Rob Beamish
Biographic Data
| ID | 263303 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rob Beamish |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rob |
| FAMILY NAME | Beamish |
| SIGNATURE | BEAMISH R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Transnational Capitalism
While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels forecast the globalization of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, it was not until the 1960s that social scientists began to systematically discuss the rise of an international capitalist class as the post‐World War II spread of multinational corporations changed the dynamic of capitalist expansion across the developed into the developing world. Following the lead of Leslie Sklair, many social scien…
Money
The modern world is unimaginable without money. Money has been described as the world's operating system. Ironically, people's knowledge about money and monetary institutions is rudimentary. Beyond its economic function, people rarely realize how deeply money is woven into the fabric of contemporary societies. The full sociological understanding of money should begin with Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money (1907) which takes a bird's‐eye view of …
Science and the Measurement of Risk
The relationship between science and the measurement of risk seems to be straightforward. How scientists measure risk and whether they can measure it accurately appear to be the two main issues. Fundamentally, it is a question of expert knowledge and accuracy. But other issues quickly arise: What type of risk? What type of science – pure or applied, natural, or social? Using the COVID‐19 pandemic as a focal point, this entry examines science and …
Economic Development
Economic development studies are concerned with how nation‐states have, could, and/or should improve their populations' quality of life, reduce the infant mortality rate, and increase life expectancy through economic development. Despite the assessments of different development initiatives after World War II and the rise of development studies, there is no consensus on how best to pursue these goals. Nonetheless, the politically and socially impo…
Global Economy
The important conceptual term “global economy” captures existing economic and social relationships. The debate over the historical existence of a or the global economy began in the 1970s, when sociologists, political economists, and economists critically examined the then dominant conceptual framework of modernization theory . The term “global economy” is most closely associated with the rise of theories and practices conceptualized as globalizat…
Public Opinion
Public opinion” is a contested term that is difficult to define. There is a central tension running through the study of public opinion. One side is captured by Charles Horton Cooley's view that public opinion is an organic process, the other by F.H. Allport's position that public opinion measures the statistical distributions of individuals' responses to opinion surveys. Jacques Necker, in 1789, was the first to popularize the term which came to…
Hegel, G.W.F. (1770–1831)
Seeking to overcome the barriers to absolute knowledge that Descartes and Kant erected, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , Science of Logic , and Encyclopedia of Philosophy made him Prussia's foremost post‐Kantian, idealist philosopher. Sociologists' interest in Hegel stems from the posthumous 1930s publications of Karl Marx's 1840s manuscripts, Alexander Kojève's late 1930s lectures, and Herbert Marcuse's, Karl Löwith's, and Georg Lukács's analys…
Reification
Sociologists from several perspectives have critically addressed reification. In general, reification is a misplaced concreteness that occurs when an analytic or abstract concept is thought of or treated as a material reality. Through reification people regard human relations, actions, and ideas as independent of themselves, sometimes governing them. The abstraction “society” is frequently reified into something that has the power to act. Society…
Use‐Value
The use‐value of a commodity is its qualitatively distinct, concrete reality that allows it, as an object, to satisfy a human want directly in consumption or indirectly as something used in further production. A commodity's use is discovered in history and its use‐value created in processes of exchange. One use‐value is unique – it is not a thing but the capacity to do work within a social relation of exchange. The capacity to do work in general …
Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism became the dominant philosophy of Marxism during the Second International (1889–1917) and, in a different form, the official, formulaic philosophy of all communist parties during Joseph Stalin's dictatorship (1929–1953). Marx never used the term dialectical materialism. Nor did he write a comprehensive statement of ontology creating the opportunity to “finish” his incomplete project even though Marx had resisted attempts t…
Exchange‐Value
Exchange‐value is the most misunderstood concept in Marx's analysis of the commodity. Useful things found in nature or procured without exchange and used for private consumption have a qualitatively distinct, concrete, natural form. Their utility is what matters; they do not contain value. Useful things intended for exchange are procured or produced by social labor. Exchangeable commodities have a visible, concrete, useful form and an invisible s…
