Scholarly Research and the Future of Body Aesthetics in the Sport Marketing Literature

Scholarly Research and the Future

in the Sport Marketing Literature

INTRODUCTION

The cultural implications of body aesthetics are prominent in every culture and have a strong influence on the way men and women are perceived. Across the world, different cultural perceptions uphold an ideal of beauty that is linked to sexual appeal and social status. In this paper, we will outline some socio-cultural behavioral descriptors that influence perceived body aesthetics. In particular, we will focus on providing a better understanding of the construct of perceived body aesthetics in the marketing literature. This discussion will incorporate a series of empirical evidence that will confirm the need of reframing the construct of body aesthetics and to confirm that body ideals are different among cultures. We will try to understand that body image concerns from the standpoint of perceived body aesthetics, rather than body aesthetics, may be a more productive and inclusive approach to the study of socially and culturally diverse young customers of sporting goods. The discussion will end with interesting implications for policy-makers and sport marketing scholars.

Body dissatisfaction is important because of its established association (e.g., Silverstein and Perlik 1995) with depression, low self-esteem, and disordered eating. Much of the research on body dissatisfaction and particularly research on disordered eating, has focused on the effect of the extremely slender ideal female body types found in Western Europe and North America. By the late 1960s, the voluptuous "sweater girls" of the 1940s and 1950s had been replaced by very slender, almost boy-like, fashion models (Lamb et al. 1993). Objective measures of cultural beauty ideals such as Playboy centerfolds and beauty pageant winners have confirmed this trend (Garner et al. 1980; Morris, Cooper and Cooper 1989; Wiseman et al. 1992). As many authors have noted (e.g. Garner et al. 1980; Rodin, Silberstein and Striegel-Moore 1984), for most women this extremely slender body type is both unhealthy and unobtainable. It is thus not surprising that adoption of the thin body ideal has been paralleled by women's decreasing satisfaction with their bodies (Feingold and Mazzella 1998). As Brumberg (1997) and many others have noted, it seems paradoxical that at the very time when social changes have greatly increased available roles and opportunities for women, social expectations of female body types have become increasingly rigid and unrealistic, deviations from these expectations have produced increasingly negative social reactions and self-evaluations, and large numbers, probably the majority, of young Western women have learned to judge their bodies by unhealthy, unrealistic, and unobtainable standards.

The rapid decline of socialism and the adoption of market economies have produced enormous social and political changes in Eastern Europe. Some authors have argued that the socialist system, with its emphases on egalitarianism, rejection of traditional views of femininity, and lack of objectification of female bodies, protected women from excessive concerns with physical appearance, the tyranny of the thin body ideal, and disordered eating (Catina, Boyadjieva and Bergner 1996; Catina and Joja 2001; Silverstein and Perlik, 1995). Even if this assessment is correct, these protections were lost with the decline of the socialist system and the development of market economies. It seems very likely that the loss of these protections, combined with the enormous social and economic stresses associated with the rapid introduction of Western values and the rapidly changing roles of women, have contributed to the marked increase in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in eastern Europe (Bilukha and Utermohlen 2002; Catina and Joja 2001; Papezova 2002; Rathner 2001). New visual media and technologies, infotainment, virtual reality, corporate image-projection, video games, internet voyeurism and many other developments all in their own ways reinforced the importance of appearances in things and attractiveness in persons. Institutions that have traditionally aimed to subordinate appearances, such as the church and the university, are scrambling to adapt to a generation with historically unprecedented visual receptivity.

We believe that we need to look critically at lookism. In our society, aesthetic capital, like other kinds of capital, is unequally distributed. Due to our increasing sensitivity to discrimination, it is gaining status as a discussable issue in public policy, which we will review in the Discussion section.

Consumer Researcher and the Body

The strong silence in the field of consumer behavior concerning the body, (despite the historical role the body has played in marketing practice), is contrasted by the impressive force with which it consumes the attention of scholars in various other fields; cultural studies, social history, literary criticism, phenomenology, feminism, postmodernism and post-structuralism, and media studies (Bordo 1003; Featherstone 1991; Foucault 1979). Although there are no specific causallinks between these various academic discourses, there seem to be many common philosophical threads running through them. One has to wonder why, lately, so much attention has been directed towards the body and consumer culture in these disciplines, for in the popular mind, this is not the stuff that these disciplines are made of. One possible reason is the realization that consumer culture cannot be separated from the broader manifestations of culture at large and, in fact, is integral to it. There has been a growing tendency in recent years to unite high and low cultures, and to regard everyday practices that circumscribe the low culture as providing a key to a true and complete understanding of the culture in its entirety. In this regard, the burgeoning literature on "human body," originally the site of low culture, has become central to postmodernist, poststructuralist, and feminist discourses on the mind-body relationship and to the cultural constructions of human body (Frank 1990).

An examination of the recent literature suggests that the female body, which historically was dismissed as a benign preoccupation of market culture, has entered the realm of feminist critique (Jaggar and Bordo 1989). By all accounts, the female body has been indispensable to the growth of market culture (Odih 2000; Sayre 2000). In the "real-world" of marketing practices, the inscription of the body on consumerist ethos has been compelling. With the emergence of televisual culture (e.g. MTV), there has been further objectification and glorification of the human body in the electronic media (Elliott and Elliott 2005). Kaplan (1987) examines the relevant issues under the socially constructed category of "gaze" in media culture. Very few consumer products are sold without at least an allusion to the human body. Looking around us, we see the full force of marketing linking the body to numerous products and services - perfumes, fashion, clothing, dining, all kinds of sensual and pleasurable objects, exercise machines, fitness centers, dietary products, cosmetic surgical procedures and the like. One wonders whether marketing/consumer culture could survive without the millions of dollars spent annually promoting body culture and on products and services, whose images fill countless advertising pages. In both traditional and modern cultures, the human body generally has been regarded with a certain awe and respect, but only in modern industrial cultures has the body been exploited with full-scale vigor (Feher 1989; Gallagher and Laqueur 1987). The body is acted upon in so many ways - clothed, shaped, painted with lotions and creams, and loathed if it does not meet the aesthetic norms of commodity culture. Marketing and consumer practices in the last half a century have derived considerable economic benefits by positioning the human body as the piece of resistance of consumer culture (Featherstone 1991; Joy and Venkatesh 1994). While academic consumer researchers were ignoring the body completely, the marketing industry was making billions of dollars by selling products closely tied to it and, ultimately, by selling the body itself as the central concept of contemporary life. This relentless marketing activism has produced a consumer culture so dominated by body culture that bodily images have become the most visible of all objects as well as the instruments of current commodification. In other words, what was invisible to academic researchers was always the most visible tool of market culture.

