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Looks, Liveliness, and Laughter: Visual Representations in Commercial Sports for Children
Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, GIH, Department of Movement, Culture and Society.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9841-2788
Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, GIH, Department of Movement, Culture and Society.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1230-3415
Stockholm Univ, Dept Child & Youth Studies, Stockholm, Sweden.
Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, GIH, Department of Movement, Culture and Society.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9965-0123
2023 (English)In: International Journal of Sport Communication, ISSN 1936-3915, E-ISSN 1936-3907, Vol. 6, no 2, p. 178-186Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

In contemporary society, visual information is influential, not least when businesses are communicating with potential customers. It represents and influences how people understand phenomena. In sports, much attention is directed toward how media represent elite sports and sport stars. Less attention is directed toward children's sports. The aim of this article is to explore and analyze visual representations of children on sport businesses' websites. The sample contained 697 images of sporting children, on which an interpretative content and discourse analysis was conducted. The study shows that the ideal customer emerging on these sites is a White, physically active, able, and slim boy or girl. Consumer culture seems to reproduce and preserve existing normative frameworks rather than producing alternative norms and ideas in children's sport. Moreover, dilemmatic images of children both as competent and as innocent develop, displaying a childhood that should be both joyful and active but also safeguarded.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Human Kinetics, 2023. Vol. 6, no 2, p. 178-186
Keywords [en]
symbolic persons; gender; Whiteness; values; norms
National Category
Sport and Fitness Sciences Educational Sciences
Research subject
Social Sciences/Humanities
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:gih:diva-7150DOI: 10.1123/ijsc.2022-0202ISI: 000942573400001OAI: oai:DiVA.org:gih-7150DiVA, id: diva2:1703737
Note

At the time of Jesper Karlsson's dissertation this article was a submitted and revised manuscript.

Available from: 2022-10-14 Created: 2022-10-14 Last updated: 2023-06-26Bibliographically approved
In thesis
1. Barn- och ungdomsidrott till salu: Om begär, immateriellt arbete och kommersialisering
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Barn- och ungdomsidrott till salu: Om begär, immateriellt arbete och kommersialisering
2022 (Swedish)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Alternative title[en]
Child and youth sport for sale
Abstract [en]

In recent decades scholars have noted a trend in Swedish child and youth sport, namely that businesses are emerging parallel to the Swedish Sports Confederation (SSC), Sweden’s leading ideally driven sports organisation. Despite this recent trend of businesses starting to organise child and youth sport, research on the phenomenon is as yet scarce. This is also true for the overarching research area of the commercialisation of youth sport. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to analyse how commercially driven child and youth sport in Sweden functions and how leading representatives from child and youth sport businesses perceive Swedish child and youth sport.

The thesis consists of four sub-studies. Three of the studies are based on data from different child and youth sport business websites, while the other is based on data from interviews with leading representatives from different child and youth sport businesses.

The results identify four different commercial de-territorialisation processes that have been established, or territorialised, in Sweden. These four de-territorialisation processes consist of businesses that target their services to different potential customers groups. They also identify how the different businesses produce immaterial values regarding child and youth sport in order to attract potential customers. These values are enunciated differently depending on the kind of de-territorialisation processes the businesses stem from. Furthermore, the thesis illustrates that in their website images the businesses often visually represent their ideal customers as white boys and girls who are actively pursuing some kind of sport. It also shows that the leading business representatives position themselves and their services as passionate sport enthusiasts, child and youth sport actors and actors in a changing society.

The conclusion is that the commercialisation of child and youth sport functions in four different ways and creates boundaries between ideally- and commercially driven sport. The challenge for ideally driven sport is to keep control over sport as a social and cultural product. This is especially important in a post-industrial society, where businesses aspire to take control of the social and cultural content of sport and make it profitable

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Stockholm: Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH, 2022. p. 106
Series
Avhandlingsserie för Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan ; 26
National Category
Economics and Business Sport and Fitness Sciences
Research subject
Social Sciences/Humanities
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:gih:diva-7152 (URN)978-91-986490-8-6 (ISBN)
Public defence
2022-11-11, Aulan, Lidingövägen 1, Stockholm, 13:00 (Swedish)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2022-10-14 Created: 2022-10-14 Last updated: 2022-11-11Bibliographically approved

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Karlsson, JesperBäckström, ÅsaRedelius, Karin

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