Surplus Value
Determining the source of social surplus was the most important scientific and political question addressed by classical political economists. Marx accepted British political economists' argument that a product's value is based on the amount of socially necessary, simple, abstract labor that is required for its production, measured as time. Marx's theory of surplus value stems from his theory of value and has four key elements: all commodities ex…
Labor/Labor Power
Labor is an eternal, naturally imposed condition, common to all societies. Humankind is directly part of the material order of nature and inescapably bound to its laws (e.g., gravity, mitosis and meiosis, aging). As living creatures, humans have specific material needs they must meet (e.g., metabolizing oxygen, water, and protein). Those needs are not all met immediately and directly. Through the evolution of the material order, the human order c…
Sport and Capitalism
Capitalism refers to the economic system emerging in thirteenth‐century Europe and extending into the present. Sport denotes a variety of cultural practices that exhibit several particular tendencies when they occur within capitalist social formations. The early pursuit of sport‐entertainment revenues pitted promoters and owners against each other. To prevent their own self‐destruction, owners formed leagues which acted as cartels to control cost…
Base and Superstructure
In the preface to the first published installment of his critique of political economy, Marx presented the classic statement of the base and superstructure metaphor. Sketching the “guiding thread” of his work, Marx noted that humankind enters determinate, necessary social relations of production appropriate to a determinate developmental stage of the material forces of production. These relations, comprised of real individuals, their activity, an…
Species‐Being
Species‐being ( Gattungswesen ), a controversial Feuerbachian‐inspired term refashioned in Marx's critique of Hegel's idealist philosophy, is central to Marx's conception of alienation and true communism. Following Feuerbach, Marx began with real, active humans, but, “inverting” Hegel's idealism, produced a dramatically different conception of species‐being. For Marx, humankind was a materially active, social being, compelled to produce (labor) i…
Value
Karl Marx's labor theory of value and Georg Simmel's cultural theory represent the extremes of sociological positions on value. Under capitalist production, Marx argued, concrete human labor congeals materials into a qualitatively distinct form which determines a commodity's use. Simultaneously, that labor creates an abstract substance of socially necessary, simple, abstract labor. Simmel's conception of value stemmed from his interest in heurist…
The Promise of Sociology: Classical Approaches to Contemporary Society, Second Edition
Unlike most introductory texts that take a topical approach to studying sociology, this smart, challenging, and accessibly written text looks at the core principles of the discipline, making links to a contemporary context.
Steroids: A New Look at Performance-Enhancing Drugs
Sports fans or not, readers will be fascinated by this revealing examination of the pressures leading to the widespread use of steroids in sport and the negative, unintended consequences of their ban. From Baron Pierre de Coubertin's original objectives in establishing the modern Olympic Games to the increasingly widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs during the Cold War to the 1998 drug scandal during the Tour de France and beyond, Steroi…
Surplus value
Determining the source of social surplus was the most important scientific and political question classical political economists addressed. The Physiocrats claimed that nature was the source of all social surplus (all other products simply circulated in the economy as an exchange of equivalents). Adam Smith maintained that the division of labor in manufacturing was the source of social surplus, suggesting that any tariffs or impediments to indust…
Reification
Sociologists from several perspectives have critically addressed reification. In general, reification refers to the act (or its result) of attributing to analytic or abstract concepts a material reality – it is a misplaced concreteness. Through reification people regard human relations, actions, and ideas as independent of themselves, sometimes governing them. The abstraction “society” is frequently reified into something that has the power to ac…
Species‐Being
Species‐Being (Gattungswesen) , a controversial Feuerbachian‐inspired term refashioned in Marx's critique of Hegel's idealist philosophy, is central to Marx's conception of alienation and true communism. Hegel had argued the form and substance of knowledge developed historically. The conscious mind (Geist) initially experiences reality as external and separate; it does not know that alien world. From its first sensory encounter, the mind becomes …
