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A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction: socialisation

and the ‘hidden curriculum’ in professional football

Article  in  Sport Education and Society · March 2012

DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2012.666966

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A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural

reproduction: socialisation and the
‘hidden curriculum’ in professional
football
a b
Christopher J. Cushion & Robyn L. Jones
a
Loughborough University, UK
b
Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK

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 Sport, Education and Society
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A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural

reproduction: socialisation and the
‘hidden curriculum’ in professional
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football
Christopher J. Cushiona* and Robyn L. Jonesb
a
Loughborough University, UK; bCardiff Metropolitan University, UK

This article draws on the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu to provide an explanatory account
of how socialisation and the hidden curriculum within coaching practice contribute toward the
formation of social identities and powerful schemes of internalised dispositions. Drawing on a 10
month ethnography within professional football, the research found that day-to-day practice was
ideologically laden and served the production, reproduction and incorporation of socialised agents
into the prevailing ‘legitimate’ culture. The legitimacies embodied included respect for authority,
hierarchical awareness, control, obedience, collectivity, work ethic and winning.

Keywords: Bourdieu; Coaching; Hidden curriculum; Reproduction; Socialisation

Although coaching is now considered a social practice, its related broad discursive
space remains largely silent and unexplored (Jones et al., 2010). Instead, coaching
continues to be largely viewed through a functionalist lens as a benign and
unproblematic activity, thus ignoring its contribution to the production and
reproduction of social structures. However, scholars have increasingly argued that
coaching is far from being narrow or instrumental, nor does it operate in a neutral
social and political vacuum. Rather, coaching, as a de-limited field of practice, is a
landscape that is imbued with dominant values and common beliefs that appear
natural and are therefore taken-for-granted (e.g. Cushion & Jones, 2006; Roderick,
2006; Purdy et al., 2009). In this respect, coaching can be defined as an ‘ideology’
(Fernandez-Balboa & Muros, 2006) arising in, with and from the culturally
structured world (Cushion, 2007; Wenger, 1998). In turn, the culture and related
discourse which house coaching have been generally identified as autocratic,
gendered and hierarchical (Cushion & Jones, 2006; Purdy et al., 2009). Central to

*Corresponding author. School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University,
Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UK. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1357-3322 (print)/ISSN 1470-1243 online/12/0000001-23 # 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2012.666966
 2 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

the creation and maintenance of these current structures is the practice of

socialisation; a ‘complex, interactive, process of development’ (Coakley, 2001, p.
82) where individuals learn to ‘adapt to a given social system’ (Eitzen & Sage, 1989,
p. 77).
Coaching and learning to coach have been described as socialisation processes
akin to an ‘apprenticeship’ (Cushion et al., 2003). For practitioners, this generally
involves a long and reflexive course of action from observing and receiving coaching
as athletes, through being novice and assistant coaches (engaging in structured and
structuring practices throughout), to positions of head coaches (Cushion et al.,
2003). Socialisation is a process which leads to the development of characteristic
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dispositions that enable competent performance (Nash, 2003; Brown, 2005) and can
take two forms, described by Margolis and Romero (1998) as a ‘weak form’ and a
‘strong form’. The ‘weak form’ defines and validates the professional role, and
includes coverage of such topics as methods, content, concerns and dispositions;
‘recognition of everything that constitutes the existence of the ‘‘group’’, its identity,
its truth, and which the group must reproduce in order to reproduce itself’
(Bourdieu, 1988, p. 56). The ‘strong form’ also works to reproduce, but is more
concerned with reinforcing stratified and unequal social relations and power
structures, thus maintaining the status quo. Importantly, in practice, these two
forms are seldom, if ever, explicitly stated or separated.
A major function of socialisation in coaching relates to the imparting of enduring
values and an ideology that guides behaviour in accordance with given expectations.
However, because much of the resultant learning is covert and embedded within
daily routine and practice, it is mis-recognised and becomes part of a ‘hidden
curriculum’ (Kirk, 1992; Margolis & Romero, 1998) that involves a ‘set of implicit
messages relating to knowledge, values, norms of behaviour and attitudes that
learners experience in and through educational processes’ (Skelton, 1997, p. 188).
At the same time, learning within and through coaching is neither linear nor
unproblematic making the social reality of coaching inherently unstable (Skelton,
1997; Cushion & Jones, 2006).
Consequently, to understand the impact of coaching practice, there is a need to
recognise moments of learning, unlearning and re-learning ideas, norms and beliefs.
Indeed, Evans and Davies (2002) argue that deconstructing conventions and
problematising taken-for-granted assumptions helps to understand how social reality
is organised, constrained and reproduced. For coaching this means closely examining
specific elements of implicit and explicit curriculum and pedagogy.
Using an ‘apprenticeship’ model of coaching practice within a professional football
club as a case study, this article offers an analytical exploration of how a social group
can produce and reproduce a culture. It also examines the precise processes and
outcomes which Nash (2003) argues disposes those subject to socialisation to
develop the particular characteristics and actions of the dominant. Through use of a
Bourdieusian framework, inclusive of such notions as field, capital, practice and
habitus, the means by which coaching’s hidden curriculum serves as a powerful
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 3

medium through which norms, beliefs and values are embedded and transmitted is
interrogated.
The significance of such analysis lies in attempting an epistemological ‘break’
(Robbins, 1998) from the dominant way that coaching is conceptualised in everyday
discourse1 to develop a greater understanding of the activity’s inherent complexity.
The value of the work also lies in examining how coaching as a social practice is
conceptualised in terms of structure and agency and attempts to shed some light on
why some coaches coach as they do in this case, thus providing a more nuanced
understanding of contextual ‘social geography’ (Marsh et al., 1996). Finally, by
linking practical actions to social issues, the purpose of the article extends to
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uncovering some of what Goffman (1974) describes as the unstated rules by which
interactions are governed, hence allowing coaches greater opportunities to grasp,
reflect upon and improve agential practice (Jones et al., 2010).

