Trygve Beyer Broch

• 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 (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.

• Broch, Trygve B (2022). Performative Feelings for Others: The Civil Repair of Organised Competitive Sports. Cultural Sociology. ISSN 1749-9755. doi: 10.1177/17499755221110313. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In many western nations, sport is an institutional component of civil society that may be considered from quite different outlooks. From the critical theorists’ viewpoint, sport reproduces social hierarchies through competition and then colonises our democratic life worlds. Scholars of civil society argue that sport actors manoeuvre civic relations and fend off anti-civil pressures to allow integration, belonging and collective decision-making. This article positions sport actors and audiences at the interstice between hierarchies and solidarity, amid competition and friendship. Using Civil Sphere Theory, I present a cultural sociology of performance that highlights how sport actors interpret the democratic character (or lack thereof) of their own and others’ sport actions. Drawing on eight months of participant field observations in Norwegian youth sport, I recreate an ethnographic tale of how coaches, players and spectators activate the civil sphere’s symbolic and affective codes for this purpose. This dramatic sequence of events, played out over the course of the season, shows how sport itself can be shaped by actors who bring the civil sphere to bear and make sport a facilitating input to the discourse of the Nordic civil sphere. This process, I conclude, is contingent on performances of the civil sphere that make sport a stage on which to display performative feelings for others. When sport actors challenge the divisive, hierarchal character of organised competition and carry out a civil repair of sport, they expand the limits of civil inclusion and momentarily create a sporting civil society.

View all works in Cristin

• Broch, Trygve B (2023). The Ponytail: Icon, Movement, and the Modern (Sports)Woman. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-20782-2. 222 p. 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.

View all works in Cristin

• 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.
• Broch, Trygve Beyer (2023). The Norwegian Children and Youth Sport Model: Translations, Institutionalization, and the Everyday Performativity of the Civil Sphere.
• Broch, Trygve B (2023). Culture vs. Gender as sociological perspectives.
• Broch, Trygve B (2023). Sport as an opportunity structure: children sports as experimentations with the constraining and the enabling modality of play.
• Broch, Trygve B (2022). Huddle Up and Hands In: Turning On and Off the Play of Sports. Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights.
• Broch, Trygve B (2022). The cultural sociology of sport: a study of sports for sociology? American Journal of Cultural Sociology. ISSN 2049-7113. 10(4). doi: 10.1057/s41290-022-00177-y. Show summary

  Despite its universality, the world of sport is magnificently, yet often subtly, playful, and diverse. At the same time, sports’ ubiquitous presence in many of our lives is thoroughly mundane and a spectacle of ritual-like proportions. Kids, youth, and adults play sports and exercise routinely, for fun, with passion, and as a healthy but tiresome obligation. And every four Olympic years, on any given Sunday—or under the glow of the Friday Night Lights for that matter—millions of people assemble to watch sports at the arena or in front of a screen. Again and again, sports, with their familiar seasonal patterns, are created and recreated as cultural systems gravitationally bound by our play to familiar symbols, myth, codes, and narratives.

• Broch, Trygve B (2022). Å satse på idrettskvinner: En historie om uintenderte konsekvenser. Morgenbladet. ISSN 0805-3847.
• Broch, Trygve B (2022). Norsk håndballkultur: Å satse på jenter og kvinner.
• Broch, Trygve B (2022). To Be a Sports Team: Bodily Dimensions in the Testing and Imposing of Civility in a Non-Civil Sphere.
• Broch, Trygve B (2021). Performing sport politics. In Pedersen, Paul M. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Sport Management. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISSN 9781800883277. p. 356–357. doi: https:/doi.org/10.4337/9781800883284.
• Broch, Trygve B (2021). Kultursosiologi, Kroppsøving og Barn- og Unge-forskning ved INN.
• Broch, Trygve B (2021). Performative Feelings for Others: The story of Teary-Eyed Tiril.
• Broch, Trygve B (2021). Kvinnene har definert norsk håndball. [Radio]. NRK P2 Nyhetsmorgen.
• Broch, Trygve B (2021). Kvinnene har dominert norsk håndball. [TV]. NRK1.
• Broch, Trygve B (2021). Håndballgutta puster jentene i nakken. [Internet]. Inn.no. Show summary

  Herrelandslaget markerer seg i VM i håndball. Trygve Beyer Broch har skrevet bok om hvordan damene til nå har preget norsk håndball.

• Broch, Trygve B (2021). Håndball – ikke lenger en «jenteidrett»? [Internet]. Forskning.no. Show summary

  Håndballherrene tok for alvor steget inn i den internasjonale toppen med sølvmedaljen i verdensmesterskapet i 2017. De gjentok bragden med et nytt sølv i VM i 2019 og tok bronse i EM i 2020. Under fjorårets EM var på det meste over en million seere samlet for å se herrene spille. Seertallene har også vært høye under denne vinterens VM. Håndballgutta er ikke lenger et kollektivt skuldertrekk.

View all works in Cristin