It seems, though, body aesthetics is also defined by cultural constructs that have changed throughout time. Ideal beauty varies in different societies around the world. Western culture at this time has embraced the fashion model as an exemplar - greatly because we are constantly inundated with these images, which are ironically far from the norm. We find beauty in familiar physical traits, particularly those images portrayed in the media. Just looking at a fashion magazine tends to leave men and women less satisfied with their weight and size.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: The Concept of Body in Consumer Research

An overview

Society places an immense emphasis on body image: so much so that body image plays an important role in nearly every human activity. Body image is a multidimensional construct, that involves internal biological and psychological factors as well as external cultural and social factors (Cash and Pruzinsky 1990; Geller et al. 2000; Petersen et al. 1984) and it has been established as an important aspect of self-worth and mental health across the life span (Harter 1988, 1998, 1999). Several studies have demonstrated that body image as well as overall satisfaction with self undergoes change during adolescence years (Fabian and Thompson, 1989; Thompson et al. 1999), partially in response to bodily changes associated with puberty. A negative self-evaluation during this time of developmental transition for young females often leads to body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem, as well as to increased incidents of depressive reactions and to eating-disordered behaviors (Ackard and Peterson 2001; Button et al. 1997; Davies and Furnham 1986; Petersen, Sarigiani and Kennedy 1991).

In the following sections, we review the literature on the body as a metaphor and the postmodern view of the concept of the body, in order to be leaded to the conceptual framework of the "perceived body aesthetics" construct.

Metaphors we live by

Within the social sciences as a whole, the body as metaphor has manifested itself in many ways. Terms such as "the cosmic body," "the body politic," "the social body," and "the body of believers" are used to emphasize the contours of the disciplinary thought in the social sciences. In art, the human body is the representation of nature, truth, and the sublime. In consumer behavior, the term "consumption" itself presupposes the body (Firat 1991; Solomon 2006) and Gentry, Commuri and Jun (2003) have argued that it is also gendered. In consumer research, until recently, consumption, has been viewed merely as purchase behavior that is, a disembodied phenomenon, and this interpretation has had a direct bearing on the marginalization of feminine perspectives (Solomon 2006). The machine metaphor, a derivative of Enlightenment philosophy that has been pervasive in consumer research, was also based on the belief that human endeavors could be modeled after the functions of the machine (an inanimate body). Such a metaphor was apropos, given the pervasive mechanization of society. Even the advances in medicine have tended to reinforce the mechanistic, dualistic and reductionistic constructions of the body (Synnott 1993).

According to Thompson, Locander and Pollio (1989), the machine metaphor, borrowed from theories in cognitive psychology, is probably the most prominent theme in consumer research and likens humans to information-processing devices. The dominance of the machine metaphor is also evidence of the silence regarding the body in consumer research. We argue that we study consumption, typically an activity associated with the animate body, yet we shape our thinking with metaphors that portray consumers as inanimate machines. Thompson, Locander and Pollio (1989, p. 134) note that the manifestations of such assumptions take the form of methodological prescriptions in consumer research - the use of and causal laws for enacting social practice. Marxists, argues Hirschman (1993), have been extremely critical of the machine metaphor because it represents the dominance of labor by capital. Feminists likewise have rejected this particular metaphor, because it values technological production over human reproduction. Machines act but do not feel. The machine metaphor has become so pervasive that we no longer liken people to computers but think of them as computers and evaluate their performance based on mechanical strength.

The Cartesian dualism of mind/body distinctions also gave rise to other metaphors of the body that privileged the mind over the body, such as "homoeconomicus." The use of such a metaphor creates a particular textual reality that appears to be fixed. Homoeconomicus forces us to think of human consumption behavior as primarily economic in character and eliminates consideration of other aspects of consumption, such as hedonism or symbolism. Maximization of gain and rationality have come to be regarded the cornerstones of economic activity. Even when consumers have been discussed in a context such as information processing, they have been regarded as rational problem solvers who carefully consider the objective features and functional benefits of products and services. The use of such a metaphor based on rationality brings to prominence the mind-body dualism that privileges the mind and cognitive activity over the body and emotional or physical labor (Bristor and Fischer 1993). As Hirschman (1993, p. 545) observes, from a marxist and/or feminist perspective, such ideology is distorted and incomplete, because it excludes all other forms of social behavior other than contractual relationships. The rational economic model of consumption has now given way to more affective modes of consumption, but the gendering of the consumer, as for instance in "man as computer," still is privileged in the literature (Belk 1987).

However, analyses that are more recent have highlighted a number of characteristics of consumption building upon the existing body of literature that have not been readily acknowledged in the past (see Table 1):

TABLE 1

Characteristics of Consumption Building upon the Existing Body of Literature

The above points are a selective summary of these recent studies, but highlight the seedchange in thinking about the nature, value and importance of consumption in shaping economic change and including innovation. In particular, such studies stress that to be an effective consumer involves time and resources. Thus they in part take up part of Lancaster's (1966, 1971, 1991) theory of consumer choice, in that the consumer needs to be an active agent and invest in time and resources to build up capabilities to consume effectively. These studies, in highlighting the development of consumer competences and routines, also echo and build upon Stigler and Becker's (1977, p. 78) neo-classical concept of the accumulation of 'consumption capital'. Just as innovations require considerable investment to produce, so do consumers need to invest in new capabilities and routines to consume them.

Body and post-modernism

Post-modernism, for Jameson (1991, p. xii), is "not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order ..., but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself." This modification has resulted in post-modern capitalism, in Jameson's view, the purest form of capital yet to emerge. Everything now has become a commodity, and by its transformation into a commodity, a thing of whatever type has been reduced to a means for its own consumption, so that "immanent intrinsic satisfactions" (Jameson 1992, p. 11) from activities are lost as everything becomes means to an end. Here, where modernism could "critique the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself," (Jameson 1991, p. 1), post-modernism is the "consumption of sheer commodification as a process" (Jameson 1991, p. 1). The reach of this form of capitalism is vastly extended: it is globalized so that it reaches outwards, but it has also crucially, moved into previously uncommodified areas including a colonization of the unconscious, whereby everything in our social lives is penetrated by capitalism. Significantly for this current analysis, this stage of capitalism is essentially aesthetic and located within the "single protean sense" (Jameson 1992, p. 1) of the visual, so much so that were an ontology of this "artificial, person-produced universe" (Jameson 1992, p. 1) still possible, it would have to be an "ontology of the visual, of being as the visible first and foremost, with the other senses draining off it; all the fights about power and desire have to take place here, between the mastery of the gaze and the illimitable richness of the visual object" (Jameson 1992, p. 1). It is thus through the visual that post-modern capitalism is able to penetrate into the psyche and it is the psyche, which is the locus where individuals transform themselves into commodities, designed for their own consumption.

There are no references to the aesthetics of the body in Jameson's work, but writers within the sociology of the body have developed similarly Baudrillardian-inspired ideas to show how the body is achieved through commodification and consumption. Falk (1994), for example, argues that the body is profoundly connected with the sense of self - "I consume therefore I am." It has become an outward sign of inward moral standing (Lupton 1995) and, most influentially, a bearer of symbolic value (Shilling 1993). The body within consumer culture, Shilling proposes in an argument, which complements Jameson's, is increasingly central to self-identity, related to reflexively, and a project to be worked on, constructed, and consumed.

The sociology of the body lacks the vital political dimension first added by Turner (1984) and later by Jameson, but the overlap between the objects of their analysis, cultural products and, the commodified, constituted body within sociology of the body, suggests the two perspectives can be fruitfully united (Turner 1996). This union produces a body that is (a) constructed and consumed within a capitalist economy whereby bodies are used in the undertaking of the role of worker in the production of goods and services and so contribute to surplus value, and (b) as consumer of capitalist goods, which maintain and constitute the commodified body, and so contribute to profits.

