This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case

This is white-collar crime: it involves a £5million fraud case. The main protagonist, businessman and wheeler dealer Matt Crawford, has a chequered past and has come up the hard way, unlike his clearly middle-class partner, Lillian, who is not involved in the case, except through her emotional relationship with him. Lillian is a member of the eponymous, largely affluent, Archer family of local farmers, who also mostly occupy the moral high ground, as well as owning much of it: she is also the widow of a wealthy man. Matt has struggled and, whilst on the right side of the law, was tolerated by the local land consortium, Borsetshire Land, but having transgressed, or at least been caught, he is marginalised. In spite of Lillian’s hopes for leniency, he has been sent to prison; ‘Take them down!’ said the judge and listeners were faced with the speed of sentencing and its finality, however well-off the offender.

Matt and his business partner at TWJ bank, Stephen Chalkman (Chalky), receive custodial sentences, and Lillian is left weeping loudly. Matt not only has the reassurance of her fidelity, but also that of earlier storylines, where characters with much more clearly working-class credentials have been reinstated into the community following release from prison. For example, Susan Carter was imprisoned as a result of protecting her brother, the infamous Clive Horrobin, armed robber and hostage-taker, at an armed raid on the Ambridge village shop. Susan currently manages the shop and post office and plays a key role in the community. However, such stories are haunted by class. Matt was never quite accepted; Susan is just the best of a rough family, a fragile step away from social exclusion.

Soaps often engage with social issues, usually with dramatic hyperbole but The Archers offers some more nuanced, complex coverage. The programme, which has a tradition of dealing with big issues: from racism, the rural economy and economic recession to dementia, family breakdown and sibling rivalry, does not limit itself to rural or agricultural matters. It deals with big issues (Woodward, 2009), such as class, family, kinship, place, diversity and inequality, which intersect in different ways, through the lens of personal experience.

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena

Soap opera can do something to engage with the detail and affect of social phenomena like white-collar crime in complex ways. As the sociologist C.Wight Mills argued (The Sociological Imagination), this is what sociology does; it demonstrates the powerful interconnections between private troubles and public issues through the sociological imagination. This is an everyday story of the personal and the public and political which has wider resonance and demonstrates, albeit inadvertently, the power of thinking sociologically.

Find out more

• The Big Issues, by Kath Woodward, Routledge, 2009
• The Sociological Imagination, by C Wright Mills, Harmondsworth, Penguin (1970), 1st edition 1959
• Get The Archers podcast
• Serious Fraud Office help The Archers with their inquiries
• Join the discussion on white-collar crime

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable.

Although sport is big business, and constituted by media, sponsorship and commercial networks as well as its practitioners, at all levels, it is also a particular social world, which seems to operate outside the parameters of convention in an uneasy relationship between promoting competition and elite outcomes, at the same time as widening participation and creating greater equality and cohesion. Sport is fun and entertainment, but it is also highly competitive and profitable (for some).

Sport is not outside debates about corruption and unfair, even illegal practices, although what is categorised as corruption in sport often centres on revelations of drug abuse and performance enhancement by individual athletes. Doping and match fixing affect the results of sporting events, which undermine the basic principles of sport, and implicate participants, organising bodies and promoters. Ideals of fair play and amateurism underpinned the Olympic movement; the modern Games were based on a movement with stated ideals, some of which seem less relevant today, like the amateur ideal and requirement that athletes be amateurs and not professionals.

Marc Hodler revealled corruption in the International Olympic Committee
[Image from Wikimedia: available under GNU Free Documentation Licence]

The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes

Ideas about democratic participation and fair play remain a powerful part of Olympic rhetoric and governance, although what counts as social exclusion or social inclusion in sport varies according to time and place. These ideals not only seem incompatible with corruption, they also serve to conceal it; rather like white-collar crime. It’s not what convention leads us to expect, whatever the current furore about bankers and politicians, so it passes unnoticed. The Games have a long history of corruption, especially in relation to the bidding processes that precede success in being the host city. As Andrew Jennings has demonstrated, corrupt practices have been rife within the IOC (International Olympic Committee), and came to a head with the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, when Marc Hodler, an IOC member, broke ranks and revealed that agents had been bribed to vote for cities bidding for the right to host the Games. This blew the lid on systematic malpractice within the IOC, and an internal enquiry found clear evidence that up to 20 of the 110 IOC members had been bribed to vote for Salt Lake. It didn’t stop in 2002, though, and there continue to be claims of corruption in the bidding process in the lead-up to 2012. 