Hegel, G. W. F. (1770–1831)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel rose from within the liberal milieu of Protestant refugees in Würtemberg to become Prussia's foremost post‐Kantian, idealist philosopher in Berlin (1818–31). Hegel's major philosophical achievements were the Phenomenology of Spirit (1804), Science of Logic (1812–16), the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1817), and his philosophy of history. Sociologists’ interest in Hegel began with the posthumous 1930s publications of Ka…
Dialectical Materialism
The term “dialectical materialism” first appeared in Joseph Dietzgen's 1887 essay “Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology,” but only became a central concept within Marxism following George Plekhanov's 1891 essay commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Hegel's death and his ensuing efforts to establish a monist view of history. Dialectical materialism became the dominant philosophy of Marxism during the Second International (…
Exchange‐Value
Exchange‐value – the most misunderstood concept in Marx's analysis of the commodity – is best grasped by moving from the immediate to the complex. Useful things found in nature or procured without exchange and used for private consumption (directly or in the creation of something else for private use) have a qualitatively distinct, concrete, natural form. Their utility is what matters; they have no relevant social substance even if they are produ…
From Chivalrous 'Brothers-in-Arms' to the Eligible Athlete: Changed Principles and the IOC’s Banned Substance List
Through an examination of the challenges to the original, fundamental principles of the Olympic Movement during the post-Second World War era, and the eventual abandonment of those principles, this study poses questions concerning the legitimacy of the IOC's current bannedsubstance list and policies. Using primary and secondary historical evidence, this article establishes the original, fundamental principles upon which Pierre de Coubertin revive…
The Persistance of Inequality: An Analysis of Participation Patterns Among Canada's High Performance Athletes
In his 1970 Proposed Sports Policy for Canadians, John Munro noted that many Canadians faced significant barriers to sport participation. His Proposed Sport Policy was designed, in part, to overcome some of those barriers and create greater equality of opportunity for all Canadians as they strived to become the best athletes in the nation and the world. Gruneau's study of 1971 Winter Games athletes indicated the extent to which socio economic sta…
The Spectre of Steroids: Nazi Propaganda, Cold War Anxiety and Patriarchal Paternalism
This essay demonstrates that certain fears in North America and Western Europe over steroid and other banned substance use in sport can be tied to three post-WWII events: reports that the Nazis had abused steroids to increase troop aggressiveness during WWII; claims during the cold war that Communist countries' athletes were utilizing steroids for purposes of totalitarian regime building similar to the manner in which the Nazis had allegedly used…
Didn’t Cyclops Lose His Vision? An Exercise in Sociological Optometry
This paper begins with an examination of five “manifest absurdities” that arise in the exchange between MacAloon and, Hargreaves and Tomlinson. It continues with a critical analysis of Morgan’s attempt at conflict resolution, paying special attention to his distorted discussion of hegemony. Against this background, the authors argue that one of the major omissions in sociology (of sport or otherwise) is the careful analysis of the enculturation o…
Canadian Football: The View from the Helmet
From Fixed Capacities to Performance-Enhancement: The Paradigm Shift in the Science of ‘Training’ and the Use of Performance-Enhancing Substances
The use of performance-enhancing substances fundamentally rests on a particular, historically situated, ontology of human performance. By analysing ‘training’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we examine the powerfully influential ontology that frames substance use today. Rooted in the first law of thermodynamics, an ontology of fixed human capacities dominated until the mid-twentieth century. Training entailed ‘drill’ to refine techniqu…
Physical Exercise Policy and the Welfare State: A Framework for Comparative Analysis
This paper sketches out a framework for the comparative analysis of physical exercise policy within the context of the development of the welfare state. The term 'physical exercise policy' is used here to refer to specific policies pertaining to the body which were geared towards the fostering of 'physical fitness' and specific sport practices. The first section presents general considerations for comparative analysis. Section two discusses a 'So…
Towards a Socio-Cultural Profile of Canada's High Performance Athletes
On the basis of a data set developed from the Canadian Olympic Association's team handbooks for the 1980, 1984 and 1988 Olympiads, this paper presents a socio-cultural profile of Canada's high performance athletes. The study shows that Canada's Olympic athletes are mature in age and have demonstrated abilities at the international level. The data also indicate that when the ratio of female to male events is held constant, women are not under repr…
