Trygve Beyer Broch

• Broch, Trygve B (2026). Culture and Sports. In Spillman, Lynette (Eds.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780197852729. doi: 10.1093/9780197852729.003.0137. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  To great gains, sociologists have either emphasized culture and sports as reflections of larger social forces and inequalities or as unique transformative powers. Therefore, it seems to be a pressing need in the field to strike a middle ground between these two poles of reasoning. If sociological sport scholarship on social inequalities and cultural autonomy is synthesized, sports emerge as a meaning-making process that allows us to reflect on, test, defy and enact social power. As sports are carried out through symbolic representations and actions, they reproduce social order and privilege but also allow improvisation and social change. At its best, the culture-and-sports literature underlines this agency and subversion with respect to hegemonic powers and expose sports’ contradictory nature of being both fair and foul, at the same time. Looking closely at the paradigms that shape understandings of culture and sports allows for a theoretically informed view of the field. Scattered across social science and humanities is a literature emphasizing the open-ended quality of sports contests and the agency and subversive qualities of sports actors. Underlining contradiction, complexity, and contingency, this literature emerges with a fully stacked interdisciplinary toolkit for focusing on the interstices, borders, and impact zones where social and cultural phenomena collide. To revitalize and sharpen explanatory claims about the cultural autonomy of sports, or the lack thereof, this literature is vital. It shows how meaning making about sports and within sports is shaped by individuals’ and collectives’ maneuvering of play, game and ritual-like modalities. Play is open-ended. Games are constrained. Social performances use culture in a ritual-like manner to maneuver the gray areas where freedom and constraints, sports and social issues spark friction. Looking closely at this body of literature, a few key studies that emphasize how sports shape social life become key to moving the field onward. At the interstices between culture and sports resides a multiplicityof meanings and actions about complex, unjust, and fragmented societies. On this middle ground, culture and sports are diverse yet mutually constitutive. The many patterns and pluralities that this mutuality generates show how culture and sports collide, why sports’ meanings and actions vary, and how sports are important in social cohesion, domination, and resistance. Therefore, future research will do well to incorporate and amend a vast range of theories under the sociological study of culture and sports. Using culture as an analytic vantage point shows how sports shape social life from multiple vantage points and positions, and it provides a subtle compromise for the study of the ways in which sports are specialized institutions and part of a whole way of life. The literature that focuses on this middle ground between social inequalities and cultural autonomy makes the study of culture and sports subversive in that it can empirically and theoretically contests the truths of sports, sociology, and society.

• Broch, Trygve B (2026). Creative Sports: A Cultural Sociological Perspective. In Rasmussen, Ludvig Johan Torp (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity in Sport. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783032133922. p. 141–160. doi: 10.1007/978-3-032-13392-2_8. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  To sociologists, sport is a cultural phenomenon, and creativity is the result of social processes. Nonetheless, sociologists’ opinions differ on how to study culture and, in turn, how to explain creativity. I use cultural sociology and ask: How can creativity in sports be theorized and explored as a meaning-making process? After stating the relevance of this viewpoint, a brief overview of the sociology of creativity is followed by a critique of the concept of creativity. This backdrop allows me to approach creativity and sports as open-ended cultural forms in which sports participants engage in improvisation: the mundane efforts and adjustments we make in the social construction of reality. Of course, every play act is not equally creative, and all sports cultures do not allow creativity in the same way. It is our use and maneuvering of symbolic structures that allow, limit, and explain improvisation. Therefore, creativity is not a trait that we can proclaim ourselves to possess but the result of social processes in which actors are ascribed positive (or negative) creativity by a community. Accordingly, the chapter ends by considering the necessity of listening to, learning from, and allowing sports participants to be ascribed and acknowledged as potentially creative.

