Structuration: Structure, Culture, & Agency in Sports

In sociology, the metaphor of structure (e.g. Bourdieu; Giddens; Hays) is often used to make sense out of people's choices, actions, and social interactions.  The basic notion is that people think and behave in relation to taken-for-granted or "common sense" ways of being that are intricately shaped by society.   Social structure might be thought of as akin to the human skeletal structure.  Professor Lisa Patel (2013) explains, "across individuals, the skeleton includes mostly the same components that govern the systemic biological processes such as breathing and eating.  From one person to the next, however, these processes can vary greatly, often due to the individual's unique characteristics but also to external factors" (p.1).  These many, multi-directional external factors include but are not limited to environmental pollutants; zip code; family socio-economics; access to food, shelter, health care; etc.

The interplay between structure and agency, or what Giddens refers to as "the duality of structure," means that you & I as individuals, and the groups we "belong" to, are both shaped by societal factors and continually reshaping this societal structure through the negotiation and realization of our particularly positioned agency within a social moment in history.  This structuring structure allows/impels individuals to exercise choices (of varying degrees of freedom) and to take actions that have disparate consequences.  

In these fast-moving social dynamics, culture plays a critical mediating role in influencing individual actors' and institutions' trajectories through societal structure.  Culture can be thought of as the taken for granted ways of seeing that makes up “a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a
member of a socially meaningful group or social network” (Gee, 1999, p.131).  Therefore, within a complex social organization such as an after-school program, a AAU basketball program, a college team, the NCAA, the NBA, the commonsense knowledge of that place ripple through what is construed as normal, natural, irrational, strange, controversial, problematic, as well as what is not thought about at all (Foucault, 1977; Gramsci, 1971).  

Culture is most visible in people and group's linguistic decisions.  It is productive, in that it continuously works to construct inter-subjective realities (See Heath & Street 2007 for ethnographic perspective on language and culture, not sports specific).  Insiders of a group tacitly understand how to “be” within their community because that group’s explicit and unspoken assumptions and generalizations about the way the world works--or how one thinks it "should work."  In this way, culture structures our social interactions by serving as a kind of ideological shorthand.   It continually creates schemas that shapes people’s social expectations, how folks behave and interact, and how phenomena are interpreted (whether in slow, reasoned thinking or "twitch" thinking... For an economic perspective on slow and fast thinking in "racial bias, even when we have good intentions," see Mullainathan in NY Times, but I'm digressing..).  Culture creates cohesions and continuities in the ways social groups operate in society, and makes an individual intuitively know she is a member of a group..  This intricate process has reproducing effects, whereby societal structures we encounter are assumed is be "true" in certain constrained ways that adhere to what we expect to hear.  So, we often uncritically look to confirm what we already know, socially constructing realities that make sense with some historically-situated worldview (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

What does this have to do with the study of sports in society?  How can attention to structuration processes inform our understanding of the intersectionality of gender, race, and economics within increasingly corporatized and profit-oriented college and pro sports?  What can we learn from a research stance that burrows into the local particulars of sports, while attending to broad societal trends and transformations in our fractured or fragmented global capitalism (Katz, 2004)
Katz (2004) posits that contemporary societies are complexly conditioned by “fragmented global capitalism.”  If we accept the proposition that how people socially reproduce themselves and their material practices are constantly being shaped by their access to the wealth, privilege, and products of globalization, then we can assume that those “in” power in the dominant culture(s) have capacity to structure opportunities to ever expand their own interests.  At the same time, structured exclusions from the accumulation of capital create frictions or ruptures in the socio-economic conditions facing those on the “outside” of these power arrangements.  This generates uneven material social practices and social consequences that impacts all of us (though decidedly differently, depending how much power and privilege you/I've got)...  (de)constructing and (re)constructing these relationships is in part my aim and our task in this course.  Let's dig in.

Citations
 Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Polity Press.
Gee, J. P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. London:
Routledge.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
Hays (1994). Structure and agency and the sticky problem of culture. Sociological Theory, 12 (1): 57-72.
Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday
lives. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Patel, L (2013). Youth Held at the Border. Teachers College Press.