Martin Roderick
Biographic Data
| ID | 249710 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin Roderick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin |
| FAMILY NAME | Roderick |
| SIGNATURE | RODERICK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9846-9752 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 394 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Towards a sportive agoraphobia of professional athletes
In careers that span anonymity to public individual, the work of professional athletes is highly visible: anyone can observe and comment on what they do. Based on the accounts of 26 full-time, UK-based professional athletes from seven sports, eight female and 18 male interviewees, the object of this article is to examine the working lives of professional athletes and how, as they go about daily routines, they value and manage the fluid balance be…
Career transitions from the English Premier League
Achieving and then maintaining a career as a professional athlete is hard. Saturated labour markets and the ever-present risk of deselection or injury means that career transitions are an inevitable feature of all athletes' biographies. Like many other professional sports organisations, English Premier League (EPL) clubs have been called upon to provide adequate support to players upon their release from their club. This investigation will examin…
Sport
The term “professional” has always been associated with sport that is performed by athletes as a form of entertainment for audiences. The history of this term, however, is complex and tied relationally to the idea of amateurism – amateurism was a response to professionalism. Differential tensions produced by professionalism can be comprehended only in relation to the historical period in which professionalization and monetization advanced and the…
I Just Want to Be Left Alone”
To date, no sociological studies of professional athletes have investigated the lived experiences of sportspeople in highly publicly visible occupations that provide relatively few opportunities for backstage relaxation from role demands. Drawing on findings from a British Academy-funded project examining high-profile sports workers and employing Goffman’s dramaturgical insights, this article provides a novel examination of high-profile athletes …
The Sociology of Sports Work, Emotions and Mental Health
The central object of this introductory \nessay, and of this Special Issue more \nbroadly, is to explore relations between \nthe study of work and the continuing \nevolution of the sociology of sport with a \nparticular focus on the mental health of \nsports workers. In particular, we argue \nthat revitalizing the study of sports work, \nand eschewing the highly individualized \nand reductionist approaches most often \ndemonstrated by dominating …
The Presentation of Possible Selves in Everyday Life
In contrast to research, which privileges the notion of an exclusive athletic identity, we argue that the identity management of professional athletes is influenced by the expectations of audiences and the motivational weight of ‘possible selves’ in explaining career transitions from ‘sports work’. Qualitative vignette interviews were conducted with 10 male participants (ages 18–26 years) on three separate occasions (30 interviews). All interview…
The whole week comes down to the team sheet
This 'On the front line' article focuses on the work and employment situation for an insecure, individualized sports worker whose main job task is fundamentally and publically collaborative. The narrative offers a realistic and nuanced understanding of the material conditions of work for a journeyman footballer and defies sociological ideas associated with attachment and identification to work, which are frequently and implicitly connected to thi…
Disciplinary mechanisms and the discourse of identity
Organization studies research exposes the need to examine power relations embedded within the design of organizations, the construction of normative behaviour, and the production of socially constructed meanings that lead to the removal of employee voice. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with Premiership football academy members, this article examines the regulation, control and ‘silencing’ of young English professional footballers. Buildin…
From identification to dis-identification
Taken from a broader study of the careers of professional footballers, this article uses two player stories of job loss to offer contrasting experiences of cynical dis-identification. I examine how in research on the careers of sports workers, athletes so often express discontent yet maintain an apparent dedication and commitment to their craft. In contrast to the overwhelming focus on the construction and shaping of workplace identity, this arti…
Recovery from addiction and the potential role of sport
To date, sport has played little part as an adjunct or alternative to adult alcohol and drug treatment programmes. However, research into natural recovery (overcoming addiction without formal treatment) identifies that sustained, meaningful activities located within the community, supportive social networks and new identities are a key part of desistance. This article draws on longitudinal data which tracked substance-misusing offenders engaging …
Domestic moves