Compare this with Bollas' (1993, 1995) theory of the self, located within a post-modernist object-relations theory which sees the self as a set of idiomatic selves which depend upon significant objects for their elaboration. In Bollas' words, the self is an "internal object" that is "fashioned from several sources: from an inner feel of the authorizing aesthetic that gives polysemous (not unitary) shape to one's being; from an inner feel of internal objects which are the outcome of the other's effect upon one's self; from the shape of discrete episodes of self experience" (Bollas 1995, p. 173). This "internal object," this "phenomenon of the real," is, he argues, the result of our moving through our lives as a unique set of evolving theories that generate insights and new perspectives about ourselves (Bollas 1995, p. 69). The theories arise from the effect of objects upon us: people, music, artworks, artifacts, whatever, they "move through" us like ghosts, inhabiting our minds, and conjured up when we evoke their names (Bollas 1993, pp. 56-57) as we may do in the conscious or unconscious thought processes through which we dream ourselves into being. Thoughts of objects indeed form countless trains, thousands of ideational routes, leading to an explosive creation of meanings which meet up with new units of life experience (Bollas 1995, p. 55).

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: Definition of "perceived body aesthetics"

Based on the most recent definitions about aesthetics, we will try to understand that body image concerns from the standpoint of perceived body aesthetics, rather than body aesthetics, may be a more productive and inclusive approach to the study of socially and culturally diverse young customers of sporting goods because not only socially and culturally diverse individuals don't adopt and imitate the same body ideals but each individual develops a totally unique system of perceptions regarding to body aesthetics. Such a conceptualization raises the notion of the "consumption of symbolic meaning" (Elliot 1997) and has a direct impact in targeting and marketing communications planning of sporting organizations, where young customers of sporting goods becoming "active" (see the recent marketing research reports produced by "Scottish Consumer Council" and the "MarketResearch.com). This means, "The consumption of symbolic meaning, particularly through the use of advertising as a cultural commodity, provides the individual with the opportunity to construct, maintain, and communicate identity and social meanings."

'Aesthetics', introduced to name that area of philosophy concerned with art and beauty, is a relatively recent rubric - it was first used in this sense in Germany in the 18face=+Superscript; thface=-Superscript; century. The word itself is from the Greek and its root meaning, very broadly, is any kind of sensory experience, regardless of whether or not this expereince is felt to be 'beautiful' and also whether the cause of this experience is natural. If this meaning is preserved, then the experiences that concern us here are based on, or include as an essential element, objects that originally appeal in some special way to sensation and perception.

From its beginning, with Plato and Aristotle, the history of philosophy encompasses a rich of reflection on the experience of beauty and on the nature of art as a distinctively human cause of beauty.

These experiences are examined within the context of philosophical, psychological, and social science perspectives on aesthetics. A distinction is made between aesthetic products and aesthetic consumption, and these two concepts are discussed in terms of marketing views of their core elements. Charter's review (2006) reflected the impact of "postmodernism" on aesthetics within marketing. Consideration was given to four philosophical conundrums relating to the aesthetic experience, which are relevant to marketing theory: disinterested attention; objective and subjective taste; the nature of the aesthetic encounter; and the relationship of evaluation to preference.

In modern literature, aesthetics is approached as a form of knowledge based upon the senses. Here, we follow Strati (2000) and Carter and Jackson (2000), who distinguish usefully between two senses of aesthetic: one which refers to judgments about taste, where the aesthetics are a property of some object and thus are external to the individual; and the other which refers to the emotional response experienced by an individual in relation to some externality, where the aesthetics are a property of the individual rather than the externality. It is this latter sense we use to inform this paper, which sees aesthetics as a process of knowing through tacit knowledge, and understanding achieved through empathy, which allows a contamination of the verbal by the visual and all the other senses (Strati 2000). The aesthetic works through processes of mimesis which involve "imitating, then bricolating and innovating with the behavior and symbols of others" (Linstead 2000, p. 63), so that an aesthetic response of subject to object involves an opening up to the object so that it works upon us, unselfconsciously, without the usual comprehensions of significance, meaning, interest or cause and effect, resulting in responses which are pre-conscious, beyond words, and therefore can clash with conscious, logical apprehensions.

TABLE 2

Conceptual Framework: The two tested theories

Based on the above theoretical background and in order to study the major objective of this paper, we formulate the following research propositions (Pface=+Subscript; vface=-Subscript; ):

Pface=+Subscript; 1face=-Subscript; : Does ethnicity influences positive body image attitudes attitudes and how it can be

measured empirically?

Pface=+Subscript; 2face=-Subscript; : Does gender role development influences positive body image attitudes and how it can be

measured empirically?

Pface=+Subscript; 3face=-Subscript; : Do gendered personality traits influence positive body image attitudes and how

it can be measured empirically?

Pface=+Subscript; 4face=-Subscript; : Do advertising and sports media influence body dissatisfaction attitudes and how it can

be measured empirically?

Based on the conceptualization of "perceived body aesthetics," through the following literature review we aim to identify the factors that can influence an individual's body image attitudes and individual's body dissatisfaction and how this influence can be measured empirically, in order to be leaded to a better understanding of the construct of perceived body aesthetics in the sport marketing context.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Does ethnicity influence positive body image attitudes and how it can be measured empirically?

Although all students experience ecological and social changes at the transition to college, they differ in their body image concerns. Historically, studies have included mostly European Americans, and have found that women express greater dissatisfaction than men do with their appearance and weight, and they place greater importance on and invest more in their appearance than men do (Mintz and Betz 1986; Muth and Cash 1997). In contrast, other work illustrates that men and women experience similar levels of discontent with their bodies when controlling for the direction of dissatisfaction (Cohn and Adler, 1992; Tantleff-Dunn and Thompson 1995). Specifically, Cohn and Adler found that most women want to be thinner, whereas men are fairly split in their desire to be thinner or heavier.

Research work on body image has included individuals from different ethnic groups. Studies that compared African American and European American women on body image have generally shown that African American women report more positive body image attitudes, including lower body dissatisfaction and more relaxed criteria for fatness (Molloy and Herzberger 1998; Rucker and Cash 1992). More recent work with Latina women has yielded mixed findings. Some work shows that European American women are more dissatisfied with their bodies than are Mexican American and Spanish women (Warren et al. 2005), yet other work indicates that Latina girls are more dissatisfied with their bodies than are female adolescents from other ethnic groups (including European Americans and African Americans; Neumark-Sztainer et al. 2002). Few studies, however, have tested sex and ethnic differences in body image together. Of those that did test both, some point to overall ethnic differences, such that African Americans report more favorable body image attitudes than European Americans and Latino/a Americans (Altabe 1998; Miller et al. 2000). Yet, others indicate no significant differences among these groups (Demarest and Allen 2000). Based on this previous work, we expected to find sex and ethnic differences in body image, and possible interactions between them as well.

Recently, Abrams and Stormer (2004) evidenced about the functionality of the SATAQ research instrument (Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire), in order to measure empirically ethnicity influences to positive body image attitudes.

Does gender role development influence positive body image attitudes and how it can be measured empirically?

