The iron cage of efficiency: analytics, basketball and the logic of modernity

Abstract

Analytics, the application of advanced statistics to sport, has become increasingly prominent. This paper will focus on their application in basketball. I will argue that the introduction of analytics is an attempt to expand the logic of modernity into sport, an area which, for Elias, its demands had historically been temporarily suspended. Instead we can see some of the key tenets of analytics–which I will explore via reference to The Mid-Range Theory, a recent book promoting their use in basketball–as reproducing the modernist demand for control, order, prediction and efficiency. In turn, I will also explore how the critique of analytics reflects the critique of modernity, most notably in its attempt to disenchant the social world and create a new iron cage of efficiency. Therefore, the case of analytics in basketball shows us that what Wagner called modernity as interpretation still has significant social purchase.