This article investigates the domestic, intra-state labour mobility of professional footballers. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represent a range of career trajectories; the specific object of 19 interviews was to examine meanings and experiences tied to job relocation. An interactionist perspective was employed to highlight the ways in which players came to def…
Disciplinary Power, the Oligopticon and Rhizomatic Surveillance in Elite Sports Academies
This article aims to apply a post-panoptic view of surveillance within the context of elite sport. Latour’s (2005) ‘oligopticon’ and Deleuze and Guttari’s (2003) ‘rhizomatic’ notion of surveillance networks are adopted to question the relevance and significance of Foucault’s (1979) conceptualisation of surveillance within an elite sports academy setting. A contemporary representation of bio-politics (Rose 1999, 2001) is further utilised to discer…
An Unpaid Labor of Love
This article presents qualitative findings which cast light on experiences of job-related geographical relocation for professional footballers and their families. Job relocation is an issue for players and partners, as labor market migration is commonplace in this profession. Although cultural expectations often lead to personal sacrifice, initial research findings indicate that many partners are deciding against relinquishing control over their …
Lay Down Sally’
This article analyses media narratives of failure in sport using a case-study of the collapse of Australian rower Sally Robbins at the 2004 Olympic Games. Media coverage of Robbins' breakdown was driven by conflicting narratives. In the dominant version Robbins was initially denigrated as being ‘UnAustralian’. However, this disparagement precipitated several counter-narratives whereby Robbins was seen as having been failed by her teammates, coach…
Attitudes to work in professional football
Attitudes to work in professional football - 1
Transfer markets and informal grapevines 1
Transfer markets and informal grapevines 1 - 1
Uncertainty and football injuries
Alan Mullery celebrated his thirtieth birthday on 23 November 1971. Not that he had anything to celebrate. By then he’d been out of action for a whole month. But long before that he’d obviously been struggling ... He’d been playing all season with stomach pains. He’d hoped he could play it out, that the pains would just fade away, but they hadn’t. He’d been using a corset for some time ... This had helped slightly at first, but then the pains had…
Injuries, stigma and social identity 1
Injuries, stigma and social identity 1 - 1
The fate of idealism in professional football
The fate of idealism in professional football - 1
Control and the process of transferring
Among the portrayals of contemporary professional football there exists a widespread perception that modern players earn vast amounts of money and, with the assistance of ‘influential’ agents, are able to dictate to club managers and directors in terms of salaries, length of contracts and other conditions of employment. There has been an increasing focus on the issue of ‘player power’ in print media since the landmark 1963 Eastham case, but parti…
Professional football in context
In industrialized societies most people spend their adult lives at work and that commitment to work can be a central feature of a person’s life ( Grint 2005 ). There may be an intricate relationship between work and self such that the work in which people engage comes to be closely bound up with their conception of self – that is, who they have been, who they are and who they would like to be. Research on work ( Grint 2005 ; Watson 1995 ) has rev…
Conclusion
Conclusion - 1
Transferring and the transformation of self
The relatively fragile nature of playing careers in professional football has been highlighted in the previous chapters in relation to the injuries sustained by players. During interview, other than periods of time inactive because of injury, the most vulnerable passages that arose for players were, first, when they were omitted from the starting line-up and, second, during job relocation. The central focus of this chapter therefore concerns the …
The Work of Professional Football
authoritarianism, ruthlessness and hyper-masculine workplace practice(s)' (Parker 1996a: 1) of the football world.Over the last twenty-five years, academic analysis of football has focused overwhelmingly on the issue of hooliganism (see Giulianotti 1999).The study of players and their work by sociologists has been marginal at best.Some academics, for example King (1999), have written about the sociology of football and neglected totally to mentio…
A very precarious profession
Based on semi-structured interviews with 47 present and former professional footballers, this article explores the uncertainty that is a central feature of the professional footballer's workplace experiences, contributing to sociological understanding of insecurities stemming from the social relations of this type of work.The professional football industry has always been marked by a competitive labour market, and players quickly grasp the limite…
The Work of Professional Football
authoritarianism, ruthlessness and hyper-masculine workplace practice(s)' (Parker 1996a: 1) of the football world.Over the last twenty-five years, academic analysis of football has focused overwhelmingly on the issue of hooliganism (see Giulianotti 1999).The study of players and their work by sociologists has been marginal at best.Some academics, for example King (1999), have written about the sociology of football and neglected totally to mentio…
A very precarious profession
