Empowering people, facilitating community development, and contributing to sustainable development: The social work of sport, exercise, and physical education programs

Abstract

Do sport, exercise, and physical education (SEPE) professionals empower the people they serve and contribute to community development? Do SEPE policies, programs, and practices contribute to sustainable economic and social development, making them worthwhile governmental investments? These questions frame the ensuing analysis. Empowerment-oriented and community-based SEPE programs, and practices may contribute to sustainable development in five related areas. They may enhance human health and well-being across the lifespan; mollify the harms caused by poverty, social exclusion, social isolation, and inter-group conflict; contribute to human capital development, especially in vulnerable youth; develop collective identities, thereby facilitating collective action; and foster social networks and voluntary associations, which animate civil society in strong democracies. To achieve these potential contributions, SEPE professionals will need to develop new capacities and build new institutions. These pervasive changes characterize the social work of SEPE programs, practices, and policies

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Rusli Lutan and Bart Crum for commissioning this paper, and I thank two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.

Notes

Social capital is the popular concept used in lieu of social network. Its ambiguities and contested meaning cause problems (e.g. Edmondson, 2003). Social network captures my meaning more precisely, and methodologies for social network analysis are established firmly.

This bold claim implicates the structure–agency duality. Professional education programs and governmental curriculum mandates are two powerful structures, and they are more powerful when they interact. When they are silent on the alternatives, programs and mandates structure a trained incapacity. Even when these structures are attented to alternatives, SEPE recruits, professional education students, and practicing professional remains as active agents with capacities for resistance, reformation, and transformation. In this second instance, trained incapacity is the result of active agent's orientations, identities, and actions in the face of powerful structures. Richard Tinning's developing research at the University of Queensland (Australia) provides a case in point.