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
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.
In the Nordic countries sport has a particular connection to civic society, and this is reflected in the Nordic governments 'sport for all' policies. The region also includes large voluntary non-profit sport organizations with an implicit monopoly on competitive sport. During the last decade scholars in Sweden have noted that commercial entrepreneurs have emerged in the child and youth sports landscape. However, empirical research on this phenomenon is scarce. Hence, in this article the aim is to map different commercial businesses and the services they offer on their websites. We make use of a Deleuzioguttarian inspired theory and method and a post-qualitative research practice, which is informed by an ontological (re)turn to realism(s) in social theory. We present four different commercial de-territorialization processes and discuss how they affect the Swedish Sport Confederation in different ways.
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.