Blind Spot Spotted–Finally Visible in the Social Order of Sports

August 23rd, 2007 Posted in Concepts, Social Invention

Blind spot: something that should be obvious is invisible. In language you define too narrowly and so omit and make invisible a fact that is glaringly present.

George C. Homans, a famous Harvard sociologist, in his book “The Human Group” chuckled over the huge research grant needed to find the local whorehouse, a blind spot manqué.

In hard science there is an observer and an object. They are separate except when the observer intervenes in an experiment. Otherwise the object continues on its own natural and predictable way. But for the sociologist the scene watched always contains people like himself, who can act willfully and independently upon the event within which they find themselves. The natural order and its future are entangled with the self generated actions of participants.

Suppose a rehearsal for a play. The actors on stage overseen by a director. The scripted scene they are to enact represents the natural order; the director is the observer. Simple enough, a situation we all find familiar.

Now three new things happen. (1) The director joins the cast on stage, reduced in rank to just another player. His interventions are now merely co-equal to those of the others. In the social world to observe is ipso facto to participate. The line between observer and observed is gone. (2) Allow the script to vary in precision. The text is not clear, there are omissions, erasures, notes in an unfamiliar hand. (3) The actors, in any case, ignore the discipline of their craft and change their lines and physical actions according to their own whims, understandings, and preferences. They contradict the supposed unique authority of the director and change the future predicted by the scenario.

And there you have the sociologist at work–the scholar in the field who wants to describe and understand is simply another actor in a setting of indistinct and imprecise definitions where all persons present are liable to behave unpredictably.

I had practiced a naive sociology, pretending science until I stumbled onto this insight at a very embarrassing moment.

^^^

A course in basic sociology, my students in lethargic resistance to the subject. Everything happening in their social lives makes sense. The social order is not mysterious. Issues or events can be described in terms of good versus evil, right versus wrong. Sociology is merely a distraction. Before I can teach I have to convince them that there might be another non-obvious way with relevance for their lives and decisively useful.

Maybe a challenge, a description of behavior in a sector of on-going experience that is not fully explained, that is not transparent, that has to be wrestled with to get at its secret, like an unsolved crime. Why not stories from the daily press? Stories that can be questioned, issues that can be raised, events set in their rightful places. Why not these open tests for the sociological attitude and method? If the teacher is so smart let him show us a trick.

At first heavy going, no startling mind-boggling force ten event. The printed page of the daily journal a placid sea. My scheme awash in platitudes. My audience restive, giddy amidst the unconventional. Get us back into our box. Return us to the way we were.

Then the sports page. A jumble of energy. Then eureka! I notice something about the social organization of sport and I find that my own preconception about how sociology goes is smashed like a frail wooden boat on an uncharted rock. I am standing before a room full of students in imagination blithely plowing the quiet waters of my experiment, seeking the harbor of success when I hit this solid and now obvious fact. Bam! There goes my boat and I am in a frothy bight. Literally gasping.

I, of course, had stumbled upon a fact within my blind-spot. I had discovered persons like myself inside professional sports acting creatively upon their own social order.

A fundamental assumption of sociology: that there is a non-obvious natural order that can be chased down and captured had been shattered for me. In the social sector, my field of mystery, I suddenly clearly saw that discovery and invention and manipulation inside the observed field itself are constantly occurring. The actors presume they know and away they go. Any natural order in the plural region, I would now presume, is accompanied by man’s acts of original construction.

My own relationship to sport: As a spectator or player I took each event as it came. In my youth, I never considered the organizational context. Each match I saw or head about or participated in seemed a simple encounter. A spectacle, a show, a contest, something merely right in front of me. Accepted simply and directly.

But through my formerly fogged but now cleared sociological lenses I finally saw that each social event is suffused with man built social organization and that the different types of sport are embedded in very different forms of social order. These orders, it turns out, are not simply natural emergents growing like weeds along a country road. They are man made, man imposed, man accepted, man activated. So for what have I been naively looking? Something like the house of ill repute, I am afraid, at the usual well-known address.

Simple but not easily described because, it turns out, there is a mix within the social order of natural forms and man made patterns. In sports where there are two sides in head to head confrontation involving offense and defense the formal relationship is always the challenge. There is a test of strength and skill, in the modern era always within fixed governing rules. The outcome decides the issue. This form is a universal experience, part of a larger even more abstract notion of encounter between two actors (or sides or groups). It has a naturalistic quality since people fall into it and do not invent it. When there is a meeting of two there are certain simple consequences that emerge from the nature of the form itself. So for example when two meet they interact and the unanticipated end result follows the give and take of the sequence. This is a contingent outcome tied back to the form itself.

