The Complicity Model of Action: Variation of Complicity in the Making of Student-Athletes in a Chinese Elite University

This study proposes the "complicity model" as an alternative to investigate the relationship between action and institutional environment. The author argues that extant literature on action is prevented from advancement by the separation between disposition and capacity, and by the separation between motivation and environment. The former separation is done by scholars' injection of intention with global knowledge into action, and the latter is due to a lack of temporality. To avoid these two separations, the "complicity model" is demonstrated in the case of Chinese student-athletes. A three-month ethnography and forty interviews are done in a Chinese elite university to extract patterns of how student-athletes cope with and fit in the college environment with their different dispositions. Three levels of complicity are used to identify the subjectless disposition-institution cooperation and the temporal dimension of the position-making of student-athletes, advancing the explanation of action.