Cultural and societal standards regarding desirable body characteristics such as thinness have become unrealistic for young women within the past twenty years (Thomas and James 2004). Adolescent males are also vulnerable to the pressure to attain the "ideal" male body. Very often, the "ideal" and "actual" body type will not or cannot coincide even with excessive exercising, and this leads to body image dissatisfaction for both males and females. Young adolescents are well aware of the cultural criteria for attractiveness through the news media, television and magazines. Media emphasis on possessing a muscular build for males and unrealistic thinness for females may have increased the percentage of young adolescents wishing to fit the "ideals." It seems appropriate try to understand the developmental precursors and concomitant factors that are related to body image in order to comprehend the complexity of the self. It is also important to provide data on body image in non-clinical adolescents rather than promulgating studies within the narrow limits of the field of eating disorders. Sports requiring a thin build have been reported in the literature as being obvious places for adolescent females to develop eating disorders (Burns 1997). However, it is not known whether this phenomenon exists across a wider range of sports and body types. For professional sportsmen and women this relationship with the body is additionally complex. Not only is it the vehicle for performance - sports after all involve an engagement in movement and motion of the body in given ways - but it is increasingly the site of an intersection between processes of 'hypercommodification' (Giulianotti 2002) and the disciplinary mechanisms of sports science being performed upon the athlete's body; partially enforced through the panopticon of the media gaze (Cashmore 2000) which aims to ensure the replication of appropriate sports bodies. New social pressures to appear sexy and perfect (Williams and Cash 2001) also surround sports participants.

Recently, Thomsen, Bower and Barnes (2004) observed that the social comparison process heavily influences body image. Although the self-evaluations of physical ability are predominantly positive, evaluations of body image are frequently negative and appear to be exacerbated by photographic poses that emphasize an athlete's aesthetic beauty rather than her athletic prowess.

Perhaps more important than the documentation of mean differences between men's and women's body image is the explanation of these differences. Examination of within group variation, specifically men's and women's gender role development, may help to do so. Gender role development is a multifaceted, context-dependent process that includes the development of gendered personality traits, such as masculinity and femininity, and gender role attitudes, such as beliefs about men and women career roles (Deaux and Major 1987; McHale, Updegraff, Helms-Erikson and Crouter 2001). Because body image is intimately connected to gender (Schroeder and Borgerson 2004), it is important to examine whether and how it relates to gender role development--the attitudes and traits that define the essence of masculinity and femininity. Although previous researchers have examined body image and its relation to either gendered personality traits or gender role attitudes (e.g., Cash, Ancis and Strachan, 1997; Jackson, Sullivan and Rostker 1988), to our knowledge, no one has examined them together from a gender role development framework.

Recently, Gillen and Lefkowitz (2006) evidenced about the functionality of the Contour Drawing Rating Scale (CDRS) proposed by Thompson and Gray in 1995, in order to assess body dissatisfaction.

Do gendered personality traits influence positive body image attitudes and how they can be measured empirically?

Previous research suggests an association between body image and gendered personality traits, often referred to as instrumentality or masculinity and expressivity or femininity (Bem 1981; Spence and Helmreich 1978). One of two theories (Johnson and Petrie 1995) typically explains these associations. Although drawn from the eating disorder literature, these theories may be relevant for understanding body image, given that body image disturbance is a strong predictor of eating problems (Polivy and Herman 2002). Specifically, Boskind-Lodahl (1976) argued that women who develop eating disorders are overly engaged in the feminine role, from which a desire for thinness manifests as one consequence. In contrast, Steiner-Adair's (1986) discrepancy theory posits that women who develop eating disorders are low in instrumentality (i.e., masculinity), a circumstance that is problematic because women are inclined to be relational oriented (i.e., feminine), yet they are also expected to possess instrumental traits. These instrumental traits are more socially valued and, therefore, are important for success. Thus, the femininity theory proposes a link between excessive femininity and body image disturbance, whereas the discrepancy theory argues for an association between low masculinity and body image problems.

In general, research supports the discrepancy theory, although there are some exceptions (Snyder and Hasbrouck 1996). Studies show that body dissatisfaction is related to low levels of masculinity, particularly in women (Hawkins, Turell and Jackson 1983; Jackson, Sullivan and Rostker 1988; Kimlicka, Cross and Tarnai 1983). Although less is known about men (Patterson and Elliott 2002), it is possible that men who lack masculine qualities will also have trouble meeting cultural expectations of masculinity, which may be reflected in their poor body attitudes. Other researchers have shown that men who are less masculine report poorer mental health outcomes, such as higher depression and anxiety, compared to men who are more masculine (O'Heron and Orlofsky 1990).

Recently, Cash, Melnyk, and Hrabosky (2004) evidenced about the functionality of the Appearance Schemas Inventory-Revised (ASI-R) research instrument, which is a 20-item self-report inventory measuring appearance management (grooming behaviors) and aspects of psychosocial functioning (social self-presentation, self-esteem, and eating disturbances) using two subscales: Self-Evaluative Salience of Appearance (12 items) and Motivational Salience of Appearance (8 items). The instrument, revised from the original 14-item ASI (Cash and Labarge 1996), assesses body image in relation to certain beliefs or assumptions about the importance, meaning, and influence of appearance in one's life and sense of self worth.

Do advertising and sport media influence body dissatisfaction and how they can be measured empirically?

In the examination of perceived body aesthetics in this paper, body dissatisfaction is important because of its established association (e.g., Silverstein and Perlik 1995) with depression, low self-esteem, and disordered eating. Disordered eating and body image is also a very common amongst adolescents not actively involved in sport or physical activity (Signey 2002; Clarke 2000). Much of the research on body dissatisfaction and particularly research on disordered eating, has focused on the effect of the extremely slender ideal female body types found in Western Europe and North America. By the late 1960s, the voluptuous "sweater girls" of the 1940s and 1950s had been replaced by very slender, almost boy-like, fashion models (Lamb et al. 1993). Objective measures of cultural beauty ideals such as Playboy centerfolds and beauty pageant winners have confirmed this trend (Garner et al. 1980; Morris, Cooper and Cooper 1989; Wiseman et al. 1992). As many authors have noted (e.g. Garner et al. 1980; Rodin, Silberstein and Striegel-Moore 1984), for most women this extremely slender body type is both unhealthy and unobtainable. It is thus not surprising that adoption of the thin body ideal has been paralleled by women's decreasing satisfaction with their bodies (Feingold and Mazzella 1998). As Brumberg (1997) and many others have noted, it seems paradoxical that at the very time when social changes have greatly increased available roles and opportunities for women, social expectations of female body types have become increasingly rigid and unrealistic, deviations from these expectations have produced increasingly negative social reactions and self-evaluations, and large numbers, probably the majority, of young Western women have learned to judge their bodies by unhealthy, unrealistic, and unobtainable standards.

In many ways, the issue confronting advertisers has shifted from creating equality in the gender roles portrayed to showing a broader range/scope of female images in advertisements. Advertisers have been accused of unintentionally imposing a sense of inadequacy on women's self-concepts (Pollay 1986; Shields and Heineken 2001). It has been claimed that advertising generates cynicism, insecurity and conformity, and has neglected higher order moral values (Pollay 1986;Shields and Heineken 2001).

