Volume 9, Issue 2

Recent years have seen a substantial increase in the number of individuals who devote a high percentage of their leisure time to sports with no regard to the psychic, physical, or social consequences. Sports medicine and sports psychology coined the term “exercise addiction” to describe this behavior, and have reported numerous important findings. In contrast to studies in the aforementioned disciplines, which generally attempt to explain this behavior by studying personal psychic and physical aspects of non-substance sports addiction, the present article takes a sociological approach. Sports addiction is treated here as a social phenomenon and is analyzed on a macro-, meso-, and micro-social level. This approach makes it possible to identify the precise socio-cultural conditions of sports- addictive behavior, and also reveals why increasing numbers of people are using especially sports activities as an addiction. By demonstrating this approach, the current article presents for the first time the outlines of a sociology of sports addiction.

Although an increasing diversification can be observed in sports professions, graduates in various disciplines of sports science often regard their chances of finding a stable and adequately paid job with skepticism. This raises the question of the extent to which sector-specific market saturation effects as well as the effects of substitutable qualification demands play a role. To provide answers, the present article adopts a life course approach and analyzes changes in the sports professions over time based on (aggregated) individual occupational career data. This study is based on a sample of n = 1,105 graduates from all Swiss universities showing the occupational biographies of graduates in sports science disciplines in the form retrospective longitudinal data from three cohorts. The results provide evidence that the labor market for graduates in sports science disciplines in Switzerland is stable. At the same time, the analysis shows that qualification structures for graduates of sport science in fields outside the school context are often missing. If introduced as a job prerequisite, such structures could potentially stabilize the professional positions of graduates in sports science over the long term.

Contrary to widely expressed expectations, the ratio of paid employment to unpaid volunteer work in sports clubs remains low, and an increase in professionalization cannot be observed. In this article, to augment existing approaches from systems theory, a production theoretical model is introduced that considers volunteer work as a form of salary donation and interprets decisions of sports clubs as con­vergence to a minimal cost function. Hypotheses derived from the model were tested empirically using data from a survey of all sports clubs in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate with over 750 club members. Because the hypotheses were largely supported, the model can be considered useful in ex­plaining the low level of apprenticeships in sports clubs as well as the requirements for including paid employment in the production function of sports clubs.