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The game of (your) life: professional rugby careers

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conference contribution
posted on 2015-03-19, 11:11 authored by Christine CouplandChristine Coupland
Taking the perspective that a professional sports person regards their sport-craft as work, it is timely to consider how this embodied, short, publically performance-measured, ultimately degenerative, career is given credibility by those who are engaged in it at an elite level. Drawing on Bourdieu the analysis of ethnographic empirical material from a study of a UK-based rugby league team playing at the Super League level (the highest level in the UK) illustrates how the natural order of things is crafted. Advancing understanding of an embodied-career resonates with contemporary understandings of short-term contracts which require the individual to be flexible and adaptable, be prepared for exit, and yet remain immersed and dedicated to the current sphere of employment. This kind of immersion requires alternatives to be, temporarily at least, silenced and in this context renders the accrual of bodily capital as fit, but only temporarily fit for purpose.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

EGOS EGOS 2014 Conference, Rotterdam

Citation

COUPLAND, C., 2014. The game of (your) life: professional rugby careers. IN: Reimagining, Rethinking, Reshaping: Organizational Scholarship in Unsettled Times. 30th EGOS Colloquium, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 3-5 July 2014.

Publisher

EGOS - European Group for Organizational Studies

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is a conference paper. The website is at: http://www.egosnet.org/2014_rotterdam/general_theme

Language

  • en

Location

Rotterdam