Sport and technology: An actor-network theory perspective

Sport and technology

Globalizing Sport Studies

Series editor: John Horne, Professor of Sport and Sociology,

University of Central Lancashire, UK

Public interest in sport studies continues to grow throughout the world. This series brings together the latest work in the field and acts as a global knowledge hub for interdisciplinary work in sport studies. While promoting work across disciplines, the series focuses on social scientific and cultural studies of sport. It brings together the most innovative scholarly empirical and theoretical work, from within the UK and internationally.

Books previously published in this series:

Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures

David Rowe

Japanese Women and Sport: Beyond Baseball and Sumo

Robin Kietlinski

Sport for Development and Peace: A Critical Sociology

Simon Darnell

Globalizing Cricket: Englishness, Empire and Identity

Dominic Malcolm

Global Boxing

Kath Woodward

Sport and Social Movements: From the Local to the Global

Jean Harvey, John Horne, Parissa Safai, Simon Darnell and Sebastien Courchesne-O’Neill

The Greening of Golf: Sport, Globalization and the environment

Brad Millington

Sport and technology

An actor-network theory perspective

Roslyn Kerr

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Roslyn Kerr 2016

The right of Roslyn Kerr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC) licence

ISBN 978 1 784 99520 1 open access

ISBN 978 1 784 99515 7 hardback

First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Contents

Series editor’s preface

Introduction

1What is technology?

2Enhancement: which technologies are improved, and how?

3The integration of ‘foreign’ technologies into sporting practice

4The actor-network of doping

5The integration of science and medicine into sports training

6Technologies for judging, umpiring and refereeing

7Translating performances: the production of sports media broadcasts

Conclusion

References

Index

Series editor’s preface

There is now a considerable amount of expertise nationally and internationally in the social scientific and cultural analysis of sport in relation to the economy and society more generally. Contemporary research topics, such as sport and social justice, science and technology and sport, global social movements and sport, sports mega-events, sports participation and engagement and the role of sport in social development, suggest that sport and social relations need to be understood in non-Western developing economies, as well as in European, North American and other advanced capitalist societies. The current high global visibility of sport makes this an excellent time to launch a major new book series that takes sport seriously, and makes this research accessible to a wide readership.

The Globalizing Sport Studies series is thus in line with a massive growth of academic expertise, research output and public interest in sport worldwide. At the same time, it seeks to use the latest developments in technology and the economics of publishing to reflect the most innovative research into sport in society currently under way in the world. The series is multi-disciplinary, although primarily based on the social sciences and cultural studies approaches to sport.

The broad aims of the series are to: act as a knowledge hub for social scientific and cultural studies research in sport, including, but not exclusively, anthropological, economic, geographical, historical, political science and sociological studies; contribute to the expanding field of research on sport in society in the United Kingdom and internationally by focusing on sport at regional, national and international levels; create a series for both senior and more junior researchers that will become synonymous with cutting-edge research, scholarly opportunities and academic development; promote innovative discipline-based, multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches to researching sport in society; provide an English language outlet for high-quality non-English writing on sport in society; publish broad overviews, original empirical research studies and classic studies from non-English sources; and thus attempt to realise the potential for globalizing sport studies through open-content licensing with Creative Commons.

At the Royal Liverpool Golf Club in Hoylake in 2014 the Open Championship organiser, the Royal and Ancient (R&A), installed free Wi-Fi access at a championship course for the first time. Concerns were raised that the innovation might disturb a key aspect of golf etiquette: spectators maintaining silence whilst the players focus on their game. Partly to deal with this problem there was ‘a strict ban on making or receiving calls on the course other than in mobile device zones’. Peter Dawson, the Chief Executive of the R&A, commented that ‘technology is something golf has to embrace and people are going to feel a great benefit this year’ (Financial Times, 17 July 2014, p. 4).

In Sport and Technology Roslyn Kerr does not explicitly discuss these developments in championship golf, but she does provide us with a distinctive way to think about and understand the complex relationships between technologies and a variety of sports – the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective. Rather than simply introducing a sport readership to ANT, Kerr demonstrates why such an approach is significant. Specifically, ANT provides a detailed methodology as well as a theoretical basis for understanding the relationship between the human and non-human in sport.

