000000016612
AUTHOR
Ramón Llopis-goig
Sports participation and cultural trends. Running as a reflection of individualisation and post-materialism processes in Spanish society
AbstractThis article examines the relationship between cultural change processes and the practice of running. The empirical basis is the national survey on Spanish sport habits carried out in 2005. Specifically, the subsamples of runners (n = 343) and other sport modalities (n = 2,687) were used. The study reveals that runners are characterised by more post-materialist and individualist tendencies than the rest of the participants. The results suggest the existence of a close relationship between the predominant cultural orientations and certain types of sport activity.
Racism, Xenophobia and Intolerance
Unlike what is usually assumed, racism is neither a phenomenon of the past nor exclusive to other latitudes. As Wieviorka points out (2009, p. 15), today there has been a surprising return of racism, even in societies that could be expected to be ridding themselves of it. Until the 1960s, the outlook clearly seemed optimistic, as the prevailing idea was that political and economic progress would end up burying phenomena of this type. This hypothesis, however, was soon revealed to be overly optimistic. Racism currently exists in European societies, and it is one of the great challenges of their present and future. Therefore, regardless of future social evolution, it is likely that European s…
Sports, morality and body: the voices of sportswomen under Franco's dictatorship
The aim of this research is to study sportswomen’s perceptions and experiences of women’s sport in Francoist Spain (1939–1975). The main objective is to analyse the social, moral and aesthetic elements that are present in the experience of these athletes. This study was carried out with an intentional sample of 24 women from Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Basque Country, Catalonia and Valencia. They were interviewed by a network of researchers from six universities. Outstanding results show the existence of social limitations to start sports practice (particularly in the post-war period); the importance of sport as a character-building aspect; sport’s remarkable influence on their body self-c…
A Growing Sector After the Impact of the Great Recession in Spain
In Spain, fitness has developed into a sector that offers a series of services associated with an active and healthy lifestyle for the body transformation, recreation and physical exercise of its users. This chapter examines the evolution of fitness in Spain parallel to the changes in the population’s sports habits. The study examines the popularity of fitness and its position in the Spanish sports system and the organisational and economic characteristics of the sector (main operators, types of gyms, activities offered, infrastructures, employment, membership fees, revenues), as well as the sociodemographic profile of the practitioners. To do so, a large number of studies and reports carri…
Football clubs ownership and management. The fans perspective. [Propiedad y gestión de los clubes de fútbol. La perspectiva de los aficionados].
Two decades after the entry into force of the law that stimulated the conversion of the football clubs into public limited sports companies (Sport Law of 1990), this article presents an investigation on the perceptions that the fans have of its configuration and functioning. The changes that have taken place in the ownership and management of the clubs are examined from the point of view of the fans, as well as the consequences that these changes have had in their relation with the clubs. Following the presentation of the process that led to the transformation of the Spanish clubs of football in public limited sports companies, the main results of a qualitative research with 25 football fan…
La creación de peñas de mujeres: ¿Un desafio a la configuración del sistema sexo/género en el futbol espanol?
Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación sobre las peñas de mujeres en el fútbol español. Teniendo en cuenta el ethos o carácter masculino que tradicionalmente ha caracterizado a este deporte, el estudio de las peñas de mujeres encierra un indudable interés socioantropológico por cuanto puede proporcionar una mejor comprensión de las dinámicas que operan en este deporte en relación con la dimensión de género. La investigación ha estado guiada por una pregunta: ¿hasta qué punto puede afirmarse que la creación de peñas de mujeres constituye un desafío a la configuración del sistema sexo/género que caracteriza al fútbol en la sociedad española? Más concretamente, se han abord…
Social inclusion in sports clubs across Europe: determinants of social innovation
Based on the multi-dimensional framework of Damanpour and Schneider [2006. “Phases of the Adoption of Innovation in Organizations: Effects of Environment, Organization and Top Managers 1.” British ...