Theoretical framework: Bourdieu and coaching

Bourdieu (2000, p. 50) insisted that in order to ‘encounter’ rather than reassemble
the social, we should move close to the site of practice and production so that we may
complete ‘the sociological picture’ (Bourdieu, 2004). Similarly, King (2009) argues
that while class issues and broad political and economic interests (i.e. the macro)
influence social practice, they cannot be understood without an appreciation of
practice itself (the micro). This perspective asserts that differentiation within social
fields is not always solely concerned with macro issues and oppositions, and that an
analysis of practice is flawed without an understanding of social context and the
positioning of individuals within ‘fields’ (Grenfell & James, 1998).
A field, according to Bourdieu, is a social arena in which individuals manoeuvre: it
has its own logic and taken-for-granted structure of necessity and relevance. The
coaching field can be seen as a structured system of social positions that define the
situation for its occupants. In the context of a professional football Academy this is
made up of the club, the coaches, the players, the sport’s governing body and the
league, all of whom influence the curriculum and practices therein. Moreover, the
Academy’s practice will refract social forces from other interested parties such as
parents, club stakeholders, producers of knowldege and the wider economy. The
coaching field ‘is also a field of struggles’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 101)
where agents, individually and collectively, seek to safeguard and improve their
positions and ‘to impose the principle of hierarchisation most favourable to their own
products’ (Bourdieu cited in Wacquant 1989, p. 40).
Interconnected to the concept of field is that of habitus, a ‘system of durable and
transposable dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 1980, p. 53) through which we perceive, judge
and act in the world (Wacquant, 1998). Ritzer (1996) argues that people are
endowed with a habitus or what he perceives as a series of internalised schemes
through which they produce, perceive and evaluate their practices. Habitus is
acquired through lasting exposure to particular social conditions and conditionings
 4 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

via the internalisation of external constraints and possibilities (Bourdieu, 1989;

Wacquant, 1995). Practice shapes habitus, while habitus, in turn, unifies and
generates practice. Brown (2005) argues that practice is a central dynamic of social
production, while Hunter (2004) goes on to suggest that culture is embodied and
reproduced in day-to-day activities by the interactions of field and habitus through
social structures and agents. Therefore, day-to-day life (social interaction, social
behaviour) is considered to be produced by the interaction of agent and structure,
making practice neither objectively determined nor the product of free will (Ritzer,
1996).
Bourdieu also considered practice to involve a blend between the conscious and
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unconscious, the intended and unintended. Practice, therefore, becomes ‘second

nature’; a point illustrated through the sporting metaphor of developing ‘a feel for
the game’. Importantly, it is practice that mediates between habitus and the social
world: ‘On the one hand it is through practice that the habitus is created; on the
other, it is as a result of practice that the social world is created’ (Bourdieu, cited in
Wacquant, 1989, p. 42). Therefore, activities like coaching are likely to reproduce
and legitimise certain orientations of one that gradually stabilise into schemes of
disposition or habitus. Hence, the coaching process (and all it entails) can be viewed
as a significant central generative site of a distinctive habitus that has the power to
shape the consciousness (Bottero, 2009). Coaching thus, like education, is a
productive locus of a particular habitus (Brown, 2005) that gives rise to ‘patterns
of thought which makes what he (sic.) thinks thinkable for him in the particular form
in which it is thought’ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1996/1977, p. 194).
According to Hunter (2004) key to the functioning of any social space (e.g. a
football club) is the concept of capital. Capital is, in effect, a form of power (Ritzer,
1996) and can occur in a number of forms: economic (that which can be directly
converted to money), cultural (such as educational credentials), social (such as social
position and connections), symbolic (honour and prestige) and physical (the
development of bodies in ways recognised as having value) (Shilling, 1997).
Individuals within the coaching field are continuously striving to maximise their
particular capital, with their respective social positions being charted by the volume
of capital afforded to them (Calhoun, 1995). This adds a temporal dimension, as the
distribution of capital can change over time. Similar to other social locations, groups
within coaching possess real and symbolic capital, and actively pursue strategies to
improve and transmit their ‘power’. For example, in professional football, as Cushion
and Jones (2006) have illustrated, social, cultural, symbolic and physical capital all
contribute to the formal and informal social hierarchy for coaches and players. Here,
social capital can be accumulated from one’s position on the coaching or playing staff
(head coach versus assistant, professional versus youth player), cultural capital from
qualifications and experience, while symbolic capital may come from personal
prestige or renown. Bourdieu and Passerson (1996)/1977) described symbolic
capital as a cultural arbitrary system of meanings; that is, what is valued in the
field is determined by the dominant power group, in this case, the coaches.
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 5

To compliment the theoretical framework already discussed two additional

concepts are relevant. Doxa is the formation and perpetuation of the ‘taken-for-
grantedness’ of the ‘objective’ world (Throop & Murphy, 2002). That is, socially and
culturally constituted ways of perceiving, evaluating and behaving become accepted
as unquestioned and self-evident, i.e. ‘natural’ (Bourdieu, 1977). Everett (2002)
contends that where doxa or common sense produces unequal distributions of
capital and a legitimation of the forms and production of capital, symbolic violence
will be found. Symbolic violence is an act of misrecognition exerted on a complicit
social agent through the order of things, the logic of practice (Everett, 2002).
Consequently, although the nature of coaching in professional sport may present
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itself as ‘self-evident and universal’, the coaching process can actually be viewed as a
doxic structure and a site of symbolic violence (cf. Cushion & Jones, 2006).

