Search results

The New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against DraftKings and FanDuel in 2015 accusing them of operating illegal gambling platforms. Using actor–network theory, we show how DraftKings, FanDuel, the New York Attorney General, critics, and legislators were preoccupied with how much agency players possessed. They also understood agency as emerging from a sociomaterial arrangement of human and nonhuman entities and saw how agency could be enhanced or limited by introducing new rules, technologies, and constraints. We compare this perspective on agency with theories typically used in sociology of sport and we consider how sociologists can intervene in sport agency.

"...[T]he rapid growth of the esports industry ... presents a range of new questions about underlying legal issues. First, there are questions about whether esports actually constitute sports. ... Second, there are questions about which laws govern exports, and how the bodies of law that apply in the context of traditional sports are both similar to, and distinct from, those governing esports. ... Third, there are questions about who will emerge as the lawyers who play an important role in developing the structure of commercial esports, and what credentials will make them most qualified"--Introduction

For university students in sport management programs, working in sports is often the end goal, and internships have become the most common curricular component for achieving this end. Sport management students bring to these internships various backgrounds and active fan attachments with sports that structure their work experiences and create certain conditions of exploitation. We thus conducted interviews with current and soon-to-be interns to understand their subjective perceptions and experiences of working in sports as fans. Drawing upon Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism as well as neo-Marxist theories of affective labor, we reveal the structuring contradictions of interns' work in the contemporary sports industry.