Yeah, Still at the Library ~ 11/13/07

This will be a quick note today to say that I am moving ahead nicely with the field research and starting to get excited about it. Clearly the experience of doing this work will be good and not only because I will most likely be doing similar work again at graduate school. It is also going to be a real challenge, and an experience.

What I am thinking about at the moment is looking at how authority is imposed during a game and how players respond to this regulation. What is the source of regulation? Does the difference in source make a difference in how players respect each other? To observe these differences, I will need to locate a few different venues for the game, and find different conditions under which it is being played. For example, observing USM’s Huskies, observing the games in the Sullivan Gym, and observing games at Back Bay are all options. The point of looking at structured games and unstructured games (with Sullivan being somewhat in the middle) should be clear; their sources of authority are very different. In the unstructured game, there is no referee, no imperitive to respect the rules, so everything is based on trust. The structured game is very different in this regard, as it comes with formal referees, uniforms, punishments, and an obligation to the rules of the game. Looked at on paper, one would suspect the violence to be found predominantly in the first example, and the harmony and team spirit to exist in the second.

Less obvious is how this might shed light on the central questions of my thesis. As I watch individuals respond to authority and what their relationship is to the rules governing the game, I will also be thinking about how this relates to authority in a more general sense.