Sport Officiating as Aggression Work: A Positioning Analysis of Gendered Emotion Management

Abstract

This study documents how sports officials negotiate aggression from cisgender male athletes as a key feature of their occupational role. Through an ethnographic case study of a collegiate intramural athletic organization, sports officials ( N = 24) were observed while officiating and interviewed about their experiences with athlete aggression. Utilizing a phronetic iterative approach and positioning theory as an analytic framework, three organizational storylines were identified that contribute to the implicit, often gendered, rules related to the experience and expression of aggression in this context. Findings also indicated that male and female officials differed in their positioning strategies in response to athlete aggression, through (a) confidence positioning, (b) stoic positioning, (c) expert positioning, and (d) coercive positioning. Implications for how aggression work and positioning theory might build on past emotion management literature are discussed.