Sporting chancers: Three Canadian corporations’ representations of sport-for-youth-development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of three Canadian corporations that used sport-for-youth-development (SYD) to fulfill part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR). Although the use of SYD has become an increasingly larger component of corporations’ CSR, there is a dearth of scholarship examining advertising texts produced by corporations, particularly by corporations other than Nike. This article directly addresses this lack, contributing to the growing body of critical examinations of corporate presentations of SYD in the Canadian context. We examined four televised commercials to describe the discursive strategies used by the corporations to authorize a particular notion of SYD. Specifically, we examined how the semiotic choices in the commercials signified key discourses related to SYD and how these elements were used to attempt to educate viewers on specific truths about childhood and youth sport. We were also interested in the underlying assumptions of these constructions and the power relationships underpinning them. Analysis of the three corporations’ texts revealed stark contradictions, difficulties, and tensions in their uses of SYD in televised commercials. We found that although the commercials presented some positive constructions of SYD, we argue that they predominantly produce and rely on several dominant discourses about youth sport, including: sport is a place of universal inclusivity, and sport has inherently “magical” qualities capable of providing all young people with contexts for positive youth development. We further argue that these CSR campaigns mirror the values of Canadian nationalism and construct SYD in a limited individualistic, consumerist manner that closely aligns with the ideologies of neoliberalism. These findings are important for researchers, educators, and SYD program developers, and we encourage other researchers to examine SYD in corporations’ CSR campaigns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".