War on Drugs in Sport

<p>This book is an innovative and compelling work that develops a modified moral panic model illustrated by the drugs in sport debate. Drawing on Max Weber’s work on moral authority and legitimacy McDermott argues that doping scandals create a crisis of legitimacy for sport governing bodies and other elite groups. This crisis leads to a moral panic where the issue at stake for elite groups is perceptions of their organizational legitimacy. The book highlights the role of the media as a site where claims to legitimacy are made and contested contributing to the social construction of a moral panic. The book explores the way regulatory responses in this case anti-doping policies in sport reflect the interests of elite groups and the impact of those responses on individuals or folk devils. <i>The War on Drugs in Sport </i>makes a key contribution to moral panic theory by adapting Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s moral panic model to capture the diversity of interests and complex relationships between elite groups. The difference between this book and others in the field is its application of a new theoretical perspective supported by well-researched empirical evidence. </p>