The 2012 website may be counting off the days, but news stories also show some of the tensions and difficulties that beset the staging of any such mega sporting event and, indeed, sport in general. Like all sporting activities, the Games involve both winning and losing, success and failure, equalities and inequalities. The Olympic democratic ideals, global reach and wide range of sports and participation mean that the Games lend themselves more powerfully to such a politics of inclusion than most other sports, especially those which are dominated by commercial concerns.

Corruption in the Games, as across sport, can be seen as the outcome of a failure of governance as Sunder Katwala has argued. This failure can be seen in part as dependent upon the inequalities that permeate the organisation of sport, and not the more corporeal inequalities or differences in skill and competence that are displayed on the field. Corruption in sport may be primarily economic and financial but it is also social and cultural and draws on social inequalities that are not entirely dependent on athletic competence.

If some of the lessons learned from critiques of white-collar crime mean drawing attention to the privileges of class, gender and ethnicity that can be obscured by ever growing bureaucratic regulatory bodies, then this concept has some purchase in understanding the slow pace of change in the governance of sport.

Find out more

• OpenLearn: Influences on corporate governance – free learning material from The Open University
• The great Olympic illusion

Further reading

• 'Embodied Sporting Practices: Regulating and Regulatory Bodies', by Kath Woodward, Palgrave Macmillan
• 'Dishonored Games: Corruption, Money and Greed at the Olympics', by Viv Simpson and Andrew Jennings, SPI Books (US)

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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Caster Semenya
[image © copyright José Goulão, some rights reserved]

As a sociologist who writes about bodies in sport, I feel fortunate to have been asked to comment, if depressed that many of the media interviews have been prefaced by some reference to Semenya’s ‘masculine’ appearance. It is hardly surprising that the athlete has a lean body with muscles; most athletes do. Bodies are shaped by sporting practices and these practices shape sport, but bodies are gendered and women in sport have to negotiate racialised, heterosexist stereotypes. Semenya’s raised levels of testosterone may tell us more about what happens to the body of an elite athlete than establishing any certainty about gender categories.

The debate, especially as manifest in media coverage, has invoked expert scientific and medical commentary in its path from claims of unfair practice and a body variously described as ‘manly’ and with a ‘strikingly musculature physique’ to sympathy for defiant resistance to the humiliation of gender verification testing and the claims that this very fast woman, must be a man.

Gender testing has a long history in sport, even though compulsory tests were abandoned at the Olympics in 1992. Tests have changed from those based on the embodied features which ‘experts’ can see to DNA and chromosomal tests to the current more complex panoply of procedures that include psychological testing. Perhaps there is some acknowledgement of the complexity of gender identities and the weakness of a distinction based on the categorisation of human beings into two sexes; intersex and a range of different forms of development mean that many people than we imagine do not conform neatly to the clear genetic and physical criteria that the regulatory bodies of sport deploy.

The very term 'gender verification' suggests that we could get at the truth. A team of experts will find out, but gender is more complex. The current coverage of Semenya's case illustrates how troubling gender is in sport. Images draw upon stereotypes of what constitutes masculinity and femininity in the current case, as in so many in the past. Women athletes have to reassure us of their femininity, through comportment and appearance, even when they, through the body practices of their sport, necessarily have very different bodies from their female non-sporting counterparts.

