This article considers some relationships between outdoor activities, nature and society, using some Australian examples. It considers how universal forms of outdoor sports and recreation may be as inappropriate for Australia as were some imported plants, animals, and farming practices that in the past caused environmental problems. It discusses how outdoor sports and activities can be considered as a kind of environmental education, either intentional or unintentional. The article argues that to understand how outdoor sports and activities are shaped by, and contribute to wider society, they must be understood not only as social and culturally constructed, but also geographically constructed. Three examples are presented. (1) The story of bushwalking in Australia illustrates how a social movement largely driven by a desire to know the country was transformed, under the influence of formal education and training courses, into a generic outdoor sport based on seeing the country as strange and unfamiliar. (2) The particular history and characteristics of the Lyell forest intersect with different patterns of outdoor activities to shape different understandings of the forest within the local community. The example shows how outdoor activities distribute environmental knowledge in a community, and shape community interests. (3) The imported sport of cross country skiing can be seen as a technical sport that requires Australian alpine areas to be transformed into universal playing fields, and as such is a kind of environmental mis-education. It discusses how cross country skiing could be developed in a way that is more respectful towards local environments.

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This report tries to demonstrate the relationship between broadcasting and sport (major sport and professional team sport) and, more importantly, to emphasize the importance of sport in broadcasting. Sport provides an important outlet for advertising in the mass-media due to its access to new audiences and its potential to increase circulation. Since the second world war in Japan, national newspapers have used the professional baseball league to promote their sales. With the advent of commercial TV, network TV broadcasting has clearly emphasized how important sport is in its programming content because it is recognized as one of the most popular TV programs. Sport provides an efficient way for broadcasters to target and communicate with large groups of people. In the 1990's as a whole, there was more sport (e. g. the Olympics, the soccer World Cup and the Super Bowl in the United States) on free-to-air television or pay television than at any other time in history. This report considers the effect of sport on the broadcasting market, defines the broadcasting market and then looks at the role of sport in it. It shows how the effect of television on sport has grown enormously in recent years which is demonstrated by the money coming into sport from the sale of broadcasting rights. A good example of this is BskyB's competition for broadcasting rights which has led to much higher fees for broadcasting sporting events across free-to air channels in Europe. This illustrates how there has always been a strong relationship between sport and broadcasting.

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Some scholars have been argued about the disability sport as an alternative of modern sport. One of their remarkable achievements is that they bring the disability sport as a controversial issue for the field of sport sociology. However they have not argued about experience of sport practice of a “person with disability”. In order to understand a disability sport, it would be necessary to consider specific sport experiences.
The purpose of this article is to illustrate how wheelchair basketball players recognize the “disability sport” and the “category of people with disability”, and also to illustrate how they recognize a “self-impairment” and other “people with disability”.
As a result, their sport practice creates an “outlook of disability in sport”. In addition, they call themselves a “fake-disabled”. To the contrary, they call other people with disability a “true-disabled”. This outlook is not static “able-disable” category. In some way, it is new category created from their practice, and it could be called a categorization practice. While their sport practice dislocates a “category of disability”, this practice also puts label on other people who are more “severely disabled” as a substantive category. Thus, their practice has an extremely ambiguity character. Finally, I suggest that disability sport studies in sport sociology should pay more attention to athletes' specific experiences. The experiences of sport practice influence on identity of players who cannot but live as a “person with disability”.

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The purpose of this study is to look at some gender studies on sport in Japan critically and to reveal an alternative perspective. This study is based on the discussion about gender in “Gender Trouble”. So, in this study, gender is expression to sex, gender and sexuality.
After a brief review of some gender studies on sport in Japan, I found the points below. The studies showed that “male/female” and “men/women” are conceptually constructed in/through sport and that sport is under orders from heterosexism as social and cultural norm to construct the dualism-thinking (such as “male/female”, “men/women”, “sex/gender” and “nature/society”). And some gender studies on sport in Japan showed the possibility that some particular “alternative sport” liberates people from constructed gender conceptually and physically. But there is a “limit” that just the possibilities have, because their claims that we can intercept the “construction” of the dualism-thinking about gender and can escape the outside of the heterosexism structure do not help us to grasp a moment of the perturbation of heterosexism. Therefore we need to think about problems from a different perspective.
We can see the possibility of the change of sport at the place that the “construction” ordered from the norm of heterosexism, because it does not always succeed. There are times when the failure of “construction” shows that heterosexism has no nature, and they are the “subversion” from the inside of heterosexism structure. So, we should make it visible in theoretical discussion.

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The purpose of this study is to describe how a supporters' association backing a visiting team of professional baseball has been organized. This study discusses the “Kinki Carp Booster Club, ” and the “Kinki Association of People from Hiroshima Prefecture” from which the former was born. This fan club, located in the large city of Osaka, supports the Hiroshima Carp baseball team whose “home town” is the smaller city of Hiroshima.
The creation of the Kinki Hiroshima Booster Club can be traced back to a fellowship which, symbolized by the “Hiroshima Carp, ” is shared by people who had moved from Hiroshima to urban areas in the Kinki District during the postwar economic growth period. They wanted to affirm an important reality in their life by making this team's first championship victory in 1975 an extension of their personal experience of leaving Hiroshima to work in Osaka. The dream of such a victory was not a personal but a communal ideal that was shared by people from the same province. The symbolism of the hometown was not only tied to the building of the individual's identity but connected with the formation of the collective identity of people from the same district.
However, since the late 1970's people who were not originally form Hiroshima Prefecture have also started to join the Booster Club. Since the sport-cheering section that had symbolic functions of maintaining the Kinki Association of People from Hiroshima Prefecture was independent of the association as a booster club, a nodal organ that does not have any relationship with the bonding of people from the same district has come to coexist in the club.

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The Saitama Stadium 2002 is one of the stadiums built for the FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan. After the World Cup, Saitama prefecture expected the local club, the URAWA REDS, to use it as home ground. Because the REDS' supporters have tremendous loyalty and affection for the current home, the Komaba Stadium, the club has not decided to move home ground, yet.
Through the fieldwork, I found the “URAWA-Style” that is the unique cultural practice of the REDS' supporters. The URAWA-Style has developed a common sense of purpose, that is to let the club win, among the supporters since the club was established. Having ‘priceless’ experiences with it, each supporter has a deep emotional attachment to the Komaba stadium. Meanwhile, the prefecture invested considerable money and has immense debts to construct a new stadium. According to the prearranged plan, the prefecture is about to move the home ground on the authority of ‘publicness’.
There are two major arguments about “publicness” developed in sport sociology. One is to admire the “publicness of sport”. In other words, sport actually has public benefit without any doubts. Another is that “sport has some potential to realize publicness”, which is an instance (Habermas's term) to oppose governmental authority. I find that each argument misses people like the supporters, that they should be the heart of actors in the argument of “publicness”.

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