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- Hellström, John
(author)
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Den svenska sporthjälten : Kontinuitet och förändring i medieberättelsen om den svenska sporthjälten från 1920-talet till idag
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis examines the media construction of five Swedish sports heroes, active from the 1920’s to the beginning of the 2000’s. The analyses are based on the assumption that sports heroes are social products that reflect the dominating ideals and values of a society or culture, and that the media plays an important role in this process. Firstly, the media provide the attention necessary for successful athletes to become publically known and, secondly, they create the stories in which some athletes are represented as heroes while others are represented as villains. The use of narrative theory in this thesis builds on the idea that a story is not merely a way of presenting information, but a way of creating meaning. A person becomes a hero when he or she is described as a hero in a heroic tale. To analyze the media construction of sports heroes is thus to analyze the media stories of them as heroes.In order to examine and compare the construction of sports heroes in the media, articles from daily press and magazines as well as broadcasts in radio and television have been analyzed. The results show that although each of the five heroes were valued and represented according to ideals and values specific of his or her time, there are similarities in the media representation of them that suggest that there is some degree of stability in the narrative of the Swedish sports hero over time. In many ways, the story of the Swedish sports hero is still intact since the 1920’s. However, this story is an ideal story and the process of constructing athletes as heroes has proved to be filled with compromise and contradictions. It can be argued that the media is more concerned with fitting the athletes into an already existing narrative of the Swedish sports hero than with representing them as individuals.Seen in a wider historical context, sports heroes represent an example of how national identity is constructed in the media. National identity is, as many theorists have shown, a dynamic and relational process. What is considered typically Swedish thus changes over time and in different contexts. In this process the social status of sports heroes helps to stabilize as well as legitimize dominating ideas of Swedish national identity.
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| 2. |
- Pihl Skoog, Emma, 1984-
(author)
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Kraftkarlar och knockouts : Kraftsporter, kropp och klass i Sverige 1920–1960
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The thesis analyses representations of body and class, and their wider ideological meaning, in Swedish power sports from 1920 to 1960. Boxing and weightlifting – sports dominated by manual workers – are chosen as study objects. The sources used are magazines connected to the power sports, and autobiographies by four prominent athletes. The thesis relates to different areas of previous research. One concerns the body as such, from a social and cultural history perspective, another revolves around medial and autobiographical representations in relation to sports, and a third is about the relationships between body, class and sport.In the analysis, the Bourdieusian concepts capital and hexis are added to a discussion on the ways that value is attached to the body, linked to the notions of use value and exchange value. The content analysis of the source material makes ground for an analysis of more implicit ideological aspects, e.g. using Barthes’s theory on mythology.Manual labour and working life appear as central organising themes in the source material. Boxing and weightlifting were largely regarded and designated as professions, challenging ideals of amateurism. A physically demanding manual work was depicted as natural breeding grounds where sports practitioners became skilled. This masculine ideal united people from various manual working groups (not only from the working class in its socio-economic sense) where the emphasis was put on the physical strength and ability of the athlete to work hard.The body was used in a form of class polemics, preferably against middle and upper class people. Certain aspects of strength and style of athletic performance were related to particular levels of intelligence and education. Power athletes from the manual working groups were depicted as “natural”, with associations to rural areas, not least working in the forest. The ideas of naturalness in its most derogatory sense of being close to animals and lacking civilisation, was however mostly used in connections with black athletes.Success stories were common narratives about power sports as arenas of success. They included a powerful norm that success must be cultivated, where the responsibility was put upon the athlete himself. Successful athletes from manual working groups could transform their physical capital into economic capital, which was often depicted as short-lived because of aging and individual shortcomings.A commercial consumer culture became more explicit in the 1950s, when bodybuilding had its Swedish breakthrough within weightlifting. Sports training was rationalised and largely decoupled from its associations with manual work. This led to an increased reification of the body as pure surface, which was attributed a value itself. The body became an area of consumption, a commodity with an exchange value, when decoupled from its use value as labour or tool for sporting success.As to the ideological aspects of the development, it is shown that there was a widespread individualist norm. Only the individual himself had the possibility to rise up and achieve success. The ideal of manual work was more of a moral and cultural nature, than political. Although there were some collectivist features in that rhetoric, the manual worker idealisation fundamentally carried an individualistic tendency. It is argued that this idealisation, or workerism, is a fruitful object for further analyses.
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| 3. |
- Stark, Tobias, 1972-
(author)
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Folkhemmet på is : Ishockey, modernisering och nationell identitet i Sverige 1920-1972
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis concerns the development of Swedish ice hockey as a national phenomenon during the period 1920–1972. The dissertation explores how the sport of ice hockey in just over half a century was transformed from a rather insignificant North American cultural import to one of Sweden’s most treasured pursuits by and large, and harbouring a national team (known as “Tre Kronor”) that at the height of its popularity in 1970 gathered almost the whole nation (82 percent of the adult population) in front of TV-sets during national game broadcasts.The analytical approach of the study is grounded in the theoretical assumption that “to be Swedish” is something you “learn” on a daily basis, and that an investigation of how “the nation” is constructed as an imagined community must see to the interplay between national rhetoric on the one hand and national practice on the other. This means that the analysis moves on two different levels, where the first is comprised of the sporting practice in itself (teams, games, players etc.), while the other deals with the conception of ice hockey in relation to national identity.The empirical investigation shows that the introduction of ice hockey in Sweden was “launched from above” under the influence of unbridled nationalistic sentiment in Sweden at large at the turn of the 20th century. The study also shows that during the inter-war era the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation promoted the spread of ice hockey in Sweden by stressing the game’s benefits as a more practical sport than the similar and already established winter sport, bandy. It is also argued that in most cases it was not so much a genuine passion for the game itself, but instead prosaic factors (economical considerations, sporting success and maintenance of ice surface etc.) that made sporting clubs take up ice hockey.After World War II the public interest in ice hockey exploded in Sweden. In the cold war era, Tre Kronor came to function as a thermometer of how the so called Swedish model stood up in comparison to the superpowers of the world. The analysis also underlines the importance of the comprehensive organizational and moral rearmament of Swedish ice hockey at large conducted by the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation in the post-war era, since it helped its cultural incorporation in the Swedish welfare state and its connection to Swedish national identity
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