Measuring dissatisfaction with coauthorship: An empirical approach based on the researchers’ perception
Abstract Increasing levels of collaboration constitute one of the characteristics of science. However, the knowledge production system is based on a fundamental discordance: on the one hand, it is cooperative in nature, with links articulated through coauthorships, and on the other, the systems for assigning merit and distributing rewards function on an individual scale. This contradiction can give rise to dysfunction and inappropriate practices. This study analyses researchers’ perceptions about the problems associated with authorship in scientific publications. We make use of a coauthorship dissatisfaction index that measures the degree of dissatisfaction with the author order on the byli…
Volunteer satisfaction in sports clubs: A multilevel analysis in 10 European countries
Regular voluntary engagement is a basic resource for sports clubs that may also promote social cohesion and active citizenship. The satisfaction of volunteers is an imperative factor in this engagement, and the purpose of this article is to explore individual and organizational determinants of volunteer satisfaction in sports clubs. Theoretically, our study builds on the actor-theory concepts where volunteer satisfaction depends on subjective evaluations of expectations and experiences in a sports club (‘logic of situation’), so that positive evaluations lead to higher satisfaction and, hopefully, retention of volunteers. This research uses a sample of 8131 volunteers from 642 sports clubs…
Racism and Xenophobia in Spanish Football: Facts, Reactions and Policies
Racism and Xenophobia in Spanish Football: Facts, Reactions and PoliciesContrary to what is sometimes supposed, racism is not a phenomenon of the past. In fact, it is one of the major challenges of the present and future in Europe and Spain. Besides providing an incomparable sense of belonging, football stadiums are also an excellent platform to express racist and xenophobic attitudes and behaviours. In Spain, for years many players have suffered abuse and insults, although it is black and ethnic minority players who receive the most harassment. Thus, the problem of racism has increased recently in Spanish football, as shown by the emission of monkey noises toward black players and the use …
SPAIN: Evolution and Characteristics of the Private Sport Sector – Focus on Fitness Centres and Gyms
This chapter contains a description of the evolution and main characteristics of the private sport sector in Spain. The first section outlines a panoramic vision of the structure and organizational framework of the Spanish sport sector, illustrating the established supremacy of the public sector above the voluntary and private sectors. Next, an analysis is laid out, utilising data from Section 931 of the Central Business Register of the National Institute of Statistics. This analysis includes information pertaining to the number of existing organisations, legal structures, number of employees, and territorial layouts. Once the general description of Spain’s private sport sector is covered, …
The predominance of soccer in the sport and leisure habits of Spanish society
The recent victories of its national football team in the 2010 World Cup and the 2008 and 2012 Euro Cups have situated Spain in the first place in the FIFA worldwide ranking, and provided it with widespread international recognition for both its decisive wins and the team's playing style. These victories mark the culmination of a dream long pursued by numerous players and coaches in Spanish football, but also by a Spanish society that is passionate about football. This article provides a descriptive overview of Spaniards' attachment to football, and tries to show its predominance in the sport and leisure habits of Spanish society. This task has been approached using diverse secondary source…
Football Italia – Italian football in an age of globalization
The 1990 World Cup was a decisive moment in the development of football worldwide. At that time, the host country Italy had the most modern stadiums, as well as Series A clubs that attracted some o...
