Till Örebro universitet

This study explores seven Swedish top-level women’s soccer players’ career development experiences. Data were produced through semi-structured interviews and a biographical mapping grid. The theoretical framework of ‘careership’ was employed to understand the data. The results showed homogenous career paths. Moreover, the data show that the players decided at a young age to pursue a career in soccer; experienced the transition from junior to senior level soccer as difficult because of a lack of physical preparedness; soccer over school commitments. We recommend that soccer stakeholders (e.g. federations, clubs, coaches) give the transition from junior to senior level soccer special attention to prevent intense demands that may cause dropout. We further propose that if athletes should give sport and education equal priority, the Swedish dual career concept of high school education and sport needs further reflection and adjustment.

Violent practices are a common feature of homosocial sporting environments. The objective of the current paper is to explore how one individual disengaged from a sporting community characterized by such practices. An autoethnographic approach involving recollection and interactional exchanges is used to create a realist narrative account which offers insight into the process of disengagement. The narrative focuses on the: (1) ongoing nature of cultural participation; (2) agency and the restriction of ways of being in sports teams and (3) the durable nature of personal characteristics that are learned in sporting environments. These issues are discussed in light of cultural learning theory and specifically, the analytic concept, ‘becoming’. The paper concludes with methodological reflections and a consideration of directions for future research.

While understanding young people has never been easy, migration trends make it increasingly difficult. Many classrooms have become culturally heterogeneous and teachers are often faced with pupils with diverse linguistic and cultural heritages. Current scholarship suggests that as a discipline, physical education has not adapted to this diversity. In fact, commentators have suggested that physical education alienates pupils from minority groups and that traditional practices work to maintain cultural difference. The broad objective of this paper is to provide insights into how physical education intersects with biographies shaped by migration. Drawing from a case study investigation, this paper presents interview data from three youths with migration backgrounds living in a German-speaking region of Switzerland. The cases were selected because they highlight various ways in which physical education (PE) comes to make sense for adolescents. The key arguments that we develop are that ethnicity often works at an implicit level in PE, that young people experience the effects of migration backgrounds in diverse ways, and that migrants themselves support official educational discourses that work to disadvantage people with migration backgrounds. A key implication is that in a cultural milieu in which generalisations are normal and sometimes considered desirable, both researchers and practitioners need to be wary of racialising discourses. As an alternative, it is suggested that focusing on individual processes can improve the conceptualisation and implementation of physical education pedagogies.

This paper critically interrogates widespread assumptions pertaining to the integrative function of sporting involvement in Switzerland. It focuses specifically on young people living in a culturally diverse area and how they make use of discursive variations of the integrative sport text. Interview material draws attention to four main sub-texts that frame sport as: a pedagogical tool, a site of interpersonal exchange, a method of catharsis, and as an apolitical activity without relevance to ethnicity. It is argued that these sub-texts: (1) are embedded within broader culturalist discourse and, (2) either support divisive social relations or do little to challenge them. Both instances suggest that changes are necessary to the way sport is ‘produced’ in discourse if it is to positively influence ethnic relations.

In this paper we illustrate how ways of thinking about ethics are tied up with sport and physical education practice and introduce an alternative approach that can help to develop ethical pedagogies. We begin by locating socio-moral education in physical education within historical and contemporary pedagogical scholarship. Our argument is that the work of today's physical educators is still shaped by claims that were made about school sport in the nineteenth century and that sport scholars have long had difficulties proving these claims empirically. Rather than search for data that can confirm or refute claims of moral learning, we examine how incidents related to moral behaviour occur during physical education lessons. To do this we draw on data from an ethnographic investigation of a school in North Western Switzerland. Specifically, we present three episodes of interaction in three different physical education lessons. To make sense of these episodes, we introduce a social constructionist perspective. The main assumptions of this perspective are: (1) meanings are created through dialogue and consensus and are context-relative; (2) interactions between people are joint accomplishments; and (3) contexts affect how people interact with one another. Equipped with a constructionist framework, we then inspect the interactive episodes more closely. We include brief discussions of how constructionist understandings might inform ethics pedagogies in the future, suggesting that practitioners should be cautious of universal understandings of ethics, consider pupils as members of communities that are held together by shared practices, provide space for pupils to position themselves differently during lessons and, finally, account for contextual factors when evaluating pupils' actions.

