Lee Nelson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3998664 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lee Nelson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lee |
| FAMILY NAME | Nelson |
| SIGNATURE | NELSON L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Edge Hill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7491-2382 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A dramaturgical analysis of information control and secrecy in an elite paralympic sport coaching context
Information control is a routine feature of social life, shaping how individuals and groups regulate what is revealed, concealed and made available to others, with secrecy representing one manifestation of these processes. However, methodologically, such practices are difficult to capture and examine. By examining how sports workers regulated access to information in an elite case-study coaching environment, this research extends interactional dr…
Unchallenged deception in performance sports work
This article breaks new ground in the sociology of sports work through its novel exploration of unchallenged deception in performance sports coaching contexts. Qualitative Jisc online survey data from 29 sports workers (coaches, performance analysts, sports scientists, doctors, a sport psychologist, physiotherapist, and scout) was subject to iterative analysis. Findings address how participants detected diverse deception attempts by co-workers an…
Playing by the (emotional) display rules
While the social and interactive complexity of coach education work has attracted increased scholarly attention, there is a paucity of work addressing the emotional display rules that feature in coach educators' interactions with others. This article begins to address this lacuna by presenting novel insights into how the emotions that coach educators convey to their learners are shaped by identifiable display rules. Data were generated via 21 emo…
The importance of appearing trustworthy in the workplace
The discipline of performance analysis is founded upon the collection and analysis of objective and reliable data to support the coaching process.While research has begun to identify the potential importance of trust in applied sporting environments, there remains a paucity of inquiry that seeks to explicitly investigate trustworthiness in the work of performance analysts.To redress this situation Jisc online survey data was collected from perfor…
Dramaturgical analysis of a coaching team’s interactional performances
Sport coaching scholars have increasingly utilised the work of Erving Goffman to theoretically interpret and understand the complexities of coaching practice from a dramaturgical perspective.While this area of scholarship has advanced our sociological understanding of sport coaching, there remains a paucity of literature addressing how coaches work in conjunction with others and stage social interactions as performance teams.Utilising an 18-month…
Research Methods in Sports Coaching
Research Methods in Sports Coaching is a key resource for students and scholars who are completing research into sports coaching. The book comprises five distinct parts that prompt readers to think about important considerations: 1. preparing and initiating the coaching research process 2. philosophical considerations for coaching research 3. coaching research designs 4. methods of collecting coaching data 5. analysing coaching data This fully re…
Maintaining professional face
This article breaks new ground in the sociology of sports work through its novel exploration of workplace deception and the associated development of an original typology of deceptive impression management. Analysis of data collected from a two-phased research design, comprising online interviews and survey responses from 102 participants, revealed that community sport coaches employed deceptive impression management to display emotional control,…
Repairing relationship conflict in community sport work
Through our investigation of relationship conflict and repair in community sport coaching this article makes a novel contribution to the sociology of sport work. Such inquiry is necessary as interpersonal conflict has the potential to erode worker commitment, engagement, performance, satisfaction, and mental health. To date, the study of interpersonal conflict in coaching has been framed psychologically. It is our position that sociologically ins…
It’s not all about me’
The aim of this study was to explore the multiple transitions that occur during retirement from (semi-) professional sport. The study used an autoethnographic methodology to consider the embodied, relational and emotional dimensions of these transitions as I, the first author approached the end of my football career. Over a period of six years, I shared, reflected, evaluated and critiqued these transitional experiences and associated autoethnogra…
Actors, interactions, ties, and networks
The Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) has transformed the ways in which young players are recruited, coached, supported and evaluated. To date, our scientific understanding of talent identification and development processes has been largely informed by (post)positivist studies addressing the physiological, psychological and biomechanical features of elite youth performance. In this paper, Crossley’s relational theorising is pr…
The Career Experiences of Football Association Coach Educators
Coach education has been the subject of increasing investigation in recent years. While such inquiry has provided important insights into coaches’ engagements with various forms of coach education provision, coach educators’ perspectives have remained curiously absent from the literature base. This study provides rich insights into the ways in which four Football Association (FA) coach educators interpreted their everyday workplace relationships …
Translation, intensification and fabrication