The book begins with a discussion of critiques of ANT, how ANT defines technology and how ANT connects with the work of social theorists such as Haraway, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari. It then illustrates the utility of ANT through rich case studies, based on original fieldwork, of the use of technologies in sports such as kayaking, competitive swimming, Australian rules football, cricket and tennis, as well as analyses of doping, refereeing and media broadcasts of sport. Sport and Technology is a distinctive contribution to debates about sport in a global context, an introduction to the Actor-Network Theory way of thinking about sport and a demonstration of the insights the perspective can yield that have value for sport scientists and others involved, or those simply interested, in the development of sport.

John Horne, Preston and Edinburgh, 2015

Introduction

When, in 2013, Lance Armstrong confessed to having adopted a range of doping practices, there was no question that he had ingested banned substances in order to enhance his cycling performance. However, when asked whether he felt any guilt over his behaviour, Armstrong curiously replied that he did not. While several authors have explained Armstrong’s lack of guilt by arguing that the Tour de France has been dominated by a doping culture for many years (see, for example, Brewer, 2002; Strulik, 2012), the existence of further examination and discussion of Armstrong’s actions indicates that the simple explanation that athletes’ decisions to use banned technologies are based purely on enhancing performance is insufficient for understanding the use of technology in sport.

Lance Armstrong’s case also concerned the immense amount of money that he obtained through sponsorship and other commercial arrangements, with fans raising questions about the continuation of those arrangements once his doping history was known. With the professionalisation of sport, athletes face increasing pressure from sponsors not only to perform but also to use particular technologies or equipment produced by their sponsors. The use of some technologies can therefore be explained by athletes’ experiencing pressure from sponsors or other commercial bodies; and, by extension, athletes’ desire to win can be explained by their wish to benefit commercially.

At the same time, athletes also make deliberate decisions not to use particular technologies or not to dope because of their desire for purity, to keep their bodies and sport clean and untainted. For example, US 5000m athletics champion Lauren Fleshman publicly criticised Lance Armstrong on the grounds that he undermined fair play, which she believed defined sporting practice (see Fleshman, 2013). Fleshman’s stance assumes an amateur ethos that places fair play ahead of winning, and harks back to a romanticised view of sport as historically free from overly competitive practices.

There is no doubt that the explanations of performance enhancement, commercial pressure and a desire for purity are valid in terms of athletes’ own individual motivations for using or not using particular technologies in sport. But one of the most controversial aspects of Armstrong’s case was the revelation of just how widespread his doping network was, and how many individuals and technological implements, such as syringes and and other equipment necessary for performing blood transfusions, were involved in facilitating his doping. This revelation demonstrated that individual motives are only one aspect of understanding the use of technology in sport, with athletes also utilising a variety of other processes and enrolling many other actors to facilitate their use of technology.

In this book, I argue that singular explanations such as quest for performance, commercialisation or quest for purity are insufficient explanations in themselves for understanding the use or non-use of technology in sport. I do not argue that these explanations are not valid, and indeed I use cases where these explanations come into play. But this book argues that these explanations do not encapsulate the myriad of processes that contribute to the use of technology in sport. Instead, I argue that in order to understand which technologies become enrolled in sport, we must examine the processes of enrolment, and seek out the various actors that affect the enrolling or non-enrolling, and acknowledge that there are multiple issues and decisions at play. This involves a shift in focus from much other work that has been done on technology in sport. It involves attending to enactment, and to process, rather than to regulations, philosophies or cultural meanings. Yet these latter aspects can also be important, since the enrolling process can include deploying the philosophies or cultural meanings held by those involved in the enrolment processes.

Indeed, enrolment processes can be highly complex, although their complexity is often obscured by the dominant narratives used by influential sporting bodies (Goldsher-Diamond, 2014). Once a technology is enrolled and its use becomes normalised, the process that produced the stability becomes concealed from view and can therefore be difficult to ascertain (Law, 1992). For example, all sports have rules that outline which technologies are permitted or not permitted to be used, but this is the extent of the information that appears in the rules and regulations. The controversies or decisions that resulted in those rules are not recorded in the same public manner and therefore become erased. Thus, in attending to how technologies come to be enrolled or not-enrolled, I also aim to bring to light the complex processes that produce particular rules or decisions.

