Volume 7, Issue 3

The article aims at addressing a sport sociological research desideratum: the question of acting in sport. So far, this question has mainly been dealt with in human kinetics and sport psychology. Here, action theories refer to action as a rational-reflective and individual phenomenon whose cognitive and ideational foundations must be given particular attention. Recently, however, the focus has begun to be shifted to embodied, pre-reflective, and relational dimensions of action in these sub-disciplines of sport science. Similar reorientations can be observed in sociology, where the mentalism and individualism inherent in action theories is undermined by practice theories emphasizing the bodily, tacit, and collective properties of practice. Practice theories promise additional advances and insights into practical action in sport insofar as they explicitly take into account dimensions of practice widely abstracted from by approaches of human kinetics and sport psychology. By means of a praxeological reflection of the existing approaches to action in sport, the article identifies their blind spots and presents initial ideas for overcoming them. Zusammenfassung Der Artikel versucht eine Annäherung an ein sportsoziologisches Forschungsdesiderat: die Frage, wie im Sport gehandelt wird. Zum Gegenstand wird diese bislang hauptsächlich in Bewegungswissenschaft und Sportpsychologie, in denen Handlungstheorien sportliches Handeln als ein rational- reflexives und individuelles Phänomen ins Feld geführt haben, dessen psychische und insbesondere auch kognitive Grundlagen von entscheidender Bedeutung und zentralem Interesse seien. Unlängst verschiebt sich die Aufmerksamkeit hier jedoch auf verkörperte, vorbewusste und z.T. auch relationale Qualitäten und Voraussetzungen des Handelns. Ähnliche Umorientierungen sind in der Soziologie zu beobachten: Der handlungstheoretische Mentalismus und Individualismus wird von Praxistheorien hinterfragt und die körperlichen, impliziten und kollektiven Dimensionen von Praxis hervorgehoben. Für eine Modellierung des Handelns im Sport versprechen diese Theorien Erkenntnisgewinne, da sie Merkmale praktischen Handelns in Anschlag bringen, die in bewegungswissenschaftlichen und sportpsychologischen Ansätzen außer Acht gelassen werden. Durch eine praxeologische Reflexion der Konzepte zum Handeln im Sport werden deren blinde Flecken offengelegt und erste Überlegungen zur Behebung dieser skizziert.

Doping usually enters the public discourse as a problem exclusive to competitive and high-performance sports. But in light of the doping practices of hundreds of thousands of amateur and recreational athletes, this narrow view fails to take account of the complexity and diversity of doping, or of the real scope of the problem. Outside the spotlight that has been focused on doping practices in high-performance sports, a doping scene has established itself, particularly in fitness clubs, where medications are abused and used unscrupulously to modify bodies that are perceived as “inferior” and transform them into hypermuscular forms. This article aims at examining and illuminating the world that weightlifters and bodybuilders inhabit - one that is largely unknown to outside observers - from the perspective of an “understanding” sociology. The findings presented here on the attitudes and biographical histories of performance-enhancing drug users, and on the existing networks, conspiratioral practices, and escalating addictive spirals, are striking and shocking at the same time. They reveal the extent to which techniques of drug-based body modeling have already become part of modern everyday life, in complete disregard for the health risks and side effects.

The article proposes a methodological approach to a problem that results from an anti-positivist concept of science. If, in rejection of positivism, all data is understood as “theory-laden”, there can be no inductive way to attain certain knowledge. What might be a methodological equivalent to this idea? The concept of prototypes can provide an answer. It also reformulates “evidence” by breaking with the idea of immediate certainty. Hence, it can be said, for example, that Olympic sport is the prototype for the sports of the modern age, which in turn is a necessary construct for distinguishing a cultural history of sports from a universal history.