Cattarin, Thompson, Carmen and Williams (2000) examined the effects of media-driven images of attractiveness on the level of body image and mood disturbance amongst females. Their findings suggest women experience distress (in terms of anger, anxiety and depression) when viewing media images that reflect the current societal bias towards thinness and attractiveness. Similarly, Stice and Shaw (1994) found exposure to ultra-thin models in advertisements and magazine pictures produced depression, stress, guilt, shame, insecurity and body dissatisfaction in female college students. One could argue that female images portrayed in advertisements are simply a mirror of Western society's preoccupation with the feminine ideal, and that these criticisms are unjustified. Richins (1991) and Martin and Kennedy (1993), for example, found no relationship between self-perceptions of physical attractiveness and exposure to attractive models in advertisements. This suggests self-esteem and body dissatisfaction are moderated by other variables, such as body weight (Pesa, Syre and Jones 2000), body image (Cash and Hicks 1990; Heinberg, Thompson and Stormer 1995), gender (Burton, Netemeyer and Lichtenstein 1995; Fallon and Rozin 1985), the motives for comparison (Cattarin et al. 2000; Martin and Gentry 1997) and age (Martin and Gentry 1997; Girgus 1989). The societal implications of the negative stereotyping of women and minority groups in the media may be profound. The repeated portrayals of African Americans as objects of social concern in public service advertisements, for example, reinforces the image of a population group dependent on government assistance and incapable of conforming to the mainstream work ethic (Stern 1999). This, in effect, not only creates discrimination and sets up barriers that exclude whole groups of people, but also suggests that the world is one homogeneous group and that all those who differ are not worthy of inclusion (Vandergrift 1993). Adolescents, in general, are very susceptible to such cues and will often use outside information (including advertisements and the mass media) to form or reinforce their own self-identity (Ashbach 1994; Schouten 1991; Freedman 1984). Negative portrayals of racial minorities in the media have been shown to have a particularly detrimental effect on the self-esteem of minority youths, making them feel largely unconnected to society, or even invisible (Kern-Foxworth 1994).

Sports media is defined as television or magazines that show athletic events or promote a sports-oriented lifestyle. Some studies have examined whether or not exposure to sports media impacts women's eating disorder symptomatology differently than does exposure to other media. Tiggerman and Pickering (1996) found that women's body dissatisfaction was negatively correlated with watching sports. The results of Harrison (2000) contradict this, finding that sports magazine exposure led to an increase in body dissatisfaction for 12th grade females. Nonetheless, a later study (Harrison, 2001) found that sports exposure negatively predicted ChEAT scores, as well as body dissatisfaction. Harrison and Fredrickson (2003) found that reading sports magazines increased body satisfaction for girls in grades 10 through 12. However, the authors justified this finding, noting that without a clear content analysis of the magazines the girls are reading, there is no way of knowing whether the participants are being exposed to men's sports, lean female sports, or non-lean female sports.

IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY-MAKERS

In our society, aesthetic capital, like other kinds of capital, is unequally distributed. Lookism is like racism, classism, sexism, ageism and the other -isms in that it can create what may be unjust barriers to equal opportunity in the workplace and education. Lookism is not only an ethical issue. It has taken on, and not for the first time, what can only be called world-historical significance. With apologies to Postman (1986) and Debord (1995), we do appear to be amusing ourselves to death in the society of the spectacle. New visual media and technologies, infotainment, virtual reality, corporate image-projection, video games, internet voyeurism and many other developments all in their own ways reinforce the importance of appearances in things and attractiveness in persons. Institutions that have traditionally aimed to subordinate appearances, such as the church and the university, are scrambling to adapt to a generation with historically unprecedented visual receptivity. We believe that we need to look critically at lookism. Due to our increasing sensitivity to discrimination, it is gaining status as a discussable issue in public policy. We will review the tradition of ethical thinking about aestheticism in general and lookism in particular, evaluate the current debate between social constructionists and evolutionary essentialists, and clarify positions on the justice or injustice of lookism and their policy implications.

Nomenclature and observational methods

In thinking about these issues, we considered a number of categories and terms. At first, it seemed that what is really at issue is a prejudicial sort of "aestheticism," or even "physicalism." After all, the kind of discrimination we are talking about is a reaction to the body as well as the face. The victims include, among others, short men and tall women, however otherwise aesthetically unobjectionable. Besides the visible body, we routinely discriminate based on accent, tone of voice, and smell. Yet these kinds of reactions do not seem different enough from the visual ones to warrant a separate category. Besides, terms such as "physicalism" and "aestheticism" are too well established in other contexts to be of much use here.

The choice turned out to be between "looksism" and "lookism." It seemed to us that "looksism," with the "s" in the middle, connotes a somewhat objective situation in which one has one's looks as one has one's social markers of race, class, and gender. Although it would emphasize the role of physiology in attractiveness, it would tend to slight the role of culture and individual taste in personal appearance. "Lookism," on the other hand, carries a suggestion of a person's "look" or style, and thus tends to skew discussion toward the opposite pole, matters of culture and taste. However, if that connotation can be mitigated, "lookism" has a metaphysical advantage. It implies a more general and perhaps more subjective reliance on visual perception of people and things. So we decided on "lookism," which we define, following Ayto, as "prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of appearance (i.e., uglies are done down and the beautiful people get all the breaks)." The term was first used in the Washington Post Magazine in 1978 in reference to "fat people" who are "rallying to help each other find sympathetic doctors, happy employers and future mates. They are coining new words ('lookism'--discrimination based on looks, 'FA'--Fat Admirer)" (Ayto 1999, p. 485). One author from the self-help genre uses the term "appearance discrimination" (Jeffes 1998). Another equivalent expression is beauty prejudice or discrimination.

On the opposite, positive pole would be maximum attractiveness, also known as "beauty" (for women and, sometimes, boys and certain men), or "handsomeness" (for men and certain women). Being judged to be at the negative pole is an aesthetic variant of what Goffman (1985) calls stigma: an immediately recognizable abnormal trait that works subliminally to turn others away and thus break social claims. Being judged to be at the positive pole is aesthetic charisma, understood both in Weber's political sense as a trait that is perceived to be a divine gift and in the sense that it is used in the entertainment industry as an equivalent of "star quality." Like stigma, charisma is also both evident and obtrusive. It is abnormal in

the sense of exceptional and immediately recognizable, and it too works subliminally, only in this case to attract others and thus to create social claims. The majority in the middle--men of ordinary appearance, women who used to be described as "plain"--are of course as caught up in the gradations of the scale as the stars and monsters.

Arguing, as we do, for the pervasiveness of lookism in our culture undeniably presents us with the methodological difficulty that lookism is implicated in other forms of prejudice and the other forms are implicated in lookism. Just listen to the language. Terms that are used in the other -isms routinely invoke lookism ("colored," "Negro," "black," "brown," "mocha," "caramel," "white," "pale male," "redneck," "red," "yellow," "slant," "pink," "lavender," and "gray"). Correspondingly, terms used in lookism invoke other -isms ("classy" for attractiveness and "pigmy" applied to short men). We know that racism, classism and sexism are often motivated by judgments of personal attractiveness. Judgments of attractiveness, likewise, are often motivated by ideas associated with race, class and sex.

How do we tease out the specific contribution of lookism to the injustices of modern society? One way would be to look for lookism as such, taking it as some sort of existential substrate for the other forms of prejudice. However, this hardly seems necessary. None of the other prejudices is clear-cut ideal types either, and this has not prevented plenty from being said and done to redress the social harm they cause. We do not need to construct a race less, classless, ageless, sexless original situation or control group.