Attending to complexity is particularly important in the light of the rapid increase in technological change that we are currently experiencing. Where, in the past, many technologies were reasonably simple and it was possible for many laypeople to understand their workings, the complexity and number of technologies have now increased exponentially, and only experts can fully comprehend them. Within such an environment, it is necessary to develop and adopt approaches that acknowledge complexity and are designed to examine multiple strands. While philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (2004) have argued for the need to see the world as consisting of assemblages in order to examine the current fluid and unstable environment, they did not extend their ideas to encompass methodology. By contrast, the approach adopted in this book, Actor-Network Theory (ANT), was designed as a methodology to examine scientific practices and technological change while acknowledging the complex and multiple strands that affect change, including human and non-human actors.

The earliest uses of ANT involved the examination of the processes of producing scientific knowledge, with detailed ethnographic practices revealing a complex network of factors that produce science (see, for example, Latour, 1987, 1993b; Latour and Woolgar, 1979). In this book, it is the network of sport that I am interested in following in order to trace similarly the factors that lead to the enrolment or non-enrolment of technology in sport. To date, there has been no other extensive study of sport using an ANT approach.

ANT is not the only approach well designed to trace the enrolment of technologies in sport. The social construction of technology (SCOT), as developed and adopted by Pinch and Bijker (1984), has similarly been utilised for the same goal and is more commonly used for examining sport (see, for example, Goldsher-Diamond, 2014; Pinch and Henry, 1999; Rosen, 1993; Varney, 2002). In examining how technologies come to be used, SCOT’s focus is on identifying the relevant social groups that contribute to the use of the technology. For example, in their analysis of the bicycle in the nineteenth century, Pinch and Bijker (1984) determined that the so-called ‘ordinary’ bicycle was deemed too risky and unsafe for use by women, whereas it was highly attractive to young men precisely because of that same riskiness. Thus, different social groups interpreted the ordinary bicycle differently (in an example of the concept of interpretive flexibility), which affected whether each group chose to use the bicycle.

ANT’s focus differs from SCOT’s through its emphasis on the technologies, and other non-humans, as actors that affect and influence enrolment processes. In SCOT, as in most sociological approaches, the focus remains purely on the human actors: in particular, on social groups. In ANT, humans and non-humans are understood as equally important, and this is reflected in the preference for the term ‘actant’ over ‘actor’ to refer to anyone or anything that affects the enrolment process. Other scholars interested in ‘things’ have similarly argued that non-human artefacts can hold agency and act as significantly as people (Harvey and Knox, 2014).

Determining how ‘things’, and particularly technologies, act is particularly important in sport, where international sporting bodies are constantly in the position of having to regulate the use of technology based on the ability of the technology to affect sporting performance. Sporting bodies must determine a technology’s level of agency in order to decide how to regulate it. This was illustrated particularly well in the case of Oscar Pistorius, where it took several years for the International Association of Athletic Federations to determine whether his prosthetic legs had greater running capacity than human legs. The crucial point was whether the actions available to the prosthetic legs were greater than those available to human legs. It was decided that they did not have greater capacity, but it took a substantial amount of time to determine this was the case.

In claiming that non-humans can hold agency, ANT has attracted critics who argue that agency can only exist through deliberate intent and therefore agency can only be the domain of humans, as non-humans do not possess the consciousness to decide to act. In emphasising the ability of non-humans to act, ANT has been criticised for anthropomorphising non-humans (see, for example, Elder-Vass, 2008; Hearn, 2012). While this point will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 1, it is a point that has been recently considered by a range of researchers interested in what Fox and Alldred (2015) term ‘new materialism’.

Essentially, discussions around agency revolve around conceptions of power. Rather than viewing power as incorporating deliberate intent, ANT views power as an effect. Utilising such a definition, anyone or anything that affects action can potentially hold power. The form this action may take varies depending on the individual study, but a simple example of the way that technology in sport can affect the action comes from my own ethnographic work in the sport of gymnastics, which utilised an ANT approach. In this excerpt from an interview with a gymnast, Malcolm, he discusses how the equipment holds power through directly affecting his gymnastics performance:

Malcolm:The high bar is always different, bouncier or harder. And the rings, sometimes they shake more.

Researcher: Is that the same here? When you compete at [another club] is it different?

Malcolm: At [another club] the high bar is a bit bouncier than I like it, and the rings, the rings are pretty good actually. The floor’s a bit harder than here, so you can get a bit more bounce if you put more into it.

Researcher: So you know what to expect? If you got sent to the US or something, I guess you’d be thinking, ‘I wonder what I’ll get here?’