Olympic athletes are potentially the most visible exponents of Olympic values. How athletes learn values, however, has not captured the attention of those responsible for Olympic documentation or pedagogues. This paper examines how aspects of Olympism became relevant for three former Olympians during their athletic careers. Interview material suggested that: (1) inconsistencies within official expressions of Olympism mirror tensions in athletic experiences; (2) some claims concerning sport made in the Olympic Charter are simplistic and translate poorly to Olympic experiences that are multidimensional and complex; and (3) universal ethical principles have limited influence on how athletes conduct themselves. The results imply that pedagogues working with elite athletes should make discursive discontinuities in sport explicit, reflect on traditional views of sport education while acknowledging implicit learning, and approach questions of ethics from a specific and practice-oriented standpoint rather than a universal and principle-based one.

Research suggests that extensive training is necessary for the development of sporting expertise. Research also suggests that extensive training can lead to overuse injuries. The aims of this paper are to: (1) expand the concept of expertise in high performance sport, and (2) contribute to the discussion of how high performance athletes move towards expert performance in sustainable ways. To achieve these aims, data from retrospective interviews with four Olympians from four different sports are presented. As a way of extending traditional approaches, a pedagogical framework focusing on dispositional learning is employed to examine athletic development. The notion of threshold concepts is used as a specific analytic tool for thinking about how athletes come to make sense of their sporting environments. Interpretations of the data provide insights into the nature of thresholds in high performance sport, factors that facilitate threshold crossing, and factors that may prevent athletes from making advances, all of which have implications for practitioners interested in developing expertise.

This article outlines sociocultural learning theory, shows how this theory can be used to examine end-of-career athletic transitions, and stimulates discussion on the implications of this framework for sport professionals. The central question addressed is how learning in elite sport affects participation in activities beyond sporting settings. Data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with three former Olympians are presented. The interpretation suggests that: 1) movement to new social settings involves abandoning some elements of athletic dispositions and developing new elements, 2) transitions are affected by prior learning in sport and the characteristics of new settings, and 3) learning in sporting environments is often unintentional or implicit. The results encourage practitioners to acknowledge the effort involved in developing new dispositions in different settings. They support a case-specific view of transitions where 'success' is considered in contextual terms. Further, the data highlight a need for sport professionals to recognize tacit learning.

Success in high performance sport has always been highly valued. Today, lucrative contracts, sponsorship deals and opportunities for celebrity status are balanced against substantial time spent training and high chances of failure. With pressure mounting on athletes to make the most of their athletic 'investment', the temptation to compromise their future well-being by exploiting their bodies for short-term gain and/or by cheating is growing. The aim of this paper is to explore the utility of sustainability science for thinking about these types of issues. Sustainability science is an emerging field which seeks to preserve the well-being of the planet and those on it by exploring the potential of nature and culture without compromising the future resource base. It specializes in developing holistic perspectives, considering multiple time scales, optimizing current systems without compromising the carrying capacity of the Earth, but also questioning the values and principles that dominate current ways of producing and consuming. Sustainability science acknowledges that we live in a rapidly changing world characterized by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. The proposition developed in this paper is that an exploration of sustainability perspectives can be generative in re-thinking and re-orienting the principles of high level competitive sports.

This chapter provides an illustration of how digital technologies (DTs) are experienced by Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) students. The illustration is based on the reflections of two students at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The students received an assignment that involved demonstrating how a specific DT could be implemented. Three perspectives of the practitioners' experiences are provided. A Deweyan perspective shows how the students and their situations are transformed by DTs. A Foucauldian perspective focuses on the regulating aspects of technology. An applied Information Technology perspective demonstrates how DTs become part of the social practices of physical education.

