INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

Postmodernist researchers attacked the legitimacy of ‘modern’
claims to “universally true” to knowledge, and so also those of
feminism, on the grounds that these theorizations are dependence on
grand narratives of emancipation, science and progress. These claims
are said to have achieved an ‘omniscient’ standpoint, which takes
precedence over the other stories that people have told so far (Lyotard,
1984 & Noris, 2000).
In place of the claim to universal knowledge, Lyotard (1984),
argues that all ‘Truths’ are local rather than general, because they are
produced within the rules of particular, limited, language games.
Therefore the ‘truth’ of ‘women’s subordination’ cannot then hold
well in other ways of thinking with other rules. This is a critical
challenge to feminism.
Put in other terms, its emphasis is also, Fearthstone (1995) argues,
placed upon a more complex combination of differences, local
diversities and otherness. The voices that are ignored or suppressed in
the unified models of globalisation and world-system process, are
potentially given more attention with postmodern theory where
women and individual experiences of women are at least potentially
more equally represented than in modernization accounts.
However, postmodern theory even if welcomed by feminists, is
still problematic in the sense of politics, ethics and in practice, but
nevertheless offers us freedom from limited knowledge claims
(Hekman, 1992; McNay, 1992).
In this paper we will try to explore the role of one woman in
decision-making positions in a sport organization, through her specific
experience in the decision making process in the Israeli Volleyball
Association, regarding the establishment of the Volleyball Academy
for Young Talented Girls (VAYTG).
Justification for using a biography as a research method
Biographical approach as a literary genre can be traced as far back
as Augustine, but the features of the current biographical approach
share much in common with the general impetus behind the
‘qualitative backlash’ of the early 1970’s, of which it was a part
(Miller, 2000).
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