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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors’ central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.

Sport played a significant part in the growth of television, especially during its emergence as a dominant global medium between 1960 and 1980. In turn, television, together with commercial sponsorship, transformed sport, bringing it significant new income and prompting changes in rules, presentation, and cultural form. Increasingly, from the 1970s, it was not the regular weekly sport that commanded the largest audiences but, rather, the occasional major events, such as the Olympic Games and football's World Cup. In the past two decades, deregulation and digitalization have expanded the number of channels, but this fragmentation, combined with the growth of the Internet, has meant that the era in which shared domestic leisure was dominated by viewing of the major channels is closing. Yet, sport provides an exception, an instance when around the world millions share a live and unpredictable viewing experience.

In the decade or more since publication of the first edition of Understanding Sport , both sport and wider global society have undergone profound change. In this fully updated, revised and expanded edition of their classic textbook, John Horne, Alan Tomlinson, Garry Whannel and Kath Woodward offer a critical and reflective introduction to the relationship between sport and contemporary society and explain how sport remains an important agent and symptom of socio-cultural change. Fully integrating historical, sociological, political and cultural analysis, the book covers every key topic in the study of sport and society, including: debate, interpretation and theory sport and the media sport and the body sport and politics commercialization globalization. Retaining the accessibility and scholarly rigour for which Understanding Sport has always been renowned, this new edition includes entirely new chapters on global transformations, sports mega-events and sites, sporting bodies and governance, as well as a succinct guide to researching sport. With review and seminar questions included in every chapter, plus concise, helpful guides to further reading, Understanding Sport remains an essential textbook for all courses on sport and society, the sociology of sport, sport and social theory, or social issues in sport. Introduction Chapter 1. Industrial Society, Social Change and Sports Culture Chapter 2. Case Studies in the Growth of Modern Sports Chapter 3. Debates, Interpretations, Theories Chapter 4. Social Stratification and Social Division in Sport Chapter 5. The Social Construction of Identity and Cultural Reproduction Chapter 6. Sport and Representation Chapter 7. Sporting Bodies: Disciplining and Defining Normality Chapter 8. Sport, The State, and the Politics Chapter 9. Governance and Sport Chapter 10. The Labour Market Chapter 11. Sport, Commercialisation and Commodification Chapter 12. Global Transformations Chapter 13. Sport Spaces, Sites and Events Afterword – Methods for Understanding Sport Culture John Horne is Professor of Sport and Sociology in the School of Sport, Tourism and the Outdoors at the University of Central Lancashire, where he is Director of the International Research Institute for Sport Studies (IRiSS). Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies and Director of Research and Development (Social Sciences) at the University of Brighton, and has authored and edited numerous volumes and more than 100 chapters/articles on sport, leisure and popular culture. Garry Whannel is Head of the Centre for International Media Analysis, Research and Consultancy (CIMARC) at the University of Bedfordshire, is one of the world’s leading experts on the cultural analysis of media sport, and has written extensively on media and culture for over thirty years. Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at the Open University and works in the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) on feminist materialist critiques, most recently in the field of sport, especially boxing. She has published extensively on identities and diversity and on issues in social science.

In the decade or more since publication of the first edition of Understanding Sport, both sport and wider global society have undergone profound change. In this fully updated, revised and expanded edition of their classic textbook, John Horne, Alan Tomlinson, Garry Whannel and Kath Woodward offer a critical and reflective introduction to the relationship between sport and contemporary society and explain how sport remains an important agent and symptom of socio-cultural change.Fully integrating historical, sociological, political and cultural analysis, the book covers every key topic in the study of sport and society, including:debate, interpretation and theory sport and the media sport and the body sport and politics commercialization globalization.Retaining the accessibility and scholarly rigour for which Understanding Sport has always been renowned, this new edition includes entirely new chapters on global transformations, sports mega-events and sites, sporting bodies and governance, as well as a succinct guide to researching sport. With review and seminar questions included in every chapter, plus concise, helpful guides to further reading, Understanding Sport remains an essential textbook for all courses on sport and society, the sociology of sport, sport and social theory, or social issues in sport.

The author first developed the concept of vortextuality for a study of media sports stars as an attempt to analyse the process whereby an intense, if temporary, focus by the media on a single event occurs. This paper presents a systematic account of the concept.