Without bounds: A cosmopolitan research agenda for drugs in sport

Abstract

The role of ‘cosmopolitan research’ was considered as a key platform with which to build a social science of drugs in sport. Cosmopolitan research is characterized as explaining human behaviour without regard for disciplinary boundaries, defined through questions that can be approached by any discipline and responded to by, preferably, collaboration across the disciplines. Three such questions are posed and explored to identify areas for collaborative research. The contributions from across the collection examining social science and drugs in sport research are analysed and synthesized to establish common areas for future research. Based on these questions and common themes, an agenda for cosmopolitan research into drugs in sport phenomena is articulated.

Notes

¹ See Backhouse et al. , Attitudes, Behaviours, Knowledge and Education – Drugs in Sport.

² It seems, at least to this author, that social science spends a lot of time deconstructing human behaviour into ever smaller bits, without reconciling these highly specific explanations into broader explanations of the human condition. Cosmopolitan research, as articulated here, is an expression of the idea that disciplines within social science need to reconstruct their results into explanations of the human condition that go beyond internal consistency within a given discipline or sub-discipline.

³ See Hoberman, Mortal Engines, 68, for a comparable explanation.

⁴ This anxiety is outlined by Carstairs, ‘The Wide World of Doping’, and to a lesser extent Lincoln Allison, ‘Faster, Stronger, Higher’. Guardian, August 9, 2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1278957,00.html; and refuted in Miah, Genetically Modified Athletes, and Tamburrini, ‘Are Doping Sanctions Justified? A Moral Relativistic View’.

⁵ See Allison, ‘Faster, Stronger, Higher’.

⁶ This point is persuasively argued by Bette and Schimank, ‘Coping with Doping: Sport Associations under Organisational Stress’.

⁷ This particular approach is advocated by Savulescu, Foddy and Clayton, ‘Why We Should Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sport’.

⁸ See Foster, ‘The Discourses of Doping’, analysis for an introduction. There also commentaries on the discourses of health risk arguments from Savulescu, Foddy and Clayton, ‘Why We Should Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sport’, and the ‘war on drugs in sport’ or zero tolerance policies defined as characteristic of political discourses noted by Mendoza, ‘The War on Drugs in Sport’.

⁹ The argument supporting the involvement of each of these is presented by Mazanov, ‘Measuring Athlete Attitudes Towards Drugs in Sport’. Eiser, Attitudes, Chaos and the Connectionist Mind, describes how dynamical modelling of attitudes can explore how attitudes fluctuate over time and what causes that fluctuation. Finn and Louviere, ‘Determining the Appropriate Response to Evidence of Public Concern’, report an accessible example of best-worst scaling. In its basic form, best-worst scaling asks respondents to indicate which of several options is their most and least preferred. The options are presented several times in different combinations to model which of several options is considered to best reflect their position and which is considered to be the worst reflection. The stochastic modelling and psychometrics underlying best-worst scaling is significantly more complicated than described here.

¹⁰ See, for example, Mike Agostino, ‘Drugs in Sport – Just Get Over It’. Sydney Morning Herald, August 5, 2006. http://www.smh.com.au/news/sport/drugs-in-sportjust-get-over-it/2006/08/04/1154198330907.html.

¹¹ Bird and Wagner, ‘Sport as a Common Property Resource’.

¹² Savulescu, Foddy and Clayton, ‘Why We Should Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sport’.

¹³ For a variant of this approach in relation to cycling see E. Almond, ‘Tour of California: Some Teams Take Action in Own Hands’. Mercury News, February 22, 2007. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/16762725.htm; and J. Macur, ‘Welcome Testing, Team Battles Cycling's Image’. New York Times, February 13, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/sports/othersports/13cycle.html?pagewanted = 2&_r = 1&ei = 5094&en = 701f4b476f18fe86&hp&ex = 1171342800&partner = homepage.

¹⁴ Miah, Genetically Modified Athletes.

¹⁵ This point came up in conversation with D. Hemphill on January 30, 2007, when discussing issues facing sport philosophy.

¹⁶ For a political scientist's efforts to reconcile this point, see Houlihan, ‘The World Anti-Doping Agency: Prospects for Success’.

¹⁷ Miah, Genetically Modified Athletes, 36.

¹⁸ Girginov, ‘Creating a Corporate Anti-doping Culture’; Houlihan, ‘Anti-doping Policy in Sport’.

¹⁹ Leonard, ‘Doping in Elite Swimming: A Case Study of the Modern Era from 1970 Forward’, argues that the eventual anti-doping activity by FINA was driven by concerns about brand protection.

²⁰ An official history from WADA is available at http://www.wada-ama.org/en/dynamic.ch2?pageCategory.id = 312. Academic histories, in addition to the one put together for this collection (Mazanov and McDermott, The Case for a Social Science of Drugs in Sport), include Hoberman, Mortal Engines; Verroken, ‘Drug Use and Abuse in Sport’; Voy, Drugs, Sport, and Politics. Popular press examples, can be found at, http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/in_depth/2000/drugs_in_sport/859851.stm or http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,1140775,00.html. A comprehensive account of the history of WADA is presented by Todd and Todd, ‘Significant Events in the History of Drug Testing and the Olympic Movement: 1960–1999’. Parisotto, Blood Sports, describes the development of the EPO test.

²¹ Using economic jargon, in the sense argued by Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government.

²² The legitimacy of anti-doping efforts has been identified as a key issue by several authors, such as Donovan et al. , ‘A Conceptual Framework for Achieving Performance Enhancing Drug Compliance in Sport’; Hoberman, Mortal Engines; and Voy, Drugs, Sport, and Politics.

²³ Kerr, ‘On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B’.

²⁴ Miah, Genetically Modified Athletes, 37.

²⁵ Thanks to Michaela Holloway from the Australian Securities and Investment Corporation for providing a sounding board that led to this observation.

²⁶ Such as that being conducted in Ireland by Kirby et al. , ‘Cheating and Doping in Sport’.

²⁷ Girginov, ‘Creating a Corporate Anti-doping Culture’.

²⁸ Thanks to Jill Owen from UNSW@ADFA for reinterpreting this idea into the language of project management.

²⁹ This point has been explored by the British Medical Association in BMA, Drugs in Sport: The Pressure to Perform.

³⁰ OECD Environmental Strategy: 2004 Review of Progress. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/51/57/31418999.pdf.

³¹ Houlihan, Dying to Win, Chapter 7.

³² As used in Allison, ‘Faster, Stronger, Higher’.

³³ Ways to achieve this are articulated in Root-Bernstein, Discovering: Finding and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Science.

³⁴ Hoberman, Mortal Engines.