• Broch, Trygve B (2025). Civil repair and children's sports: The Norwegian welfare-state's reconstruction of unhealthy, undemocratic and unsafe sports. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. ISSN 1012-6902. Online First. doi: 10.1177/10126902251390510. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  How can state politics reconstruct unhealthy, undemocratic and unsound sports as a common good? This study explores the convergence of state and sport politics. Using cultural sociology, I unearth how the Nordic welfare state reconstructs children's sport and embeds it in its broader purview of civil society. Through document-ethnography of white papers from the Ministry of Health and Care Services, Ministry of Culture, and Ministry of Childhood and Families, I clarify how the Norwegian welfare state criticizes and “repairs” children's sports by classifying its good and bad practices. The paper then reveals how this meaning-making process justifies and shapes the state's use of sport as an integration arena in civil society. The result reveals that the domain-specific politics of public health, volunteerism, and childhood and family hold three empirically interrelated yet analytically distinguishable codes. These binary codes transcend their domains to instantiate a coherent sport model that shapes how democratic integration and social criticism should be carried out in sports. Consequently, state politics can, in a culturally contingent way, (re)form sport organizations that do not have health promotion, representative democracy and “the child's best interest” as their primary functional tasks. In Norway, the state endlessly works to reshape “ bad sports” to reintegrate into its horizon of civil society. The civil repair of unhealthy, undemocratic and unsafe children's sports allows the state to use sports as a formative institution. From the perspective of the state, sport actors do not always solve all social issues, but they can learn, if principally committed, how to engage with a dynamic landscape of social problems.

• Broch, Trygve B & Melenteva, Marianna (2025). Making new sport cultures. In Girginov, Vassil & Girginova, Katerina (Ed.), Handbook on Sport and Culture. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISSN 9781035339983. p. 51–63. doi: 10.4337/9781035339983.00012. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  As a cultural phenomenon, modern competitive sport seems quite predictable in its rule-governed practices. There is a strong hold of commercial interests on its play, and professionalization challenges sports’ foundations in voluntarism and creativity. It seems as if sport, as we know it today, has little in common with the traditional play and games of the community rituals or religious and spiritual practices from which it was conceived. Yet, at the same time, the institutionalization and standardization of sport and play, and the commodified mass-production of sports, do not appear to eradicate all chances for change nor exhaust its actors of creative potential. New sports emerge and styles of play fluctuate. The limits for representation and identification oscillates. Perhaps, it is our idea of sport that has petrified?

• Næss, Øyvind & Broch, Trygve B (2025). A matter of logics and practicalities: How the state, parenting, and children connect in a digitalized childhood. Childhood. ISSN 0907-5682. p. 1–18. doi: 10.1177/09075682251411192. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Important contributions have been made to understanding how screens shape children’s lives, but the arrangement of the constitutive components of digitalized childhoods is not yet fully elucidated. This article draws on a mix of methods to map out how the practicalities of digitalized childhoods are induced by logics embedded in the interconnected spaces of the state and parenthood. To this end, assemblage theory is employed to help explore how the digitalization of childhoods unfolds within an arrangement of diverse scales and complexities. The article draws on ongoing debates within childhood studies concerning children’s agency and the methodological construction of childhoods.

• Broch, Trygve B & Kristiansen, Elsa (2025). Gendered Sport Communication. Critisism, diversity and change in complex modernity. In Pedersen, Paul M. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication. Routledge. ISSN 9781003430278. p. 305–314. doi: 10.4324/9781003430278-31. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The study of gender has a long and proud history within the field of sport communication. When we account for gender, the media communication with, about, and by athletes is far from neutral but incorporates gendered imagery, stereotypes, and symbolics into a sport-media complex with enormous social, cultural, political, and economic importance. This chapter aims to provide a fresh take on gendered sports communication. By drawing on performance theories we highlight the ability of sport actors to use gendered codes, myths, and narratives to not only reproduce, but also challenge and change gendered sports. With empirical examples from Norwegian sports, we show how contemporary sport politics—ranging from government representatives, via old and new media, to the athletes themselves—maneuver a terrain where criticism is part of a democratic mundanity and where stereotypes are confronted with diversity on a regular basis. Far from being rid of gender inequality, today's sports communication balance in a complex modernity where tradition and transformation go hand in hand.

