The War on Drugs in Sport : Moral Panics and Organizational Legitimacy Paperback / softback

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." The War on Drugs in Sport 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.