Social integration in sports clubs: individual and organisational factors in a European context
Sports clubs are often perceived as important mediums for social integration, but the empirical evidence to support this claim is limited. This article sets out to identify individual and organisational characteristics that are conducive to social integration of members and volunteers. Drawing on survey data from 13,000 members and volunteers in ten European countries, an exploratory factor analysis identified three dimensions of social integration. They match the overall conceptual distinction between socio-cultural and socio-affective integration and the sub-division of socio-affective integration into ‘interaction’ and ‘identification’. Multilevel regression analyses examined the relevan…
The Decline of the Spanish Fury
Before the Spanish national team won the UEFA Euro 2008 tournament, it had been said that the economic take-off and growing international relevance acquired by Spanish society since the restoration of democracy after the death of General Franco had not been reflected in Spanish football. Its main representative, the Spanish national football team did not manage to obtain significant victories in the most important international championships or develop a playing style that satisfied its followers. This fact strongly contrasted with the protagonist role and huge success achieved by the main Spanish football clubs at the European level. However, the victory of the Spanish national team in Eur…
Elites and Culture: Social Profiles in the Cultivated Population
Since the 1990s, the central references of the sociology of cultural practices have been the theoretical frameworks developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Richard A. Peterson around the concepts of distinction and omnivorousness. This article is based on these frameworks; it revises them together with those of Donnat and Lahire and postulates that the terms of cultural classification and especially those of the upper classes (distinguished and omnivorous) require revision. The article also claims that there are diverse socio-cultural profiles due to the fact that there is never a single logic of differentiation of tastes, and that the results of the present research demand a new conceptual frame…
Sport Clubs in Spain
Spain is a decentralised state with an approximate population of 47.1 million. It is a European Union member state since 1986 and the 13th largest economy in the world. According to the latest survey of sporting habits conducted in Spain (2010), 19 % of people over the age of 15 engage in some kind of sport or physical activity through a sports club or association. The corresponding figures in previous surveys were 24 % in 2005 and 25 % in 2000. Although the number of sports clubs in Spain has increased over the last 10 years, there has been an even greater rise in the number of people taking up recreational sport or physical activity without being formally linked to any sports federation o…
Club-militants, institutionalists, critics, moderns and globalists: A quantitative governance-based typology of football supporters
This article presents a quantitative typology of football fans’ attitudes towards governance. Data collection is done through an online survey in six European countries: France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Results reveal the existence of five types of supporters: club-militants, institutionalists, critics, moderns and globalists. The critics, moderns and globalists fans share a preoccupation for football governance problems but differ in the intensity of their views. At the same time, critics and globalists are heavy consumers of football games and merchandise. The results suggest that existing fan typologies that understand supporters in dichotomic terms of authe…
Detraditionalization, Hyper-consumption and Ambivalence
During the past 20 years, European football has witnessed an intense change process that has radically transformed some of its main structural characteristics. This process is related to the same tendencies that have affected other aspects of social and economic life in western societies, such as the communication technologies revolution, the progressive rationalization of work, the increase in migration, the commodification of human activity, and the development of social and economic globalization processes, to name a few of the most relevant changes. These trends are usually thought to have had a strong influence on the recent evolution of football, giving rise to a redefinition of its c…
Team Identification and Football Culture
The two previous chapters have shown the importance of identification with the main football clubs in Spanish football culture. While the first chapter presented the fact that 66.8 per cent of Spanish adults identify with a football club, the second — among other aspects — offered a description of the way these feelings of identification have evolved during the 20th century.
Spain: Putting the Pieces of the Sport System in Place — The Role of the Sport Federations
This chapter examines the functions and characteristics of the Spanish sport federations, and the way in which their actions are driven by the principles of the National Sports Act. In order to do this, the chapter offers an overview of the Spanish sport system in terms of structure, steering, support and governance, as well as a reflection on how the traditional Spanish strong public culture is reflected in sport. Focusing on sport federations, the chapter explains the way in which they interact with the rest of the actors in the sport sector and it offers an analysis of their characteristics and functions. The chapter ends with a section that includes some strategies and perspectives stem…