• Kristiansen, Elsa; Fristrup, Tine; Sonne, Lasse; Broch, Trygve B & Massao, Prisca Bruno (2025). Shaping Racialised Media Representations in Norwegian Sports. An Anti-racial Self-understanding Embedded in Nordic Exceptionalism and Hegemonic Colour-blindness. In Fristrup, Tine & Sonne, Lasse (Ed.), Internationalisation at Home: Critical Frameworks for Inclusive Global Learning. Novus Forlag. ISSN 9788283901740. p. 313–342. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The article sheds light on how the Norwegian media presents, processes, and shapes perceptions of racism in Norwegian sports. The article is based on a debate in the media between mid-February and March 2021 on whether there is structural racism in Norwegian sports. We ask: How does the media represent racism in Norwegian sports? The analysis deals with the different views on racism presented, and these perceptions are arranged in three different frames of understanding. The first understanding was based on the fact that racism in Norwegian sports is a marginal problem that can often be explained by individual minority ethnics’ lack of cultural understanding and that it is not the responsibility of organised sports to correct it. The second understanding is of sport as part of society where racism is practised and where challenges experienced by individual minorities can be conceptualised as signs of structural racism. The NIF uses the last understanding to legitimise their strategies. The media debate exemplifies how Norwegian media can carry out their democratic mission by highlighting how social problems are reflected in Norwegian sports. Our data shows that Norwegian media and sports present an anti-racial self- understanding embedded in Nordic exceptionalism and colour-blindness.

• Kristiansen, Elsa; Broch, Trygve B & Stensrud, Trine (2024). Chasing an Olympic dream: a holistic approach to how youth athletes narrate injuries, performance, and the value of being seen. Sports Coaching Review. ISSN 2164-0629. doi: 10.1080/21640629.2024.2343576. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article explores how athletes experience injuries and performance pressures when striving for an “Olympic dream”, and focuses on how ten young women, aged 19–22, understand present and past experiences with injuries. Through a narrative analysis, we found that female players striving to become elite athletes often talk about injuries as something that made them feel invisible in a culture where visibility is key. “Being seen” emerged as a parallel narrative to that of injuries and the elite athlete as the players often looked back with regrets about how young and naïve they had been. This holistic take on injuries as a cultural construct is important for any coach to consider when working with young aspiring athletes. We conclude that this process is contingent on social processes and is a matter of when, how, and on what or whose terms young athletes are seen.

• Broch, Trygve B (2024). Attentive hands: The coexistence of digital and analog attentions in children's sports. Anthropology of Consciousness. ISSN 1053-4202. 35(2), p. 159–170. doi: 10.1111/anoc.12232. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Through an extended ethnography of a sports team of boys growing from 7 to 11 years old, I explore Norwegian parents' anxieties about the digital world encroaching on their children's lives. I compare parents' monitoring of their children's (non)digital leisure activities with how kids interact (non)digitally. On the surface, as parents observe how their children's bodies move from screens to sports, they see their kids' attentive hands shifting focus from electronic gaming and screen swiping to a more welcomed ballplaying and high-fiving with nonelectronic teammates. However, close inspection reveals that my interlocutors never completely enter or leave the digital, but dwell within both worlds simultaneously. The result shows the meaning of children sports as changed by the digital, how the digital appears in the foreground or the background of our interactions, and how an emphasis on attentive hands can help unearth how the digital passes through us to constitute our lifeworlds.

• Broch, Trygve B (2023). Ritual pathways and dramaturgical efforts: Negotiating the meaning of organized play in Norwegian children's sports. Acta Sociologica. ISSN 0001-6993. doi: 10.1177/00016993231201483. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article joins Durkheim's theory of cult and Goffman's notion of an interactional membrane to show how rituals transform social life from mundanity to ritual, and back again. I update these classical theories with a cultural sociology of performance and the sociology of fun to emphasize diversity in social compositions, contextual transformations, and contradiction in meaning. With an abductive methodology, I leverage an ethnography of children's sports in Norway to show how we carry out symbolic work to set sports apart from the mundane and then meaningfully enact games either as an attractive play modality or as a constrained organizing of creative play. Dramaturgy, not athletic success, is key in this study. Children's sports, as an arena for tacit learning about symbolic modalities, show us how much effort it takes to create ritual-like encounters and fun. The study also reveals how broadly available codes about children's sports, and about play itself, are worked into sports through social performances where adult coaches and children manoeuvre the possible meanings of sports. The result is a theory of the multiple pathways for symbolic work we can travel to create ritual-like interactions.

