Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

Den här artikeln undersöker hur kommersiella idrottsentreprenörer inom barn- och ungdomsidrott positionerar sig själva och sina verksamheter i förhållande till den svenska föreningsidrotten. Studien undersöker olika positioner som entreprenörer intar i relation till barn- och ungdomsidrotten och diskurserna som omgärdar den utifrån entreprenörers perspektiv. I resultatet lyfts tre olika positioner fram: (1) Den vanliga, passionerade barn- och ungdomsidrottsentusiasten; (2) entreprenörer som kompletterande aktörer i relation till föreningsidrott; och (3) företagarnas position i relation till det omgivande samhället. Sammanfattningsvis positionerar entreprenörerna sig inte som ett hot mot den svenska idrottsrörelsen. Men samtidigt hävdar de på olika sätt att deras verksamhet överträffar idrottsklubbarnas när det gäller att tillhandahålla idrott för barn och ungdomar. Dessutom tycks de positionera sina tjänster gentemot utvalda familjer framför andra, och verka inom en ram där barn- och ungdomsidrott i allt högre grad behandlas som en kommodifierbar enhet i det nutida samhället.

The contexts in which young people participate in sport are diverse. In Scandinavia, as in many other countries, child and youth sport is mainly organised in non-profit, membership-based and voluntary driven sports clubs. In Sweden, this model is now challenged by commercial businesses providing child and youth sport services. The overall aim of this article is to provide empirically based knowledge about these ongoing and largely unexplored commercialisation processes. The focus of the article is to illuminate how commercial businesses produce immaterial values through the promotion of sport services. In this article, we have explored the cultural and social values produced and promoted by commercial businesses in youth sport. Drawing on the website communications of eight commercial businesses from four different commercial strands, we use the concept of immaterial labour to consider the values produced when child and youth sport is turned into a desirable product on the market. The values generated from the texts on the selected websites are the immaterial values of (i) competence, (ii) individually adjusted training and, (iii) happiness. These values are enunciated differently by the businesses in the different strands. We situate the findings in relation to western social and cultural values and discuss the potential consequences of these value productions for contemporary ideas about youth sport and the way it should be organised.

Vi är idag ständigt värderade och bedömda: som hyresvärdar på Airbnb, som arbetstagare under utvecklingssamtal och som potentiella partners på Tinder. Detta gäller också för barn i deras vardag. Bedömningar blir ett kvitto på en position i gruppen och i samhället i stort. Med hjälp av olika bedömningsverktyg positionerar vi inte bara oss själva och andra, utan vi blir också positionerade av förväntningar och normsystem. Ingen behöver påpeka att vi bör hålla oss i form, laga mat från grunden eller låta våra barn idrotta och konsumera teaterkultur hellre än att spela Fortnite. I detta självdisciplinerande samhälle kan vi alla se vårt värde i relation till samhälleliga ideal – men det kan också alla andra. Att utvärdera, bedöma och välja den bäst lämpade individen passar väl in i dagens idé om meritokrati. 

One central issue in sports is the role of informal learning in organized child and youth sport in contrast to learning in the school context of physical education (PE). In Scandinavia, the model for organizing sports include an independent sports organization that organizes child and youth training on many levels, including the grassroots level and elite competitions organized within non-profit clubs and based on non-salaried voluntary work. In contrast to the public schooling context where physical education is led by educated and professional PE-teachers, organized child and youth club sports are based on parental engagement. Drawing on ten interviews with male coaches training their own children, this study examines how fathers are handling learning in the dual position as a father and a coach. This narrative analysis focuses on the theoretical concept of dilemmatic spaces in interviews and shows how shared cultural and societal storylines are used by the parental coaches in their personal stories. The results illustrate three dilemmatic spaces of learning that the participants must rhetorically handle. The first dilemma illuminates the dual position of both being a father, and at the same time acting as a coach. In the second dilemma, the fathers are seeking to balance between care of their child and increasing performance development. The third dilemma is balancing the training as child/parent quality time and the need for children to develop autonomy. The results show how the dual position of being a father and a coach can be both an asset in the relational building but also highly problematic and, in any case, involves a relational identity change. Learning in this dual position means that the fathers cannot act entirely as a coaches and disregard or override their parental position.

This article examines the long historical interest for the selection of young talented children in sports. This seemingly everlasting search for talents and the quest for the especially gifted is followed by the practice of trying to find and select the right individuals. This paper elucidates historical representations of talent and talent selection in a series of professional sports literature in Sweden during the 1930s, 1980s, 1990s and 2010s.

Drawing on a discourse analytic approach, it illustrates the historical understanding of selection and how such practices produce formations of legitimacy. The study shows how certain historical elements reoccur in contemporary selection discourse and how specific actions are transformed into personal characteristics. These selection processes construct a rationale for a legitimate selection and illustrate how talent selection is based on historically specific assumptions, normative and moral statements and activities connected to a specific discursive formation. This insight can underlines that talent selection cannot be understood as essential skills identified through observation, tests or interviews. It is rather to be understood as a discursive repertoire responding to a specific historical legitimacy.