Based on semi-structured interviews with 47 present and former professional footballers, this article explores the uncertainty that is a central feature of the professional footballer's workplace experiences, contributing to sociological understanding of insecurities stemming from the social relations of this type of work.The professional football industry has always been marked by a competitive labour market, and players quickly grasp the limite…
Playing Hurt
Professional football is, in terms of the risk of injury, a high-risk occupation. The objects of this study are to examine the ways in which professional footballers respond to and cope with injury and, in this context, we focus on the culture of 'playing hurt' in football. The study involved semi-structured interviews with former and current professional footballers as well as interviews with club doctors and physiotherapists. The interviews foc…
Adding insult to injury
Sociologists studying the topic of workplace injury have neglected professional athletes despite the fact that, for such employees, remaining 'active' at work is of paramount importance. This study involved semi-structured interviews with 47 current and former male professional footballers who all had careers in the English professional football leagues. The interviews focused on the players' experiences of injury and rehabilitation and their rel…
An Unpaid Labor of Love
This article presents qualitative findings which cast light on experiences of job-related geographical relocation for professional footballers and their families. Job relocation is an issue for players and partners, as labor market migration is commonplace in this profession. Although cultural expectations often lead to personal sacrifice, initial research findings indicate that many partners are deciding against relinquishing control over their …
The Football Imagination
The Presentation of Possible Selves in Everyday Life
In contrast to research, which privileges the notion of an exclusive athletic identity, we argue that the identity management of professional athletes is influenced by the expectations of audiences and the motivational weight of ‘possible selves’ in explaining career transitions from ‘sports work’. Qualitative vignette interviews were conducted with 10 male participants (ages 18–26 years) on three separate occasions (30 interviews). All interview…
The Sociology of Sports Work, Emotions and Mental Health
The central object of this introductory \nessay, and of this Special Issue more \nbroadly, is to explore relations between \nthe study of work and the continuing \nevolution of the sociology of sport with a \nparticular focus on the mental health of \nsports workers. In particular, we argue \nthat revitalizing the study of sports work, \nand eschewing the highly individualized \nand reductionist approaches most often \ndemonstrated by dominating …
The whole week comes down to the team sheet
This 'On the front line' article focuses on the work and employment situation for an insecure, individualized sports worker whose main job task is fundamentally and publically collaborative. The narrative offers a realistic and nuanced understanding of the material conditions of work for a journeyman footballer and defies sociological ideas associated with attachment and identification to work, which are frequently and implicitly connected to thi…
Disciplinary mechanisms and the discourse of identity
Organization studies research exposes the need to examine power relations embedded within the design of organizations, the construction of normative behaviour, and the production of socially constructed meanings that lead to the removal of employee voice. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with Premiership football academy members, this article examines the regulation, control and ‘silencing’ of young English professional footballers. Buildin…
Domestic moves
This article investigates the domestic, intra-state labour mobility of professional footballers. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represent a range of career trajectories; the specific object of 19 interviews was to examine meanings and experiences tied to job relocation. An interactionist perspective was employed to highlight the ways in which players came to def…
Disciplinary Power, the Oligopticon and Rhizomatic Surveillance in Elite Sports Academies
This article aims to apply a post-panoptic view of surveillance within the context of elite sport. Latour’s (2005) ‘oligopticon’ and Deleuze and Guttari’s (2003) ‘rhizomatic’ notion of surveillance networks are adopted to question the relevance and significance of Foucault’s (1979) conceptualisation of surveillance within an elite sports academy setting. A contemporary representation of bio-politics (Rose 1999, 2001) is further utilised to discer…
The Sociology of Risk, Pain, and Injury
This paper presents a sociological assessment of Howard L. Nixon II’s work on risk, pain, and injury in sport. Nixon employs a variant of social network analysis in order to understand the “culture of risk” which, he claims, constrains athletes to play with pain and injuries. By drawing on aspects of figurational sociology, one might expand Nixon’s work and account for the broader social processes connected to the development of modern sport and,…
I Just Want to Be Left Alone”