Method and context

Twenty-four players and five coaches participated in a season long (August
May, 10
months) ethnography conducted at Albion Football Club (pseudonym). The players
were from the two senior youth teams at the club (under 18s and under 16s), and
were a combination of full-time (n 20) and contracted school-boy players (n4)
looking to secure full-time professional player status. The coaches included the
Academy Manager (Andy), his three full-time assistants (Pete, Greg, Dean) and a
part-time assistant (Bob) who worked evenings, weekends and during school
holidays (all coaches have been given pseudonyms). Albion was a medium sized
Premiership (highest professional football division in England and Wales) football
club. The Club was ambitious and keen to develop its ‘home-grown’ talent and, as
such, had invested in facilities and staffing for the youth Academy2. The Academy
programme represented a significant investment in the players, and had provided
structured training and preparation over a period of years for entry to the
professional game at the age of 16 for the participants.
Data were collected within an ethnographic framework that included participant
observation and interviewing (Patton, 1990). This approach enabled an insight into
the varying and evolving coaching process at the club. Observations were conducted
over periods ranging from two to four days per week during the season in question,
and varied in length between two hours to all day depending on the schedule of
games and training. At the end of the season, a series of in-depth interviews were
conducted with the five coaches, while two focus group interviews (4 players per
group) were carried out with a random sample of the academy players. The design
enabled a valuable linking of the focus groups to individual interviewing and
participant observation (Morgan, 1988). It also provided differential layers of
collaborative evidence or ‘triangulation’ (Miller & Glassner, 1997), which was used
to increase understanding, but was no guarantee of ‘validity’ (Silverman, 1993).
Rather, it was used to assist in the building of evidence for key claims (and evidence
denying key claims), and to deepen understanding of different aspects of an issue
 6 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

(Cain & Finch, 1981; Seale, 1999). Like the methods themselves, these processes
were not considered tests of ‘truth’, but as further opportunities for reflexive
elaboration on the unfolding findings (Bloor, 1997).
The subsequent data analysis was grounded both conceptually in the ideas and
objectives informing the research, and empirically in observations about relation-
ships in the data. Specifically, the analytic process involved three overlapping phases,
each with increasing levels of abstraction. First, data from the field notes and
interviews were inductively examined and organised. This built a system of themes
representing the coaching process within an active, unfolding context. Second, the
classification of themes was used to produce an ordered descriptive account of the
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experiences of the coaches and players. This was done to gain an insight into their
structured and structuring practices, and to outline the characteristics of dispositions
that were developed and developing. Although these descriptions highlighted the
various relationships and processes under study, they did not capture the complexity
of the socialisation process. Consequently, a third level of analysis was employed to
situate the data within a theoretical framework (as already discussed) (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1996) that enabled a move from concrete description to abstraction.
Doing so, increased the understanding of the relationship between the social actors
and structures under study, and how they interacted to produce and reproduce
coaching discourse and culture. Importantly, the use of a theoretical framework was
not a rigid prejudgment as to how to read the data (correctly), but a process of
supporting analysis and interpretation. The following presents the findings from the
entire analytic process.

Results and discussion

Recognising socialisation and the hidden curriculum
The relationships within the coaching field, between the club, the culture, the actors,
practice and the socialisation process was a complex one. The coaches were keen to
develop ‘competent workers’ equipped with the skills to do the ‘job’, but they also
wanted the players to acquire the values, ideology and cultural capital required of the
wider field. Such an interpretation stretches far beyond a functionalist ‘performance
gains’ view of coaching, demonstrating what Bourdieu (1986) insists is fundamental
cultural reproduction. The Club, in turn, was clearly concerned with producing a
steady stream of players from the Academy to support and supplement the needs of
the first team and reserves; (e.g. Dean: ‘Our goal is producing players for the first
team’). For the coaches, to develop a professional footballer involved the construc-
tion of a particular identity, an appropriate habitus, and depended on a number of
processes.
These processes required more than simply the acquisition of knowledge and skills
associated with the game, but also included learning the values and perspectives of
the Club and professional football. The coaches saw their work as related to getting
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 7

the players to ‘fit’ within professional football or, put another way, to merge habitus
and field. In the words of Greg (youth team coach):
Yeah techniques, we do all that, but the main job is to try and get them (the
players), to understand their role as footballers. To give them everything a player
has got, you know, on and off the pitch to fit within a football environment.
Despite such clear statements, this purpose was never given direct attention or
recognition in the planning, organisation or delivery of sessions, nor it was found in
the Academy’s published curriculum. Rather, the messages imparted in relation to
this value development were both covert (planned but unstated) and hidden
(unplanned and unrecognised) (Bain, 1990). Such messages were communicated
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unavoidably as a ‘hidden curriculum’, a socialisation of practice passed on

unconsciously through the formal and routine activities of the Club.
The coaching was overt and formal, with sequential training sessions and games.
Yet socialisation was informal, random and characterised by a lack of order. The
daily coaching sessions had a well-developed and reasonably fixed timetable, while
the accompanying or underlying socialisation process had no fixed time frame, nor a
rational plan, and its accompanying strategies were divorced from or unrelated to
pre-determined outcomes. Subsequently, the coaching programme’s discursive space
was not simply experienced as a given set of functional relations. Instead, it was a
vehicle for the transmission of a powerful doxic hidden curriculum defining
acceptable practice within the context of the field, and consolidating the social
differentiation constructed by some agents to impose dominance over others.

Routines, ritual and work ethic

While the substance or specific focus of individual sessions changed during the
season, the routine and the interactions between the coaches, players and the Club
remained remarkably consistent. In this case, the coaching was highly structured and
ordered, while the players had to learn what Nutt and Clarke (2002) described as the
routines, rules and regulations of particular activities or those pertaining to specific
behaviour.
Illustrating this, each day at the training ground followed a predictable format.
Training sessions commenced between 10.15 am and 10.30 am, and finished
between 12.30 pm and 1.30 pm. Every session would start with the same ‘drill’. Greg
(youth team coach) would often join in to ‘formalise’ the start of the morning’s
‘work’. The following data not only illuminate the ‘routine’ of the training activities,
but also give an indication of the legitimacies of the field as embedded within
coaching practice; namely, professional and game related expectations (work ethic),
and the consequence of poor performance. They serve to illustrate some of the
pervasive doxa that the hidden curriculum conveyed, and with it, the complexity of
the coaching process. The data also give a flavour of the conventions of coaching
practice at Albion, and the seemingly common sense approaches that were routinely
 8 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

employed; approaches that both organised and constrained the participants’ social
reality:
The players organise themselves into a circle, two of them try to intercept the ball
being passed around the edge. Walking towards the players Greg calls: ‘Last person
on someone’s back!’ The player’s rush around looking for a partner, the last pair go
in the middle of the circle. Greg joins the circle and sets the rules. ‘One touch, try
for 20 passes’. The players pass the ball around the circle. Each pair of players gets a
go in the middle of the circle. The pair who allows the most number of passes gets
the ‘punishment’, in this case 10, 10, 10 (sit ups, press ups and burpees):

‘‘Threes!’’ Greg shouts. The players try to get into groups of three. The last again
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begin in the middle of the circle. The first group win the ball quickly, as do the
second. Greg interjects, he is unhappy: ‘‘Get down the fuckin’ lot of you, 10 press
ups, fuckin’ game tomorrow!’’