Att samtidigt vara förälder och tränare innebär flera utmananingar och det kan vara svårt att skilja på de två rollerna. Men engagemanget som föräldratränare bidrar även till att bygga och stärka sociala band. Det visar en studie där tio pappor som tränar sina egna söner har intervjuats.

I de urvalsprocesser som bl.a. ungdomsidrottens präglas av betonas försöker man identifiera unga begåvningar. Men vad menar man egentligen med begreppet talang?  Vilken roll spelar begreppet i hur vi ser på urvalsprocesser och deras legitimitet? 

Success stories are a frequently investigated genre of shared cultural narratives. This paper will pay particular attention to success stories in sports and investigate how young participants in selection camps in soccer and hockey are using a set of shared narratives in order to produce their personal stories of success. By looking at narratives-in-interaction in this specific context, these interviews are investigated as a narrative genre. The analysis shows how a set of shared narratives are used in storylines in order to legitimize the personal story of success and how a number of dilemmatic spaces are addressed. This study shows how personal success stories are intimately tied to “discursively shared narratives” and how this context constitutes a specific narrative framework.

In sports, there seems to be an eternal interest in discovering young talents and refining them into elite adult athletes. The dilemma of selecting talent, while at the same time ensuring every child´s right to participate, needs to be addressed and have consequences in social practice. This dissertation elucidates the discourse of selection and the process of selecting young sporting talents during final selection camps for youth national teams in football, hockey and floorball in Sweden. More specifically, the aim is to analyze how talent selection is organizationally legitimized, how “selectability” is produced in interaction and how specific narratives are used in success-stories. The empirical material includes research interviews, performance appraisal interviews (between district or national team coaches and the player) and field studies during ongoing final selection camp. Drawing on a discursive-narrative approach, the aim is to investigate how selection is discursively legitimized and, by using narrative analysis, how positioning in talk-in-interaction functions. The first article investigates the construction of legitimate selection within the Swedish Sports Confederation by analyzing their organizational documents, sport journals and literature for coach education. The findings show how a specific set of narratives are used to legitimize selection and how legitimacy works both individually to those within the selection system and on a wider arena of welfare politics. The second article investigates the co-construction of selectability in small story-interaction during interviews between the coach and a player in the final selection camp. The analyses highlight how this narrative genre produces certain stories and preferred positions. The third article analyzes how the young participants, in research interviews during final selection camp, uses discursively shared narratives to produce personal stories of success. The findings illustrate how the personal stories of success are balancing the dilemmatic space, positioning yourself as outstanding and at the same time appear a humble team player. The principal contribution of this dissertation is to show how talent is organizationally legitimized and how selectability is produced in interaction, as well as illustrate how specific stories are used in stories of success. This work investigates the discursive framework for selection and how rationalities for talent selection are produced (and reproduced) and coconstructed in narrative interaction. In this apparatus of selection it takes more than physical talent to be chosen; it takes talking talent.

This paper draws on detailed analyses of authentic coach-athlete-interviews during the final selection camp for the Swedish national youth team in hockey. The audio-recorded interviews between the coaches and the individual players (20 players and two national team coaches) covered various issues, involving both the individual players´ goal-setting and sports character, as displayed in his self-presentation during the interview. If the presumptive elite level player presented a vague or low goal or an overly humble self-presentation, this was contested by the coach through jokes, laughter or ironic teasing. Such conversational joking exchanges formed part of each coach´s toolkit for giving critical feedback to interview questions. In their uptake to the coaches playful corrections, the players were expected to engage in po-faced receipt or to laugh along. The selection involved character contests both on the ice rink and in the talk-in-interaction that formed part of the performance appraisal procedure.

An increasingly central part of the scientific debate in sports has come to focus on how neuroscience can help to explain sports performance and development of expertise. In particular, the process of identifying young talents has been increasingly influencedby neuroscientific tests to identify future potential. It has been argued that instead of relying on coaches’ subjective assessments the process of selection should be based on general metrics of the brain through standardized testing. One key neurological functionhighlighted in the search for talent is cognitive executive functions. In the contemporary debate, studies of brain activity have suggested that children should undergo neuroscientific testing to determine the appropriate cognitive executive functions (CEF) for elite sports.This paper builds on previous work on the implications of a neuroscientific ontology in sports and Bruno Latour’s work onthe construction of scientific facts. Departing from discourse analysis,this paper studies the production and popularization of CEF as scientific facts. The findings illustrate how representations of brain activity are visualized and legitimized and how the out-of context tests are translated into facts about brain functions. The CEF test results are produced as inscriptions of undisputable facts, claiming that the results show prerequisites for sporting success.We argue that the mind-brain-behaviour relationship cannot be reduced to CEF tests and instead calls for a critical gaze on neuroscientific truth-claims and taken-for-granted facts in the area of sport.

