Sport as Craftsmanship

“Craftsmanship” may suggest a way of life that waned in the advent of industrial society – but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names a basic, enduring impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 9

Our collaborative project with Drs Richard Tahtinen, Michael McDougall, Niels Feddersen and Olli Tikkanen on craftsmanship in sport started in 2018 as “a hobby project” but we soon realised that we were into something that holds promise to help us understand the one important pathway to meaningful sport.

In our study, we recruited a diverse sample of athletes, from recreational to elite levels in the UK (N=258, 61.6% male, age 18+) to fill in a demographic questionnaire, the Work and Meaning Inventory (Steger, Dik, & Duffy, 2012) we modified for sport, and the recently developed Craftsmanship Scale (Thorlindsson, Halldorsson, & Sigfusdottir, 2018).

We found that older age and individual sport significantly correlated with higher scores of craftsmanship.

On the other hand, craftsmanship and religion were two independent predictors of meaningfulness but emphasised partly different meaning dimensions.

Both craftsmanship and religion were significant predictors of the Positive Meaning subscale (i.e., athletic career is experienced as meaningful and sport is felt to contribute to life meaning).

However, only craftsmanship was a significant predictor of the Meaning Making Through Work subscale (i.e., focus on personal growth, self-understanding, understanding of the world).

And moreover, only religion predicted the Greater Good Motivations subscale (i.e., serving a greater purpose and making a positive difference in the world through sport).

Our findings can be interpreted to indicate that, on one hand, meaningfulness in sport is related to how athletes approach their craft (i.e., adopting a craftsmanship approach), and on the other hand, on participants’ overall framework of life meaning (i.e., beliefs and values such as those brought by religion).

The article published in Sociology of Sport Journal can be read via publisher’s site (requires subscription) or free access is available via ResearchGate.