Competition

Competition occurs in social relationships in which comparisons of performances are made according to shared standards, such that performances can be objectively evaluated and ranked.

Competition and the importance of striving for success are an inherent part of the ideology of many social institutions, in particular, the economy, military, and politics. However, competition in sport is not considered in the same way as it is manifested in many forms of social life. The structural aim of sport competition is to measure and rank competitors according to the results of athletic performance. The ranking is based on the principle of equality among sport competitors.This principle seems to be a unique feature of competition in sport.

Competitive Relationships

The Canadian sport sociologist JohnW. Loy has defined competition “as a struggle for supremacy between two or more opposing sides,” in which opposing sides can “encompass the competitive relationships between man and other objects of nature both animate and inanimate” (Loy et al. 1981, 25).Thus, he has built a typology of competitive relationships to include competition between one individual and another, competition between one team and another, competition between an individual or team and an animate object of nature, competition between an individual or team and an inanimate object of nature, and competition between an individual or team and an ideal standard.

In general competition in sport can take the form of direct competition in which two opponents confront each other, as in ball games; or parallel competition in which contestants compete with one another indirectly, as in swimming; or competition against a standard, as in gymnastics.

Sport Competition from a Historical Perspective

In order to determine the outcome of a contest and the real winner in sports, it is essential to ensure equality and fair play in the competition. But have sport competitions as we know them always existed?

The concept of ranking athletes according to their performance required a certain equality of opportunity that seems similar to what today we would call “fairness.” However, the principle of fairness in sports is a rather new phenomenon. In ancient Greece the ethical code of sportlike activities was subordinated to the requirements of bravery. In the Middle Ages, it was expressed by honor. In the period around the founding of the modern Olympics in the 1890s, fair play became a fundamental moral principle that incorporated ethical codes within the sports arsenal of detailed rules.

The development of sport and the emphasis on the concept of fair play as a standard reference for morally right and good behavior in sport competitions can be seen in light of an increasing social control of violence and aggression since the Middle Ages. As the British- German sociologist Norbert Elias (1897–1990) has noted, the passage of the term fair play into everyday language is linked to the growth of sport in the nineteenth century.

Elias found in his analysis of the genesis of sport that the need for competitions to be impartial and fair grew considerably with the increased popularity of gambling. For example, interest in putting money on a horse in horse racing depended on whether gamblers could rely on an impartial and just result.

The conception of sport, as manifested in the modern Olympic system developed at the end of the nineteenth century, was based on principles of equality and distinction. Sport constitutes a distinct social order in its regulation of the systematic endeavor to break records of competitive achievement. Moreover, the mode by which the pronouncement of losers and winners and the symbolic display of results is organized represents a new and modern order.These tasks are accomplished without causing the deaths of parties in the event, which was not always the case during sporting events of earlier times.

According to the Polish sociologist Zbigniew Krawczyk, the modern Olympic Games were built on the principles that sport should be practiced due to its immanent values and not for material gain; sportsmen and sportswomen should compete as people living in friendship and peace without nationalist emotions and wars; and victory means less than participation in sporting events. Unlike a society in which people are differentiated according to race and class, for example, in Olympic sport the goal is that egalitarianism should prevail.Thus, although the system of sport itself is structurally hierarchical in nature, participants experience egalitarianism and friendship.

Though it is possible to identify the modern order in contemporary sport, activities we today refer to as sport have developed and changed in relation to social and cultural change. As the Norwegian sport philosopher Sigmund Loland maintains: “Today’s Olympians may have ideas of serving their country, their race, their ideology, or even their God. Still, secular goals of performing well, of winning, and of attaining fame and fortune are probably more common. During China’s Cultural Revolution, the slogan was ‘friendship first, competition second.’. . . This is in clear contrast with the Western high-performance sport mentality expressed in telling slogans such as that attributed to the Green Bay Packer football coach Vince Lombardi: ‘Winning isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing!’” (Loland 2002, 10–11).

The competitive individualism of the market that dominates professional sports today is far away from ideas of the founders of the modern Olympic Games, who regarded sports competitions as existing outside the mainstream structures of society, separated from politics and commercializing tendencies. As is the case with commercial entertainment, modern sport would have had no meaning to them, and the social acceptance of women’s participation in sports competitions in the late twentieth century would likely also have been unthinkable, as it was to most sport leaders in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Competition as a Defining Feature of Sport

The competitive character of sport regards rules of bodily movement in space and time that are linked with the achievement of a measurable result. The rules are directed at the aim of being able to pronounce a winner and, in contradistinction to premodern times, these rules are no longer local but have been systematized on a global level.