Greg changes the rules; ‘two touch’. The game starts again, and a player plays the
ball with only one touch. Again Greg is unhappy; ‘‘Get down J, concentrate, game
on tomorrow’’.

‘‘Have a stretch boys’’ signals the end of this round. The players stretch in silence.
Greg starts the next round, calls out the number of each pass as it is made; ‘‘Let’s
get lively boys, game on tomorrow!’’

The game ends and the players snake off around the pitch as instructed. The
player’s stop, sit and stretch, Greg walks among them speaking, giving advice about
tomorrow’s game; ‘‘Back four, clear and push out’’.

Get your success on the right hand side.

Get your success on the left hand side.

Greg divides the players into two groups facing each other.

Pass the ball and follow, one touch,

Nice little set up for your mate,

The passing is mixed.

‘A’, two gone astray already,

Change of pace, ‘R’, That means quicker.

The passing still is mixed in quality;

Going sloppy, get it back, only a ten yard ball.

Ah ‘A’, sloppy son,

Hold it there! 10 press ups not fuckin’ good enough!

The complexity of the practice is developed. The players are not responding and
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 9

not reacting quickly enough, causing the practice to breakdown.

Greg, frowning, remarks; ‘‘Not got going yet today’’.

Two players mess up. Greg responds ‘‘organise you two, fucking shambles.’’

The practice is developed once more. This time three players are involved.

‘B’ one of the first year Academy players keeps getting it wrong.

Greg holds his head ‘‘we’ll keep doing it until ‘B’ gets it right’’.
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‘B’ completes a correct play, to ironic cheers. He gets another attempt correct and
Greg shouts; ‘‘2 right, must be a fluke’’, the group are now concentrated on ‘B’‘s
attempts.

Again, Greg shouts; ‘‘fuckin’ look at ‘B’ that’s three on the trot’’.

Greg joins in.‘A’ plays the ball out and gives it away, the opposition score as a result.
Greg, annoyed, shouts to ‘A’; ‘‘We’ve been playing two fuckin’ hours, its 2-2 and it’s
the cup final . . . you might not think like that but someone might!’’
Such daily patterns of practice and behaviour were routinely repeated throughout
the season. As Skelton (1997) argues, implicit socialisation messages, although
created by the various actors within the context, take on the appearance of
normality through their daily production and reproduction. In this sense, the
players experienced a continuous process of socialisation that served to knit
together social legitimacies. These legitimacies included respect for authority,
hierarchical awareness, control, obedience, collectivity, work ethic and winning.
The social context thus ensured the development of a set of practical competencies,
giving both players and coaches a ‘sense of the position one occupies in the social
space’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 235). Jenkins (1992) argued that this renders
individuals largely incapable of perceiving their social reality in all of its
arbitrariness, as anything other than the way things are; a doxic experience. For
example, the staff, professional players, and Academy players at Albion were
physically positioned and defined through their own clearly marked areas within
the Club (i.e. dressing room, dining area and training and game pitches). That is,
although the training pitches were allocated daily, the Academy players were always
given a pitch last depending on the needs and desires of the professionals. The
Academy players and teams never trained or played on the ‘stadium pitch’; a space
that was used for reserve team fixtures and first team training, and clearly
symbolised the ‘next level’:
Greg speaking to a player in training; "‘I’, I let you off some of those touches. If you
go there or there (indicating the reserves and first team pitches), they won’t."
In addition, Academy players were presented with squad numbers and personalised
items of kit. The kit clearly distinguished the Academy players from both the
professionals and ‘trialists’3 who each wore a different colour; as did the coaching
 10 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

staff whose kit carried their initials rather than a number. The coaches’ and
professionals’ kit, whilst distinguishable, adhered more closely to the general club
colours, whereas Academy players’ and trialists’ kit provided a stark contrast. Whilst
symbols have multiple meanings and are multi-vocal (Turner, 1967), the simple idea
of different colours and of ‘squad numbers’ and ‘initials’ offered a constant, highly
visible tangible symbol of achievement and status (cf. Light, 1999). This player
differentiation was entirely taken for granted, and carried onto the pitch. Simply
waiting for training to begin each day demonstrated what Bourdieu (1990) describes
as ‘the practical experience of the familiar universe’ (p. 20). Here, players show their
‘understanding’ of their position in the field:
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The players are without supervision in groups of 4 and 5. Some stand around, some
pass a ball. There is occasional laughter. There is one trialist with the group, who
practises alone. Today, five professionals have joined the Academy group. They
stand separately, and pass a ball amongst themselves. Andy and Greg walk over and
watch an improvised ‘circle keep-ball’. The professionals do not join in. Andy
interrupts and divides the group into two. The five ‘pro’s’ and those who did not
play on Saturday go off and warm up. Greg takes the balance for a warm-up; the
starting 11 from last Saturday’s game.

Greg sends the players to get a goal. The players slowly walk to the next pitch. The
professionals sit on the floor, contracted status means that they don’t have to do
‘jobs’. The trialist starts to walk after the group, drops behind them, then sits down
alone.
Respect for authority was reinforced through daily interaction, with the different
social positions recognised and afforded status through how they were referred to.
For example, Academy players could refer to Academy staff by their first name or
nickname (usually an abbreviation of, or an additional ‘ey’, to the surname).
Whereas, the senior Academy coach Greg, Andy (Head of the Academy) and the
reserve team coach were referred to strictly by name. The first team manager was
referred to by all simply as ‘Gaffer’ in appreciation of his position of authority, and
their deference to him. Furthermore, Academy players were never allowed to ‘answer
back’ any staff:
Greg questions a player about a decision he has made during a practice and
suddenly shouts: ‘‘So why do you fucking answer back?"

Before the player has a chance to answer.

