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Keep Your Fans to Yourself: The Disjuncture between Sport Studies' and Pop Culture Studies' Perspectives on Fandom

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17430430701388764

1743-0445

Kimberly S. Schimmel, C. Lee Harrington, Denise D. Bielby,

Sports Analytics and Performance

Abstract This essay explores different understandings of fans and fandom between sport studies and pop culture studies through presentation of survey data originally collected for a study on global fandom/global fan studies. Email surveys from 65 fan scholars around the world reveal important distinctions between sport scholars and pop culture scholars in terms of their basic understandings of fans and fandom, the role of self-reflexivity in fan research, and the location of sport and other pop culture scholarship in the academy. Analysis points to a disjuncture between sport and pop culture fan studies that ultimately limits the ability to fully understand the range of fan experiences and fandoms. Notes [1] By 'pop culture fan studies' we include studies of fans of all other pop cultural forms beside sport: television, music, film, advertising, animation, music videos, etc. Any sport-related interaction with the above (such as fans of televised Super Bowl ads or fans of sport celebrities) we would categorize under 'sport fan studies'. We acknowledge that this broad definition might be controversial within some areas of the academy, and indeed, by some of our survey participants. [2] CitationHarrington and Bielby, 'Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies'. [3] CitationRowe, 'No Gain, No Game? Media and Sport', 347. [4] For example, see CitationSchimmel, 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame: The Transformation of Production-Consumption Relations in Professional Team Sport', for an overview of cartelization, monopoly and monopsony practices in the US professional team sports industry. [5] CitationSabo and Panepinto, 'Football Ritual and the Social Construction of Masculinity'. [6] The sport text is unique in regard to the element of uncertainty. Fans cannot predict the outcome of the sporting event beforehand, unlike pop culture fans' ability to access movie or concert reviews. This uncertainty or unpredictability historically sets sport apart from other cultural forms, though new media genres – such as some reality TV shows, for example – also invest heavily in uncertainty (with greater or lesser success) as a basis for viewer pleasures. [7] CitationBairner, Sport, Nationalism, and Globalization; Citation Brown , Fanatics! Power, Identity and Fandom in Football. [8] CitationCialdini et al. , 'Basking in Reflected Glory: Three (Football) Field Studies'; CitationWann et al. , Sport Fans. [9] CitationHughson and Free, 'Paul Willis, Cultural Commodities, and Collective Sport Fandom'. [10] CitationGiulianotti and Robertson, 'Glocalization, Globalization and Migration: The Case of Scottish Football Supporters in North America'; CitationMaguire, Global Sport; CitationSandvoss, A Game of Two Halves. [11] CitationGiulianotti, 'The Sociability of Sport: Scotland Football Supporters as Interpreted through the Sociology of Georg Simmel'. [12] CitationDunning et al. , Fighting Fans; CitationGiulianotti, Bonny and Hepworth, Football, Violence and Social Identity; CitationTaylor, 'Football Sad: A Speculative Sociology of Football Hooliganism'; CitationYoung, 'Standard Deviations: An Update on North American Sports Crowd Disorder'. [13] CitationHorne, Sport in Consumer Culture; see also CitationCrawford, Consuming Sport, and Giulianotti, Bonny and Hepworth, Football, Violence and Social Identity. [14] CitationRaney, 'Why We Watch and Enjoy Mediated Sports'; Wann et al., Sports Fans. [15] CitationWann, 'Preliminary Validation of the Sport Fan Motivation Scale'. [16] CitationWann and Hamlet, 'Author and Subject Gender in Sport Research'. [17] CitationChung, 'Sport Star vs. Rock Star in Globalizing Popular Culture'; CitationLines, 'The Sport Star in the Media'; CitationMelnick and Jackson, 'Globalization American-Style and Reference Idol Selection: The Importance of Athlete Celebrity Others among New Zealand Youth'. [18] CitationSandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. [19] Giulianotti, 'The Sociability of Sport: Scotland Football Supporters as Interpreted through the Sociology of Georg Simmel', 289. [20] CitationAllen, Speaking of Soap Operas. [21] CitationThorp, America at the Movies. [22] For example, see CitationWertham, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth. [23] CitationHorton and Wohl, 'Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction'; ibid. [24] The following is a severely truncated version of a discussion made in Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington, 'Why Study Fans?'. We note that other scholars have described the generational history of pop culture fan studies differently than we do here; see, for example, CitationJenkins, 'Intensities Interviews Henry Jenkins'. [25] CitationJenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. [26] Perhaps because of its (relatively) shorter history and sub-disciplinary specialization, sport fan studies is not as identifiably organized by generations as is pop culture fan studies. However, for a lengthy discussion of the generations of scholars/scholarship and unity/disunity of intellectual traditions within North American sociology of sport, see CitationIngham and Donnelly, 'A Sociology of North American Sociology of Sport'. [27] For example, see CitationGantz and Wenner, 'Fanship and the Television Sport Viewing Experience'; Sandvoss, Fans. [28] Sandvoss, A Game of Two Halves. [29] Crawford, Consuming Sport. [30] Chung, 'Sport Star vs. Rock Star in Globalizing Popular Culture'; Lines, 'The Sport Star in the Media'; Melnick and Jackson, 'Globalization American-Style and Reference Idol Selection'; CitationSandvoss, Bernstein and Real, Bodies of Discourse: Sports Stars, Mass Media and the Global Public. [31] Here, Gantz and his colleagues follow through on earlier research that documented sport fans' active TV viewing and called on scholars to compare fans across different TV programming genres; see Gantz and Wenner, 'Fanship and the Television Sports Viewing Experience'. [32] The questionnaire was designed to focus on four elements of the TV viewing experience: what people do before their show comes on, their motives for watching, the things they do and feel while watching, and the behaviours and feelings they experience