Until the late 1960s, women’s artistic gymnastics consisted of mature women performing gentle ballet-type exercises that were emotionally expressive and graceful. During the 1970s, however, the gymnasts’ performances and bodies changed dramatically. Young and sexually undeveloped gymnasts began to execute acrobatic- and risk-driven routines that consisted of complex air-bound combinations of gymnastics elements. The trend to acrobatics emerged in the former Soviet Union. Within this specific political context, a highly competitive, ambitious and ingenious sporting atmosphere fostered the development of the acrobatic trend in the Eastern Bloc countries and later in the West. Analyses of the 1964 and 1975 International Code of Points (Code) and specific descriptions of the physical appearance and winning floor routine of Czechoslovakian Vera Caslavska at the 1968 Olympic Games and that of Romanian Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 Games, demonstrate the differing gymnastics styles. Interviews, academic literature, popular texts and Internet sites help explain the developments. Michel Foucault’s genealogical research methodology and ‘analytic’ of modern relations of power assist in this pursuit, revealing a particular history of social change.

This article includes narrative excerpts compiled from field notes the author collected observing six Australian women's elite artistic gymnasts and their two coaches. Using creative nonfiction and auto-ethnography, the stories' plots describe the gymnasts' daily training realities and include personal reflections on the author's gymnastics experiences and reactions to what she saw during the observations. The stories illustrate how, despite differing levels of authority, the coaches', gymnasts', and parts of her own identity and behaviors are shaped by a dominant gymnastics model. This ideal coerces the coaches and gymnasts to regulate their selves and behaviors according to its dominant characteristics. Although potentially beneficial and satisfactory, the training model's discourses and practices can have debilitating effects.

Success in high performance sport is highly valued in today's world, with lucrative contracts, sponsorship deals, and opportunities for celebrity status balanced against substantial investments of time and energy, and high chances of failure. With pressure mounting on athletes and coaches to make the most of athletic investments, the temptation to make health-related or ethical compromises is growing.

Sustainability in High Performance Sport examines the pressures faced by coaches and athletes, and considers how sustainable science can offer alternative pathways to sporting excellence. By applying principles relating to carrying capacities, complexity and uncertainty, production and consumption, and ethics, this unique book provides new ways of thinking about both enduring and emerging challenges. With a scope that includes themes such as coaching practices, coach-athlete relationships, over-training and injuries, the development of sporting expertise, and doping, Sustainability in High Performance Sport is the most comprehensive exploration of sustainability in elite sport available.It is an invaluable resource for anybody with an interest in achieving long-term success in high performance sport. This book was originally published as a special issue of Reflective Practice.

Sport coaching has traditionally been seen as a techno-rational activity. In recent years, there has been a 'subjective turn'. Intuitive, as well as situation-specific interpretations are today perceived as necessary to handle complex, dynamic and often unpredictable sport environments. While a considerable body of research has attempted to understand coaching practice, research on intuitive and situation-dependent praxis is only emerging. Phronesis - mostly defined as practical wisdom or practical rationality - has been put forward as a useful theoretical concept to frame such coaching practice. In this contribution, we employ phronesis as part of sustainability science to consider the coaching of one top-level middle-distance running coach. Observations, informal talks and semi-structured interviews produced the empirical materials for this analysis. The results suggest that the coach's practice was guided by both techno-rational and phronetic knowledge. While techno-rational knowledge manifested itself in a focus on time and control, the latter was reflected in a concern for impact, focus on community, authenticity and modesty. From a phronetic perspective, these characteristics can be seen as morally just and important precursors for sustainable sport.

