Technique, Instrumental Formal Organization and the Hinge in Exercise Physiology Research

This presentation outlines results from a 12-month multi-method investigation of how exercise physiology research focused on physiological mechanisms and markers of sport performance is enhanced, curtailed, shaped and ultimately deployed, by broader sociological, political, historical and technological trajectories. In doing so, this presentation follows the theoretical leads of Jacques Ellul, Erving Goffman, and Norbert Elias in briefly reviewing three discrete but connected issues. First, the social and political factors that affect the conduct of lab-based research and how they shape knowledge processes from discovery to development, delivery, and use in the sports world; second, the processes of identification, construction, and resolution of bioethical problems in sport and exercise physiology research; and finally, the ways technologically mediated understandings of people developed in the lab and manifest in sporting endeavours facilitate the emergence and transmission of cultural logics and societal values. Throughout the presentation special attention is paid to the recursive relationship between biology and sociology in order to understand how people and their political, social, and moral potentialities are interwoven into historical trajectories of cultural production and societal organization of their bodies.