CONCEPTUALIZING COMMITMENT: HOW COMMITMENT CAPITAL CREATES SOCIAL DISTINCTION IN FANDOMS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
No other form of entertainment or pastime has held the attention of contemporary consumers quite like professional sports. Despite atypical longevity of sports fan communities and the intensity of its members, scholars have yet to fully explore how theories of taste and capital apply to this unique and novel context. As such, this study uses a qualitative approach to grounded theory to investigate and analyze how Saskatchewan Roughrider football fans use ritual performances to distinguish themselves within their fandom. Data was collected in three phases and consisted of observational field studies at Saskatchewan Roughrider football games, in-depth interviews with hardcore Roughrider fans, and field interviews with new and non-fans. The findings that emerged provided three theoretical contributions. The first is a novel conceptualization of ‘commitment’, which can manifest as the ambit of one’s personal investment, embodied as commitment capital in the extents of one’s ritual performances, and in the form of socially scarce symbolic capital. The second is a class-based structure of collective hierarchy, which differentiates fans into different hierarchical tiers of fandom according to their associated attitudes, preferences, perceptions, and embodied practices. The third is combines my findings and existing theory to produce a clear illustration of how fans can augment the social distinction they attain by orienting their ritual performances to garner greater ‘legitimacy’. My research adds to consumer behaviour literature by creating a model of constituent distinction by sustaining how fans, through their ritual performances, can more effectively acquire symbolic capital, achieve higher distinction within their constituency, and even ascend to higher tiers of social hierarchy within the fan community.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".