The micro-level enactment of elite sport policy has received little critical coverage in the sociology of sport subdiscipline. This paper provides original insights into how coaches working in professional youth football academies variously interpreted, experienced and engaged with The FA Premier League's Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). In-depth, cyclical interviews were used to generate data for this study. The transcripts were rigorously …
More than just a ‘Pro’
This paper addresses the social and relational dimensions of player transitions in professional football. Data were generated through a total of 24 cyclical, in-depth interviews with three former players. The interview transcripts were subjected to emic and etic readings, with Bauman's metaphors of liquid modernity, hunters and pointillist time, May's theorisation of belonging and Crossley's relational theorising providing the primary heuristic f…
Uncertainty, shame and consumption
This paper addressed the lived experiences of two community sports coaches in an era of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, and insecure employment. Specifically, we considered (a) their attempts to develop a desired occupational identity in a casualised and audit-driven industry and (b) their experiences of the tensions that existed between the conditions of their employment and their ability to effectively enact other (important) identities out…
Trust and Distrust in Community Sports Work
This study addressed the issue of interpersonal trust and distrust in the (sporting) workplace. Data were generated through cyclical, in-depth interviews with 12 community sports coaches. The interview transcripts were subjected to emic and etic readings, with Hardin and Cook’s theorization of (dis)trust and Goffman’s dramaturgical writings providing the primary heuristic devices. Our analysis produced three interconnected themes. These were a) h…
An elite hockey player's experiences of video-based coaching
In this article, we present a poststructuralist reading of Claire's (a pseudonym) experiences of receiving video-based coaching in elite level field hockey. Data were gathered through a series of in-depth interviews that formed part of a recursive and iterative data collection and analysis process. Interpreting Claire's stories through a neo-Foucauldian application of Mathiesen's synopticon revealed how the presence of a video camera mediated Cla…
Developing micropolitical literacy in professional soccer
To date, there has been a paucity of inquiry into the contextual learning of performance analysts in elite-level sport. A narrative approach was used to explore Ben’s understanding of his early career experiences as a performance analyst in professional soccer. In our discussion of Ben’s career stories, we contend that the inherent structural vulnerabilities of his job, as well as Ben’s desire to advance his position and protect his professional …
Exploring the everyday realities of grass-roots football coaching
While scholars have increasingly engaged with the (micro)political and emotional experiences of coaches in professional and semi-professional football, little attention has been given to grass-roots coaches’ understandings of these issues. The aim of this paper is to outline one possible research agenda that could contribute to the development of a rich and increasingly nuanced understanding of the everyday realities of being a grass-roots footba…
Thinking, Feeling, Acting
This paper aimed to shed light on the emotional nature of practice in coaching. In particular, this article was designed to explore the relationship between emotion, cognition, and behavior in the coaching context, through a narrative exploration of Zach’s (a pseudonym) experiences as the head coach of a semiprofessional soccer team. Data for this study were collected through a series of in-depth semistructured interviews that were transcribed ve…
Analysing coach–athlete ‘talk in interaction’ within the delivery of video-based performance feedback in elite youth soccer
The purpose of this paper was to explore coach–athlete ‘talk in action’ during performance analysis feedback sessions. Our goal was to examine how interactional tasks are accomplished through the use of talk. Coach–athlete interactions were recorded within six home match video-based feedback sessions, over the course of a 10-month English Premier League Academy season. Interactions within the sessions were recorded and transcribed using a convers…
Carl Rogers, learning and educational practice
Discussions about ‘athlete-centered’ coaching and ‘coach-centered’ coach education have started to gain increasing popularity in the field of coaching science. While it has been suggested that these ‘learner-centered’ approaches arguably align with the theoretical ideals of humanistic psychology, an in-depth examination of the implications of this learning orientation to sports coaching remains elusive. Rather, discussions have tended to be detac…
The analysis of athletic performance
This article presents a hypothetical dialogue between a notational analyst (NA) recently schooled in the positivistic assessment of athletic performance, an ‘old-school’ traditional coach (TC) who favours subjective analysis, and a pragmatic educator (PE). The conversation opens with NA and TC debating the respective value of quantitative and qualitative methods of performance analysis. Having considered their arguments from a-distance, PE offers…
Receiving video-based feedback in elite ice-hockey
The aim of this paper was to provide some rich insights into how an elite ice-hockey player responded to his coaches' pedagogical delivery of video-based feedback sessions. Data for this study were gathered through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews and a reflective log relating to those interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim with the text being subject to the process of inductive analysis. The results highlighted how …
Formal, Nonformal and Informal Coach Learning
Using Coombs and Ahmed's [1] framework of formal, non-formal, and informal learning as the analytical framework, this paper aims to review and conceptually locate literature exploring how sports coaches acquire the knowledge that underpins their professional practice. Furthermore, in an attempt to develop a robust set of accessible terms and concepts this paper identifies, explores and positions various terminologies under the broader heading of …
Trust and Distrust in Community Sports Work
This study addressed the issue of interpersonal trust and distrust in the (sporting) workplace. Data were generated through cyclical, in-depth interviews with 12 community sports coaches. The interview transcripts were subjected to emic and etic readings, with Hardin and Cook’s theorization of (dis)trust and Goffman’s dramaturgical writings providing the primary heuristic devices. Our analysis produced three interconnected themes. These were a) h…
Thinking, Feeling, Acting
This paper aimed to shed light on the emotional nature of practice in coaching. In particular, this article was designed to explore the relationship between emotion, cognition, and behavior in the coaching context, through a narrative exploration of Zach’s (a pseudonym) experiences as the head coach of a semiprofessional soccer team. Data for this study were collected through a series of in-depth semistructured interviews that were transcribed ve…
Carl Rogers, learning and educational practice
Discussions about ‘athlete-centered’ coaching and ‘coach-centered’ coach education have started to gain increasing popularity in the field of coaching science. While it has been suggested that these ‘learner-centered’ approaches arguably align with the theoretical ideals of humanistic psychology, an in-depth examination of the implications of this learning orientation to sports coaching remains elusive. Rather, discussions have tended to be detac…
Uncertainty, shame and consumption
This paper addressed the lived experiences of two community sports coaches in an era of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, and insecure employment. Specifically, we considered (a) their attempts to develop a desired occupational identity in a casualised and audit-driven industry and (b) their experiences of the tensions that existed between the conditions of their employment and their ability to effectively enact other (important) identities out…
Receiving video-based feedback in elite ice-hockey
The aim of this paper was to provide some rich insights into how an elite ice-hockey player responded to his coaches' pedagogical delivery of video-based feedback sessions. Data for this study were gathered through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews and a reflective log relating to those interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim with the text being subject to the process of inductive analysis. The results highlighted how …
Translation, intensification and fabrication
The micro-level enactment of elite sport policy has received little critical coverage in the sociology of sport subdiscipline. This paper provides original insights into how coaches working in professional youth football academies variously interpreted, experienced and engaged with The FA Premier League's Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). In-depth, cyclical interviews were used to generate data for this study. The transcripts were rigorously …
More than just a ‘Pro’
This paper addresses the social and relational dimensions of player transitions in professional football. Data were generated through a total of 24 cyclical, in-depth interviews with three former players. The interview transcripts were subjected to emic and etic readings, with Bauman's metaphors of liquid modernity, hunters and pointillist time, May's theorisation of belonging and Crossley's relational theorising providing the primary heuristic f…
Exploring the everyday realities of grass-roots football coaching
While scholars have increasingly engaged with the (micro)political and emotional experiences of coaches in professional and semi-professional football, little attention has been given to grass-roots coaches’ understandings of these issues. The aim of this paper is to outline one possible research agenda that could contribute to the development of a rich and increasingly nuanced understanding of the everyday realities of being a grass-roots footba…
An elite hockey player's experiences of video-based coaching
In this article, we present a poststructuralist reading of Claire's (a pseudonym) experiences of receiving video-based coaching in elite level field hockey. Data were gathered through a series of in-depth interviews that formed part of a recursive and iterative data collection and analysis process. Interpreting Claire's stories through a neo-Foucauldian application of Mathiesen's synopticon revealed how the presence of a video camera mediated Cla…
Maintaining professional face
This article breaks new ground in the sociology of sports work through its novel exploration of workplace deception and the associated development of an original typology of deceptive impression management. Analysis of data collected from a two-phased research design, comprising online interviews and survey responses from 102 participants, revealed that community sport coaches employed deceptive impression management to display emotional control,…
Actors, interactions, ties, and networks
The Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) has transformed the ways in which young players are recruited, coached, supported and evaluated. To date, our scientific understanding of talent identification and development processes has been largely informed by (post)positivist studies addressing the physiological, psychological and biomechanical features of elite youth performance. In this paper, Crossley’s relational theorising is pr…
Formal, Nonformal and Informal Coach Learning
Using Coombs and Ahmed's [1] framework of formal, non-formal, and informal learning as the analytical framework, this paper aims to review and conceptually locate literature exploring how sports coaches acquire the knowledge that underpins their professional practice. Furthermore, in an attempt to develop a robust set of accessible terms and concepts this paper identifies, explores and positions various terminologies under the broader heading of …
The analysis of athletic performance
This article presents a hypothetical dialogue between a notational analyst (NA) recently schooled in the positivistic assessment of athletic performance, an ‘old-school’ traditional coach (TC) who favours subjective analysis, and a pragmatic educator (PE). The conversation opens with NA and TC debating the respective value of quantitative and qualitative methods of performance analysis. Having considered their arguments from a-distance, PE offers…
Receiving video-based feedback in elite ice-hockey
The aim of this paper was to provide some rich insights into how an elite ice-hockey player responded to his coaches' pedagogical delivery of video-based feedback sessions. Data for this study were gathered through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews and a reflective log relating to those interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim with the text being subject to the process of inductive analysis. The results highlighted how …
Analysing coach–athlete ‘talk in interaction’ within the delivery of video-based performance feedback in elite youth soccer
The purpose of this paper was to explore coach–athlete ‘talk in action’ during performance analysis feedback sessions. Our goal was to examine how interactional tasks are accomplished through the use of talk. Coach–athlete interactions were recorded within six home match video-based feedback sessions, over the course of a 10-month English Premier League Academy season. Interactions within the sessions were recorded and transcribed using a convers…
Carl Rogers, learning and educational practice
Discussions about ‘athlete-centered’ coaching and ‘coach-centered’ coach education have started to gain increasing popularity in the field of coaching science. While it has been suggested that these ‘learner-centered’ approaches arguably align with the theoretical ideals of humanistic psychology, an in-depth examination of the implications of this learning orientation to sports coaching remains elusive. Rather, discussions have tended to be detac…
Thinking, Feeling, Acting
This paper aimed to shed light on the emotional nature of practice in coaching. In particular, this article was designed to explore the relationship between emotion, cognition, and behavior in the coaching context, through a narrative exploration of Zach’s (a pseudonym) experiences as the head coach of a semiprofessional soccer team. Data for this study were collected through a series of in-depth semistructured interviews that were transcribed ve…
Developing micropolitical literacy in professional soccer
To date, there has been a paucity of inquiry into the contextual learning of performance analysts in elite-level sport. A narrative approach was used to explore Ben’s understanding of his early career experiences as a performance analyst in professional soccer. In our discussion of Ben’s career stories, we contend that the inherent structural vulnerabilities of his job, as well as Ben’s desire to advance his position and protect his professional …
Exploring the everyday realities of grass-roots football coaching
While scholars have increasingly engaged with the (micro)political and emotional experiences of coaches in professional and semi-professional football, little attention has been given to grass-roots coaches’ understandings of these issues. The aim of this paper is to outline one possible research agenda that could contribute to the development of a rich and increasingly nuanced understanding of the everyday realities of being a grass-roots footba…
An elite hockey player's experiences of video-based coaching
In this article, we present a poststructuralist reading of Claire's (a pseudonym) experiences of receiving video-based coaching in elite level field hockey. Data were gathered through a series of in-depth interviews that formed part of a recursive and iterative data collection and analysis process. Interpreting Claire's stories through a neo-Foucauldian application of Mathiesen's synopticon revealed how the presence of a video camera mediated Cla…
More than just a ‘Pro’
This paper addresses the social and relational dimensions of player transitions in professional football. Data were generated through a total of 24 cyclical, in-depth interviews with three former players. The interview transcripts were subjected to emic and etic readings, with Bauman's metaphors of liquid modernity, hunters and pointillist time, May's theorisation of belonging and Crossley's relational theorising providing the primary heuristic f…
Uncertainty, shame and consumption
This paper addressed the lived experiences of two community sports coaches in an era of neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, and insecure employment. Specifically, we considered (a) their attempts to develop a desired occupational identity in a casualised and audit-driven industry and (b) their experiences of the tensions that existed between the conditions of their employment and their ability to effectively enact other (important) identities out…
Trust and Distrust in Community Sports Work
This study addressed the issue of interpersonal trust and distrust in the (sporting) workplace. Data were generated through cyclical, in-depth interviews with 12 community sports coaches. The interview transcripts were subjected to emic and etic readings, with Hardin and Cook’s theorization of (dis)trust and Goffman’s dramaturgical writings providing the primary heuristic devices. Our analysis produced three interconnected themes. These were a) h…
Translation, intensification and fabrication
The micro-level enactment of elite sport policy has received little critical coverage in the sociology of sport subdiscipline. This paper provides original insights into how coaches working in professional youth football academies variously interpreted, experienced and engaged with The FA Premier League's Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). In-depth, cyclical interviews were used to generate data for this study. The transcripts were rigorously …
The Career Experiences of Football Association Coach Educators
Coach education has been the subject of increasing investigation in recent years. While such inquiry has provided important insights into coaches’ engagements with various forms of coach education provision, coach educators’ perspectives have remained curiously absent from the literature base. This study provides rich insights into the ways in which four Football Association (FA) coach educators interpreted their everyday workplace relationships …
Actors, interactions, ties, and networks
The Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) has transformed the ways in which young players are recruited, coached, supported and evaluated. To date, our scientific understanding of talent identification and development processes has been largely informed by (post)positivist studies addressing the physiological, psychological and biomechanical features of elite youth performance. In this paper, Crossley’s relational theorising is pr…
Repairing relationship conflict in community sport work
Through our investigation of relationship conflict and repair in community sport coaching this article makes a novel contribution to the sociology of sport work. Such inquiry is necessary as interpersonal conflict has the potential to erode worker commitment, engagement, performance, satisfaction, and mental health. To date, the study of interpersonal conflict in coaching has been framed psychologically. It is our position that sociologically ins…
It’s not all about me’
The aim of this study was to explore the multiple transitions that occur during retirement from (semi-) professional sport. The study used an autoethnographic methodology to consider the embodied, relational and emotional dimensions of these transitions as I, the first author approached the end of my football career. Over a period of six years, I shared, reflected, evaluated and critiqued these transitional experiences and associated autoethnogra…
Research Methods in Sports Coaching
Research Methods in Sports Coaching is a key resource for students and scholars who are completing research into sports coaching. The book comprises five distinct parts that prompt readers to think about important considerations: 1. preparing and initiating the coaching research process 2. philosophical considerations for coaching research 3. coaching research designs 4. methods of collecting coaching data 5. analysing coaching data This fully re…
Maintaining professional face
This article breaks new ground in the sociology of sports work through its novel exploration of workplace deception and the associated development of an original typology of deceptive impression management. Analysis of data collected from a two-phased research design, comprising online interviews and survey responses from 102 participants, revealed that community sport coaches employed deceptive impression management to display emotional control,…
Playing by the (emotional) display rules
While the social and interactive complexity of coach education work has attracted increased scholarly attention, there is a paucity of work addressing the emotional display rules that feature in coach educators' interactions with others. This article begins to address this lacuna by presenting novel insights into how the emotions that coach educators convey to their learners are shaped by identifiable display rules. Data were generated via 21 emo…
The importance of appearing trustworthy in the workplace
The discipline of performance analysis is founded upon the collection and analysis of objective and reliable data to support the coaching process.While research has begun to identify the potential importance of trust in applied sporting environments, there remains a paucity of inquiry that seeks to explicitly investigate trustworthiness in the work of performance analysts.To redress this situation Jisc online survey data was collected from perfor…
Dramaturgical analysis of a coaching team’s interactional performances
Sport coaching scholars have increasingly utilised the work of Erving Goffman to theoretically interpret and understand the complexities of coaching practice from a dramaturgical perspective.While this area of scholarship has advanced our sociological understanding of sport coaching, there remains a paucity of literature addressing how coaches work in conjunction with others and stage social interactions as performance teams.Utilising an 18-month…
A dramaturgical analysis of information control and secrecy in an elite paralympic sport coaching context
Information control is a routine feature of social life, shaping how individuals and groups regulate what is revealed, concealed and made available to others, with secrecy representing one manifestation of these processes. However, methodologically, such practices are difficult to capture and examine. By examining how sports workers regulated access to information in an elite case-study coaching environment, this research extends interactional dr…
Unchallenged deception in performance sports work
This article breaks new ground in the sociology of sports work through its novel exploration of unchallenged deception in performance sports coaching contexts. Qualitative Jisc online survey data from 29 sports workers (coaches, performance analysts, sports scientists, doctors, a sport psychologist, physiotherapist, and scout) was subject to iterative analysis. Findings address how participants detected diverse deception attempts by co-workers an…
Psychology (20 works) · Sport Psychology and Performance (19 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Coaching (12 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (12 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Physical Education and Pedagogy (9 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Elite (7 works)