"I couldn’t give a fucking shit! Too many of you . . . fucking answering the staff
back. Pack it in now! You can fuck right off and I couldn’t give a shit. We aren’t that
fucking good, been saying it all along. . .to answer him back, me back, the physio
back. Right!

Andy: It’s unforgivable to speak back to staff, it’s just a fucking . . . I don’t care who
you are, if you do, you won’t be at this football club.
Through day-to-day practice, players developed a ‘hierarchical awareness’ (Sabo &
Panepinto, 1990, p. 121) or what Chodorow (1978) referred to as positional identity,
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 11

a ‘submission to order’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 54) that provided a practical and taken-
for-granted acceptance of their conditions of existence. This was further reinforced
by the Academy players being addressed in terms of their inferiority, known to the
staff as ‘boys’ or ‘kids’, a reminder not only of their youth but also of their
subordinate position:
Andy: That kid at the back, he’s 19, what’s that doing for his development? The
Club have bought him, he’s fuckin’ useless, not his fault. I’ve asked, as he’s still a
kid, if he can join in with us.

The ball goes out for a corner and Greg sets up to practise corners. During one of
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the practices Greg says that the players not selected should pay attention; ‘‘you
boys, the oranges, this could be you tomorrow’’.
Over time, the practices and dispositions conveyed about being a footballer and the
football world, though originally learned as part of a conscious process, were
remembered as a habitual response. This learning of the logic and culture of the
field was incorporated bodily, a ‘habitus-inspired ‘‘map’’ of embodied action’
(Shilling, 2004, p. 75), with the habitus operating as an internalisation of
structures. Thus, the routinised work at Albion produced a ritualised and
standardised culture, a doxa viewed as common sense by all involved. Indeed,
the daily organisation of the Academy and the coaches’ actions within it were
viewed as legitimate, while the players carried an awareness and the marks of their
social positions; what Bourdieu termed as ‘knowing one’s place and staying there’
(1977, p. 82). Engagement in this process ensured that the culture was confirmed
and reinforced, with the players linked to the culture through the latter’s editing or
filtering of their everyday experience. In the following excerpts, the coaches
describe the ritual nature of the training, through the repetition and reinforcement
of coaching content:
Andy: We’ve done our closing down, we’ve done our keep-ball. We know what we
have to do to win. We have a game plan; I know and you know what our jobs are. I
know if we stay on our feet, if the back four stay together we’ll win. I know, if we
stop crosses we’ll win the game. We all know how we’re gonna win the game. We
know and you know.

Andy: We use Monday to Friday take on board information, that is all Monday to
Friday is. Just get it learnt, learn to get the technique better. Get the pattern right.
We don’t do things just for the sake of it. You know what we will be doing next
week. You know Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday off. . .Thursday, Friday you
know . . . then Saturday . . . is payday.
Constant messages, from how and where to dress, eat, train, play and behave, given
to the players at Albion reinforced conformity through constraining ritual. Hence,
the training sessions and games, and their continual reproduction, were an
affirmation of the existing regime and, therefore, a containment of choice.
 12 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

Repetition, control and embodying culture

The interpretation of coaching practice as a process of socialisation through the
relationship between player, coach and club has strong parallels with the work of both
Bourdieu and Foucault (Giulianotti, 1999). Using Foucault (1979), the hidden
curriculum within coaching can refer to a disciplinary practice that reduced the players
to docility. The coaching environment at Albion moved the players from ‘routine’
relations to the confined social space of professional football. This restricted space was
experienced on a day-to-day basis, and assumed within the coaching at the Club. For
example, the players were given little autonomy and, despite their obvious hetero-
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geneity, were treated as an undifferentiated group. The restriction of individuality was

evident around the Club, with players commonly moving en masse from one activity to
the next. Individual action was conducted only under specific instruction; for example,
the daily ‘jobs’ (moving equipment, filling water bottles) or rehabilitation from injury.
Alongside a curtailment of individuality came a lack of privacy exchanged for
communal experiences: changing, showering and eating. Consequently, few oppor-
tunities existed for personal escape from the group or coach supervision.
Furthermore, players had no input into, or choice about, their daily routine. The
coaches decided what training players did, and how long that training lasted:
The coaches decide that today the players will undergo fitness testing. The players
complete the bleep test and go for a jog around the pitch with Greg. They then do
an individual sprint test. Andy and Greg observe. At the end, the players are sent
for another jog; Andy and Greg check the results. The players ready themselves for
another bout of tests, but Andy looks at his watch and announces that they should
take lunch and resume later.

While the players engage in circle keep-ball, Andy and Greg discuss the day’s
training, principally whether the players need to do ‘pattern of play’. They decide
that the session will end with pattern of play.
During the season, team-selection and game tactics were also entirely in the hands of
the coaching staff. Any player consultation was limited to coach-led team ‘talks’, with
perfunctory requests for player input juxtaposed against the discourse of ‘no
answering back’. The control exercised by the coaches resulted in players being
denied all decision-making about their professional experience and, whilst within the
confines of the Club, their social experience. Similarly, whilst not directly controlled
by the coaches or the Club, time-off was subject to staff ‘guidance’. This control was
legitimated through frequent reminders by the coaches that players should, ‘look
after themselves’ and ‘look after the nuts and bolts’ through correct diet and rest.
This was particularly emphasised prior to matches:
Andy: Prepare properly, good food, early night. Hard work tomorrow not play-
time.

