Abstract
In this paper we analyze identity in a soccer team using a discursive perspective, in which individual psycho-logical functioning is considered to be built in and through social interactions within groups. Analysis is based on naturally-occurring interactions that were audio recorded during technical meetings before and after the match. The data were collected within an ethnographic investigation of an Italian soccer tam carried out over a two-month period. The results show that the team’s members made rhetorical use of a complex repertoire of their own and others’ social identities, and that two main variables influenced the use of social identity markers: a) the role of the speakers (in particular the “power” role of the coach); b) the result of the match around which the interactive discourse revolved. Against this background, we discuss how narratives and identity positionings were used to achieve specific goals and to perform specific actions, such as the planning of future matches and the interpretation of victories and defeats.
Highlights
To date the “psychology of sport” has had a mostly psychophysiological or cognitive interest in studying the athlete from an individual point of view
Very few studies have adopted a conversational-discursive approach to analysis of how identity and the related processes of identification, differentiation and categorisation in sport groups are carried out discursively, and little empirical research on these phenomena has used as its empirical data transcripts of interaction/conversation among members of sport teams
Against this background, which is already interesting for the light that it sheds on the rhetorical manipulation of the social identities arising in the discourses of this professional soccer team, in what follows we shall conduct more detailed analysis of the relation between the construction and use of specific identity positionings and the rhetorical actions performed through these positionings by the members of the sport group, doing so in relation to the interactive features of the three meetings analyzed
Summary
In this paper we analyze identity in a soccer team using a discursive perspective, in which individual psychological functioning is considered to be built in and through social interactions within groups. The results show that the team’s members made rhetorical use of a complex repertoire of their own and others’ social identities, and that two main variables influenced the use of social identity markers: a) the role of the speakers (in particular the “power” role of the coach); b) the result of the match around which the interactive discourse revolved. Against this background, we discuss how narratives and identity positionings were used to achieve specific goals and to perform specific actions, such as the planning of future matches and the interpretation of victories and defeats
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