Book Review: Sport: A Critical Sociology by Richard Giulianotti

Frontiers in sports and active living, 2023

The relevance of a sociological view on the problems of society has never been as important as it is today. To quote the editors of the journal Nature in their editorial, Time for the Social Sciences, from 2015: if you want science to deliver for society, you need to support a capacity to understand that society. In other words, the technological and scientific disciplines cannot simply transfer their findings into everyday life without knowing how society works. But this realisation does not seem to have caught on everywhere. The sociology of sport is entering a critical period that will shape its development and potential transformation over the next decade. In this paper, we review key features and trends within the sociology of sport in recent times, and set out potential future challenges and ways forward for the subdiscipline. Accordingly, our discussion spans a wide range of issues concerning the sociology of sport, including theories and approaches, methods, and substantive research topics. We also discuss the potential contributions of the sociology of sport to addressing key societal challenges. To examine these issues, the paper is organized into three main parts. First, we identify three main concentric challenges, or types of peripheral status, that sociologists of sport must confront: as social scientists, as sociologists, and as sociologists of sport, respectively. Second, we consider various strengths within the positions of sociology and the sociology of sport. Third, in some detail, we set out several ways forward for the sociology of sport with respect to positioning within academe, scaling up research, embracing the glocal and cosmopolitan aspects of sociology, enhancing plurality in theory, improving transnational coordination, promoting horizontal collaborations, and building greater public engagement. The paper is underpinned by over 60 years (combined) of work within the sociology of sport, including extensive international research and teaching. KEYWORDS sociology, key societal challenges, sport, theory, methods, horizon, strengths and challenges of sociology, position of the sociology of sport TYPE

On the 50th anniversary of the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) and International Review for the Sociology of Sport (IRSS), a key international figure in the study of media and sport within the sociology of sport, David Rowe, reflects on the field as a whole and the role for studying media and power within it. Rowe considers how some development in the sociology of sport within the larger discipline of sociology may be seen as 'gestural and instrumental'. In considering the challenges of the field, Rowe notes how the media serves to situate and amplify sport's inherent powers of 'liveness', whether sport is manifest in mega-events or in 'extraordinary ordinariness'. The closing section of the essay focuses on questions of media and power, foremost those concerning spectacle and commodification and their intersection with politics and the transactions of nationalized identities with those of race, ethnicity and gender in a globalized media sports cultural complex. Reflections Meditative articles of this kind often display contrasting, perhaps incommensurate tones – the triumphant versus the elegiac. The former narrates stories of struggle, of barriers overcome and progress made, while the latter laments what has been lost and the regrets that accompany failure and thwarted ambition. The reflections here will be tinged with both analytical moods, taking on an inevitably autobiographical character that is intended to demonstrate that the field and its history looks rather different according to vantage point, and that omniscient claims to encapsulate it all should be treated with appropriate scepticism. In short, this is a commentary by a self-identified sociologist of sport who also identifies as much else besides, who came to the field through academic happenstance, and who is acutely aware of the particularity of his experience.

Sociological Research Online, 2015

RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2020

In recent years, the importance of sports in Russia has increased dramatically, which is determined primarily by the country's hosting international sport events, in particular, the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup 2018. The influence of sports on social processes has increased, sports began to strengthen its position in public opinion as a prestigious sphere of employment and an important social category [24. P. 60]. Thus, there is an obvious need to identify the relationship of physical culture with society as a whole and with all elements of the social structure and specific social institutions. The article examines the origins and prerequisites for the formation of sociology of sport as a relatively independent scientific discipline; presents the issues of sports sociology in the historical perspective-in the context of both their social genesis and contemporary sociological theories; considers the social role and social functions of sport education and sports. The authors believe that the differentiated social distribution of sports practices is determined by the interconnections of the space of possible practices (supply) and the space of demand for certain practices. In the article, the well-known foreign scientists are presented in the new perspective as sociologists who provided for both Russian and foreign authors the incentive and direction for theoretical studies of sports issues. The article also presents to Russian readers the original studies on sociology of sports conducted by famous scientists-Norbert Elias, Eric Dunning, Anna Ingram, Georges Hébert, etc.

Physical Education and Sport Through the Centuries, 2018

Summary In this paper we evaluated the basic viewpoints on the mutual relations between contemporary sport and society. Sport is a global social phenomenon which is determined by a variety of different processes, including: the fast development of the industrial society and capital, an increase in leisure time, the development of a liberal democracy and the media. A special feature in these relations is the overall globalization process in today’s world. The basic structure of this paper is made up of two functional parts. In the first part we indicate the dominant theoretical-methodological paradigms in studying sport in social sciences, especially sociology: functionalism, conflict theory in society, interpretive and postmodern theory. In the second part of the paper we analyze the dialectics of contemporary relations between sport and society, where special attention is dedicated to the distribution of social power between sport, capital and the media at the local and global leve...