Andy; Don’t go out on the piss. We did on Wednesday because we’d won, but not
on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday.
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 13

The degree of intervention and control experienced by players was manifest in

intense and rigid discipline during training, which was itself subject to scrutiny and
examination by ‘experts’; i.e. the coaches (Foucault, 1977; Giulianotti, 1999).
Skelton (1997) argues that the hidden curriculum can be seen as a disciplinary
practice, objectifying all who, in turn, accept an institutional definition of themselves
as docile, dominated beings; a scenario clearly played out by the players through the
coaching at Albion. As Fernandez-Balboa (1993) states, the ‘hidden curriculum’
shapes and mediates not only values, but also experiences and practices. In this case,
the social grammar that players were subjected to at Albion was characterised by
isolation, intervention and control. Hence, the socialisation process acted to guard
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the players from differential association (Bottero, 2009). In doing so, it protected the
habitus from ‘crisis and critical challenge by providing a milieu to which it is as pre-
adapted as possible’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 61). The enforced social similarity
experienced by the players ensured that practices were shared in common, and
unreflectively taken-for-granted (Bottero, 2009). This served an important purpose
in the socialisation process, as actors (in this instance the players) isolated in a social
space are more likely to be seen as ‘the same’ which, allied to the proximity of
conditions, translates into durable linkages between them (Bourdieu, 1985; Bottero,
2009). Such experience has a particular weight for individuals in shaping dispositions
because, it institutes a ‘relative irreversibility’ in the orientation of the embodied
subject to the social world as new experiences or challenges are ‘at every moment
perceived through the categories already constricted by prior experiences’ (Bourdieu,
1992, p. 133). Therefore, action remains ‘within the limits of the embodied
sedimentation of the social structures which produced it’ (Wacquant, 1992, p. 19).
For Shilling (1997), the body is an unfinished article that develops in conjunction
with various social forces. Because of its ‘unfinishedness’, acts of labour (e.g.
undertaking training sessions and games) are required to turn the body into a social
entity, which inevitably influence how people develop. In the context under study,
through day-to-day activity and routine, the hidden curriculum proved an important
mechanism in enabling the attitudes and norms espoused by the coaches to become
embodied by the players. The body of a professional footballer is also a bearer of
symbolic value. Indeed, Wacquant (1992) suggests that performers ‘appropriate
through progressive impregnation a set of bodily and mental dispositions that are so
intimately interwoven, they erase the distinction between the physical and the
spiritual’ (p.224). Similarly, football skills emerge from a ‘bio-psycho-sociological
complex of body techniques’ (Loy et al., 1993, p.72). At Albion, this process was
evident in the routines that transmitted themselves by way of direct embodiment to a
mastery of the fundamental corporeal, visual and mental schemata required of a
professional football player (Wacquant, 1992).
The coaching process, similar to Brown’s (2005) interpretation of physical
education, would appear a good example of a de-limited field of production that
exists to perpetuate the supply and demand cycle of valued cultural goods that, in
this case, are embodied. For the coaches, the sessions over which they exercised
considerable control were the practical tools for maintaining this supply and demand
 14 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

(i.e. producing professional football players), an activity that, in turn, served to

further reinforce and legitimate their practices. As Dean describes:
Week in and week out we improve them as players; their techniques and
understanding, the physiological side, so they become better players. It’s also
about representing themselves as professional footballers. Ultimately the club is
accountable in a few years time for how those boys became professional footballers.
Such language-in-use demonstrates a transformation of the subject ‘player’ to an
object, ‘pro’ (the professional), within coaching discourse. Coaching thus moves
from an end in itself, developing players, to a means towards other ends, supplying
professional footballers to the field. It is, of course, important not to paint players
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within the study as over-determined passive receivers of covert or cryptic messages

(Skelton, 1997). Social life is never so clear-cut. Rather, as Giddens (1984) suggests,
the individual actor is not helpless at the mercy of social forces: ‘Structural
constraints do not operate independently of the motives and reasons that agents
have for what they do’ (Giddens, 1984, p. 181). No doubt at Albion, players still
possessed widely differing amounts of social power and cultural capital, comprising
differing degrees of choice. However, the players’ goals predisposed through the
habitus aligned with subjective structures at Albion and resulted in their complicity;
they just wanted to become professionals, a view expressed with enthusiasm (cf.
Cushion & Jones, 2006):
M: I just wanna get into the first team, get a better contract

S: I wanna become a pro, play well in the reserves, score goals, do well in the
reserves

T: To become a better player, to become a professional

(Focus Group)
Consequently, in pursuit of their own goals, players engaged in social practices that
contributed to the maintenance of the existing culture and helped to reproduce it. In
so doing, they sustained on-going relationships of power and inequality in a struggle
for capital. Those in power, the coaches, controlled the players, who behaved with
submissiveness and docility, thus being complicit in their domination; an essential
element of symbolic violence (discussed later, cf. Cushion & Jones, 2006).

Winning and becoming a ‘pro’

Players are sitting outside, gathered around a wall chart. Greg and Andy stand.
Andy says: All staff here have equal authority, anyone talks back when they are
asked to do something then they will be gone. I don’t care how good a player they
are, they will be gone.

The players sit in silence.

 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 15

Andy draws the players’ attention to the chart. I think I would give us about 5 out of
10 so far, is that about right? None of the players respond.

‘‘Greg’s about right when he says we aren’t that good yet. Looking at this, we’re not
getting hammered every week, but there are games that we should of won, and the
goals conceded are down to individual mistakes. Full back letting the ball go across
the goal, goalkeeper not attacking the ball. . ..You E, leaving the game with twenty
minutes to go. I’m fining you £15, by the way, double the next time it happens. I’d
have thought that looking at this goal scoring record you’d have stayed watching the
game, working out where you could have scored. We need players to be reliable. N,
the only reliable thing about you is that when you get the ball it will be a goal kick. I
just turn my back I already know that you’re going to miss. Individual mistakes and
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unreliable players get managers the sack. Follow instructions; G, I tell you to pass
the ball forward and in front of me you pass it back. Twice. Why? . . .

No one responds.

What does it say about you as players that you want to buck the system? I might not
be very good at anything but I am reliable. If I turn around and say that I’ll do what
I want or Greg does, we get the sack. I don’t have to stay and watch the game, I
could go with 20 minutes left, get in my Mercedes and go to Paris for the weekend
and not come back until Monday. What would you think of that!!?’’

The players say nothing.

