Abstract
The work of Michel Foucault has had a considerable impact on a wide range of academic disciplines but is yet to infiltrate the field of sport psychology. Foucault's work offers rich reward to sport psychology because his primary interest was how human beings acquired knowledge of themselves and their practices. One Foucauldian concept that has considerable potential to contribute to our understanding of sport performance is that of 'docility'. Foucault's (1995) Technologies of Discipline is a theoretical framework that showed how the meticulous organization involved in many of modern societies institutions such as prisons, schools, or the workplace can result in human docility. This is problematic because it may produce behaviours – compliance, apathy, confusion—that make humans more not less predictable. After outlining this framework we illustrate how these organizational structures have saturated modern sporting practices. Specifically, the combination of the organization of time, space and movement are techniques that Foucault (1995, p. 139) referred to as "small acts of cunning". We argue that they produce a host of smaller, less visible and taken-for-granted practices that instill a discipline on athletic bodies that may ultimately undermine athlete performance. Sport psychology practitioners may gain better results with athletes through a greater awareness of how modern sporting practices – designed with efficiency in mind, may actually hinder outstanding individual performance.