after viewing; see CitationGantz et al. , 'Sports Vs. All Comers: Comparing TV Sport Fans with Fans of Other Programming Genres'. [33] The questionnaire was designed to focus on four elements of the TV viewing experience: what people do before their show comes on, their motives for watching, the things they do and feel while watching, and the behaviours and feelings they experience after viewing; see Gantz et al., 'Sports Vs. All Comers: Comparing TV Sport Fans with Fans of Other Programming Genres', 20. [34] CitationJones and Lawrence, 'Identity and Gender in Sport and Media Fandom: An Exploratory Comparison of Fans Attending Football Matches and Star Trek Conventions'. [35] CitationWann and Branscombe, 'Sports Fans'. [36] Sandvoss, Fans. [37] CitationMurphy and Kraidy, 'Towards an Ethnographic Approach to Global Media Studies', 11. [38] See CitationIngham, Blissmer and Davidson, 'The Expendable Prolympic Self: Going Beyond the Boundaries of the Sociology and Psychology of Sport'; Ingham and Donnelly, 'A Sociology of North American Sociology of Sport'; CitationMaguire, 'Triple-Jeopardy: A Career in the Sociology of Sport in Britain', Maguire and Young, 'Back to the Future: Thinking Sociologically about Sport'; Wann and Hamlet, 'Author and Subject Gender in Sport Research'. [39] Harrington and Bielby, 'Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies'. [40] North America is over-represented, comprising 49 per cent of the sample (n = 32). Other countries represented include Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, England, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan and Turkey. English is the primary language of publication for these scholars, though Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, German, Finnish and Dutch are also represented. [41] Harrington and Bielby, 'Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies'. [42] For purposes of analysis in the larger study, disciplinary location was broken down into five general categories: social sciences, humanities, interdisciplinary fields, business management and 'other'. For purposes of discussion here, we are interested in more specific disciplinary and sub-disciplinary locations: sociology, psychology, English literature, movement science, and so on. [43] See CitationAbercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination; CitationGiulianotti, 'Supporters, Followers, Fans and Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities in Football'. [44] CitationCooley, 'The Last Roots of Social Knowledge'. [45] See CitationHills, Fan Cultures. [46] See Hills, Fan Cultures [47] Jenkins, 'Intensities Interviews with Henry Jenkins'. [48] See also, CitationEastman and Land, 'The Best of Both Worlds: Sports Fans Find Good Seats at the Bar'. [49] Harrington and Bielby paraphrase from Murphy and Kraidy, 'Towards an Ethnographic Approach to Global Media Studies', 11. [50] Please note that the survey items soliciting this information were open-ended. The tiers represent the most frequently identified publications, persons and publication outlets by the overall sample. [51] CitationJenkins, '"Never Trust a Snake!" WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama'. [52] Harrington and Bielby, 'Global Fandom/Global Fan Studies'. [53] The 18 journals identified by sport fan scholars are: Sociology of Sport Journal, International Sports Journal, Journal of Communication, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Communication Research, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, Journal of Sport Behavior, Group Dynamics, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Sport Marketing Quarterly, Internal Journal of Sport Marketing and Sponsorship, Journal of Sport Behavior, Journal of Sport Management, International Journal of Sport Management, European Sport Management Quarterly, Sport Management Review. Please note that not all participants specified journal titles; instead, some provided answers such as 'cultural studies journals', 'sport psychology journals' or 'interdisciplinary journals'. [54] To give several more examples, the journal Sport Marketing Quarterly has published 31 articles on fans since 2000 but was mentioned by only four of our participants, the Journal of Sport Management has published nine articles on fans since 2003 and was mentioned by three participants, and the International Journal of Sport Management has published four articles on fans since 2001 and was mentioned by two participants. [55] Ingham, Blissmer and Davidson, 'The Expendable Prolympic Self', 259. [56] CitationRajagopal, 'Mediating Modernity: Theorizing Reception in a Non-Western Society'. [57] CitationJuluri, Becoming a Global Audience, 219. [58] CitationMeehan, 'Leisure or Labor? Fan Ethnography and Political Economy'. [59] CitationMaguire and Young, 'Back to the Future', 6. See also CitationBourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. [60] Maguire and Young, 'Back to the Future', 7. [61] CitationSchimmel, 'The Political Economy of Place: Urban and Sport Studies Perspectives'. [62] CitationWann and Hamlet, 'Author and Subject Gender in Sport Research'. [63] See Crawford, Consuming Sport. [64] CitationGray, Sandvoss and Harrington, 'Why Study Fans?' [65] Gantz et al., 'Sports v. All Comers: Comparing TV Sport Fans with Fans of Other Programming Genres', 6. [66] Sandvoss, Fans, 4. [67] CitationKraidy and Murphy, 'Media Ethnography: Local, Global or Translocal', 303. [68] CitationHills, The Pleasures of Horror. [69] CitationCraib, Psychoanalysis and Social Theory, 196. [70] See also CitationIngham and Beamish, 'Didn't Cyclops Lose His Vision? An Exercise in Sociological Optometry', 259, for a similar discussion concerning the fusion of Williams and Freud and the future directions of the sociology of sport. [71] Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences. [72] Wann et al., Sports Fans. [73] Giulianotti, 'Supporters, Followers, Fans and Flaneurs'. [74] CitationCavicchi, 'Loving Music'. [75] Ericksen and Steffen, 'Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex Research in the Twentieth Century'. [76] Sandvoss, Fans, 10. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKimberly S. Schimmel Kimberly S. Schimmel, School of Exercise, Leisure and Sport, 263 Gym Annex, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242. C. Lee Harrington C. Lee Harrington, Department of Sociology and Gerontology, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056. Denise D. Bielby Denise D. Bielby, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106.