Although training in sport is necessary to reach Olympic status, a conditioned body is not the only outcome. Athletes also learn how to be Olympians. This learning involves taking on certain ways of acting, thinking and valuing. Such learning has implications beyond competition, as athletes eventually retire from elite sport and devote their time to other activities. This paper examines processes of learning and transition using the case of Amelia, a former Olympic synchronised swimmer. Through two in-depth interviews, empirical material was generated which focused on the learning that took place during this athlete's career and after, during her transition to paid employment. A cultural view of learning was used as the theoretical frame to understand the athlete's experiences. Our reading suggests that the athlete learned in various ways to be productive. Some of these ways of being were useful after retirement; others were less compatible. In fact, Amelia used a two-year period after retirement to reconstruct herself. Key to her eventual successful transition was to distance herself from the sport and to critically reflect upon her sporting experiences. We thus recommend that those involved with high-performance athletes foster a more balanced perspective that acknowledges and promotes ways of being beyond athletic involvement.

Although overtly racist political discourse in Switzerland has receded, culturalist discourses continue to construct ideal immigrants. Policies define immigrants in terms of “cultural proximity” and contain an implicit distinction between “distant” and “proximal” foreigners. Culturally, distant immigrants have been stereotyped as aggressive and/or lacking interest in education and professional success and while scholars have examined immigrants from Switzerland’s “culturally-near” regions, the experiences of second generation immigrant populations from perceived culturally distant countries have largely escaped attention. Knowledge about girls and women is particularly scarce. Against this backdrop, this paper provides an examination of how six teenage girls living in a German-speaking Swiss city negotiate their perceived cultural distance. By combining interview material with elements of Foucauldian theory, the paper provides insight into (1) the diasporic experiences of girls with second generation immigration backgrounds and (2) the operation and influence of culturalist discourses. Foucault’s notion of dispositive—the discourses, institutions, laws, and scientific findings that, through various means of distribution (e.g., media texts, policies, education curricula), act as an apparatus that constructs and supports normative ideals—provides a generative analytic tool for this task. The analysis suggests that the ways girls learn to understand their social worlds is a collective process of discipline that places mechanisms of social control within each individual. This process involves the homogenisation and marginalisation of the immigrant population and is circular in nature in that the girls strengthen and maintain the power of existing culturalist knowledge that works negatively on them. The paper concludes with a consideration of how this situation might be challenged.

Immigration discourses in Switzerland have developed out of a fear of 'over-foreignisation'. Central to this development are discourses of difference in which Swiss culture is centred and foreign ones are marginalised. At present, Eastern and South-East European cultures are particularly affected. In this article, we challenge perceived cultural incommensurability by examining the socialisation of second-generation girls of immigrant background, through data generated from semi-structured interviews with them. The girls draw on a tightly defined discursive range of linguistic resources to construct the meanings of sport, health and the body. Specifically, the girls refer to healthism, within which sport is seen to provide a means to achieve good health and a slim and feminine body. These references reflect a set of knowledge and discourses important to Western cultures. Alternative discursive resources exist, yet were not utilised. We argue that the girls' adoption of healthist ideas is used to counter cultural narratives-such as the uncultured, and thus non-integrated, immigrant-and that this adoption supports and maintains white healthist ideas, 'othering' the (foreign) other.

From 1952 until the fall of Communism in 1989, the most successful women’s artistic gymnasts emerged from Communist sport regimes. From the 1970s onwards, their model of women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG), ‘pixie-style’ model (Kerr, et al, 2017; Barker-Ruchti, 2009), which prescribes young age, sexually undeveloped bodies, and darling-like and cute performance, became globalised (Cervin, 2017). In this presentation, we aim to explore how WAG in five case countries -Australia, Brazil, Romania, Russia, and The Netherlands –has developed since 1989. We draw on Robertson’s (1994; 1995) glocalisation theory to examine the countries’ WAG efforts to develop WAG. Materials to do this were collected through our expert knowledge, publicly available documents, informal interviews and scientific and media texts.