Imagine a world without sport; the euphoric triumphs, the heart-breaking losses and the everyday sporting controversies which captivate a global audience would no longer exist. For millions of people around the world the excitement that sport entails ‘are like lightning bolts that interrupt an otherwise continuous skyline’ (Cashmore, 2000:6). Without sport, the world would never have witnessed Andy Murray make history by being the first Briton in 77 years to win the Wimbledon men's title, Victoria Pendleton would never have powered her way to winning gold in the women’s Keirin during the 2012 London Olympics, and Alex Ferguson would not have retired as the ‘greatest’ football manager of all time (?). Needless to say, there is more to sport than the sports themselves. Sport has become so deeply entrenched as a pillar of modern society, that to envisage a world without it seems inconceivable; neither the globalisation of commercial sports (Coakley, 2003) nor the intimate relationship between sport and politics (Houlihan, 2002) would ever have been formed. Additionally, the idea of using mega-sporting events, such as the Olympics, as global platforms for protest (Cottrell and Nelson, 2010), or as backdrops for terrorism (Giulianotti and Klauser, 2012), would be non-existent.

Book reviews 509 non-Western academics, in non-Western locations and also in less visible geographical places and sports.

The Sociological Review, 2006

It is surprising that the sociological and social scientific study of sport-ritualized, rationalized, commercial spectacles and bodily practices that create opportunities for expressive performances, disruptions of the everyday world and affirmations of social status and belonging-was still seen as something as a joke by mainstream sociology until recently. A similar comment was made in the introduction to a previous Sociological Review Monograph on Sport, Leisure and Social Relations published twenty years ago (Horne, Jary and Tomlinson, 1987). Yet, quite clearly, social aspects of sport can be considered from most classical, modern and postmodern sociological theoretical perspectives, even if the 'founding fathers' did not have much explicitly to say about them (Giulianotti, ed., 2004). Ritualized, civic, events and ceremonies (Durkheim); rationalized, bureaucratically organized, science driven behaviour (Weber); commercial, global spectacles (Marx); expressivity and the everyday (Simmel and postmodernism); and male cultural displays and cultural centres (feminism). These are just a few of the issues that have concerned sociological theorists and inform the sociological analysis of sport. It was Pierre Bourdieu, however, alongside Norbert Elias and his colleague Eric Dunning, who has been one of the few leading mainstream sociologists to have taken sport seriously and who recognized the difficulty in doing so: 'the sociology of sport: it is disdained by sociologists, and despised by sportspeople' (Bourdieu, 1990: 156). This book suggests that just as modern competitive sport and large-scale sport events were developed in line with the logic of capitalist modernity, sports mega-events and global sport culture are central to late modern capitalist societies. As media events, the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA association football World Cup provide cultural resources for reflecting upon identity and enacting agency. More generally they provide resources for the construction of 'a meaningful social life in relation to a changing societal environment that has the potential to destabilize and threaten these things' (Roche, 2000: 225). Sports 'mega-events' are important elements in the orientation of nations to international or global society. As Munoz suggests in his chapter, mega-events,

The present article aims at presenting and structuring a brief historical-sociological panorama about the constitution of the sports sociology field in the international scene, making afterwards some inferences and transpositions to think about the Brazilian and, maybe, Latin-American, scenario. This undertaking starts from a bibliographic exploratory approach, so as to restore some historical elements of the development of sports sociology and, moreover, to write a general panorama which may contemplate some of the main theoretical frameworks and the respective authors who followed closely the study of the social phenomenon called modern sports and, consequently, contributed for the institutionalization of this space for academic discussion.

Sport in Society, 2016

Sport has a deep, enduring attachment to nation as spatial anchor, governmental principle and romantic ideal while being simultaneously implicated in processes that strain, challenge and disrupt the sportnation nexus. Sport institutions, practices and tastes move into new territories and, correspondingly, people relocate to national spaces where they must negotiate the terms of an established sportingsocietal order in the context of a global 'media sports cultural complex'. Sport, therefore, is compulsively transnational, unevenly global, and reflexively national in character by means of multidimensional, dynamic interplay. This article focuses on how the lives of ethnically diverse, urban and mobile human subjects in Australia are interwoven with sport in ways that illuminate its capacity symbolically to bind and separate citizens/residents to extant national formations. In addressing sport's role in social inclusion/exclusion and cultural citizenship in demographically diverse societies, the article explores its positioning at the intersection of national symbols and material processes. Introduction: sport within and beyond nations Sport is a social institution and cultural form that derives much of its symbolic power from the idea of nation while, for over two centuries, increasingly exceeding the boundaries of the national in material and symbolic form (Bairner 2001). For this reason, to talk about sport in 'transnational contexts' is, in effect, to embrace all contemporary sport, including those that are highly local and more 'folk'-oriented (such as kabbadi, kho kho, jukshei and pelota) but cannot be isolated from external sporting forces. It may be more or less national, transnational or global in nature, but to be defined as sport-in short, rationalized, regulated, competitive physical play-is inevitably to be implicated in the realm of the supranational. This article is principally concerned with those sports that are most regulated, commercialized and mediated. Sport in the twenty-first century is pulled in different directions, appealing, especially when involving international competition, to nationalist frameworks and impulses, while, especially in the light of its digitally-facilitated mediation (Hutchins and Rowe 2012), creating myriad connections and points of identification. A double movement,