Andy: Saturday is payday. I can get people contracts at this club, more if you are
winning than if you’re not. Take it from me that it is the truth. You can get more if
you win. All this crap it doesn’t matter about winning is just that, crap.
It is possible to juxtapose these excerpts against the stated objectives of the Football
Association’s Charter for Quality (1998) that defines the criteria for granting an
Academy licence to clubs. The Charter places great emphasis on the needs of
players:
The Charter for Quality places the needs of the performer at the centre of all
recommendations. . .The programme of activities should be organised in the best
interests of the players’ technical, educational, academic and social welfare
. . . Academy Directors will also be mindful of the impact of the programme on
educational and social development (Football Association, 1998, pp. 1
7).
This suggests a developmental approach where the goal of the coaching
programme is to improve players. Indeed, on the surface, the Academy at Albion
promoted such an approach. It was a view also expressed in a newspaper column
written by Andy, who described Albion as starting to address the issue of player
development seriously. Despite espoused notions of the Academy programme
having a ‘player-centred’ and developmental philosophy, deeper probing and
observation revealed a different picture. The pre-occupation with team success
overshadowed the players’ broader development, a feeling shared by the players
who recognised that the coaches’ desire to win was not linked to their (i.e. the
players) development:
 16 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

T: Andy just worries about winning.

A: Yeah, they’re not bothered about bringing players on. They treat the Academy
like a first team.

M: Yeah, first team.

S: You look at teams like, Town, they put their youngsters into the Youth Team to
bring them on. Whereas with them (the coaches at Albion) it’s not about bringing
players on it’s about the result. Get the best result you can.
Here, the concept of ‘winning’ and being ‘winners’ emerged as the most pervasive
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and consistent of the socialisation ‘legitimacies’. Indeed, winning was enforced in

all aspects of coaching practice, although as an objective, it was never formally
stated in terms of the Academy’s aims. Thus, sessions and games became
significant socialising forces shaping the development of the players’ habitus.
Lessons on winning and losing were repeatedly drawn and integrated into training
sessions:
Andy addresses the players before training: First thing the reserve team coach said
this morning was "good result", didn’t even see us play and wasn’t bothered. We are
in the winning business, that’s the mentality that we have to adopt.

Greg: Get last week out of the system. Not enough people wanted to win the game,
not many people mentioned passing or shooting, just that not enough people
wanted to win the game.

Andy; The Gaffer’s (1st team manager) watching this game, a good chance for you
to impress, and we’ve conceded 3 goals. That doesn’t put you in a strong position in
contract terms. I can’t defend you if you are conceding goals and gonna lose games.

Greg: This game tomorrow, who wants to win the fuckin’ game tomorrow. I know
Andy does, I know I do. Let’s have that mentality.

Andy: It really is what we are paid to do. That’s the truth of it. Everything else is
secondary. Saturday is about winning. No more no less, it’s about winning.
Although pressure to win was not always expressed in such overt terms, it would
manifest itself constantly through the coaches’ desire for players to ‘be first’ or to ‘win
individual battles’. Andy and Greg consistently espoused the need for players to be
winners, mentally and physically, in an attempt to inculcate what they saw as
desirable professional values. Winning and competitiveness were key characteristics
of distinction, not just against opposing teams but also within the group (related to
the awarding of individual contracts); attributes and achievements that would enable
an individual to stand out, or rather stand above others, in the field (Reay, 2004).
This was a message clearly received by players who constantly manoeuvred to
improve their position for example: ‘If I make them feel like crap, it will affect their
game, then no threat. Its dog- eat-dog really, you’ve got to look after yourself’. Such
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 17

a situation echoes the belief of Krais (2002), that institutions are often organised on
an antagonistic basis in which hierarchies are constructed on conflict.
The discourse of winning expressed through the hidden curriculum was
illustrative of ‘powerful ideological work, suggesting a necessary, rather than
contingent, relationship’ (Kirk, 1992, p. 44). Hence, even though results had no
direct bearing on Academy players achieving professional status, such discourse
had both social and political consequences, as the resulting beliefs became
unquestioned and taken for granted (Kirk, 1992). These messages, through the
hidden curriculum, became self-fulfilling, developing player dispositions and served
to legitimise the existing coaching process. The players, in turn, became convinced
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that success on the field would enhance their positions in the field and subsequent
career progression.

Coaching, socialisation and symbolic violence

The socialisation process and hidden curriculum at Albion were illustrative of an
apparatus of control that maintained a particular social order, a set of relations of
production and exercise of power often without power being felt (Jenks, 1993).
Similarly, symbolic violence is the imposition of systems of symbolism and meaning
(culture) in a way that ensures they are experienced as legitimate (Jenkins, 1992).
For symbolic violence to occur, recipients must be complicit (Bourdieu & Wacquant,
1992). In this study, the players attended the Club each day and took part in the
coaching practices set out. As Bourdieu put it, ‘one is only hooked if one is in the
pool’ (1984, p. 89).
Symbolic violence involves engagement in pedagogic action, which Bourdieu
described as a mechanism for reproducing the seemingly arbitrary culture of a field
and the interests of the dominant group. Pedagogic action involves the agents, in this
case players and coaches, experiencing what Bourdieu termed as misrecognition: ‘the
process whereby power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are, but
in the form that renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder’ (Bourdieu &
Passeron, 1996/1977, p. xiii). The nature of socialisation discourse at Albion
imposed the culture on players and was viewed, by coaches and players, in a
legitimate way. It is this legitimacy that obscures the power relations that permit the
imposition to be successful (Jenkins, 1992). Symbolic violence reinforces the
position of those in power and obscures what they are doing. It is a form of
intimidation when displayed that is not aware that it is intimidation, with the
intimidating person denying any intent to intimidate (Bourdieu, 1991). The coaches’
discourse appeared to be undertaken in the interests of the players and was perceived
by the coaches as a motivational tool:
I pushed him and pushed him, it could have made him or broke him. At the
moment it has made him. He’s sorted himself out, and decided I am going to get
through this. He’s come through. Good lad. I like that. It would have been easy to
go back home and say ‘fuckin don’t like him’. Not because of what I’ve said to him.
 18 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

I suppose you could relate the two but he brought himself through, he made that
decision. (Greg)
Thus, symbolic violence is misrecognised, and social structure reproduced in the
process of cultural reproduction (Jenkins, 1992). Greg perceived his behaviour as a
challenge to the players to respond, to prove their worth and strength of character.
The players have to demonstrate the common sense to react and act in a way that is
perceived by the coach and the culture to be appropriate. Those in power, the
coaches, control the players who must be docile and submissive and must conform
and respond in the correct way.
For successful pedagogic action to occur, pedagogic authority is required.
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Pedagogic authority is the arbitrary power to act, (mis) recognised by its practitioners
and recipients as legitimate. The pedagogic action evidenced in this study (i.e. the
coaching) was experienced by players as neutral or even positively valued as a means
of helping them reach their goal of being professional footballers. Such action was
embodied by Greg and Andy, both former professional players who, although treated
with a degree of indifference by the players, were nonetheless respected for having
‘done something’ in the professional game:
Interviewer: What are you looking for in a coach?

