This thesis explores how coach-athlete relationships are influenced within the organisational culture of a rowing club. Relational Cultural Theory and the work of Weber are used to examine how the concept of organisational culture informs understanding of coach and athlete relating. The study, covering a complete competitive season, involved an eleven month long ethnography of an elite rowing club in Great Britain. The findings demonstrate the visceral, enculturated and complex nature of coach-athlete relationships in elite sport. Relational disconnection occurred in the disenchanted organisational life, where intrinsic values were subordinated to a rational quest for efficiency, control and ultimately success, as well as traditional social ordering based on status and gender. Relationships were characterised by power over relating, distance and impersonal relations, caretaking rather than caring about, fragile trust by the athlete and trust through surveillance by the coach, where emotion was concealed and conflict avoided. However, enacting shared identities, the emotion involved in competing and the fact this was a voluntary organisation with competing values, provided an escape from simulacra of elite sport to allow for multi-value paradigm of interests. The opportunity for coaches and athletes to connect with each other based on their values and with emotion exposed their humanity and revealed the potential for relational mutuality and authenticity. The study challenges the valorised coaching and elite sport relationships and lifestyle. Implications for coaching include providing individuals with confidence to raise the issue of relationship, providing coaches and athletes with knowledge of connection and disconnection in relationship and the outcome on well-being. The need to develop a systemised approach to embedding growth-fostering relationships in the culture of high performance sport is highlighted.

Since the late nineteenth century boxing in England has been socially organised into two ideologically distinctive versions - amateur and professional boxing – that to this day are practiced in spatially segregated social universes. Nonetheless, both amateur and professional boxing-practitioners understandings and lived experiences in and through boxing are necessarily grounded in the wider social and cultural contexts through which they interpret meaning and construct worldviews and identity. Thus despite the institutional, ideological and spatial boundaries demarcating either code, on a rather more subtle yet incredibly powerful cultural level, amateur and professional boxing are both symbolically and practically deeply intertwined. Over a five year period, I conducted ‘insider’ ethnographic research among distinct cohorts of amateur and professional boxers based in Luton and London to investigate the lived experiences and socially constructed worldviews, values and identities developed by practitioners immersed in either code. The overriding aim of this research was to critically evaluate the limits and possibilities of boxing-practitioners association with and development through ‘boxing’ henceforth. The findings of this ethnography reveal that it was common for the amateur and professional boxing-practitioners studied to cultivate empowering identities through intersubjective and socially validating instances of purposefulness, expressivity, creativity, fellowship and aspiration. These lived dimensions were grounded in sensuous, symbolic and emotional attachments respective to the social organization defining the social practice of either code of boxing. Equally, the research reveals that under the veneer of collective passion for and consequent fellowship experienced through boxing, an undercurrent yet ever-present sense of dubiety, tension and intra-personal conflict was in evidence among both the amateur and professional boxing-practitioners studied. It is suggested, therefore, that as a consequence of an array of both micro and macro post-industrial societal reconfigurations defining the structural principles of amateurism and professionalism in the practice of ‘boxing’, contemporary boxers are increasingly predisposed to developing athletic identities predisposed towards patterns of meaning production “…dominated by market-mediated consumer choice and the power of individualism” (Jarvie 2006 p. 327). Thus through complex, historically dynamic and seemingly paradoxical social processes of cultural (re)production and transformation - dialectically fusing individualistic aspirations geared towards self-interested gain, acts of group and subcultural fellowship and social resistance to measures of institutionalised control - it is argued that the role of boxing as an agent for humanistic personal and social development in the contemporary late-modern era of structural reconfiguration is progressively rendered impotent.

During every summer Olympic Games, the sport of gymnastics rises briefly to the world’s attention as the public admire the incredible skills and feats performed by fit muscular bodies on a range of apparatus. The gymnastics they watch consists of performances in which bodies assemble with apparatus. This thesis utilises an Actor Network Theory (ANT) perspective to follow this assembling of gymnastics in the five codes of competitive gymnastics competed in New Zealand: women’s artistic gymnastics, men’s artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, trampolining and competitive aerobics. This thesis is a descriptive ethnography of the world of high performance gymnastics. It begins by examining some of the controversies that have operated to both criticise and rework the sport. Next, the gymnasts are followed through the selection processes that lead them to become members of national squads and teams. It then moves to the training gymnasium and examines the variety of non-human actants that work in the gymnasium to assemble gymnastics. The next two chapters examine how gymnasts are found to enrol and assemble with video technologies and sports science professionals in their efforts to improve performance. Following this, gymnasts are observed to produce a routine at a competition which is translated into a score and ranking through the highly complicated and laborious process of judging. Finally, the thesis concludes with the story of Angela McMillan, New Zealand’s most successful athlete within the gymnastic codes. Throughout are a range of accounts from participants, together with observations, describing attempts to secure the stabilisation of gymnastics as an actor-network that produces internationally successful athletes. All the networks followed involve a continual process of enrolling, un-enrolling, translating and mediating, with power constantly shifting and being shared between various heterogeneous actants including coaches, parents, the national federation and the international federation. At times these networks stabilise with particular actants, such as sports scientists or technologies, being enrolled, while at other times the paths of the networks come to an end as particular assemblages or actants, such as physical ability tests, are no longer enrolled. In contrast to a perception that successful high performance sports include key actors and resources, this thesis shows how the networks that produce high performance gymnasts are highly unpredictable and messy, with humans and non-humans both equally influential in affecting every branch of the networks. Processes such as talent identification, training and judging are found to be complicated and unstable.