Public debate is always framed by a moral discourse of 'fair play' that invokes the unfair advantage that men who pass a women might gain in sport, but what is most alarming and distressing about these cases is the humiliation that women undergo in being subjected to 'verification' and the public and expert scrutiny that is reserved for women. The drug testing which has largely replaced the genetic testing in the Olympics could be carried out without a specifically gendered emphasis. Then maybe we could celebrate the achievements of a woman who can run very fast.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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I am not alone in this; the average UK motorist apparently listens to football on the radio three times a month. 21% do so  every week and over 6% do so every day, which is two million people all tuning in to football daily as they drive. However, sport, at least not in all its forms, may not necessarily be good for your health. Listening to football commentary on the radio while you are driving could be dangerous and lead to accidents, according to a report commissioned by esure, the car insurance company. 

The research, carried out by the University of Leicester and published in a report called Football Focus, received media attention on 27 May 27, the day of the Champions League Final.

Football is emotional; there’s no doubt about that. Sport elicits powerful commitment and the thought of fans extending the exuberance and distress of the terraces to their driving practices is alarming.

Young man in a car, with raised fist.
[image © copyright Photos.com]

This research suggests that the behaviour of fans is very different from casual listeners, who do not adjust their behaviour behind the wheel in such extreme ways (tail-gating, erratic acceleration and sudden lane changes). I have, for a long time wondered about the embodied responses of spectatorship, for example in being a spectator at the game, especially, in the case of boxing, which I have written about in my book, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity, the i of the tiger (published by Routledge), where being at the fight is a very different experience from the more sanitised spectatorship of pay-for-view television.

However, I have also noted the physical reactions of the sporting follower who is listening at a distance, especially in the case of football with its distinctive style of commentary. I have felt disquiet as the rising crescendo of commentary increases my heart rate and seems to implicate the embodied listener in the waves of emotion evoked in the reporting of the game, even  when I care little for the outcome and my team is not involved at all. 

Sport is sensational, not only in the sense of media hyperbole - it appeals to and implicates all the senses of everyone involved.

The voice of the commentary could itself be a part of the total experience of sport. The research distinguishes between the fan and the uncommitted listener, but I think that there may be something more in the synthesis of the embodied experience that is particular to sport and specific to some sports, especially the genre of football commentary. It is clear that anxiety and exhilaration might lead to other embodied practices, such as accelerating.

This research demonstrates that it is not only sport, on the pitch, and spectatorship, at the ground, that is embodied; so too is the empathy and identification that people have with sport. As I demonstrate in another book, Embodied Sporting Practices (published by Palgrave Macmillan), sport is not only all about bodies, about embodied sporting practices (that is, what sort of physical activities make up what we call sport) it is also about the interaction between everyone involved, including those listening in their cars.  The research also indicates that sport is sensational, not only in the sense of media hyperbole - it appeals to and implicates all the senses of everyone involved.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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The most successful cricket story for English cricket fans in recent weeks might, or should have been, England winning the world cup -no not the England men’s team, but the women’s team, beating New Zealand by four wickets to win the ICC Women’s World Cup in March 2009.

Yes, there was media coverage (the six best games were broadcast to 100 countries world wide) and even interviews with captain Charlotte Edwards on BBC radio sports programmes and not just Woman’s Hour. Even cricket fans might have trouble naming the members of the team though. What’s happening here-or not happening for women’s sport? It’s not just that we can’t name the team; we don’t really know anything about the players even if we do their names.

Women’s games do get a bit more coverage now, if nowhere near as much as men’s cricket, but that’s the only reason the sporting public are not as engaged with women’s sport as they are with men’s. Sport generates its own meanings and what happens on the pitch or in the field matters, but why are the fans not so gripped by the tensions and excitement of women’s sport? Success in competition provides a great impetus for creating wider interest; think of the 2005 Ashes series and the great boost given to English men’s cricket by their success. Success can go a long way towards encouraging young people to play, although the resource problem applies to men’s and women’s cricket, but tradition means the situation is worse for the women’s game. However, the increased interest in men’s cricket after 2005 came partly from the increased coverage of cricketers off the pitch as well as on.

