ABSTRACT
The landscape of lifestyle sport is characterised by the presence of a range of increasingly transnational corporate forces. Lifestyle sports have been appropriated to sell a vast array of products, services and experiences. Commentators have, therefore, described extreme sport as a ‘co-opted’ sporting movement, increasingly associated with the global expansion and reproduction of consumer capitalism and controlled by multinational and transnational corporations and media organisations (cf. Wheaton, 2005). Nonetheless, more recent research across different sports and contexts has illuminated how consumer capitalism penetrates lifestyle sport cultures in complex and contradictory ways (e.g. Rinehart, 2008; Edwards and Corte, 2010; Stranger, 2010), illustrating that the media and consumer industries’ roles are often more complex, contradictory and fluid than incorporation and co-option. Consumers and participants re-work the images and meanings circulated in and by global consumer culture. Research on institutionalisation and professionalisation processes, especially as expressed through attitudes to competition and regulation, also provides important insights into understanding how co-option has been contested, and is my focus here.
