This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel’s revelation of the organization and work of sport

ABSTRACT

The novel This Sporting Life by David Storey is used in this article as fictive, ethnographic data to explore the relationship between sports work, industrial organization, identity, and the management of the body. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu on sport, and rugby specifically, and the relationship between sport, the body, class, and rationalization, this paper argues that David Storey provides a vivid, if pessimistic, fictional, and semi-autobiographical account of the ways in which sports, and sports work specifically, is driven by management discourses of rationality and control. We examine how this functions as class exploitation where labour is embodied and expended as a form of bodily capital. Lastly, we offer a critique of the precarious social mobility that sports work promises. Through Storey’s Rugby League playing fictional anti-hero – Art Machin – we explore the central struggle between social structures and individual agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport
• Rugby League
• industrial labour
• class
• management of the body

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Special thanks to Bill Cooke for suggesting the topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Sports work’ is understood here as paid employment to ‘play’ a sport. As such it contrasts with notions of unpaid amateur sport. Such employment is often both precarious and ephemeral, being uncertain and normally lasting only a few years (Stebbins 1992; Sayers and Edwards 2004; Roderick 2006).

2 Shorthand for an idealized sense of the value of amateur sporting activity (‘Corinthian’ 2017).