Sport Executives and Voluntary Associations: A Review of the Literature and Introduction to Some Theoretical Issues
Since the overwhelming majority of sport opportunity in Canada is enjoyed, organized, and administered by voluntary associations, it is surprising that so little research has been done in this area. This paper reviews the voluntary association literature in general and the sport voluntary association literature in particular. Broadly stated, the general literature shows that voluntary association membership reflects the normative order and no mat…
Understanding Labor as a Concept for the Study of Sport
William J. Morgan has recently argued that the existing critical analyses of sport are in error because they cannot take into account the peculiar logic of sporting action. Although there are a number of points in Morgan’s argument with which one could take issue, in this paper I examine only one—his erroneously narrow reading of the concept of labor in Marx’s work. In the course of my argument, I show first that Marx’s conception of “labor in ge…
Government and Sport: The Public Policy Issues
Canadian Football: The View from the Helmet
The Persistance of Inequality: An Analysis of Participation Patterns Among Canada's High Performance Athletes
In his 1970 Proposed Sports Policy for Canadians, John Munro noted that many Canadians faced significant barriers to sport participation. His Proposed Sport Policy was designed, in part, to overcome some of those barriers and create greater equality of opportunity for all Canadians as they strived to become the best athletes in the nation and the world. Gruneau's study of 1971 Winter Games athletes indicated the extent to which socio economic sta…
Towards a Socio-Cultural Profile of Canada's High Performance Athletes
On the basis of a data set developed from the Canadian Olympic Association's team handbooks for the 1980, 1984 and 1988 Olympiads, this paper presents a socio-cultural profile of Canada's high performance athletes. The study shows that Canada's Olympic athletes are mature in age and have demonstrated abilities at the international level. The data also indicate that when the ratio of female to male events is held constant, women are not under repr…
Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class
Physical Exercise Policy and the Welfare State: A Framework for Comparative Analysis
This paper sketches out a framework for the comparative analysis of physical exercise policy within the context of the development of the welfare state. The term 'physical exercise policy' is used here to refer to specific policies pertaining to the body which were geared towards the fostering of 'physical fitness' and specific sport practices. The first section presents general considerations for comparative analysis. Section two discusses a 'So…
Marx, Method, and the Division of Labour
Marx, Method, and the Division of Labor
Didn’t Cyclops Lose His Vision? An Exercise in Sociological Optometry
This paper begins with an examination of five “manifest absurdities” that arise in the exchange between MacAloon and, Hargreaves and Tomlinson. It continues with a critical analysis of Morgan’s attempt at conflict resolution, paying special attention to his distorted discussion of hegemony. Against this background, the authors argue that one of the major omissions in sociology (of sport or otherwise) is the careful analysis of the enculturation o…
From Chivalrous 'Brothers-in-Arms' to the Eligible Athlete: Changed Principles and the IOC’s Banned Substance List
Through an examination of the challenges to the original, fundamental principles of the Olympic Movement during the post-Second World War era, and the eventual abandonment of those principles, this study poses questions concerning the legitimacy of the IOC's current bannedsubstance list and policies. Using primary and secondary historical evidence, this article establishes the original, fundamental principles upon which Pierre de Coubertin revive…
From Fixed Capacities to Performance-Enhancement: The Paradigm Shift in the Science of ‘Training’ and the Use of Performance-Enhancing Substances
The use of performance-enhancing substances fundamentally rests on a particular, historically situated, ontology of human performance. By analysing ‘training’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we examine the powerfully influential ontology that frames substance use today. Rooted in the first law of thermodynamics, an ontology of fixed human capacities dominated until the mid-twentieth century. Training entailed ‘drill’ to refine techniqu…
The Spectre of Steroids: Nazi Propaganda, Cold War Anxiety and Patriarchal Paternalism
This essay demonstrates that certain fears in North America and Western Europe over steroid and other banned substance use in sport can be tied to three post-WWII events: reports that the Nazis had abused steroids to increase troop aggressiveness during WWII; claims during the cold war that Communist countries' athletes were utilizing steroids for purposes of totalitarian regime building similar to the manner in which the Nazis had allegedly used…
Fastest, Highest, Strongest
