Sport, Power and Politics: Exploring Sport and Social Control within the Changing Context of Modernity

Abstract

The focus of this paper charts sports role within the broader framework of exercising power and enforcing social control. From the start, I undertake a socio-historical analysis that seeks to explore the changing methods of implementing power and how they have evolved from industrial times to service a postindustrial setting. Through this prism, I examine sport, both as a central part of culture and as a policy area within post-war Britain. The contours of which, help the paper articulate the different roles sports policy has played within production and consumer-based societies, by exploring its metamorphosis from an area of social policy designed to instil discipline and set behaviours through a panoptic approach to governing. To now, becoming a central area of a modernised policy framework, built around the seductive workings of synopticism. Here, it is examined how elite sporting role models and the international success they acrue, are now used as sites of inspiration to motivate ordinary members of the public to be physically active. The contours of which, conform to a very different method of controlling populations and enforcing power from what was seen previously.