To date, no sociological studies of professional athletes have investigated the lived experiences of sportspeople in highly publicly visible occupations that provide relatively few opportunities for backstage relaxation from role demands. Drawing on findings from a British Academy-funded project examining high-profile sports workers and employing Goffman’s dramaturgical insights, this article provides a novel examination of high-profile athletes …
Career transitions from the English Premier League
Achieving and then maintaining a career as a professional athlete is hard. Saturated labour markets and the ever-present risk of deselection or injury means that career transitions are an inevitable feature of all athletes' biographies. Like many other professional sports organisations, English Premier League (EPL) clubs have been called upon to provide adequate support to players upon their release from their club. This investigation will examin…
Lay Down Sally’
This article analyses media narratives of failure in sport using a case-study of the collapse of Australian rower Sally Robbins at the 2004 Olympic Games. Media coverage of Robbins' breakdown was driven by conflicting narratives. In the dominant version Robbins was initially denigrated as being ‘UnAustralian’. However, this disparagement precipitated several counter-narratives whereby Robbins was seen as having been failed by her teammates, coach…
The Football Imagination
The Sociology of Risk, Pain, and Injury
This paper presents a sociological assessment of Howard L. Nixon II’s work on risk, pain, and injury in sport. Nixon employs a variant of social network analysis in order to understand the “culture of risk” which, he claims, constrains athletes to play with pain and injuries. By drawing on aspects of figurational sociology, one might expand Nixon’s work and account for the broader social processes connected to the development of modern sport and,…
Playing Hurt
Professional football is, in terms of the risk of injury, a high-risk occupation. The objects of this study are to examine the ways in which professional footballers respond to and cope with injury and, in this context, we focus on the culture of 'playing hurt' in football. The study involved semi-structured interviews with former and current professional footballers as well as interviews with club doctors and physiotherapists. The interviews foc…
Attitudes to work in professional football
Attitudes to work in professional football - 1
Transfer markets and informal grapevines 1
Transfer markets and informal grapevines 1 - 1
Uncertainty and football injuries
Alan Mullery celebrated his thirtieth birthday on 23 November 1971. Not that he had anything to celebrate. By then he’d been out of action for a whole month. But long before that he’d obviously been struggling ... He’d been playing all season with stomach pains. He’d hoped he could play it out, that the pains would just fade away, but they hadn’t. He’d been using a corset for some time ... This had helped slightly at first, but then the pains had…
Injuries, stigma and social identity 1
Injuries, stigma and social identity 1 - 1
The fate of idealism in professional football
The fate of idealism in professional football - 1
Control and the process of transferring
Among the portrayals of contemporary professional football there exists a widespread perception that modern players earn vast amounts of money and, with the assistance of ‘influential’ agents, are able to dictate to club managers and directors in terms of salaries, length of contracts and other conditions of employment. There has been an increasing focus on the issue of ‘player power’ in print media since the landmark 1963 Eastham case, but parti…
Professional football in context
In industrialized societies most people spend their adult lives at work and that commitment to work can be a central feature of a person’s life ( Grint 2005 ). There may be an intricate relationship between work and self such that the work in which people engage comes to be closely bound up with their conception of self – that is, who they have been, who they are and who they would like to be. Research on work ( Grint 2005 ; Watson 1995 ) has rev…
Conclusion
Conclusion - 1
Transferring and the transformation of self
The relatively fragile nature of playing careers in professional football has been highlighted in the previous chapters in relation to the injuries sustained by players. During interview, other than periods of time inactive because of injury, the most vulnerable passages that arose for players were, first, when they were omitted from the starting line-up and, second, during job relocation. The central focus of this chapter therefore concerns the …
The Work of Professional Football
authoritarianism, ruthlessness and hyper-masculine workplace practice(s)' (Parker 1996a: 1) of the football world.Over the last twenty-five years, academic analysis of football has focused overwhelmingly on the issue of hooliganism (see Giulianotti 1999).The study of players and their work by sociologists has been marginal at best.Some academics, for example King (1999), have written about the sociology of football and neglected totally to mentio…
A very precarious profession
Based on semi-structured interviews with 47 present and former professional footballers, this article explores the uncertainty that is a central feature of the professional footballer's workplace experiences, contributing to sociological understanding of insecurities stemming from the social relations of this type of work.The professional football industry has always been marked by a competitive labour market, and players quickly grasp the limite…
Adding insult to injury
