Geesin, Beverly and Mollan, Simon (2017) This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel's revelation of the organization and work of sport. Culture and Organization.

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Abstract

The novel This Sporting Life by David Storey is used in this article as fictive, ethnographic data to explore the relationship between sports work, industrial organization, identity, and the management of the body. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu on sport, and rugby specifically, and the relationship between sport, the body, class and rationalization this paper argues that David Storey provides a vivid, if pessimistic, fictional, and semi-autobiographical account of the ways in which sports, and sports work specifically, is driven by management discourses of rationality and control. We examine how this functions as class exploitation where labour is embodied and expended as a form of bodily capital. Lastly we offer a critique of the precarious social mobility that sports work promises. Through Storey’s Rugby League playing fictional anti-hero–Art Machin–we explore the central struggle between social structures and individual agency.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	"This is an accepted version of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Culture and Organization on 20/11/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14759551.2017.1401625"
Status:	Published
DOI:	10.1080/14759551.2017.1401625
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management H Social Sciences > HM Sociology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
School/Department:	School of Education, Language and Psychology
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/2617

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