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© 1993 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc.

In the early 1970s Spreitzer and Snyder developed the Psychosocial Functions of Sport Scale to assess people’s perceptions of the importance of sport, and they administered this instrument to a sample of Toledo, Ohio, residents. This study reassesses the reliability and construct validity of the scale and examines college students’ perceptions of the importance of sport. Factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha indicate that Spreitzer and Snyder’s scale meets the criteria of reliability and construct validity. An item analysis indicates that most subjects believe sport to be important for individuals and society. Subjects’ responses to 12 of the 15 items are strikingly similar to the response distribution reported by Spreitzer and Snyder; however, there are notable differences on three of the items, suggesting that the present sample did not view sport as an institution that develops good citizens, promotes fair play, or alleviates drug problems in society.

The introduction of “replacement teams” into the social world of NFL football during the 1987 strike stimulated a laminated language, a language that transformed traditional meanings by linking varying social definitions to one another. Emergent content analysis of extensive newspaper, sport magazine and newsmagazine, and live television and radio accounts was used to inductively study this language. Power, media, and social structure impacted on the various language terms that were created. Laminated language protected, rejected, accepted, satirically extended, and integrated definitions. Various ways in which the recognition of laminated language may be used to enhance the use of Goffman’s framing concepts and leads in the sociological study of everyday life are offered.

Interuniversity athletic departments face an ever-increasing number and complexity of factors in their environment, which may impact on their organizational activities to varying degrees. The head athletic directors at 34 of the 45 (76%) Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union (CIAU) member institutions rated the degree of control of 15 environmental elements over seven basic activities of the athletic department. The athletic department was perceived to function relatively independent of broad environmental control, with the exception of establishing and supporting a philosophy of interuniversity athletics. It appears that perceived control is a multidimensional phenomenon that varies across the environmental elements and the activities of the athletic department.

A number of scholars have noted the increased social currency that a risk vocabulary has come to assume in late modernity. This vocabulary has been deployed in discourses o physical inactivity and obesity, wherein children have increasingly been identified as an at-risk population leading a sedentary lifestyle, which is culturally represented as a primary risk factor for obesity and ultimately ill health. This article explores the usefulness of Foucault’s governmental perspective in problematizing the function served and effects produced by a risk vocabulary within discourses and practices directed at intervening in the childhood inactivity and obesity epidemics with a specific focus on the Canadian context.

The Webb Scale (1969) has been used in much of the research focusing on the professionalization of attitudes via sport. The results of such studies seemed to indicate that the extent to which winning was valued varied by age, gender, and type of sport involvement. However, these findings may in part have been a function of the noncontextual nature of the Webb Scale. In addition, the use of ranking methodology may have forced game orientation into an artificial bipolar continuum bounded by play orientation on one end and professional orientation at the other end. In the current study, the results of the administration of the Webb Scale and the Game Orientation Scale (Knoppers, Schuiteman, & Love, 1986) to 312 youngsters were compared across gender and degree of athletic experience. The Game Orientation Scale uses descriptions of two different sport scenarios and 5-point Likert scales to assess game orientation. The results revealed that game orientation was multidimensional, that the Webb Scale’s validity was questionable, and that professionalization was more a function of measurement and of the type of setting than of a generalized inherent attitude.

There has been no attempt to compare the sociological functions of organized sports in British and American boarding schools, yet for over a century they have been an essential component of the class ideals taught in the best known schools. This paper examines five critical functions of team games: the extension of institutional control, their role as molder of “manly Christian character,’’ the importance of closer involvement of faculties in games as surrogate parents, the emergence of school leaders from the successful athletes, and their preparation of athletes for elite colleges and universities. Team sports in boarding schools in both England and New England were introduced to teach boys to be gentle men, which is what most of their parents hoped they would become. Team sports socialized boys into class and gender roles that corresponded to moral expectations of legitimate behavior. Success in sports became a crucial prerequisite for acceptance at school; the sports also fostered powerful bonds between classmates and inculcated a strong attachment to the school. The competition of team games in school encouraged the love of winning, which in turn encouraged a concern with success and doing well in one’s later endeavors, derivative of the enjoyment of schoolboy success in sports.

While contemporary American sport films seem to be targeting the adolescent audience for a message of empowerment, a smaller group of sport films seems to have reached out to the adult audience with the “preposterous” claim that sport allows us opportunities for personal redemption. Through interviews conducted at the Dyersville, Iowa, site of Fields of Dreams, a critical examination of several contemporary adult baseball films, and analysis of the Pete Rose saga, I hope to show that the opportunity for personal redemption is not only possible but in fact is a primary function of all sport. When asked in Field of Dreams by Shoeless Joe Jackson, “Is this heaven?” Ray Kinsella responds, “No, it’s Iowa.” I maintain that the predominant mythos in contemporary sport is that, indeed, it is heaven.