The initial comparison: professional baseball, boxing and tennis. They are organized quite differently even though all of their games played are challenges.

Challenges can be stacked. The series is simply two opponents playing a fixed and limited sequence of games whose summary outcomes determine dominance. It is an extension of the challenge. There is usually an odd number of games to prevent a final tie outcome.

The tournament is a limited group of meetings of more than two individuals or teams in which they play each other in turn. After a fixed number of encounters the ultimate winner of the whole test is usually the one who wins the most games. Some tournaments work by elimination, a loss removes one from the contest and the last standing is the winner. All of these forms can be transient, set up for one time only, or can be repeated periodically, a recurring event with a history and a tradition.

There is another social form based on the universal issue of distinguishing in from out. All gatherings of people implicitly, in their very togetherness set up an in-and-out distinction even if it is transient and with no other significance. But there are actual forms that consciously define members from non-members and use the distinction to distribute rights and duties and, frequently, to build and maintain a perceived advantage. In U.S.A. sports this formal identifier is called the league. It is a closed membership order of individuals or teams. They play, in the examples I know, an annual round of contests against each other and they refuse participation in this cycle to any outside team. It has the advantage of the combine or an exclusive club. The limit implies an advantage for the ins though this may be disputed by the outs.

My first inkling of my blindness was that the three professional sports of boxing, tennis and baseball were each organized in a specifically unique way. But the logic of these differences was not in the field itself. Each sport could have traded its organization with the others without loss of the way the game was played. The dominant mode of encounter within each professional sport is exchangeable with all the others. The actual configurations represent inventions and choices made by actors in the field. Man constructs his own social spaces. This capacity does not kick-in and stop but continues. It is endemic. The chosen form is embellished and encased by human actions within a constructed social order.

Boxing is organized around the challenge simple. Tennis around the short elimination tournament. And baseball into two formal leagues with annual elimination cycles. Since this observation they reorganized (note this) and set up a second elimination tournament at season’s end for specially selected clubs.

Yet these preferred ways can be switched. Boxers in the Olympics are involved in eliminations and are members of teams. In its early years itinerant baseball teams toured and played simple challenge games with local teams. And in tennis ordinary players are involved in informal challenges and team up in doubles play. So which forms are used and how in fact depends (again) on human decision.

Further into detail of human choice–the number of teams in a league, the particular rules governing play, the treatment of spectators, the scheduling of games, and etcetera–and the interventions of participants or special segments of insiders becomes obvious and the presumption of a naturally developing order outside of history becomes ridiculous.

For any established game order an historian, looking backward in time, could theoretically describe the sequence of steps or flex points when human initiated changes occurred and show how a particular order at time A has become another order at later time B. But in detail this can be a difficult task with events unrecorded, unremarked and unremembered. Lost does not mean non-existent.

Looking forward from time A the experience is different. The process could be goal directed, driving toward an envisioned end. Or it could be a line of casual responses, instant by instant, only focused on the here and now, going no one cares where. But in any event with each flex or change during the process the order at A becomes another social order at B, and each change will, in part at least, be evoked by a problematic (not known before hand) human intervention, recognized or not. I see this moment as the intrusion of human will and this involves invention (making-up) or discovery (finding) and their negations.

Other sports and games which existed in the past are no longer played, essentially do not actively exist now. (In Mexico and Central America in pre-Euro-invasion time they played a no hands basketball-like game).

Note the distinction between forms (patterns of human relationship that, when in place and permitted to continue, have discernible consequences) and interventions (new or modified patterns of relationship introduced by participants in the field.) We must recognize that the two types of events are not strictly categorical. The intervention comes into play as another form, and the decision to stop using a form is an intervention.

You can sense the willful intervention of man in the social field in the history of baseball. There was a shift early in the 19th century from a child’s game with bat and ball to a more serious variant played by youths. Rules varied and very little literary attention was paid until the Civil War when the game was played by Union soldiers, some of their encounters drew large numbers of spectators. It appears that the game continued as a popular local activity with informal teams and challenge meetings after that war and it come to literary attention around 1870 with the formation of a team in Cincinnati, trained and coordinated by a playing manager, that went on the road and visited and played challenge games with locals all over the Mid-West and the East with a very successful record. These men played for money and spectators paid to watch.

