Order on the court : the interactional organization of basketball practice activities

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the local production of basketball practice activities in order to explicate the methods that participants collaboratively employ to accomplish these activities as recognizable social facts. The empirical data for the study consists of video recordings of a youth development basketball team's training sessions. Ethnomethodological methods of membership categorization analysis, conversation analysis and embodied analysis are employed to unpack the reflexive configurations of methods to which members orient in producing and recognizing accountable social actions and objects within basketball practice sessions. The research demonstrates the detailed situational considerations that a coach must orient to in visually locating relevant errors in player performances, and outlines some of the ways in which correction sequences are collaboratively organized in order to make problematic actions and their correct replacements visually available to multiple participants. The study is intended to contribute to two distinct bodies of knowledge. Firstly, it suggests a radical alternate to the prevailing studies of sport within the sport studies literature, and demonstrates the analytic payoff of taking up an ethnomethodological perspective on sport. Secondly, it aims to contribute to the field of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in both an empirical and methodological sense. Empirically, it expands the corpus of studies of social interaction by investigating a setting that has received little attention - that of sporting activity. Methodologically, it argues and seeks to demonstrate that separate analytic methods from ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and workplace studies can be integrated into a hybrid methodology for examining the accomplishment of sporting conduct. Overall, the thesis makes an original contribution to the fields of sport sociology and ethnomethodology by explicating in detail some of the constitutive methods used by participants to construct basketball practice sessions as intelligible activities.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English