Search results for "Elite"
showing 10 items of 370 documents
Socio-Cultural Power Dynamics and Coping Functions: A Narrative Case Report of a Female Paralympian
2012
Purpose: This case study explores the lived experiences of an elite female Paralympic powerlifting athlete. The focus is on restrictions and coping responses employed to manage the daily hassles within the cultural and ethnic requirements for achieving athletic excellence. Methods: With an unstructured interview, the narrative was acquired which ranged to a total of 75 minutes (approx) and 20 single spaced pages. The data was analyzed using Foucauldian discourse analysis in conjuncture to feminist poststructuralist theory. Results: The results highlight the issues relating to femininity, culture and ethnicity with regard to athletic career. The analysis elicits extracts from the narrative t…
Changing Perceptions of Multiculturalism in the British Public Sphere
2017
This paper is devoted to the examination of the evolution of the uses of the term multiculturalism in a corpus of selected speeches by prominent British politicians, officials and diplomats in the United Kingdom within the decade 2001–2011. Britain is considered to be one of Europe’s most multicultural countries and there was a time when its government took pride in its pro-integration policies. That is why within the elite discourses of the Labour governments of the late 1990s, multiculturalism had overwhelmingly positive connotations: it was associated with new opportunities, strength, enrichment, social progress and economic success. However, over the course of the 2000s there was much d…
Reducing the gap between leaders and voters? Elite polarization, outbidding competition, and the rise of secessionism in Catalonia
2016
ABSTRACTThe ethnic outbidding thesis explains party polarization as a consequence of political changes amongst voters. We argued instead that party elites’ extreme position on the national identity cleavage can help polarizing strategies to prevail over moderate strategies in a context of increasing political uncertainty, without previous voters’ polarization. We test successfully this hypothesis in Catalonia by analysing the polarization of political parties and people’s demands for self-government in Catalonia since the early 2000s. We also find that the result of this outbidding pattern of competition was a reduction in the gap between elites’ and voters’ views on national identity. The …
Opera houses: from democratization to plutocratic control? Lyric production, economic management, and elite control in the main Spanish opera houses …
2021
For 20 years, the main cultural institutions in Europe have faced new challenges such as increasing their efficiency in terms of the use of public resources. However, while operas found themselves ...
Becoming a Gamer: Performative Construction of Gendered Gamer Identities
2021
This article examines how women construct their gameplay identities in relation to the hegemonic “gamer” discourse. The article is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with women who occupy central roles in the Finnish gaming industry. We deploy Judith Butler’s theorization of performative identity construction to examine how the women negotiate their identity in relation to the hegemonic gamer discourse, focusing on how they both embrace and resist the hegemonic, masculine constructions of gameplay. The study shows the dynamics surrounding the gamer identity. While women submit to the hegemonic gamer discourse, reproducing the masculine gamer notions to gain recognition as a viabl…
Development of School and Sport Burnout in Adolescent Student-Athletes: A Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Study.
2018
We investigated the development of school and sport burnout in adolescent student-athletes (N Time 1 = 391, N Time 2 = 373) during their first year in upper secondary school using an embedded mixed-methods design. The questionnaire-based data were analyzed with growth mixture modeling and four burnout profiles were identified among student-athletes. From the found burnout profiles, two were typical for the interviewed subsample of elite athletes (n = 17), that is, burnout risk and non risk profiles. We generated rich descriptions of well-being and ill-being, showing that elite athletes in two burnout profiles differed in their experienced demands and resources related to individual and envi…
Critical factors influencing international sporting success of the Philippines : the athletes' perspective
2017
The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the recent declining performance of the Philippines in international sporting competitions by identifying and evaluating relevant factors that are critical to its international success through the perspective of the national elite athletes. An evaluation of the organizational effectiveness of the national sports governing bodies provides explanation to the poor performance of the country in major international competitions such as the Southeast Asian (SEA)Games. One of the most recent approaches used in measuring organizational effectiveness is the Sport Policy factors Leading to International Sporting Success (SPLISS) model. Th…
“You are special”: othering in biographies of “GDR children from Namibia”
2017
ABSTRACTThe article analyses a historical case of politically induced flight. The so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR) children from Namibia are about 430 people brought to the GDR between 1979 and 1989. They came from Namibian refugee camps and were part of a solidarity project between South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and the GDR. They were educated to become the Namibian elite once the country had been liberated. Their stay was to be temporary, with the children identified as Namibian by SWAPO and GDR. The article reconstructs culturalist and biological-racist forms of othering as characteristic biographical experience of the young people which deny them belonging to…
Elites and Culture: Social Profiles in the Cultivated Population
2021
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…
Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging : Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia
2019
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in thei…