|  | Feature: “Ethical Issues in Coaching” | No.58 January 2010 |
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The Politics of Evidence in Sport: Thoughts on Coaching Ethics Jim Denison |
Introduction Successful regimes always have their casualties. A university track team, for example, grows large and strong because of its results, its winning ways and the attraction this has to recruits. Imagine, then, a boy, a talented runner in everyone’s estimation, drawn to such a team because of the promises he envisioned: promise in himself, promise in the future. On the surface, it was impossible to deny the evidence of this programme’s superiority: splendid trophies rising high in glass cases, fabulous school records, grand budgets and pristine facilities. Collectively, they represented what this team stood for. So not much else was reported, not much else was known, about the coach’s philosophy or style, for example, or the people and processes in place to provide support and care. Over time, this boy began to realise that those “other” qualities were also important to him, but that no one else seemed to be concerned about them because they were so busy working out how to win more trophies, set faster school records, amass bigger budgets and build new facilities. When eventually he stopped growing as a runner and more, and his performances began to decline, all the coach could manage to say to him was, “You must not have been that talented after all.” According to Denzin and Giardina (2008) “the politics of evidence cannot be separated from the ethics of evidence” (p. 21, italics original). In making this argument, they were referring to developments in social science research, and the need for qualitative research, specifically, to be judged legitimate and critical to various policy decisions despite its sometimes “messy” nature. As they explained, to respond to concerns that only have the weight of evidence behind them would be to disregard, dismiss or omit from consideration a host of problems and issues. Without the evidence to see a problem, they asked, does the problem then not exist? For example, consider a male runner who is in pain, who is injured. Questions could easily arise about his pain tolerance, his toughness (read masculinity) or his commitment without any evidence on-hand to verify the problem—an X-ray, swelling, bleeding or some other wound. In this way, his credibility, his “character”, could be scrutinised by others, and most certainly his coach, possibly leading to a number of abuses or pressures that might actually worsen the situation. Or consider another case involving a runner, this time a girl. All the evidence indicated that she was getting in shape, and getting there fast: a declining percentage of body fat, an increasing strength to weight ratio, a declining resting heart rate, an increasing maximal oxygen uptake. How then to explain her total collapse—having to be carried off the track on a stretcher—halfway through her final race of the season? The attending paramedic asked her coach, “Couldn’t you see this girl was starving herself?” “But her food logs were always completed to perfection: energy expended equalled by calories consumed,” the coach replied. Apparently that was all the evidence of a proper diet he needed: a balance sheet of debits matched by credits, what could be written down in four neat columns, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Snack. These examples from the world of running have left me to ask, how do coaches know when their actions might be unethical? The evidence of this is not always clear. Take overtraining. What is too much work for an athlete? Or what is the wrong work for an athlete? The science here is vague. To understand how athletes adapt and respond to training requires a sensitivity and awareness that transcends reading weights, measures and progressions (Richardson, Andersen and Morris, 2008); when a coach relies on “hard” evidence to make training decisions, a great deal of relevant information can go unexamined: mood, context, relationships. Moreover, any problems that might result from this neglect are unlikely to receive much attention because no clear evidence of overtraining was ignored by the coach—what might otherwise be termed unethical coaching. However, one could argue that a coach’s greatest responsibility has been ignored in such cases: his or her duty to care for his or her athletes. In this way, relying on hard evidence can seemingly make it easy for coaches to be ethical. When according to McNamee (1998), coaches’ ethics need to encompass an awareness of “problems” and “abuses” that might not always be so obvious. In Pursuit of Ethics Using a Foucauldian frame of reference, Shogan (2007) made the case for the application of ethics in sport to include far more than breaking rules. As she explained, “Problems that are…accepted as legitimate effects of attempting to meet the ‘accepted’ demands of one’s sport are seldom seen as ethical problems” (p. 124). Similarly, König (1995) asked in his criticism of doping as an antiquated view of sport ethics, “who takes care of the army of nameless ones [athletes], who ruined their bodies for the rest of their lives by using ‘normal’ technological aids in sport?” (p. 250). In other words, there is certainly something ironic about the wholesale condemnation of doping because its [ab]use can be evidenced while doctors, lawyers, sports administrators, parents, and of course fans, ignore the many constitutive and taken-for-granted (read invisible and unproblematised) practices of high-performance sport that sees some coaches making demands of their athletes that are much riskier to their health and performance potential than a medically supervised doping program. So it is that, the fight against doping, waged so fervently by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its many partners, such as the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA), has led to the creation of functions and procedures that frame their actions as caring and benevolent—to protect athletes’ health, to rid out bad role models for children. In other