Spain: Conviviality, Social Relationships and Democracy at the Basis of Spanish Sports Clubs’ Culture
This chapter provides an overview of the main functions of sports clubs in Spanish society with regard to social integration, democratic involvement and voluntary work. At the European level, Spanish sports clubs are among the front-runners in terms of presence of people with disabilities, at the average when it comes to people with migrant background and far below the average concerning people over 65 years old and women. Talking about democratic involvement and engagement for the community, most of the clubs try to involve members when making important decisions and delegate decision-making from the board to their committees. On the other hand, their members report the democratic culture …
Public communication of emerging sciences and technologies. Problems and challenges in the case of nanotechnology
This work deals with public understanding of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Concerns about public attitudes towards both, including a lack of knowledge on the part of the general public, have lead scholars in a number of countries to conduct early studies on the social perceptions of these fields. However, this has not been the case in Spain or Latin America, where studies on the popularisation and public understanding of nanotechnology are almost non-existent. This work has a double aim. First, it seeks to contextualise and explain the Spanish situation in this regard. Second, it aims to communicate the results of a Delphi study involving nanotechnology experts (n=38) and designed to fill…
Challenging or Accommodating the Football System? A Case Study of Female Football Supporter Communities in Spain
The chapter is dedicated to the study of a specific type of football community that emerged during the 1980s in Spain: women’s penas. Llopis-Goig and Flores discuss how women’s link to these penas provides them with networks of support and sociability, bonds of friendship and integration in a community as well as a door to the public space that helps them avoid the isolation of a nuclear family for some women. Thus, the female fans generate empowerment strategies that allow them to gradually combat the discrimination experienced in football and in society. However, Llopis-Goig and Flores argue that women’s penas cannot be regarded as initiatives that question the patriarchal structure of fo…
Hooligans, Ultras and Vandals
Football hooliganism in its modern sense is often said to have started in Great Britain in 1961, after a serious riot broke out during a match between Tottenham Hotspur and Sunderland; although crowd disorder was not unknown in other countries, this event is regarded as the birth date of the so-called ‘English disease’, which grew in seriousness and extent over the next few decades. The increasing professionalization and internationalization of English football during the 1950s generated a need for greater profits in football clubs that brought about a reorganization of stadiums (Taylor, 1971). Due to this reorganization, young working-class people were relocated at the ends of the stadiums…
Identificación con clubes y cultura futbolística en España. [Teams identification and football culture in Spain].
Pese a la enorme relevancia del futbol en la sociedad espanola, algunas de sus pautas y procesos caracteristicos han sido poco examinados por la investigacion sociologica. Este articulo presenta una investigacion sobre la identificacion con los principales clubes de futbol en la sociedad espanola e incluye un analisis de los dos principales componentes de la cultura futbolistica de sus aficionados, esto es, la vinculacion y el compromiso personal con el club. El estudio se basa en una encuesta representativa de la poblacion espanola realizada en 2007 por el Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas (CIS) que conto con una muestra de 2.473 entrevistas. Los resultados obtenidos ponen de manifies…
Spaniards’ Secular Ritual
Football is the most popular sport in Spain, and its strong attraction is clearly reflected in its economic dimensions. Recent estimations of the economic influence of Spanish football concluded that it had an effect on production of some €4,000,000,000, almost one per cent of the general Gross National Product (GNP) and about 1.2 per cent of the GNP of the services sector (LFP, 2004). Adding in other indirect effects, such as employee remuneration and the gross operating surplus, the total impact of Spanish football on the Spanish economy climbs to €8,066,000,000, approximately 1.7 per cent of the overall GNP and 2.5 per cent of the GNP of the services sector, and it provides direct or ind…
Sports participation in France and Spain: An international comparison of voraciousness for sport
International audience; The societal comparative approach used in this article to assess voraciousness for sport is based on local surveys. The global was studied at a local level, based on a lengthy process of harmonization of quantitative local surveys. The research is carried out in two countries that are geographically close, but quite different to each other: France and Spain. In an increasingly globalized world, the objective is to examine differences in the social uses of physical activities and sports (PAS) between the two populations, by explaining them with respect to the differences between these two societies as a whole. The social differentiations identified in the portfolio si…