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• Broch, Trygve B (2023). The Ponytail: Icon, Movement, and the Modern (Sports)Woman. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783031207822. 222 p. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This open access book adopts a cultural sociology of materiality to explore the hallmark of the female athlete: the ponytail. Studying a wealth of news articles about ponytails in sports and society, Broch uncovers this hairstyle’s polyvocality and argues that it is a total social phenomenon. By separating his approach from the cultural studies tradition, Broch highlights how hair is imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to understand, maneuver, and criticize social gender relations in deeply personal ways. Using multiple theories about hair, bodies, myths, and icons, he creates a multidimensional method to show how icons are imitated and used. As women navigate their practical lives, health issues, and gendered expectations, the ponytail materializes their dynamic maneuvering of cultural and social environments. Sporting a ponytail—itself an embodiment of movement—is filled with a performativity of social movements: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical.

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• Broch, Trygve B (2026). The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Living with Moralities in Norwegian Children’s Sports. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This presentation explores the interactional flow of moralities in Norwegian children’s sports. At the end of the season, when the sun is always shining and school is either out or soon to be closed, Norwegian children and adults travel to the spectacle of “the cup.” At the cup, teams meet up for a last dance of the season, stay overnight at the comfort of the nearby school’s cement floor, eat unhealthy snacks throughout the day, and compete. Here, at one of these tournaments, I met Micheal, a long-time coach of the Canary birds, who taught me quickly that it is not only the children who compete at these events, so do the adults. Drawing on five years of ethnography in volunteer-organized children’s sports, I show how sport competition for children interweaves with adults’ competing for a civic appearance. Drawing boundaries between the civic good, the bad and the ugly—the unlikeliest of “civil settings,” the intense spectacle of children’s sport becomes a scene for the discussion and enactment of civic moralities. Fair play and following the rules of play is nowhere near enough. The good coach is foremost concerned with the existential exigencies and interactional flows of sympathy. Not only between his own players but also between his team and the opposition. However, in the heated contest that commences on the court, the good can turn bad, and the ugly must thus be evoked to set things straight and to repair one’s own civic image and imagination.

• Broch, Trygve B (2024). Lukten av nellik og lyden av julesanger: Hvorfor jakter vi julestemningen? [Internet]. Forskning.no. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  En bestemt lukt i huset, en julesang, eller en gammel og slitt julekurv på treet – mange har klare tanker om hva som skaper julestemning. Hva driver vår evige jakt på den magiske følelsen?

• Broch, Trygve B (2024). Tribute to Jeff Alexander. Full text in Research Archive
• Broch, Trygve Beyer (2024). Performing sport politics. In Pedersen, Paul M. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Sport Management. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISSN 9781035317189. p. 717–719. doi: 10.4337/9781035317189.ch417. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Understanding sport politics as performances draws our attention to the capacity of actors and audiences to use macro cultural codes, narratives,and myth to shape actions. It shows how political legitimacy and management in sports are ongoing achievements shaped by meaning making and interpretive battles for ends, power, dignity, prestige, and moral purity.

• Broch, Trygve B (2023). Sport as an opportunity structure: children sports as experimentations with the constraining and the enabling modality of play. Full text in Research Archive
• Broch, Trygve Beyer (2023). Fateful Moments: On Collective Effervescence and Emotional Energy in the Chase for Fun. Symbolic interaction. ISSN 0195-6086. 46(4), p. 521–524. doi: 10.1002/symb.642. Full text in Research Archive
• Broch, Trygve B (2023). Culture vs. Gender as sociological perspectives. Full text in Research Archive
• Broch, Trygve Beyer (2023). The Norwegian Children and Youth Sport Model: Translations, Institutionalization, and the Everyday Performativity of the Civil Sphere. Full text in Research Archive
• Broch, Trygve B (2022). Norsk håndballkultur: Å satse på jenter og kvinner. Full text in Research Archive

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