For the Finnish sociologist Juha Heikkalä, the core elements of the logic of competing are as follows (1993, 403): (1) setting individuals/teams against each other to produce a momentarily set hierarchy of performances; (2) maintaining a permanent state of scarcity, meaning that only one individual/team can, at a given time, occupy the position at the top of the hierarchy (i.e., win); (3) ensuring recurring possibilities of transcending one’s own and/or opponents’ performances and of occupying the top position of the hierarchy; and (4) instilling a will to win.

The Finnish sport sociologist Kalevi Heinilä has noted that in competitive sport these elements are combined in a process of an ascending spiral.This spiral of competition shows not only who is best, but also how good it is possible for an athlete to become, which seems to be infinite.

The logic of competing serves to demarcate sport from nonsport. Competition, according to this view, is identified as a constitutive feature of sport conceived as an action system, in contradistinction to its role in the fields of physical education, play, or game, in which it can have a function that is merely regulative. But what does it mean to compete as defined by the constitutive rules?

An individual’s motivations for engaging in sport competition can be varied.They can reflect a desire for pleasure or health, for example. But a shared interpretation of “winning” is a necessity for meaningful competitions to be possible at all. As Loland has noted: “Competitions between groups of competitors each of whose ethos has radically different content become very hard if not impossible.There would be few shared norms and the sport in question may degenerate or even die” (2002, 8).

Different sports have sport-specific goals, and the constitutive rules of a sport provide a conceptual framework within which sport can occur. In sport, winning is logically dependent on using only the means defined in the individual sport’s constitutive rules. Regulative rules, on the other hand, place regulations on activities that are logically independent of the process of competing, whether they be technical demands, norms about how to perform, or rules that define the size of the ball.

The process of competition, according to this view, is a defining feature of sport. Competition is not something that is optional within sport; it is part of sport itself. Athletic activity that is not competitive falls, by this definition, into the domain of play, physical exercise, or training.

Cultural Variances

In real life competitions are characterized according to various degrees of fairness and acting in accordance with the rules. For example, studies of football (soccer) players have shown that the interpretation of the rules of football (soccer) varies between professionals and amateur players and between different clubs.Yet, most sports are also seen to be relatively stable social practices.

Philosophical and social scientific approaches have analyzed and also valued sport competitions in various ways. A traditional interpretation is to distinguish between “formal fair play,” which refers to rule conformity, and “informal fair play,” referring to attitudes toward the game, toward other competitors, and toward officials. The historical and cultural change of sport competitions as right or not and good or not, respectively, can be seen in the perspective of how formal and informal fair play change in different settings.

When people interpret the meaning of sport for themselves, there will be a variety of the sports forms that they practice. However, it seems that the importance of competition is dependent on age and gender much more so than on nationality. Thus, competition has been indicated to be a more important component of sport for males than for females and for adolescents than for older people. In many cultures competitive behaviors are not considered appropriate for girls or women, although it has become much more acceptable in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Several studies have indicated that sport undergoes cultural adaptation. For example, a comparative study has investigated the degree to which “achievement” criteria characterize the sporting behavior and sporting perceptions of adolescents in Berlin and suburban New York. In this study Berlin adolescents emphasized a more vague concept of sport, in that physical activity that was not competitive or “win-oriented” could still be sport, and was generally perceived to be enjoyable. “Achievement criteria such as the importance of practice, competition, and victory may be less central to the sports concepts of Berlin adolescents when compared with those of suburban NewYorkers” (Rees et al. 1998, 227).

Indeed, the role of sport in the system of education may be what determined the different views on sport concept, since interscholastic sport is largely nonexistent in Germany, whereas school sports and athletic scholarships have a pervasive influence in America. In addition to sport industries, educational institutions have been used socially to promote the virtues of competition in U.S. culture.

The Danish-German sport sociologist Gertrud Pfister has further noted that, in general, women participate in sports less for competition than for health and enjoyment. Yet, still more women enter the sports arenas, although their participation in competitive sport has been limited by ideology, economy, and family responsibilities. For example, about one-third of the participants in the 2004 Olympics were women, and they are now allowed to compete in almost every Olympic event.

Competitive sport is rapidly becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Economic factors and the media have played a major part in its spread. Thus, what is meant by sport is becoming more uniform as international competitions such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup are televised worldwide. Though there are indeed an increasing number of sports forms that are practiced at the national or local level, at the present time competitive sport is the predominant form of sport from a global perspective.

Critical Perspectives on Competition

Is competition good or bad? Is competition an entirely destructive basis for interaction or a source of exhilaration, motivation, and self-knowledge? The American philosopher Michael L. Schwalbe asks these questions in his essay about a humanist conception of competition in sport. Proponents of competition stress that it spurs the participants toward excellence; that it fosters self-development, discipline, and respect for others; and that it is a legitimate source of pleasure. Critics emphasize that competition is a source of unnecessary stress, that it is less productive than cooperation, and that it celebrates domination.