The current debate: Essentialists vs. Constructionists

Prima facie, lookism may be difficult to see as a prejudice because judging people based on how they look is in many areas of life an indisputable good. After all, much depends on our ability to make valid aesthetic judgments. The most obvious case is sexual attraction. As in nature, so in culture, romance, friendship, familial affiliation, imagination, art and major sectors of the economy are unthinkable without judging by appearances. When and where lookism is triggered-- that is, its economic sector or social context--determines whether it might result in unjust discrimination. What is ordinarily and unobjectionably exclusionary in a romantic situation, for example, might be unjust at work or at school, where lookism can be construed to pervert a natural impulse. What is otherwise normal may become abnormal.

Today, the debate is still between essentialists and constructionists, but the essentialists have become evolutionary and the constructionists have become social. Both sides are more informed by ethical and political concerns than was the case in the previous debates. What decides which camp you are in is the proportionality you give to those venerable determinisms, nature and nurture? If an unjust behavior is more natural than nurtured, or in other words "essential," it is more difficult to discern as unjust and therefore more difficult to change. By contrast, if an unjust behavior is more nurtured than natural, in other words "constructed," it is easier to discern as unjust and therefore easier to change. Most of the time, beauty signals health, both physical and mental; health signals reproductive success. Ugliness, on the other hand, sometimes signals disease, hence reproductive failure. What could be more essential to the human project than desire for pleasure, disgust with pain, and, determining everything else, the need to reproduce? In such contexts, it makes sense to say that we are naturally inclined against ugly people and in favor of beautiful people; however those categories may be interpreted. Paying attention to aesthetics in these contexts is discrimination in the positive sense, akin to prudence.

From the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, lookism would seem to be a requirement, if only to ensure reproductive success. The instantaneousness of the lookist response could be due to our need to quickly size up others as friend or enemy, threat or opportunity.

Attractiveness varies from culture to culture, but each ethnic group does not construct it ex nihilo. Take, for example, the most notorious instance: the practice of the Ubangi tribe in Africa in which disks are inserted in young women's lips to stretch them out gradually to form two plates extending from the front of the mouth.

Exceptional, granted; but at least the plates are on the same plane. Both lips are horizontal. The young women's faces are otherwise attractive, in whatever cultural terms. Symmetry has some sway, even in the tropics.

It is true that social context can trump the evolutionary impulse in many ways. In certain fields, women and men are discriminated against if they are judged too attractive. However, relativism, as always, turns out to be incoherent, and the commonalities between cultures on basic matters of personal appearance turn out to be more important than the differences.

IMPLICATIONS FOR SPORTS MARKETING RESEARCH

In conditions of high modernity, there is a tendency for the body to become increasingly central to the modern person's sense of self-identity (Shilling 2003, p.1). The evidence of such a view can be found in the sports media focus on body image and the promotion and preservation of youth, beauty and sexual desire. This has been accompanied by growing numbers of people utilizing their body shape and appearance as a means of expressing their individual identity; developing them into social symbols, that give messages to others. Such a process often involves viewing the body as a project, an entity in the process of becoming and therefore opens to reconstruction in line with the designs of its owner - with the inherent acknowledgement that such bodies are not found 'naturally'. Citing Beck (1999), Shilling notes that it is surely significant that regimes of health, beauty and self-care referred to above are potentially promoting the body as a place of ontological security in a global system characterized by multiple and inescapable risks. To follow Lasch (1991), observing a millennial society where its citizens spurn community or forms of collectivity in preference for unyielding self-regard and the emergence of a new morality of self-gratification, argues that one aspect of this behavior is a demand for physical perfection - a bodily orientation - involving a fear of ageing and sickness: '...having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet...' (Lasch 1991, p.40).

For professional sportsmen and women this relationship with the body is additionally complex. Not only is it the vehicle for performance - sports after all involve an engagement in movement and motion of the body in given ways - but it is increasingly the site of an intersection between processes of 'hypercommodification' (Giulianotti 2002) and the disciplinary mechanisms of sports science being performed upon the athlete's body; partially enforced through the panopticon of the media gaze (Cashmore 2000) which aims to ensure the replication of appropriate sports bodies. Additionally, professional sportspeople and sports teams can operate as powerful signifiers of class, nationality, politics, gender, borderless and bordered lives (Wong and Trumper 2002). As professionals, and in their extra mural activities, their actions and attainments now possess far greater significance than they have ever had whilst, as individuals, they arguably wield a highly variable degree of control over the signifiers attached to them and their meanings.

Giulianotti's definition of commodification is 'a process by which an object or social practice acquires an exchange value or market-centered meaning.' It is not a single but ongoing process, often involving the gradual entry of market logic to the various elements that constitute the object or social practice under consideration. The marked intensification of this process within the sports domain in recent years is of a different order to that experienced in the late 1980s and could therefore is termed as a period of hypercommodification. However, whilst the development of this concept is primarily focused on football, this particular sport has arguably led the realignment and heightened 'mediaization' of other sports within the UK during this period: potentially operating as the originator of these trends. This process of hypercommodification has tended to involve the efforts of sports governing bodies and club directors and owners to attract wealthier audiences - especially where they had been absent or marginal - to attend games. The English football authorities recognised this in the early 1990s following a period when the sport had been in the doldrums and was facing the apparently terminal blight of routinized problems of serious spectator disorder.

'In the 1990s and beyond, patterns of affluence and the associated fragmentation of circumstances and interests make it almost impossible to formulate any leisure activity as a truly mass market one. The implication is that hard choices have to be made as to the consumer segment to which the offer is to be targeted, and hence the ingredients of that offer. As implied above, the response of most sectors has been to move upmarket so as to follow the affluent 'middle class' consumer in his or her pursuits and aspirations. We strongly suggest that there is a message in this for football and particularly for the design of stadia for the future.' (The Football Association 1991, pp. 8-9)

The F.A.s 'Blueprint for Football' led to the sport targeting those engaging in the burgeoning leisure market emerging in the late 1980s - aiming to increase the appeal of the sport to this audience involving a profound shift in the 'customer base' for football. Such a social realignment of the sport also has consequences for concepts of community and the traditional ties clubs have had with the communities they are located within (Williams 1996). With the increasing number of new all-seater stadia being located outside city centers, the increase in levels of mobility through car ownership and a reliance on it to facilitate leisure spending, there then comes a pressure to sustain the psychological attachment between clubs and supporters. As the Henley Centre stated: '...the question of finding new mechanisms to cultivate this attachment which do not rely on physical proximity is a pressing one.' (The Football Association 1991, p.13)

Since the late 1980s, diverse but extraordinary volumes of have driven hypercommodification capital that have entered sports from entirely new sources such as satellite and pay-per-view TV networks, the Internet and telecommunications corporations, transnational sports equipment manufacturers, public relations companies and the major stock markets through the sale of club equity. Simultaneously, a new set of social and cultural relations arose during this period: seeing the greater migration of elite sports labor, the gradual proliferation of continental and global competitions, the huge rise in the salaries of elite sportsmen and women within some sports, new media outlets for sports (e.g. satellite TV, club TV, the Internet and the new generation of mobile phones) and new forms of cultural encoding through these media. Arguably, these new forms of encoding hinge around the personalities, attainments and the bodies of key sports figures. It is this tapestry that has seen the rise of the superstars such as David Beckham and, more recently, Wayne Rooney.

