Structural Functionalism Paradigm In Sport

1.

In the perspective of a sport historian, I would employ Marxism as an approach out of the four paradigms discusses in lecture 7. I would use this paradigm because this is the approach that I began to approach the sociology of sports from after taking the course KIN 140. We learned about how sport has a different meaning from athlete to athlete, and how sports affect spectators differently than they affect the athletes themselves. This almost lines up perfectly with the aspects of the Marxism paradigm, and since I had a lot of practice with this approach in my class, I think it would be the most beneficial for me because it would come most naturally. I selected this approach instead of the Structural-Functionalism approach, because a disadvantage of this approach is that it generally does not address disparities in sporting between groups. Also, a con of Modernization is that seems to imply that sports have to be formal and organized now, and cannot exist as informal, unorganized play. Furthermore, I thought that both of these aspects of sports were important and should be addressed, and an advantage of the Marxism paradigm is that these two aspects above can fit into this. Lastly, a con of Postmodernism is that it is an outlier and I did not believe that it would make sense to use this paradigm in this context since it denies historical writing to be accurate.

2.

I personally find that the moderate position on the scale of the confidence and expectation in reasoning scale to be the most comfortable. I say this because I am a realist. From this, I could be found within the moderate or high position on the scale. However, the adjective of “fallibilistic” describes me much more than absolutism and rationalism do. I truly feel as though having a complete knowledge of a subject cannot be possible, and that there is always more to