Suchergebnisse

In his 1970 Proposed Sports Policy for Canadians, John Munro noted that many Canadians faced significant barriers to sport participation. His Proposed Sport Policy was designed, in part, to overcome some of those barriers and create greater equality of opportunity for all Canadians as they strived to become the best athletes in the nation and the world. Gruneau's study of 1971 Winter Games athletes indicated the extent to which socio economic status (SES) influenced participation in the upper levels of Canada's sport system in the Olympic sports.This paper presents data gathered from a 1986-7 survey of Canadian national team athletes and all athletes who were part of the Athletes' Assistance Program in 1986 to examine the extent to which Munro's Proposed Sports Policy has created a sport system based on athletic ability rather than SES. The data suggest that despite a number of federal government programmes which the Proposed Sports Policy initiated, SES is still a major factor in determining which Canadians become the nations' top, high performance athletes. The data in this study clearly indicate that athletes from Canada's national team are significantly overrepresented among the upper SES groups and significantly underrepresented among the lower SES groups, no matter what indicators of SES are used.2In this presentation, I am only concerned with the relationship between socio-economic status and participation in sport at the elite level within Canada. The unequal patterns of participation that I will indicate below are also found in other western countries. For information on sport and inequality outside of Canada, see Berryman and Loy (1976), Collins (1972), Crawford (1977), Eggleston (1965), Loy (1972), Pavia (1973), and Shine (1977). For general discussions of sport and inequality related to athletes, see Gruneau (1975), Heinemann (1980), Kneyer (1980), Lüschen (1981), or Loy, Kenyon and McPherson (1978, 332-81).3In the McPherson (1977, 172) study, 60 percent of the players had fathers from the lower two Blishen categories while Gruneau's (1976, 121) had 39 percent. This difference, I would argue, reflects the fact that McPherson was surveying players in a professional career. Many of Gruneau's middle Blishen level hockey players would soon opt for a more secure career outside of hockey leaving only those who could afford the risks — upper SES players — and those who have little to lose — lower SES players — working their way to the professional ranks. Of course, the professional ranks will have far more players from the lower SES groups than from the upper SES groups of Canadian society.4See Beamish (1985) for a discussion of how movement towards the national level in instrumental voluntary associations in sport relates directly to an increased exclusivity based on SES.5For details about the Blishen Scale see Blishen (1967), or Blishen and McRoberts (1976). One should also note that I have not used Blishen's (Blishen, Carroll, and Moore, 1987) update to his SES scale because in constructing his new scale, Blishen dropped out the Pineo/Porter-based prestige score component of the overall Blishen score. To make comparisons with Gruneau's data, I felt it was preferable at this time to use Blishen scores that still contained the prestige score component. In addition, in view of Blishen's revisions, one is now just as far ahead to report occupation and education directly rather than report Blishen scores that combine the two. I have, of course, already presented those data immediately above this section of the paper.

While trauma and loss can occur anywhere, most suffering is experienced as personal tragedy. Yet some tragedies transcend everyday life's sad but inevitable traumas to become notorious public events: de facto "public" tragedies. In these crises, suffering is made publicly visible and lamentable. Such tragedies are defined by public accusations, social blame, outpourings of grief and anger, spontaneous memorialization, and collective action. These, in turn, generate a comparable set of political reactions, including denial, denunciation, counterclaims, blame avoidance, and a competition to control memories of the event. Disasters and crises are no more or less common today than in the past, but public tragedies now seem ubiquitous. After Tragedy Strikes argues that they are now epochal--public tragedies have become the day's definitive social and political events. Thomas D. Beamish deftly explores this phenomenon by developing the historical context within which these events occur and the role that political elites, the media, and an emergent ideology of victimhood have played in cultivating their ascendence.

While trauma and loss can occur anywhere, most suffering is experienced as personal tragedy. Yet some tragedies transcend everyday life's sad but inevitable traumas to become notorious public events: de facto ";public"; tragedies. In these crises, suffering is made publicly visible and lamentable. Such tragedies are defined by public accusations, social blame, outpourings of grief and anger, spontaneous memorialization, and collective action. These, in turn, generate a comparable set of political reactions, including denial, denunciation, counterclaims, blame avoidance, and a competition to control memories of the event. Disasters and crises are no more or less common today than in the past, but public tragedies now seem ubiquitous. After Tragedy Strikes argues that they are now epochal—public tragedies have become the day's definitive social and political events. Thomas D. Beamish deftly explores this phenomenon by developing the historical context within which these events occur and the role that political elites, the media, and an emergent ideology of victimhood have played in cultivating their ascendence

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Conceptual Footings of Risk and Governance -- Chapter 2. Risk Communication, Local Civics, and Discourse -- Chapter 3. Davis, California -- Chapter 4. Roxbury, Massachusetts -- Chapter 5. Galveston, Texas -- Conclusion. The Civic Politics of Risk -- Appendix. Research Strategy -- Notes -- Index

In the Guadalupe Dunes, 170 miles north of Los Angeles and 250 miles south of San Francisco, an oil spill persisted unattended for 38 years. Over the period 1990-1996, the national press devoted 504 stories to the Exxon Valdez accident and a mere nine to the Guadalupe spill -- even though the latter is most likely the nation's largest recorded oil spill. Although it was known to oil workers in the field where it originated, to visiting regulators, and to locals who frequented the beach, the Guadalupe spill became troubling only when those involved could no longer view the sight and smell of petroleum as normal. This book recounts how this change in perception finally took place after nearly four decades and what form the response took. Taking a sociological perspective, Thomas Beamish examines the organizational culture of the Unocal Corporation (whose oil fields produced the leakage), the interorganizational response of regulatory agencies, and local interpretations of the event. He applies notions of social organization, social stability, and social inertia to the kind of environmental degradation represented by the Guadalupe spill. More important, he uses the Guadalupe Dunes case as the basis for a broader study of environmental "blind spots." He argues that many of our most pressing pollution problems go unacknowledged because they do not cause large-scale social disruption or dramatic visible destruction of the sort that triggers responses. Finally, he develops a model of social accommodation that helps explain why human systems seem inclined to do nothing as trouble mounts.