In case you are not convinced of how significant invention, innovation, discovery are on culture and social organization consider a few other obvious and even blatant changes in sports orderings over time. I will limit my examples but I am sure you will recall others from your own experience.

–Baseball (the American League) introduced the designated hitter and took the bat out of the pitcher’s hand–changing the order of the offensive team from the defensive team.

–Football introduced unlimited substitution. Before two teams of eleven players each met for an hour of head to head struggle. Now there are four squads of eleven separate players each. The game is no longer the pure test that it had been.

–Members of the several leagues have changed radically, franchises in different cities being exchanged for money. There are shifts in number of teams, number of players per team, style and material used in equipment and uniforms, the rise of player trade unions and agents to help manage player careers and money.

–The legal status of contracts of players and team owners and managers have changed radically. Players have gained some, but not all, free agent rights and, for some sports, conceded a cap on the total salaries paid to members of each team.

Invention is frequently associated with struggle. Segments or sectors of associated participants seeking relative advantage (in economic income, status, power, or identified ideology) form conflict fronts with their perceived opponents in the shared field.

Several themes (or fronts) emerged among supporters of the game of baseball: first the contest between amateurism and professionalism. Those who wanted the game to be an upper class activity, playing for pleasure and fellowship only (these are the people who financed the early clubs) against those who wanted to earn some money and turn a profit. The gentlemen were hardly appealing to a mass audience in any case. Their ideal was the meadow in the park with attention alternating between picnic and play.

A second theme was moral tone. Many of the working class players associated the game with drinking beer and chewing tobacco. They were not adverse to cursing, fighting and rowdy behavior. Many gentler families warned their sons against the sandlot game and there was a move within the game’s investors and managers against such loose living. This struggle continues episodically. The hell-bent, burning the candle at both ends attitude was a more general one, associated with illiteracy and semi-literacy. It permeated the entire social experience. Young men, foot-loose, unattached, living for the moment, associated with the frontier life, gold mining, oil field work and within the urban world the saloons and bawdy houses and Bowery bums. A great deal of moral energy was dedicated to the salvation of these men and boys and for the girls and women who comforted them for cash.

A third, moral and practical, concern was the quick entrance of gambling as a subsidiary of the game. And with gambling came the fix. One of the main pleasures of witnessing a game, the uncertainty of the outcome, was subverted, and this reduced the attraction of the game for spectators. So suppression of the gambling associations of players became paramount.

A fourth theme was segregation. The same wall that separated imputed Europeans from imputed Africans was applied to baseball. The segregation wasn’t totally perfect but the cracks were only around the edges. A few African Americans passed as South Americans, Middle-East emirs, Indian potentates. And at the sandlot level semi-pro teams of Euros and Afros played each other. But most of the Afro professional players were in a separate Negro League until Jackie Robinson’s break through.

These themes can be seen as fronts—contradictory ideas about how we should think, feel, and do carried by contending segments within a social field—that turn up in any and all sectors of society.

Another front: In baseball, players and investors/managers contested control of the rules of the game. Player control reduced discipline–refusal of practice, missing games, higher salaries demanded, skipping out on contracts in mid-season. The investors gained control at the same time they tightened the order of the league member clubs as well, for many clubs were undisciplined and under financed. Some players who cooperated with gamblers to fix games were expelled from the league for life and under-funded teams were dropped from league membership

Look around, spot human intervention for yourself in other fields. In selecting presidential candidates the substitution of primary elections for the smoke filled back room. The prohibition of alcohol as part of the fundamental law in the USA and its later repeal.

^^^

Beating a dead horse, belaboring the obvious. We can only observe a social field from within. For the moment we note that any social field can be described by at least three types of information: (1) Actors who are capable of sui generous (unpredictable) initiatives; (2) Interactions–actors contingent relationships with each other; (3) Abstract forms that, once initiated and kept in place, set identifiable consequences of their own. Forms like the challenge, tournament, elimination. Also the league, club, association and the more informal forms that establish a line (in-out) between field participants.

Please excuse a slightly technical note on method. Encouraging the concurrent observation of interventions amid social forms already in place allows us to combine the two time related ways of seeing traditionally used by sociologists–function (the tracking of consequences) and development (history of the changes in social order.) This might have always been obvious to others but I required the jolt toward insight I have described to actually notice and accept it.

Metaphorically emerging from the water soaking wet in the new insight, I hopefully begin to try for a slightly more realistic sociology.

And away we go.