Author(s): HSU, S., LEE, Y.L., Institution: NATIONAL CHENG KUNG UNIVERSITY , Country: TAIWAN, Abstract-ID: 1798

This study examined the emotional experiences of elite athletes in Taiwan through the lens of Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling. While emotions such as motivation, anxiety, and pressure are often treated as individualized psychological states, this research situated them within the broader dynamics of organizational culture. For Williams, structures of feeling refer to emergent, lived experiences that precede formal articulation as ideology. Unlike stabilized notions of worldview or doctrine, he argued that thought itself is affectively constituted and that social meanings are mediated through embodied, relational experience. The term “structure” does not imply rigidity; rather, it highlights the patterned tensions and interrelations among cultural elements that generate both coherence and contradiction. Extending this framework to elite sport, this study conceptualized sport organizations not merely as administrative systems of policy and resource distribution, but as formative cultural sites in which emotional attachments, tensions, and negotiations are produced and reproduced. Because Williams devoted limited attention to organizational processes, his framework was complemented by Joanne Martin’s (1992) three perspectives on organizational culture—integration, differentiation, and fragmentation. Martin’s model provides an analytic vocabulary for operationalizing Williams’ insights by specifying how emotions are structured through shared values, subcultural divisions, and cultural ambiguity. Together, these frameworks enabled a multi-layered analysis of how affect circulates within institutional settings. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with eight current elite athletes (five women and three men), the study examined how athletes’ affective lives were shaped and negotiated within Taiwan’s sport institutions. Guided by Martin’s three perspectives, the findings revealed the tensions and contradictions that organized athletes’ emotional attachments and dislocations. Specifically, the analysis identified: (1) an integrative discourse of national glory and collective excellence that fostered pride and obligation; (2) conflicts and ruptures across organizational subcultures that generated strain and ambivalence; and (3) fragmented and shifting cultural practices that produced unstable forms of emotional support. By situating athletes’ narratives within the politics of sport governance, this study demonstrates how organizational culture mediates both flourishing and vulnerability in elite sport. In doing so, it contributes to sociological debates on affect and culture by showing how structures of feeling are formed, contested, and reconfigured within the institutional ecology of competitive sport.
Reference:
Martin, J. (1992). Cultures in organizations: Three perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. New York: Oxford University Press.