To suggest that sport competitions are potentially meaningful and valuable social practices, the emphasis is on sport not as forced labor, but as an activity that includes a strong voluntary and playful dimension. The playful character of competition is seen in relation to the principle of equality. From this view it is argued that the symbolic meaning of competition is rendered meaningless unless the contestants in the competition, match, or tournament are also fairly matched. Social practices such as doping, for example, can corrupt the endeavors that ensure such conditions.

Competition in sport, critics have emphasized, ties physical activities to an ideology that stresses individual achievement and dominance over opponents in ways that do not emphasize partnership, sharing, open participation, nurturance, mutual support, and drug-free sports. Winning serves as proof of individual ability, worth, and character. Achievement is measured in terms of a never-ending quest to improve the “bottom line,” according to the American sport sociologist Jay Coakley (2003, 329–330).

Moreover, the way in which the ideology of elitist competition can function to oppress women and children in sport has been discussed. According to feminist thinkers, the emphasis upon strategic relations and nonemotionality between competitors reflects a peculiarly male ethic of competition.

The humanist critique of elitist competition is first and foremost that “it encourages purely instrumental social relations rather than encouraging relationships in which people are valued as ends in themselves” (Schwalbe 1989, 47). Another criticism is that competition is morally objectionable if inequality is a desirable goal in itself.

However, since competition is intrinsic to sport as we know it, does sport as a competitive activity not seem worth preserving? Schwalbe suggests that competition in sport can be legitimatized, if we see sport as “a unique domain of social activity, competitors as critically self-conscious social actors, and competition as dialectically related to cooperation” (1989, 49).

In principle competitive sport can be seen as a unique domain that celebrates equality of opportunity even while it typically insists on inequality of outcome. The way in which striving to excel in relation to others is based on a dialectical relationship between competition and cooperation is explained by the following double premise:

• Symbolically, we are enemies: We can only play together if you are also trying to win. 
• Symbolically, we are friends: We can only play together if there is fair play among peers. 

This characterization of sport regards the conceptual level of clarifying points of similarity and difference among cultural phenomena.

Media and Large Corporations Highlight Competitive Success

Critical views of competitive sports have mostly concerned professionalization and commercialization of sport. According to Coakley (2003, 368), these processes have been realized because large corporations “use the bodies of elite athletes to represent their public relations and marketing images,” and some highprofile athletes can “reaffirm a success ideology, which reproduces privilege among powerful people around the globe.” Media-hyped rivalries are emphasized as more important than the way athletes enjoy friendships with other competitors. And Coakley continues by suggesting that the media tell about sports participation not from the perspective of the athlete but “in a way that supports the interests of those who benefit from cultural commitments to competition, productivity, and material success” (2003, 428).

As a media celebrity, the athlete is involved in a new form of competition within conceptions of sport as a commodity. In this context, play is paid labor, and professional sporting performers are paid well for doing their work well. And media celebrities seem to be a part of the traditional gender order. Women’s sports have been televised more since the early 1990s. However, Coakley stresses that much of this coverage has been given to those sports that emphasise grace, balance, and aesthetics rather than to sports that are more competitive in nature.

Implications

Sport competitions are complex activities, and it seems reasonable to make a distinction, as Loland and Sandberg suggest, between sport competition as a system of ideas—a possible form of conduct defined by a rule system—and as a system of action, the realization of the rule-defined practice of certain persons at a certain time and place. Mostly, it is not competition per se that engenders the cultural forms of sport or the diverged answers to the question of whether competition is good or bad. In spite of a variety of individual, cultural, and social differences, in the Olympic Games, for example, athletes from all over the world, representing approximately 200 nations, are able to interact in an intelligible way in the contest arena.

Yet, the goals of sport competition differ and are objects for controversy. If the only purpose for engaging in sports is to win, then the only role that is required is strategic. The case of professional sports has illustrated this most starkly. Professional athletes are competitive athletes, but they are also workers. However, as Schwalbe emphasizes, “it is not competition per se that engenders this alienated labor,” it is “an economy exploiting athletic ability to make profits” (1989, 56). “External goals, like fame and fortune, can only be realized outside of the competition. Internal goals are linked to experiential values such as excitement, challenge, and fun, and can only be realized within the very activity of competing,” according to Loland and Sandberg (1995, 231).

The invention of new games, for example, alternative and extreme sports in which the usual cultural values of competition are subordinated to values of cooperation, parallel the process of professionalization. However, competitive sport embodies mainstream values of individualism and competition as a means of gaining fame and reward, and new conceptions of competition and changing ethics of competition to a celebration of cooperation can hardly become universal in the very near future.

Inge Kryger Pedersen

See also Cooperation