tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post1615539796144567414..comments2024-03-23T04:01:39.348-04:00Comments on Understanding Society: What kind of social knowledge does a football coach have?Dan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-42878963125076143332011-04-10T05:03:36.840-04:002011-04-10T05:03:36.840-04:00Hello Chancellor Little,
I was reading through so...Hello Chancellor Little,<br /><br />I was reading through some of your posts and this one really caught my attention. <br /><br />From my own personal experiences as a pedagogue and leader--both, on and off the football field, I've found a multitude of relationships between football and other organizations and structures, namely student government. Having been privileged to experience leadership roles as a football player and coach, and as a student government senator and president, I came away with several very inspiring, intertextual experiences.<br /><br />In this day and age, organizations continue to restructure their framework to be more adaptive to forecasting conditions, as do football teams. Consider the 2007 Super Bowl champs, Indianapolis Colts, and their innovative offensive passing strategy. Although this strategy is now being used by many other football teams, it requires a very intelligent quarterback to facilitate, and defenses are continuously becoming more and more effective at adapting to it. As more teams have adopted this strategy, other teams have anticipated its use and strategized to prevent its potential outcomes. With this and other complicated, strategical factors that play into winning a football game, it would be safe to say that the overall success of a football team is not determined entirely by the skill of a few of its individual players, or lack thereof. Likewise, the fallacy of composition holds no value here.<br /><br />I mentioned adaptiveness because I think it really ties into your most recent post, "Structures and structuration," insofar as "entities at this level conform to a regular set of causal relations." I think you really hit the nail on its head in this article when you explained, “a football game involves coordination among a number of purposive actors...” who are in continuous anticipation of the actions of their opponents. If social structures have causal powers that are not reducible to facts about the individuals, then an ‘invisible hand’ serves as the only other (unlikely) explanation. Individual behavior plays a large role, I believe, in the argument of Structure vs. Agency, and in this “football game” when the players on the Structure side of the debate are losing, they blame everyone but themselves. <br /><br />I'm looking forward to our next meeting. See you soon!<br /><br />HusseinAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com