The implications of body image for sport marketing practice

One aspect of the shift in these social and cultural relations can be seen in the marketing of sports (and associated products) using images of those who play them. Whilst the use of recognized sports personalities within marketing campaigns is not new and has a lengthy history, the nature and extent to their use is. Even English cricket captains are now regularly used to publicize national tournaments - presenting the sport and using their status in ways their predecessors even five years ago would never have experienced. Therefore, billboard posters for BBC Radio 4's continuous coverage of the 2003 One Day International (ODI) series against South Africa and Zimbabwe utilized the bruised and stitched face of the then newly promoted England captain, Michael Vaughan, to symbolize the 'no hiding place' attitude of the game supposedly occurring in both the enactment and coverage of this tournament thus providing a harder edge for the presentation of these series of games which one would not traditionally associate with this sport or with the traditionally genteel radio coverage provided by the BBC.

But more importantly, if Vaughan had been a more discretely known sports figure (it could be argued he was known then to cricket aficionados but less recognized outside the game) his elevation to national ODI captain has ended that and the poster campaign potentially stimulates curiosity for those who are unaware of who he is, what he does and the 'battle' he is engaged in (who is this battered man with a cricket bat?). The upside is the potential for gaining 'customers' for the matches either as listeners or as spectators. However, if Vaughan's level of public recognition has accelerated, his status has been used to market the sport he plays for and the team he leads, along with a specific tournament, its sponsors and (surely inadvertently) the satellite TV network covering the ODI series. The previously reticent figure of Vaughan is now directly and indirectly a vehicle for marketing a plethora of products financing his sport - and financing him as a player. He can no longer remain a shadowy figure even if he wanted to.

Additionally, the new forms of cultural encoding of sports has seen further developments in the ways in which sports themselves are reported and represented across the media with certain events, matches and players attaining a symbolism that extends beyond the confines of the sport with the sportspeople involved within such events being subjected to a degree of scrutiny and representational manipulation that is unparalleled and, as stated, is rarely within the control of the sportsmen and women, their clubs or governing bodies. Thus, sportspeople can be presented as symbols of national identity. For example, Chisholm (1999) shows how the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team's victory in the 1996 games was portrayed as a final victory in the cold war with the gymnasts themselves and their attainments being described in military terms. Maguire, Poulton and Possamai (1999) illustrate that the media coverage of the England versus German football match in Euro 96 illustrated the existence of an agenda based around nostalgia and ethnic assertiveness/defensiveness on the part of the English press, with references to the Second World War and the World Cup victory of 1966. The German press preferred to focus on the contemporary European political situation to assert their superiority over England - and to take further satisfaction from the victorious performance of their football team. Finally, Madan (2000) illustrates how World Series Cricket in Australia becomes a space for 'diasporic nationalism', creating an Indian reality in a non-Indian place. Additionally, sportspeople can also operate as signifiers of class (Foote 2003) and gender (Chisholm 1999; Mennesson 2000; Sparkes and Smith 2002). This 'manipulation' of national sporting events and sports people is successful in engaging emotion because, as acknowledged by Weiss, sport is shaped by and derives symbolic significance from its close links with society.

'With its classic, socioculturally valid and transparent norms, it forms a social subsystem in which different types of identity reinforcement can be found through...a sports performance; or it can be experienced vicariously as sport spectator.' (Weiss 2001, p.393)

For Weiss in modern societies there is no other social subsystem that gives so many people, regardless of their religion, gender, age or social or educational level, access to a system of social validation and acknowledgement by others. Arguably the sports media are both aware and exploit such social validation and the feelings sports performances can and do engender in those who watch and follow a sport or a particular event - they are often involved personally with these processes as supporters/sports watchers themselves.

In the UK, the early 1990s and the emergence of a now major TV network has had a huge impact on the TV coverage of a range of sports and the utilization of increasingly sophisticated production values. It could be argued that this sea change in presentation was and is not confined to football but has extended to include a complete revision of the ways in which sports and sportspeople are depicted across the full range of media forms. The commitment made by the (then) new TV sports provider Sky to raise such standards concerning their presentation of the English football's Premier League not only enhanced the league's status in its early days but '...forced a reaction by the other media who were fearful of being left by the wayside. Commercial radio and the tabloids in particular responded in a manner, which brought a quantum leap in the perceived importance of football. Under Sky, the game blossomed from being merely a 90-minute action spectacle, into an art form worthy of discussion and analysis. Sport as drama. Sport as soap opera. If it was always the most important sport in the country, it was now the second, third and fourth most important sport as well.' (Fynn and Davidson 1996, p.217)

It is now a drama played out and marketed through the lives, performances, personalities and bodies of sportsmen and women. For Cashmore (2000), there is a strong link between the sports body and the ideal vision of the body portrayed within commodity culture. Given that the sporting body can be (at the highest levels of a high profile sport) a commodified body with elite athletes literally being bought and sold by the clubs they play for, whilst also commanding huge sums for endorsements.

Additionally here, as noted with the example of Michael Vaughan, those who gain pre-eminence within their sport will now be used to advertise it. For TV companies and sports sponsors, it is clearly desirable, if not imperative that the ambassadors for those sports possess a physique that can operate as a vehicle for marketing as well as performative purposes.

The implications within an organizational setting have been profound (especially within North America) as employees are implicitly held to account for their own body image and behaviors; going some way to explaining the 1990s incantation that everyone "wanted to be like Mike Jordan" As Helstein (2003) shows, through an analysis of the politics and production of desire within Nike advertising to women, how the organization through its association of knowledge power and truth has and continues to publicize and authorize a specific notion of who or what counts as a female athlete. This is manifest when an examination of the pairing of the themes of 'commitment', 'excellence' and 'emancipation' is made in relation to a specific set of Nike advertisements.

'Athletes are driven by commitment, to their sport, to themselves, to excellence itself. Commitment fuels the extra mile, the final set, the last quarter, the sprint to the line, going on, when the body begs to stop...'

(Nike, 1998 - as cited in Helstein 2003, p.279).

As noted by her, the campaign indicated that by following the prescriptions of the discourse - working on the body, eating healthy food, exercising and so on - the female athlete would undergo self-transformation and growth. Whilst Helstein does not make the connection between organizational and sports connotations held by these themes, there is clearly a high degree of resonance between the language used by Nike in their advertisements and the influential excellence literature of the late 1980s and 1990s and the (controversial) themes of empowerment that still echo within HR discourse. '...the female athlete who competes hard and only accepts excellence is 'within the true' and that way of being an athlete (or at least an aspiration to it) has become the legitimate choice. Therefore, the empowerment and self-acceptance that could be achieved through exercise...is now achieved through working on the body in ways that produce excellence. This is the latest prescription for self-transformation within the discourse of Nike.' (Helstein 2003, p.281)

As an increasing number of athletes are used within corporations - as inspirational figures, ambassadors, motivational speakers, or promoters of internal fitness and health promotion campaigns - there is a triadic relationship emerging between the body of the athlete, the advertisers who utilize the performative and aesthetic qualities of the body to sell its products, and organizations who also utilize the achievements and wider social signifiers of the athlete for the company's own disciplinary performative purposes.