Etnoargumentos y discursos comunes en torno a un megaevento deportivo: La 32ª America's Cup vista por la sociedad anfitriona
Entre 2004 y 2007, se celebró en Valencia, España, la 32ª edición de la America’s Cup, el evento deportivo más antiguo, el más prestigioso del mundo de la vela y uno de los de mayor impacto económico y mediático que existe en la actualidad a escala internacional. Aunque era la primera vez en que tal evento se celebraba en Europa los resultados fueron unánimemente considerados como un éxito de organización, asistencia y audiencias. Este artículo aborda un aspecto menos explorado de los megaeventos deportivos: las percepciones que sobre el mismo elaboraron los propios residentes. Para ello se realizó una investigación cualitativa –consistente en veinte entrevistas– que ha permitido identifica…
From ‘socios’ to ‘hyper-consumers’: an empirical examination of the impact of commodification on Spanish football fans
Traditionally, the Spanish game has been analysed in scholarly studies in terms of the effect of crowd violence or the nationalist and regionalist implications of the Spanish clubs. Latterly analysis has also extended to include gender issues (and the process of constructing masculinity, in particular) and a spate of studies dealing with racism and xenophobia, both of which have blighted the Spanish game in recent years. Little attention, however, has been given over to the study of the effects on fans of the rapidly expanding influence of commercialization on football in Spain. With this gap in mind, this study sets out to examine, from an empirical perspective, the social consequences of …
Football and National Identities in Spain: The Strange Death of Don Quixote
In spite of its enormous presence and influence on the sport and leisure habits of Spanish society, football has not been a relevant research topic in studies of the social sciences in Spain, excep...
Racism, xenophobia and intolerance in Spanish football: evolution and responses from the government and the civil society
Contrary to what is sometimes supposed, racism is not a phenomenon of the past. In fact, it is one of the major challenges of the present and future in Europe and Spain. Besides providing an incomparable sense of belonging, football stadiums are also an excellent platform to express racist and xenophobic attitudes and behaviours. In Spain, for years, many players have suffered abuse and insults although black and ethnic minority players are those who receive the most harassment. Thus, the problem of racism has increased recently in Spanish football, as shown by the emission of monkey noises toward black players and the use of racist slogans and symbols in the stadiums. This study analyses t…
Fortalezas, dificultades y aspectos susceptibles de mejora en la aplicación de un Programa de Responsabilidad Personal y Social en Educación Física. Una evaluación a partir de las percepciones de sus implementadores
ResumenEste articulo se centra en la implementation del Programa de Responsabilidad Personal y Social (PRPS) a traves de las clases de Educacion Fisica (EF) en cinco centros de Educacion Primaria. Se ha realizado una utilization-focused evaluation dirigida a evaluar sus fortalezas, limitaciones y aspectos susceptibles de mejora. La obtencion de datos se llevo a cabo mediante la realizacion de una doble entrevista semiestructurada y un grupo de discusion con los profesores que implementaron el PRPS. El trabajo concluye que los principales puntos fuertes del PRPS son su aplicabilidad al contexto escolar y la capacidad de promover su desarrollo profesional. Entre las limitaciones se senala la …
The Metamorphosis of Football Clubs
In recent decades, Spanish football clubs have experienced an extraordinary transformation process that has decisively influenced their organizational structure. This chapter uses a sociological approach to study Spanish football clubs’ origin and evolution throughout the 20th century and until the present day. It includes an analysis of their recent processes of structural differentiation and their progressive transformation into transnational corporations, as well as an examination of the fans’ perspective on these transformations.
Deporte, medios de comunicación y sociedad.
Aunque en la actualidad pueda parecer sorprendente, los estudios sobre 'Deporte y medios de Comunicación' no se convirtieron en un área importante de la Sociologia hasta el inicio de la década de los ochenta.
Dimensions of cosmopolitanism and their influence on political consumption: an analysis focused on Spanish consumers
The purpose of this study was to confirm the hypothesis that political consumption ‐ a form of consumerism whose importance has increased during the past few years ‐ can be considered a form of critical action, and that cosmopolitanism contributes to its development. The main objective was, first, to analyse an unexplored dimension of political consumption and, second, to obtain a measurement proposal for what some authors have called ordinary cosmopolitanism. The study, based on a survey, was divided into three sections. The first section offers a theoretical introduction to the study proposal. The second describes the hypothesis and the data analysis strategy, and proposes an operationali…