Fastest, Highest, Strongest presents a comprehensive challenge to the dominant orthodoxy concerning the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Examining the political and economic transformation of the Olympic Movement during the twentieth century, the authors argue that the realities of modern sport require a serious reassessment of current policies, in particular the ban on the use of certain substances and practices. The book includes de…
Hegel, G. W. F. (1770–1831)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel rose from within the liberal milieu of Protestant refugees in Würtemberg to become Prussia's foremost post‐Kantian, idealist philosopher in Berlin (1818–31). Hegel's major philosophical achievements were the Phenomenology of Spirit (1804), Science of Logic (1812–16), the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1817), and his philosophy of history. Sociologists’ interest in Hegel began with the posthumous 1930s publications of Ka…
Dialectical Materialism
The term “dialectical materialism” first appeared in Joseph Dietzgen's 1887 essay “Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology,” but only became a central concept within Marxism following George Plekhanov's 1891 essay commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Hegel's death and his ensuing efforts to establish a monist view of history. Dialectical materialism became the dominant philosophy of Marxism during the Second International (…
Exchange‐Value
Exchange‐value – the most misunderstood concept in Marx's analysis of the commodity – is best grasped by moving from the immediate to the complex. Useful things found in nature or procured without exchange and used for private consumption (directly or in the creation of something else for private use) have a qualitatively distinct, concrete, natural form. Their utility is what matters; they have no relevant social substance even if they are produ…
Use‐Value
Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the use‐value of the commodity, suggesting, perhaps, that all useful concrete things have use‐values – but that is incorrect and the distinction, fine as it might seem, between the utility of a thing and the use‐value of a commodity is important. First, not every useful thing is a commodity, although every commodity, except one, is a useful thing. There are many things in the world around us – some may have…
Sport and Capitalism
As an analytic term, capitalism refers to the economic system that began to emerge in thirteenth‐century Europe and extends into the present. Sport is an abstraction that denotes a variety of cultural practices that occur and develop within the context of specific socioeconomic formations. “Sport” and various sports exhibit several particular tendencies and characteristics when they occur within capitalist socioeconomic formations
Labor/Labor Power
While establishing their materialist position, Marx and Engels argued that one may distinguish humankind from other biological entities by consciousness, religion, or whatever else one chose, but humankind fundamentally distinguished itself from animals and other living organisms when it began to produce its means of life. Labor, they argued, is an eternal, naturally imposed condition of human life, common to all forms of society. Finally, Marx a…
Value
Value and theories of value might begin in economics but they have significant sociological importance. As with economics, two divergent conceptions of value dominate sociological thought: an objective, intrinsic, production‐centered theory versus a subjective, consumption‐focused conception of value – best represented in Marx and Simmel's works, respectively. Marx's systematic presentation of value's form and substance in Capital critically exte…
Reification
Sociologists from several perspectives have critically addressed reification. In general, reification refers to the act (or its result) of attributing to analytic or abstract concepts a material reality – it is a misplaced concreteness. Through reification people regard human relations, actions, and ideas as independent of themselves, sometimes governing them. The abstraction “society” is frequently reified into something that has the power to ac…
Species‐Being
Species‐Being (Gattungswesen) , a controversial Feuerbachian‐inspired term refashioned in Marx's critique of Hegel's idealist philosophy, is central to Marx's conception of alienation and true communism. Hegel had argued the form and substance of knowledge developed historically. The conscious mind (Geist) initially experiences reality as external and separate; it does not know that alien world. From its first sensory encounter, the mind becomes …
Surplus value
Determining the source of social surplus was the most important scientific and political question classical political economists addressed. The Physiocrats claimed that nature was the source of all social surplus (all other products simply circulated in the economy as an exchange of equivalents). Adam Smith maintained that the division of labor in manufacturing was the source of social surplus, suggesting that any tariffs or impediments to indust…
Political science (29 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Economics (21 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (17 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Market economy (11 works)