Applying a Foucauldian analysis here, the body is the archetypal subject of power and political control with power relations operating through and inscribed upon it often in subtle rather than coercive ways. We incline towards conformity because of the involvement in discourse that prescribes ranges of normality for the human body and thereby human behavior. This does not preclude resistance, but it can be difficult to resist these processes of regulation emerging from powerful institutions - be they sports bodies, advertisers or employers. In the sports domain there is a strong overlap between discourses on the healthy body and the sporting body with those of medicine, public health and sport all emphasizing a controlled, self disciplined body with the ideal being similar across all of these discourses and involving technologies of the self directed at achieving the best possible self via an enduring, on-going project. As Cashmore acknowledges, the bodies of professional sportspeople are subject to extensive regulation as the degree of control being exerted within that environment increases due to the use of sports science technologies to develop physical performance through training, dietary regimes and to detect 'unlawful' drug use. Recent field work with an English Premier League football team, known for its innovative investment in sports science, indicated that one aspect of their focus on this area (which includes a focus on psychology) was not only performative. Because of the degree of surveillance, daily measurement and monitoring of the body occurring there, it meant that the individual player has 'no excuses'; failure to perform was thereby transferred from the potential province of the backroom staff to the highly exposed individual and collective of the team.

Therefore, if, for the contemporary self it is believed that the body conveys the thoughts and dispositions of the 'owner', given the inextricable link between self-identity and embodiment, the deportment and appearance of the body has become highly important. For those whose bodies will be used to promote the sports they play and upon which so much depends, they have to indicate engagement with the body project by providing evidence - the fit, measured, monitored, healthy body.

The attainment of this body, as stated previously, does not come 'naturally' - it is a personal achievement requiring constant work and vigilance. Through the presentation of their bodies, sports people demonstrate (or not) their capacity for self-discipline and heightened self-control: an ability to overcome the sins of the flesh. Therefore, sports stars who are physically unfit or ill are increasingly presented by some media reporters as anomalous - as seen in the ribbing of Australian cricketer Shane Warne in the 1996/7 test season due to his weight gain; the criticism of American tennis player, Monica Seles at Wimbledon in 1997 for the same reason. In both cases, the suggestion was that such elite athletes should not allow their bodies to disintegrate to such an extent. Another reading might point to the pre-eminent status both possessed within their respective sports and the implications their weight gain had for a range of stakeholders because such less-than perfect sports people, including those who may spectacularly fall from moral grace, cannot be used as authentic role models for corporate (or any other form) of consumption.

The contribution of this article

Body aesthetics is an issue of high importance not only for the image-making industry but also for sports businesses as a very attractive market. Around the world, beautiful faces and bodies sell. Advertisers and fashion houses hire good-looking people to represent their products. The sports industry is no different.

According to the findings of the literature review, it seemed that perceived body aesthetics linked to some significant socio-cultural behavioral descriptors and influenced significantly by sports media. We propose that socio-cultural behavioral descriptors should be considered as a valuable psychographic criterion in the sports marketing planning. Overall this paper identifies some of the main literature in the area and demonstrates that addressing literature on body aesthetics within the context of sports marketing is worthy of further exploration.

Rather than confirming body aesthetic ideals different among cultures, our paper reframed the discussion about body aesthetics. We conclude that understanding body image concerns from the standpoint of perceived body aesthetics, rather than body aesthetics, may be a more productive and inclusive approach to the study of socially and culturally diverse young customers of sporting goods which become highly "active."

Future research

The marketing and consumer behavior literature coverage on the topic of body and literature review findings regarding to the research propositions allowed us to see more clear that a new research thrust is needed in the field of sport marketing regarding to body aesthetics. We propose that a significant focus of sport marketing researchers is needed for research themes related to the implementation of CDRS, ASI-R and ChEAT research instrument and measurement scales in order to assess body image in relation to socio-cultural, psychographic and behavioral characteristics of sports and sporting goods consumers as also sports media influence to body image.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Body aesthetics is an issue of high importance not only for the image-making industry but also for sports businesses as a very attractive market. Around the world, beautiful faces and bodies sell. Advertisers and fashion houses hire good-looking people to represent their products. The sports industry is no different.

Based on the most recent definitions about aesthetics, we have tried to understand that body image concerns from the standpoint of perceived body aesthetics, rather than body aesthetics, may be a more productive and inclusive approach to the study of socially and culturally diverse young customers of sporting goods because not only socially and culturally diverse individuals don't adopt and imitate the same body ideals but each individual develops a totally unique system of perceptions regarding to body aesthetics. Such a conceptualization raises the notion of the "consumption of symbolic meaning" and has a direct impact in targeting and marketing communications planning of sporting organizations, where young customers of sporting goods becoming "active." Based on the conceptualization of "perceived body aesthetics," through the literature review we aimed to identify the factors that can influence an individual's body image attitudes and individual's body dissatisfaction and how this influence can be measured empirically, in order to be leaded to a better understanding of the construct of perceived body aesthetics in the sport marketing context.

Based on the theoretical background and the literature review we can summarize the most interesting research, managerial and policy-making implications of this research topic:

Research Implications:

Ethnicity, gender role, gendered personality traits, sports media, and their influence to an individual's body image attitudes and individual's body dissatisfaction can be measured empirically but it seem that further exploration is needed.

The marketing and consumer behavior literature coverage on the topic of body and literature review findings regarding to the research propositions allowed us to see more clear that a new research thrust is needed in the field of sport marketing regarding to body aesthetics.

Managerial Implications:

Socio-cultural behavioral descriptors should be considered as a valuable psychographic criterion in the sports marketing planning.

One aspect of the shift in these social and cultural relations can be seen in the marketing of sports (and associated products) using images of those who play them. Whilst the use of recognized sports personalities within marketing campaigns is not new and has a lengthy history, the nature and extent to their use is. In terms of targeting and marketing communications planning, the conceptualization of perceived body aesthetics raises the notion that young consumers of sporting goods are becoming active and this practically means for sporting organizations that: a. young consumers will construct the appropriate marketing identities and b. the consciously aware consuming subject can choose to consume particular symbolic meaning in relation to desires and motivations.

Additionally, the new forms of cultural encoding of sports has seen further developments in the ways in which sports themselves are reported and represented across the media with certain events, matches and players attaining a symbolism that extends beyond the confines of the sport with the sportspeople involved within such events being subjected to a degree of scrutiny and representational manipulation that is unparalleled and, as stated, is rarely within the control of the sportsmen and women, their clubs or governing bodies. Thus, sportspeople can be presented as symbols of national identity.

The implications within an organizational setting have been profound (especially within North America) as employees are implicitly held to account for their own body image and behaviors; going some way to explaining the 1990s incantation that everyone "wanted to be like Mike Jordan." This is manifest when an examination of the pairing of the themes of 'commitment', 'excellence' and 'emancipation' is made in relation to a specific set of sports advertisements with bodies the sell.

Policy-making Implications:

In a policy making level, as a society we must fully understand that aesthetics is a capital like other kinds of capital, is unequally distributed. So public policies and strategies must be implemented in order to be managed effectively and efficiently.

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