Sociologists studying the topic of workplace injury have neglected professional athletes despite the fact that, for such employees, remaining 'active' at work is of paramount importance. This study involved semi-structured interviews with 47 current and former male professional footballers who all had careers in the English professional football leagues. The interviews focused on the players' experiences of injury and rehabilitation and their rel…
Lay Down Sally’
This article analyses media narratives of failure in sport using a case-study of the collapse of Australian rower Sally Robbins at the 2004 Olympic Games. Media coverage of Robbins' breakdown was driven by conflicting narratives. In the dominant version Robbins was initially denigrated as being ‘UnAustralian’. However, this disparagement precipitated several counter-narratives whereby Robbins was seen as having been failed by her teammates, coach…
Disciplinary Power, the Oligopticon and Rhizomatic Surveillance in Elite Sports Academies
This article aims to apply a post-panoptic view of surveillance within the context of elite sport. Latour’s (2005) ‘oligopticon’ and Deleuze and Guttari’s (2003) ‘rhizomatic’ notion of surveillance networks are adopted to question the relevance and significance of Foucault’s (1979) conceptualisation of surveillance within an elite sports academy setting. A contemporary representation of bio-politics (Rose 1999, 2001) is further utilised to discer…
An Unpaid Labor of Love
This article presents qualitative findings which cast light on experiences of job-related geographical relocation for professional footballers and their families. Job relocation is an issue for players and partners, as labor market migration is commonplace in this profession. Although cultural expectations often lead to personal sacrifice, initial research findings indicate that many partners are deciding against relinquishing control over their …
Domestic moves
This article investigates the domestic, intra-state labour mobility of professional footballers. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represent a range of career trajectories; the specific object of 19 interviews was to examine meanings and experiences tied to job relocation. An interactionist perspective was employed to highlight the ways in which players came to def…
From identification to dis-identification
Taken from a broader study of the careers of professional footballers, this article uses two player stories of job loss to offer contrasting experiences of cynical dis-identification. I examine how in research on the careers of sports workers, athletes so often express discontent yet maintain an apparent dedication and commitment to their craft. In contrast to the overwhelming focus on the construction and shaping of workplace identity, this arti…
Recovery from addiction and the potential role of sport
To date, sport has played little part as an adjunct or alternative to adult alcohol and drug treatment programmes. However, research into natural recovery (overcoming addiction without formal treatment) identifies that sustained, meaningful activities located within the community, supportive social networks and new identities are a key part of desistance. This article draws on longitudinal data which tracked substance-misusing offenders engaging …
Disciplinary mechanisms and the discourse of identity
Organization studies research exposes the need to examine power relations embedded within the design of organizations, the construction of normative behaviour, and the production of socially constructed meanings that lead to the removal of employee voice. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with Premiership football academy members, this article examines the regulation, control and ‘silencing’ of young English professional footballers. Buildin…
The Sociology of Sports Work, Emotions and Mental Health
The central object of this introductory \nessay, and of this Special Issue more \nbroadly, is to explore relations between \nthe study of work and the continuing \nevolution of the sociology of sport with a \nparticular focus on the mental health of \nsports workers. In particular, we argue \nthat revitalizing the study of sports work, \nand eschewing the highly individualized \nand reductionist approaches most often \ndemonstrated by dominating …
The Presentation of Possible Selves in Everyday Life
In contrast to research, which privileges the notion of an exclusive athletic identity, we argue that the identity management of professional athletes is influenced by the expectations of audiences and the motivational weight of ‘possible selves’ in explaining career transitions from ‘sports work’. Qualitative vignette interviews were conducted with 10 male participants (ages 18–26 years) on three separate occasions (30 interviews). All interview…
The whole week comes down to the team sheet
This 'On the front line' article focuses on the work and employment situation for an insecure, individualized sports worker whose main job task is fundamentally and publically collaborative. The narrative offers a realistic and nuanced understanding of the material conditions of work for a journeyman footballer and defies sociological ideas associated with attachment and identification to work, which are frequently and implicitly connected to thi…
Sports, Gender, and Society (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (13 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Football (11 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Medicine (9 works)