J: I liked him (Greg) because of who he is, what he is. Been there and done it

N: Yeah . . . someone who’s played before, who knows what it’s like, definitely gets
more respect

R: Someone who knows what they’re talking about, and who can do what they’re
saying
The Club acted as an agent that, through its coaches, exercised pedagogic action.
For the players, the coaches sat at the apex of their social and cultural hierarchy, and
acted as the gatekeeper(s) to professional contracts.
Pedagogic action is achieved through pedagogic work, which was described as:
A process of inculcation which must last long enough to produce a desirable
training, i.e. habitus . . . capable of perpetuating itself after pedagogic action has
ceased (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1996/1977, p. 31).
The long-term function of pedagogic work evidenced at Albion was, at the very least,
the production of dispositions that generated correct responses to the symbolic
stimuli from the Club and its coaches, the agents endowed with pedagogic authority
(Jenkins, 1992). Albion sought, through symbolic violence, to impose its language,
meanings, symbolic system and culture on the players, thus reproducing existing
power relations. The training of players was accepted as legitimate, while the created
culture added its own force to the existing power relations. The players’ desire to
succeed in the field ensured the misrecognition of the activity, with the culture being
experienced as an axiom; players and coaches no longer questioned ‘why?’
 A Bourdieusian analysis of cultural reproduction 19

Conclusions and implications for practice

Coaching research has been led by behavioural educational approaches and
psychological conceptions. Such perspectives typically view coaching through an
individual functionalist lens as a benign and unproblematic activity, or an entirely
positive endeavour, while the context is simply accepted as the physical location and
the setting for practice (Cushion, 2010); a situation into which the individual is
dropped. Conceiving coaching as ‘the mere aggregate of individual strategies’ makes
it impossible to account for its ‘resilience as well as for the apparent objective
arrangements that these strategies perpetuate or challenge’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant,
1992, pp. 9
10). Indeed, a purely objective explanatory representation of coaching
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in football, captures a ‘co-ordinated system’ driven by ‘common purpose’, but

succeeds only in ‘destroying part of the reality it claims to grasp’ (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992, p. 8) namely the social and historical. Such a representation is as
subjective and politically motivated as any as it obscures the idea that symbolic
systems are social products that constitute social relations. Using Bourdieu’s
concepts this research has enabled an alternative more critical perspective, a
rejection of simple empirical objects and idealistic interpretations of cultural
practices. In turn, the findings have drawn attention to what Swartz (1997) calls
the social conditions of struggle that shape cultural production. This research has
shown that even the most ‘neutral’ or ‘positive’ of cultural practices were embedded
in systems of social distinction (Bourdieu, 1991) a series of material and symbolic
‘legitimations’ around rituals, language and notions of difference.
Coaching in football Academies possesses a specific doxa constituting common
sense or tacitly accepted ideals (Giulianotti, 2005), or ‘everything that goes without
saying’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 51). The findings of the current study makes explicit the
tacit and taken-for-granted within coaching and demonstrates that the doxa is
internalised unquestioningly by coaches and players and simply taken for granted,
with the culture as responsible for learning as the coaches. This creates what
Bourdieu and Wacqaunt (1992) describe as the conditions for oppression.
Consequently, a true transformation of coaching is being universally resisted and
any change arguably acts to protect capital. Coaches and players sustain the field by
constructing its history, debating its traditions and elaborating and reforming its
doxa. In Academies part of this doxa is the objectification of players by coaches,
arising from coaching practice that transforms their bodily capital into football
capital to win games, which is assumed to lead to professional contracts. These
messages are passed to the players through the daily (re) production of practice, to
the extent that they become accepted as legitimate. Thus, beliefs and behaviours
came to be unquestioned, the ‘way things were’.
The challenge for researchers, coaches and players, is to engage with coaching
doxa thereby increasing awareness of the (often constraining) discourses that
currently inform practice. Bourdieu’s work offers a ‘critical yet reflective vista’
(Everett, 2002, p. 56) and a means to introduce alternative approaches to coaching.
The intention here was to trigger discussion and debate, and to help ‘transform the
 20 C. J. Cushion and R. L. Jones

world by transforming its representation’ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1996/1977, p. 14).

Essentially, by transforming representation this research has started to engage in
critical reflection and ask different questions around issues of socio-political
importance. In-turn, critical reflection by coaches helps engender cultural disloca-
tion and provides the momentum and materials of self-understanding to build a new
consciousness around coaching. In this sense, changes to coaching need to be
‘bottom-up’, rather than ‘top-down’ if they are to be real rather than rhetorical.
Rather than acting as subordinate to local (coach driven) objectives that tend to
objectify players, a more ‘player centered’ alternative approach to coaching focuses
on developing individual player habitus, and means that coaching should not be
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transmitted undifferentiated to all players as is currently the case. An alternative is

the coaching process as a collaborative socialisation with coaches, players and club
working together to construct new coaching structures. Robbins (1993) describes
such an approach as a type of participatory construction around social consenus that
develops mutual obligation, rather than acts as imposition. Such aspects need to be
considered to help reconfigure the field, and to reconstruct ‘better’ forms of
coaching.

Notes
1. This discourse has a tendency to be utilitarian, driven by scientific functionalism that views
coaching as an unproblematic process and therefore lacks any micro-political consciousness
or social criticality.
2. Every professional football club in England and Wales has a centre for developing youth
players. These are known as Academies or Centres of Excellence. School-boys are contracted
to an Academy typically from the age of 9 and train part-time. At the age of 16 boys are
offered full-time ‘scholarships’ that lead, for the successful players, to full-time professional
contracts.
3. A trialist was a player at the Academy ‘on trial’ attempting to win a contract with the Club.

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