Our results demonstrate three development paths: The decline, roller coaster and innovation path. Each of these paths had at its basis organisational investment to systematise national WAG, albeit to different extents and at different points in time. The decline path depicts the East European systems, who had championed pixie style WAG, but have since 1989 lost dominance because of political, economic and social challenges. The roller coaster path portrays Australia and Brazil. These countries’ path has been characterised by competitive instability because of organisational inconsistencies, inter-organisational conflict, accusations of abuse, and instable coach/athlete populations. The innovation path describes The Netherlands. Their key development strategy has been the initiation and branding of a novel performance style, which has generated international medals and popularity.In sum, the three paths offer a longitudinal perspective of the multidimensional and glocalisedprocess of national sport development (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2004). They highlight the influence of historical, structural, and (inter-)organisational factors, and the glocalised reactions and innovation activities, and how these shape the development of sport.

The 1920s was characterised by a struggle over the social acceptance and inclusion of women's track and field disciplines into international organisations. The debate was particularly heated between Alice Milliat, the then president of the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale, and the members of the International Athletic Federation and International Olympic Committee. Underlying the debate were differing assumptions about gender ideals and the role of women in society. While Milliat's efforts have been crucial and recognised in developing women's track and field, little research has examined how visual representations of track and field athletes related to gender norms. In this paper, we examine a corpus of professional sports photographs taken during the 1926 Women's Games in Gothenburg to gain understanding of how female athletes' media representations were part of negotiations over gender ideals. Placing the material within the notion of gender dispositive, our analyses reveal a process of negotiation between the new woman ideal that included characteristics such as autonomy and self-control, as well as the mechanisation of women's bodies and traditional notions of femininity.

At the 2013 conference “Gender in Physical Culture” of the ‘Transnational Working Group for the Study of Gender and Sport’, held at the University of Gothenburg, a number of presentations related to how individuals, groups of individuals and organizations challenge and change dominant gender discourses and practices. Several of these presentations have come to form this volume on ‘Gender in Physical Culture: Crossing Boundaries – Reconstituting Cultures’. To begin the volume, the following article outlines how the seven contributions are connected. We present Lamont and Molnàr’s (2002) idea of ‘boundaries’, which they consider as visible and invisible socially constructed borders that create social differences. Such boundaries are, however, malleable. We propose that this flexibility means that ‘gender boundaries in physical cultures’ can be shifted, crossed and transformed. The case studies included in this edition present concrete examples of how this is possible.

Women’s artistic gymnastics is commonly understood to require early entrance and intense training during childhood. Most gymnasts retire before reaching adulthood. In recent years, the gymnast population at the highest level has “aged.” In this article, we adopt a socio-pedagogical perspective to explore the training contexts, pubertal development, and associated learning 10 older elite gymnasts reported. We develop a cultural perspective of gymnast development and show that transitioning through puberty allowed the gymnasts to extend their careers. Support from their coaches and parents, self-reflective time, and genetic predispositions facilitated the transitioning. Through this, gymnasts gained control over self, body, relationships, and performance. In conclusion, we provide implications for gymnast development practice.

This study examines how women football coaches reach top-level coaching positions. Semi-structured interviews and a biographical mapping grid gave a sample of 19 women coaches the opportunity to identify factors that impacted their coaching career paths. Hodkinson and Sparkes’ (1997) sociological theory ‘careership’, and in particular their metaphor of ‘turning points’ are employed to: (1) differentiate between the life events that shaped the women’s coaching career development; and (2) outline and conceptualize the career decisions and types of learning that followed these events. The results demonstrate that the women coaches did not necessarily consider coaching as a possible career pathway before and when entering the occupation, but that ‘structural’ turning points enabled them to start and progress a coaching career. Further, ‘forced’ and ‘self-initiated’ turning points significantly affected career development. A key implication is for women coaches to develop ‘coaching career visions’, which can be created and reinforced through strategic entry points and associated support systems.

