How to apply sociological imagination to sport?

I am having great difficulty applying the sociological imagination to sport and then to gender, race and class.


If anyone could help that would be much apprieciated.How to apply sociological imagination to sport?
This sounds like a homework assignment, so my suggestion is to try harder, think, use your ';imagination';. I'm sure you'll come up with whatever I was thinking anyway.





Good luck with it!How to apply sociological imagination to sport?
If by the sociological imagination we (a)connect personal issues to the wider society and ( b)attempt to understand historically how we got to this kind of society,





Then what kinds of sociological questions might we be asking?





What kind of people are we today - what concerns about our bodies and fitness do we have? How do we evaluate ourselves in relations to others? -How does this affect our values towards different age groups/gender relations/ in society? Why are young Australain football stars so at risk of being invloved in drug %26amp;sex scandals What does this mean in terms of our current values about sport , male bonding and and masculinty?


What broader values eg on competition, personal fitness, major focus on fit bodies, fair play, drug taking stem from this focus





How important are the institutions centred around sport today?


How significant is the sports economy in terms of the broader economy ?


How do these competiitve ,commoditised values of sport today fit with the broader political economic values of our time? ie what are the most read /watched major media stories that the we access about sport and sports celebrities?


What kinds of commoditisation of labour occurs in the sporting sphere built and what levels of exploitation occur?


What part do the sporting elite play in our social values?


Why do 99% of politicians in Australia feel obliged to name and declare their loyality to their favourite football team?


Why do so many economically and politically successful men buy overseas Soccer Teams?


Has the globalisation of culture and the labour market been parallelled by similar forms of globalisation in the world of sport?


a)Ethnicity:What happens to the massive number of young soccer hopefuls shipped from Africa to Europe if they don't succeed in getting into one of the European teams?


b)Class relations: How does this globalised commodification of soccer conflict with the continuing but conflicting set of values based on its local regional fan base?


c) Gender: How are issues of gender differences /ethnic differences/patriotism/ played out and enhanced or diminished in the sphere of sport?


-Who does the unpaid caring domestic labour of washing the mounds of stinking sporting gear after the weekend amateur games?


-what is the relationship between amateur and professional levels ie how dependent on the amateur level is the professional commoditised level of sport?


-Have women sports stars affected our image, widened our range, of ways of being of 'feminine'?





Historically how did we move from privileging 'amateruism' to privileging 'professionalism' in sport?


How have various sports become commoditised over the past century?


How important are TV sports programmes in generating advertisng dollars?


What peripheral occupations are generated in the sporting sphere in todays 'sport obsessessed' society?





Finally my own particular specific interest - why hasn't the Tug of War association been successful in its decades long attempt to get the 'Tug of War' accepted as an Olympic sport? ( I know this seems like a trivial question but it really puzzles me sociologically - why do we privilege one form of sport over another and why/how has this once popular sport become sidelined? )