ABSTRACT
This chapter locates our research within two key bodies of scholarship—action sport studies and critical sociological theorising of the contemporary Olympic Movement, International Olympic Committee (IOC), and Olympic Games. The first section provides an overview of the theoretical frameworks that have informed our own scholarship and many others working in action sports studies (i.e., Bourdieu, Foucault, hegemony, and from within cultural and youth studies via CCCS and post-CCCS). This literature is the terra firma of our individual and collaborative scholarship over the past two decades, and it inevitably weaves (both implicitly and explicitly) throughout many of the chapters. The second section provides a summary of key Olympic studies scholarship that informs this book, as well as a discussion of the IOC as a global sports organisation. Locating our work at the intersection of these bodies of literature, we argue that both action sport studies focused on processes of incorporation and sportisation, and critical Olympic Studies are often underpinned by hegemonic understandings of power, with the IOC (and other powerful sporting bodies) presented as all-dominating monolith against which some groups (i.e., activists, athletes, action sport participants) resist, with varying levels of success. We conclude with a discussion of Actor Network Theory (ANT) as an alternative approach to thinking about and studying the complex relationships and workings of power between and within action sport cultures and the Olympic Games.