words, only through evidence-based research, that meets the highest standards of “quality” scientific research, will the IOC and WADA gain the public’s trust in their war against drugs and continue to receive government funding to “clean-up sport”. Accordingly, “when ethics becomes part of the operating discourses producing evidence, these discourses gain additional, unexpected powers and general acceptance” (Koro-Ljungberg, Gemignani, Chaplin, Hayes and Hsieh, 2009, p. 502). So where is the politics of evidence debate in sport? More specifically, for coach educators, how do we ensure that our research doesn’t just serve as an uncritical problem solving technology? For if it does, we run the risk of losing our influence to create change and challenge coaches’ ethics or the various normalising practices found in sport. Further, the need for evidence of just one particular type could potentially downplay the underlining complexities and uncertainties of coaching. As Markula and Martin (2007) showed, many ethical problems coaches face are too complex to be solved in a simple, controlled and easily governed manner. However, evidence based practices are seen as especially attractive to policy makers and administrators because they aim to rationalise and simplify complex social processes and ethical dilemmas. As a result, many difficulties, differences and troubles are silenced and erased as researchers’ attention gets directed away from problems based on power relations, cultural differences, values and multiple viewpoints that can lead to conflict and disagreement. In addition, according to Villenas (2006, p. 666), “those researchers who are situated in and work from non-dominant discourses and paradigms are required to take a stance of committed partner or clear-cut role of resistor.” Or as Koro-Ljungberg et al (2009) explained, “researchers’ commitments and non-commitments to desirable and controllable forms of evidence either grant legitimacy or result in exclusion, which permits disciplines to control and shape the subjectification practices for the work and life possibilities of researchers” (p. 500). It is in this way, therefore, that the act of research involves thinking about one’s own subject position in relation to regimes of power and knowledge. And for Foucault (1980), how an individual acquired an identity within power relations was crucial to analyse in order to know how people understand their ethics, who they are, what they do, why and with what effects. For many coach educators, given the dominant bio-science model of sport performance that values evidence-based research to enhance athletes’ performances, the possibilities of identity formation have been constrained by specific definitions and limitations of what sports scientists, and to an extent practicing coaches, value as legitimate research. And according to Hann (2002), it is this relation between truth and identity that is the basis of subjectivation and, accordingly, how “individuals construct themselves through pre-established norms, and therefore become subjects not only politically, but also by recognising themselves within social constructed forms of subjectivity” (p. 150). It is in this way, that the regime of truth established by the evidence-based movement in sports science promotes the development of specific subjectivation practices in the “identity developments and reality perceptions of researchers, who are forced into choosing between embracing the standards of evidence-based science or being excluded” (Koro-Ljungberg et al, 2009, p. 501). Conclusion As I conclude, I am left to question, what should my relationship to evidence and ethics be? How should I position myself as a coach educator knowing that I am dependent on evidence to participate in conversations concerning ethical coaching? Clearly these are important questions to consider as I reflect on my actions, goals and ethics as a social science researcher caught within the tensions of ambiguity and the quest for certainty. Clearly these are important questions for me to answer so that I may better understand my assumptions regarding knowledge and the ethics of coaching. And what is the answer? Invoking Foucault (1980), I don’t believe there is one answer, but a step forward could be the importance of actively problematising everything I do. Otherwise, how will I ever know if my research is actually doing more harm than good? References Denzin, N.K. and Giardina, M. (2008). (Eds.). Qualitative inquiry and the politics of evidence. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. Pantheon Books, New York. Hann, B. (2002). Foucault’s critical project: Between the transcendental and the historical. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. König, E. (1995). Criticism of doping: The Nihilistic side of technological sport and the antiquated view of sport ethics. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 30, 247-261. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Gemignani, M., Chaplin, S., Hayes, S. and Hsieh, I.H. (2009). “Mission civilisatrice”: Fixing scientific evidence and other practices of neo-colonialism in social sciences. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1, 491-514. Markula, P. and Martin, M. (2007). Ethical coaching: Gaining respect in the field. In J. Denison (Ed.), Coaching knowledges: Understanding the dynamics of sport performance (pp. 51-82). Oxford: AC Black. McNamee, M. (1998). Celebrating trust: Virtues and rules in the ethical conduct of sports coaches. In M. McNamee and J. Parry (Eds.), Ethics & Sport (pp. 148-168). London: E & FN Spon. Richardson, D., Andersen, T. and Morris, R. (2008). Overtraining in sport: Towards a holistic perspective.Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Shogan, D. (2007). Sport ethics in context. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Villenas, S. (2006). Latina/Chicana feminist postcolonialities: Un/tracking educational actors’ interventions. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19, 659-672. Contact Dr. Jim Denison University of Alberta Alberta, Canada Email: jim.denison@ualberta.ca http://www.icsspe.org