Sport

Sport—loosely defined as the regulated manifestation of competitively based physical activity—is a complex phenomenon that operates simultaneously within numerous social realms (i.e., physical, commercial, media, and political) and can be experienced in a number of different ways (i.e., as participant, spectator, viewer, owner, investor, and worker). Adding to its complexity, sport is also a fluid category whose precise constitution is bound to the specificities of the context in question. Despite this historical and cultural contingency, sport can still be considered a universal practice. Virtually all societies exhibit some form of sporting activity, which, to varying degrees and in varying ways, provides a vehicle for the embodied expression of local identity and difference. Therefore, in deriving from, and contributing toward, the structural, institutional, processional, and behavioral dimensions of social life, sport represents a potentially illuminating field of sociological inquiry; something fully recognized by those within the sociology of sport. Indeed, the approximately four-decade evolution of the sociology of sport subdiscipline has [Page 788]generated an empirically rich, politically prescient, and both theoretically sophisticated and diverse body of work.

Propelled by a growing band of scholars located in, among other places, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Holland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the sociology of sport can be considered a truly global academic community. As well as an expanding array of sport-focused books and book series, the primary vehicle for the dissemination of sociology of sport research has been through the field's major academic journals: Sport in Society; International Review for the Sociology of Sport; Journal of Sport and Social Issues; and the Sociology of Sport Journal. The accumulated body of work represented within these various publication outlets demonstrates an understandable lack of uniformity with regard to the manner in which sport is addressed as a sociological problem. Sport's multidimensional character means there is no, nor has there ever been, an empirical, methodological, or theoretical orthodoxy within the sociology of sport. With regard to social theory, it is possible to discern exponents of virtually every major strand—from structural functionalism to post-modernism—among sociologically informed sport scholars. To illustrate the breadth of this theoretical diversity, the remainder of this brief overview will concentrate on the five major social theorists whose influence is most evident within contemporary sociology of sport research.

As in other subdisciplines within the social sciences, Karl Marx's impact on the sociology of sport has been extensive yet varied. He may have referred to sport only once in his voluminous writings; nevertheless, there are a number of insightful analyses of the political economy of contemporary sport from a Marxist perspective. Shifting from the economy to culture as the locus of critical engagement, Marx's influence is also apparent within an array of Gramscian-inflected sport studies that, from various different vantage points (be they ethnic, race, gender, sexuality, or nation oriented), approach sport as a cultural terrain on which everyday identities and experiences are immersed in a process of continual contestation.

While perhaps not as prevalent as Marxist-oriented scholarship, Max Weber's theorizing has also been a consistent feature of sociologically based sport studies. His concept of rationalization, and more specifically, the notion of instrumental rationality, has proved particularly useful for those interested in theorizing the increasingly commercialized and bureaucratized nature of sport organizations.

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