Malcolm: Yeah, because you get used to the floor you train on every day. If you have a soft floor at home and go to a hard floor somewhere else, you end up going ‘Oh no!’ And some floors are really bad, they’re soft on the top and hard underneath and you end up tearing your achilles and stuff.

This excerpt from Malcolm’s interview reveals how he has learnt how to ‘be affected’ (Latour, 2004, p. 210) by the apparatus, and therefore the apparatus holds the power to affect his gymnastics performance. His comment about the bounciness of the high bar makes it clear that he realises a certain amount of manipulation of the equipment is required to produce optimum results, but that the type of equipment directly affects what he must do. He is aware that his gymnastic routine will occur only if he manages to work as an assemblage with the equipment and describes how he ‘puts more into’ the floor to make a harder floor work more effectively.

The notion of the ‘assemblage’ is central to ANT. Essentially, ANT encapsulates the notion that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ through arguing that combining humans and/or non-humans can create assemblages that have vastly different qualities and capacities from singular parts. This is easily understood in the case of sport, where athletes can be understood as possessing particular and often impressive qualities owing to the athlete-assemblage, consisting of a human plus a variety of technologies and training that transform the human into something surpassing normal human ability. For example, neither a human nor a pole is capable of independently jumping five metres into the air, but once a human with training uses a pole, they are transformed into an athlete-assemblage called a pole-vaulter, who can accomplish this task.

Viewing athletes as assemblages of humans and technologies creates a significant shift in thinking for the sports policy-maker. For example, at times, policies in sport attempt to ban or limit the use of particular technologies, seeing them as entirely separate from individuals. As previously discussed, seeing the two as separate was shown to be problematic in the case of Oscar Pistorius, whose legs are so interconnected with his ability to run at all that he epitomises Donna Haraway’s (2004) notion of the cyborg, with no discernible differentiation between human and technology. It is also problematic with regard to doping, where vast sums of money are spent in attempting to determine whether an athlete has ingested banned substances. Doping policy-makers could instead, if they adopted the ANT notion of the athlete as assemblage, simply have an upper limit of the amount of whatever substance they are testing for and disregard whether it arrived in the body by natural or artificial means. This has occurred at times. For example, in order to test for the presence of the banned artificial substance Erythropoietin (EPO), some sports organisations used the method of testing hematocrit levels in order to ensure that no athletes went beyond the limit of 50 per cent. Their reasoning for choosing a level of 50 per cent was related to the health issue of blood thickening that occurs beyond this level (Böning, Maassen and Pries, 2011). This testing method ensured that athletes were safe and healthy, but was unable to determine whether athletes reached hematocrit levels below 50 per cent by human or artificial means. This policy assumed that athletes were assemblages made up of a range of hormones and chemicals. In the language of policy-makers, such a stance ensured safety and produced a level playing field. However, this method has now been replaced by a definitive test for the use of artificial EPO, along with a range of other mechanisms as detailed in Chapter 4, which consider the human as needing to remain separate from any technological interventions.

The concept of the ‘assemblage’ also reflects the use of the word ‘network’ within ANT. To remain with the example of the pole-vaulter, implying that a pole-vaulter is simply an assemblage of a human plus training and a pole is oversimplifying the network that produced the performance. If we were particularly intent on determining how the pole-vaulter achieves this outcome, we would need to identify the myriad of other components that contribute to the pole-vaulter’s success. We would expect that the pole-vaulter would use an expert coach and other sports science experts, along with possibly specialised shoes and maybe particular mats for training. The pole-vaulter would also need funding, and competition experience. The pole-vaulter’s ability to jump high is thus made up of the assemblage of all these aspects, and it is this assemblage that ANT refers to as ‘the network’.

It may seem that listing these components in this way is simply repeating the components that make up elite sporting success, as identified in studies such as that by De Bosscher et al. (2006), who produced a model of factors that determine elite sporting success. The ANT approach differs from these kinds of studies in assuming that networks are individualised, rather than universal, and highly unstable. This assumption stems from the ANT view of the world as existing as a network of assemblages that changes over time. For example, at the moment I am involved in a project examining the experiences of older elite gymnasts. One of the findings from this project is that, as gymnasts reach adulthood, their coaching and training requirements change considerably from when they were younger. Some gymnasts question whether they even need a coach as an adult, given that