Recent scientific debate in sports has come to focus on how neuroscience can help in explaining sports performance and the development of expertise; and in the process of talent identification. It has been argued that instead of relying on coaches’ subjective assessments the process of selection should be based on general metrics of the brain through standardized testing.

Cognitive executive functions (CEF) are highlighted as one of most important neurological function in the search for talents. Studies of brain activity have suggested that children should undergo neuroscientific testing to determine the appropriate cognitive executive functions (CEF) for elite sports. This presentation builds on previous work on the implications of a neuroscientific ontology in sports and Bruno Latour’s work on the construction of scientific facts.

Using discourse analysis, the presentation discusses the production and popularization of CEF as scientific facts. In our findings we identify how representations of brain activity are visualized and legitimized and how the out-of-context tests are translated into facts about brain functions. The CEF test results are produced as inscriptions of undisputable facts, claiming that the results show prerequisites for sporting success. On the contrary, we argue that the mind-brain-behaviour relationship cannot be reduced to CEF tests. Instead, we urge other researchers to direct a critical gaze on neuroscientific truth-claims and taken-for-granted facts in the area of sport in general and in talent selection in particular.

This article analyzes talent selection within Swedish Sports. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which this process of legitimacy is produced in the case of children and adolescents. The article involves a discourse analytical approach where organizational policy documents, annuals for operation, educational coach literature constitute the corpus of data. The aim is to document how problems of legitimizing talent selection are handled within the organization through the use of different discursive repertoires. The purpose is to deconstruct explicit statements and underlying suppositions through with the current process of selection is legitimized.  The research material allows us access into how the process for talent selection constitutes a significant part of a discursive apparatus of selection. In order to make the process of selection appear neutral, discursive work is played out in order to make the process appear fair and unbiased. Furthermore, this article shows how the production of the legitimate selection works in two directions, both individually and politically. The process of selection is being rhetorically displayed as legitimate to those within the system, as well as a Swedish egalitarian welfare politic at large.

Success stories and heroic tales are recurrently investigated narrative genres in literature (Propp, 1998), journalism (Lule, 2001) and, not the least, in sports (Hellström, 2014). In sports, we repeatedly hear athletes explain their performance at half-time or give us reflections on a recently completed competition. However, these stories are not produced in a social vacuum; they are part of a discursive framework and a product of time and place. The trajectories for a legitimate success story is limited and specific storylines are repeated and holds a specific dramaturgical structure. The heroic story typically follows a temporal structure, from a beginning to an end, where events and performances function as phases of a narrative journey towards a defining triumph (Hoebeke et al. 2011). Which performances that constitutes the highlight of an athlete’s career will always be culturally determined, since cultures produces heroes according to their own specific values and traditions (Whannel, 2002). Thereby, the “personal” story is both a contextually specific narrative and a culturally shared narrative.

Aims and empirical material

In this paper, we are seeking to investigate how success stories in sports as a central part of the athletes identity work, and how these stories also serve as symbols for values and morals of a wider sporting society (Kilger, 2017). Many narrative scholars within the area of sports have been interested in retrospective studies of sports heroes or historical media studies of successful athletes (Hargreaves, 2000; Hellström, 2014; Whannel, 2002). In this study, we would like to pay particular attention to how personal narratives are built ´in-action´ and study which narrative elements are recurrent in the interviews and how is the own performance explained. Accordingly, we are interested in how such narratives of success and failure are co-constructed in the interview interaction and how they are structured. By investigating which master narratives that the participants recruit in their personal stories, this can help us to uncover shared normative storylines in elite sports. Moreover, we would like to illuminate how the athletes are using ´temporal-identity´ in the interviews as a way to construct a legitimate story of performance.

The data set will include after-performance media interviews from Swedish television (SVT) during the FIS Cross Country World Championships. More specifically, we are seeking to analyze between 15-20 after-race television interviews with Swedish athletes during the FIS Cross Country World Championships 2019 in Falun, Sweden.

In sports, there is an extensive interest in identifying and selecting talented children in order to develop elite adult athletes. The process of selecting and screening talents involves not only physical and technical skills but also efforts to find adequate personality traits. Therefore, different types of performance appraisal interviews (PAIs) are becoming increasingly common within the field. Departing from fieldwork in two selection camps for Swedish youth national teams in soccer and hockey, we will take a closer look at the PAIs employed during these camps. This article takes on a narrative approach, emphasizing PAI as a narrative genre and a framework for a specific form of interaction. Our findings show how eligibility is performed in interaction through following three practices: (i) showcasing gratitude without tipping into flattery, (ii) using temporality as a way of displaying developmental potential, and (iii) adopting the role of the self-reflecting subject. This genre of interviews not only produces certain practices but also preferred subject positions and narratives. The PAI is thus a narrative genre where the players are encouraged to perform talent in order to appear selectable.