Although sport is enmeshed with popular culture, which is often seen as a female terrain of interest in celebrity, we read more of the feelings and inner lives of male cricketers than female. Kevin Pietersen’s anxieties about being away from home and on losing the captaincy almost get more coverage than his competence on the pitch.

This is not a superficial point. The women’s team are not represented as complex real people in the terrain of popular culture which means that the success of the team doesn’t have the same resonance. The politics of success in sport includes a range of different materialities, of resource and of organisations and institutions, of the sport itself and how it’s played, and of culture and representation.

Media coverage is just one of the dimensions of sporting success, as I’ve argued before in this blog; visibility matters but it’s the form it takes that matters too. Visibility extends beyond ball by ball coverage (although that would be great); being in the public eye can contribute to how success is seen and understood and how much or how little those in sport can benefit from success on the field.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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In other areas of experience, where bodily competition is not so central, it may be more difficult to comprehend the French justice minister Rachida Dati’s decisionto return to work only five days after giving birth by caesarian section. Perhaps, as an ambitious, successful woman of 43, she was anxious about showing any signs of weakness?

Rachida Dati.
[image by Ma Gali, some rights reserved]

It certainly made the papers and she did look stunning: a supreme embodied achievement. It was newsworthy, because most people don’t don 5 inch stiletto heels a few days after surgery, even if they have a reputation for wearing stunningly fashionable clothes and dressing impeccably in the day job. The tabloid press did focus on what she was wearing with some voyeuristic pleasure, for example the Daily Mail’s concern with her being ‘more glamorous than ever’.

More seriously, could it be the feminist concerns with women’s hard won rights to maternity leave being so flagrantly disregarded by a high flying successful woman in high office that make this an important matter to explore in the political public arena? As Madeleine Bunting noted in the Guardian, 'this is bad for her and bad for us too’.

As a public figure, Dati also has some responsibility and her actions have meanings about what is important for all of us. Dati’s actions make it clear that, not only are the rights that women have fought for to protect their physical well being as mothers, but also the relationship between the mother and her child which represents emotional intimacy, much less important than career success. Breastfeeding her baby and its accompanying intimacy will be very difficult under these circumstances, but although breastfeeding may be promoted by health professionals it occupies a very uneasy place in contemporary culture.

Bunting’s feminist political argument is countered by French claims that things are different across the channel, as Agnès Poirier argues. Poirier suggests that ‘French women view themselves as women first, mothers second’ and ‘don't see maternity as their sole raison d'être. You could call it feminism’. However, it is still more usually women who give birth and women who breastfeed. (A US woman who had her breasts removed, grew a small beard and became legally male as Thomas Beatie, subsequently gave birth very publicly as a man, albeit with a woman’s reproductive organs, apart from the excised mammary glands. The beard, like the shoes, may be a distraction).

There are, of course different feminisms, but Poirier’s version is somewhat disembodied with no recognition of the specificities or values of embodied experience. Resting after major surgery, accessing the legal and civil rights that are embedded in contemporary neoliberal governance and investing in emotional life do not constitute throwing in the towel or turning your back on competition and success.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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This story may tell us more about the inadvisability of those from the academy entering the field of popular culture and speaking its language rather than confining interventions to providing an informed critique. However, Greer’s comments do raise questions about what is a ‘healthy body’ and how far conventional representations of size zero women might challenge or reconstruct the ‘healthy body’ for women.

Sport is all about healthy bodies and healthy lives and sport is not an area where one might expect discussion of appearance, either of being thin or of being fat, except insofar as body size might interfere with and impede or enhance the body practices which make up sporting performance. The Beijing Olympics produced representations of strong athletic women, who excelled in their sports, as I noted in my recent Invisible Athletes blog. Maybe things were changing and sexualised images of women agonising over dress size and even the tiniest bit of extra flesh were no more, at least not in sport. Kira Cochrane described it as the shift from ‘wags to winners’.

