The Professionalization of Action Sports

How do lifestyle or extreme sports become professionalized?

This book, published with Holly Thorpe, explores the main transformations at stake in the field, offering novel insights into the changing structures of the action sports industry and their effects on athletes, coaches, agents, and cultures. Such trends came to the fore in the inclusion of surfing, skateboarding, sport climbing, and BMX freestyle into the Tokyo Olympic Games. 

We explore the working lives of action sports athletes, specifically their social media practices and the commercial pressure from sponsors, and we also provide key insights into the institutionalization and professionalization of action sports amid ongoing processes of globalization, commodification, and incorporation. 

The book reveals how different action sports (i.e., snowboarding, surfing, kiteboarding, parkour, climbing, skateboarding) and countries are at various stages in the professionalization process, with local, national, and international responses and reactions to such trends differing considerably.

Available here.