Editorial

The contagious effect of measuring research performance has affected almost all European universities. The question of whether rankings do indeed foster research excellence still remains to be answered. On the one hand, rankings catalyse a research dynamic that indisputably leads to a rising number of both publications and third party research funds. On the other hand, the reduction of assessing research quality by measurable indicators leads to the phenomenon that all research achievements that are not measured by these indicators are institutionally devalued. Young researchers are socialised into this systemic reality. They experience that universities often reward the acquisition of research funds more than the production of knowledge. They get to know that in order to make a career at a university, many short publications are better than few long contributions, independent of qualitative aspects. They therefore learn to cut their research findings into pieces in order to publish more articles (“Salami tactic”). The Swiss economist Martin Binswanger (2010) compares this phenomenon with the search for dinosaur bones in China in the 19th century. In order to push their research forward, palaeontologists offered the farmers financial rewards for every delivered dinosaur bone. In consequence, the farmers hacked the bones they had found into small pieces in order to get more money. At the end, dinosaur research was significantly hampered because palaeontologists had trouble putting the bones back together again.

We discussed rankings and their consequences before in the issue January 2015. We also mentioned that the impact factor of a journal plays a very important role in the process of quantifying scientific performance. However, with our decision to collaborate with our new publisher, Routledge, the discussion about impact factors and indexing will again become a relevant topic for our journal. This makes sense because although it is generally known that an impact factor is not a valid indicator for research quality, impact factors play a relevant role for researchers both regarding hiring processes and performance-based allocation of resources. But how are impact factors defined? Impact factors are usually calculated by identifying how often articles which have been published in a specific journal within a time frame of two years are cited in other articles in the following year. The number of citations is divided by the number of quotable articles in the specific journal within the given time frame of two years. The result is the average number of citations of a journal’s article per year. Therefore, an impact factor of 1 means that the articles of the last two years published in a specific journal are cited one time per year on an average.

Impact factors are, of course, particularly influenced by the numbers of authors and articles within a certain discipline. Hence, medical journals usually have a higher impact factor than for example sociological journals. However, this alone does not explain, why sport sociological journals usually have such a low impact factor. A possible explanation could be; instead of citing their own peers and journals, sport sociologists prefer to cite articles in journals of the mother discipline and/or deceased researchers. This is not a useful practise if sport sociologists are interested in bringing the journals of their “own” discipline forward. Of course, it is often necessary to refer to broader, and older, theoretical frameworks that inform a particular study, but as sporting practices tend to acquire a relative autonomy from wider social and cultural processes it is important to seek contrasts and complementarities within the field of sports sociology itself. We therefore appeal to sport sociological researchers to foster scientific communication within their own field by discussing their research findings with their peers. This also means actively taking notice of their peers’ studies by both attending conferences and mentioning their findings.

This issue content articles are undoubtedly quotable. Peter Carlman and Christian Augustsson investigate how children experience Sport for All Programmes (SAP) in school. Applying repeated focus group interviews with 15 ten-year-old children (9 girls, 6 boys), the study shows that the children’s experience of the SAP included both opportunities and obstacles for creating a Sport for All practice. Although conceptionalized as a “low threshold” activity, SAP practice was not free from performance-oriented. Children with a strong performance ethos had the capacity to handle competitive practice in the SAP. Nevertheless, all children’s experience considered, Sport for All pedagogy needs to be self-reflective regarding the consequences of competition principles.

Clement Perrier, Benedicte Vignal and Bastien Soule present results of a qualitative study about a marketing-driven change of dresses in women’s basketball using the model of the economies of worth. Based on twelve semi-structured interviews, the study comes to the conclusion that despite a noticeable opposition, the change of dress was not strongly supported by the players. However, the organisation’s fluidity allowed maintaining the change despite a full appropriation by the stakeholders.

Richard Giulianotti and Tommy Langseth examine Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of the six ‘orders of worth’ in order to understand political disputes within sport. The topic of their theory-driven analysis was the public issue of Olympic bidding and hosting. The study shows that the six worlds are organised hierarchically into three ‘levels of worth’. Civic world arguments have a lot less influence on stakeholders regarding the advocacy of big sport events than market or fame related justifications.

Roger Penn’s paper on the dialectics of language and football comes to the conclusion that ‘Football Talk’ is considerably more positive and integrative than foregoing research indicates. ‘Football Talk’ rather has to be considered as a lingua franca amongst football supporters which is both inclusive and exclusive.

Besides these articles, we also included a study report in this issue: the European Sport Index. This study was conducted by Otmar Weiß, Gilbert Norden, Michael Nader and Florian Arnusch and ranks the social significance of sport in the 28 member states of the European Union. The ranking is based on seven indicators, such as the populations’ access to sport and the socio-political and economic significance of sport, among others.

In this issue, you will also find a conference report about the EASS Conference 2015 in Dublin.

We wish you a pleasant reading.