One of the Beijing medallists was double gold winner Rebecca Adlington, whose image adorned the cover of the Observer Sport Monthly on November 23^rd, somewhat surprisingly heavily made-up with golden ringlets and posing seductively in a swimsuit and high heels. The swimsuit is not so surprising for a swimming medallist and she is well known as a fan of designer shoes with high heels. Indeed this is her contribution to the BBC Sport’s page on possible Sports Personality of the year .

However, the actual poses on the cover and inside the magazine, reminiscent of a 1950s card girl and the accompanying text in which Adlington expresses her anxieties about her spare tyre and body weight, is troubling and even depressing. The possibility of a post feminist parodic display is unconvincing, as is the likelihood of the OSM providing handy hints on what to wear for the forthcoming Personality of the Year awards (a swimsuit?). If this is meant to be a humorous piece, it seems unjust, as Adlington deserves admiration for her massive sporting achievements, rather than trivialisation. The article on Shane Warne, in the same magazine does not reveal his body anxieties nor offer him advice on cosmetic care. Even sports women who are elite athletes are constituted and certainly represented within the same discourses that frame the celebrities of the mainstream of popular culture. It seems that even by winning Olympic gold women cannot escape the tyranny of the slim, thin body.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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The aims of this game were to remind us of our collective responsibility in achieving the Millennium Development Goals to reduce world poverty, adopted in 2000 by 191 heads of government. The proceeds of the match went to finance projects in Africa, Latin America, Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.

In spite of its enormous popularity at the local level, can football - with its global image of overpaid superstars - make any contribution, to highlighting the problems of world poverty or even offering any kind of real material compensation? Aren’t any contributions which the sport might make on the global arena distorted by the size of the wages of Premiership players? Is there any scope for more heroic leadership by these players rather than merely celebrity status?

In 2008 the Togo and Arsenal striker Emmanuel Adebayor, BBC African footballer of the year 2007, made what he called his "Tour of Hope" back to Africa for the BBC World Service. Although Adebayor lives most of his life in the star-spangled celebrity field of international sport, he described his reasons for making the programme as follows:

I am a true son of Africa. …I hope to help young people receive the necessary attention, guidance and assistance that will empower and help them to fulfil their potential as productive citizens of Africa

On the World Service programme, Adebayor was at pains to focus on his role in promoting a more socially inclusive cultural citizenship:

I think a lot of people know me just on the pitch. They don’t know where I come from and they don’t know how I began. I put in a lot of hard work to be where I am today, but I’ll never forget what it was like when I was young. Life was very difficult, and I told myself that I only had one chance to survive and that was to be a footballer… When I was growing up I had someone to help me, to give me something, and today I’m in a position to help others, so helping people is always a pleasure for me.

Is this the stuff of sentimentalised aspirations and dreams? The hopes of those selected by authentic talent scouts are also countered by the exploitation of trafficking which has grown in recent years.

However, Adebayor’s actions can be seen as more about his paying tribute to the place and the people who gave him his chances, and the desire to "give something back". His story also puts the poverty of his people onto the agenda and makes it public. He chose the BBC World Service for his tour of hope, rather than the commercial enterprises preferred by many celebrities. The impact may be marginal, but it is part of the process.

The role of celebrities, however honourable, is very much in contrast to the small scale ventures that characterise interventions. One such very different project is that of Shepherd Food, a local project which links farmers in Lincolnshire with those in Nigeria through a church organisation. The aim is to promote sustainable farming to combat poverty - but there’s a spin-off, too.

That spin-off is Football - only a small part of what the project does, but one which recognises the powerful appeal that sport has and how it might play a part in engaging with everyday life.

For example, one disabled group begs for alms in the morning and plays soccer on Saturday evening at Lekan Salami Stadium, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.

It is very different from the big match in Malaga with nearly 30,000 spectators; or from a major star’s journey of hope back to his roots, but it is part of the process. Maybe we need them all and sport can be part of the fight against poverty - because sport, like poverty, is a big part of life for huge numbers of people.

This blog is part of Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts