Representações sociais do rugby aos atletas da cidade de Ponta Grossa no Paraná

Abstract

The objective of this master's thesis was to understand the social representations of the term "rugby" for athletes from the Ponta Grossa Rugby team. To this end, the following specific objectives were used: to verify the academic production about the Rugby modality in the Social perspective; to point out the academic production about the Rugby modality in Brazil; categorize rugby as an element in the sports field, or more precisely as a subfield, according to Pierre Bourdieu; demonstrate rugby as a possibility of thematic to be investigated from the theory of social representations; and to verify the social representations of the Rugby modality to the practitioners in the city of Ponta Grossa - PR. The construction of this dissertation took place from the use of the Scandinavian model, also called multipaper, which proposes a structure composed of different articles, which make it possible to understand the research problem and have complementarity. To this end, five articles were prepared: “State of knowledge: studies referring to rugby in the social perspective”; "Rugby in Brazil: state of knowledge about national studies carried out on the sport"; “Amateur vs. professional: characterization of rugby from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu”; “Serge Moscovici's Theory of Social Representations: rugby in focus”; and "Social representation of" rugby "to the athletes of the Ponta Grossa - Paraná team". It is concluded that in Brazil the biggest productions on the modality deal with themes such as sports performance, nutrition and supplementation, and the organization and management, while the academic production referring to the rugby modality from a social perspective has prominence in South America, mainly in South America. Argentina is mainly related to three categories referring to social classes: class construction, social changes, and class struggle. This relationship can be explained from the historical context of the sport, given the dispute between the amateur values (bourgeois class) and professionalization (lower classes). This connection can also be understood using Bourdieu's theory of fields, in which rugby can be understood as a subfield of the sports field, considering the disputes regarding the maintenance of amateur values, the popularization of the sport, and professionalization. Such disputes can still be aspects of investigation through the Theory of Social Representations proposed by Serge Moscovici and, more specifically, addressing the Theory of the Central Nucleus of Jean-Claude Abric, which proposes to observe the structure of a representation from the understanding of its more solid and more fluid characteristics. Using the Ponta Grossa Rugby team as a possibility to understand the structure of the representation about the sport for this group, it was observed, through the athletes' discourse, that the representation is related to the conducts that they consider important for the practice of this sport, having the term “respect” as a highlight. Using only the discourse, it is not yet possible to prove the relationship of these codes with the social representation of rugby, for this verification it is necessary to carry out further studies based on the clues found here, to verify if the practice of this group is consistent with the speech of the athletes.