Despite increased recognition that a higher education sports coaching qualification plays an important role in shaping coaches' ethical decision-making, few scholars have considered what ethics to teach and how best to deliver such curriculum. Examples of actual ethics courses are particularly amiss. This article furthers scholarship on ethics education by introducing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), a pedagogical perspective and approach that is employed to teach quality of mind competences considered necessary to make ethical decisions. To demonstrate how ESD can be translated into ethics curriculum, we present the university course "IIG206 Sustainable Sports Coaching", which the authors delivered to coaching students, and outline how the course offered students' opportunities to develop quality of mind competences, including "thinking on their feet", complexity thinking, working interdisciplinarily, creativity, and "thinking outside the box". Practical recommendations for scholars keen to create and deliver ethics education in coaching education conclude the article.

High-performance sport impacts athletes beyond the physical. Coaches and coaching practice are particularly influential in shaping this learning and development. This article examines the learning identified through an inductive content analysis of eight former Olympic athletes’ career narratives. Three phases of learning could be identified across the cohort: ‘Growing into high-performance sport’, ‘Making sense of high-performance sport’, and ‘(Re)shaping high-performance sport’. A cultural perspective of learning, in particular the metaphor of ‘becoming’, is employed to interpret the Olympians’ learning experiences. The findings of this research indicate that athlete learning is bound by particular high-performance sporting contexts and career phases, yet impacted by the athletes’ individual backgrounds and dispositions. Further, data indicate that athletes’ personal development reflexively intertwines with athletic performance and performance enhancement. Implications for coaches are to: (1) involve athletes in co-constructing their sporting cultures and training contexts; and (2) provide possibilities and support for athletes to develop personally.

Background: High-performance sport has been described as a formative environment through which athletes learn sporting skills but also develop athletic selves. Within this process, career movements related to selection for and de-selection from representative teams constitute critical moments. Further, retirement from sport can be problematic as the athletic self becomes ‘obsolete’. This dilemma is acute in sports that demand an early entry, extreme time investments and a high risk of retirement before adulthood. Women's artistic gymnastics (WAG) is such a sport.

Purpose and scope: This article considers an artistic gymnast's (Marie) experiences of movement into and out of this sport. Marie's construction and reconstruction of her athletic self when she entered gymnastics at the age of six, relocated to a different city in order to train with the national team at the age of 15, and retired from the sport one year later receives particular attention.

Method and theoretical perspective: An in-depth biographical interview was conducted with Marie. Further, the first author's personal knowledge of this gymnast's career experiences was used for contextualisation. The analysis of data involved the identification of learning outcomes during her time in high-performance WAG and post-retirement. Storied accounts surrounding the key learning experiences were compiled. In order to understand Marie's learning, cultural perspective of learning developed by education scholars and the respective metaphors of ‘learning as becoming’ and ‘horizons for action’ and ‘horizons of learning’ are employed.

Findings: Marie's choice of relocating to train with the national team involved her assuming a temporary orientation towards the requirements of the high-performance WAG context she entered. To achieve this, Marie suppressed the dispositions she had brought to this setting and adjusted her training philosophy, relationship with her coach, diet and socialising. Further, despite Marie intending to only momentarily adjust to the practices of the high-performance context, her learning was deep. Upon retiring from gymnastics, she could not leave the high-performance gymnastics self behind. The subsequent process to adjust to life without gymnastics was difficult and testing, and could only be realised with professional treatment.

Conclusion: Learning in sport is not limited to athletic skills. Athletes’ selves are formed in interaction with sporting contexts and actors. This embodiment can become durable and cause significant conflict when moving out of sport. To handle life without sport, adjustment may be challenging and lengthy.

Recommendations: Sporting cultures should allow for more interactive learning and athlete diversity. Coaching practices that allow athletes to voice difficulties should be provided. Athletes should be encouraged to reflect upon their sporting experiences and upon leaving high-performance sport, should be (professionally) supported.