Assessing the sociology of sport: On culture and political economy

Reflections on the trajectory of the sociology of sport

Sport can be viewed as one of the most successful export products of the Old World. Over the past centuries, Western civilization has exported numerous social, cultural, political, and economic institutions to the rest of the world, often assisted by military force or enforced by economic supremacy. The hegemonic power of the Western bloc framed the processes by which its own cultural institutions turned into apparently universal principles. Worldwide, states, nations, and people have largely consented to the regulatory framework of the nation state and its associated principles of parliamentarianism, democracy, egalitarianism, market capitalism, and the like. Yet, in terms of spread, compliance, and acceptance, hardly any institution has proved to be more successful, pervasive, and persistent than sport. While representative political participation, free entrepreneurship, equal employment opportunities, and even basic human rights are often highly contested and the subject of severe dispute, almost unanimous consent is granted to the veneration of physical prowess on the playing fields and the excitement generated by sportive games and contests. No matter what cultural belief and value systems give order and meaning to a particular society, people everywhere are highly likely to approve of the aesthetics of the sporting body, the narratives of symbolic competition, the moral economy of fair play, and the symbolic and often also material value of victory and sporting records. Explanations of this phenomenon are usually either rooted in political economy or in cultural analysis.

The macro-sociological analysis of the political economy of sport is loosely based on the assumption that society is segmented according to relations of ownership (Marx, 2003 [1872]), social facts (Durkheim, 1971 [1915]), or the interplay of wealth, prestige, and power (Weber, 2010 [1921/1922]), separating the various groups of society from each other and integrating them at a more distant level of aggregation, such as class, the local community, or national society. Following the tradition of these giants of sociological theorizing, researchers have argued that sport is functionally equivalent to religious belief and ceremonies in producing organic solidarity across group boundaries in post-traditional society (Bromberger, 1995), or that sport contributes to the alienation of the working class (Vinnai, 1972) and the disguise of the oppressive forces of class relations in capitalism (Brohm, 1978), or that sport is nothing but a microcosm of society, shaped and characterized by the same premises (Guttmann, 1978).

Quite a different strand of sport studies, usually based on micro-sociological research and more prominent in recent years, renders sport as cultural practice or performance. Such an approach requires understanding the fundamental relationship between subjective acting and objective conditions and the impact of the individual’s action on the construction of these conditions. As Susan Brownell (1995: 11–13) argued in her ethnographically and historically grounded exploration of modern Chinese body culture, the structured body movements of sport generate a moral orientation toward the world once they are repeated frequently enough and assigned symbolic and moral significance.

Constructionist views on the human being, as a totality in which the tangible aspects of human life are related with the body and its material experience, the techniques of work, control of emotion, and the enactment of ritual and ceremonial performances, have shaped the thinking of intellectuals as different as Hegel, Weber, Durkheim, Polyani, Elias, and Levi-Strauss. It was Marcel Mauss (1989 [1934]), however, who first outlined a coherent model of the “techniques of the body” resulting from “education” and “contact” (with the social environment). Later, Pierre Bourdieu (1984) sharpened the concept of habitus as an explanatory concept and analytical tool, referring to a complex set of dispositions, a habitual way of being that rests upon the objective conditions everyday life is subjugated to, such as race, class, or wealth, as well as the cultural expressions, media, rituals, and games that underpin social stratification. Within sport studies, the constructionist notion has been most prominently applied by anthropologists looking at sport in non-Western settings (e.g. Dyck, 2000) or by fan community ethnographies (e.g. Armstrong, 1999).

However, even though sport has become seen as a prime indicator of cultural globalization, the trajectory of much extant sociological research on sport in Western, as in non-Western, countries is, similar to social theory in general, blindfolded by what has been criticized as methodological nationalism. Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) identified the widespread ignorance of the national as integral factor of social theory as one out of three variants characterizing methodological nationalism across disciplines and times. More relevant in technical terms are the limitations in access to data or systemic information procured by national entities, and the naturalization of the national container society, encompassing a people, a state, a market, and a culture, as a taken-for-granted unit of analysis. Almost all historical and sociological accounts of sport – whether on single countries, border-crossing regions, or on a global scale – have been taking the national state as a basic unit of analysis and point of reference for theorizing. While the link is more explicit in the former case that relates the institutionalization and differentiation of sport to another core project of modernization, the establishment of the nation-state proper, it also informed the way social sciences have been looking at sport.

Social scientists’ partial blindfoldedness of cultural variability within and across national borders has been prompted by the academic division of labor that compartmentalized the social sciences into different academic fields based on their specialized approach to structures and processes within nation-state boundaries. Another factor contributing to the naturalization of the nation-state was the social scientists’ reliance on systematic information and data procured by state governments taking the national population, economy, and polity as a basic unit. I would argue that this holds true even for accounts that purportedly deal with sport on a global scale but rather contrast national trajectories with each other.

Assessing the challenges of the sociology of sport

Any attempt of de-centering the study of sport faces two basic and apparently contradictory challenges relating to the interplay of culture and political economy. First, how can a sociological theory of sport come to terms with an intrinsically fuzzy field that is loosely demarcated by the label of a particular national culture, while dealing with a phenomenon that is arguably the prime example of globalization? Speaking of sport in Japan, for example, the geographic and cultural allocation of “Japan” is far from being unproblematic. “Japan” may refer to the state as the institution which claims to monopolize the legitimate use of power within a given territory, a claim which is often changing and disputed. Or the attribute may refer to the nation, as a populace held together by a particular kind of lasting identity that encompasses common myths of origin, historical memories, a common culture, conceptions of common rights, duties, and economic opportunities, and, above all, attachment to a given territory (Hargreaves, 2000). These notions are neither stable nor distinct, as the changing geography of political powers in the region demonstrates. Furthermore, nationality remains contested territory in any multi-ethnic society commanding over a hegemonic national identity that is not fully inclusive. The concept of nation may be of global applicability, but, because of the vast cultural variability in the construction of nations, nationality, and nationalism, a full account of the peculiarities of the situation in which specific nationalities are operating is demanded (Bairner, 2001).

Second, how can a sociology of sport get hold of a phenomenon that pretends to be universal but is actually highly specific in origin and in the way it is practiced and understood at a given time and place? The history of and present-day sport in the peripheries of the world cannot be grasped adequately without considering the manifold relations between centers and peripheries beyond the world of sport. Colonial empires, missionary regimes, and international trade provided the premises for the early stage of the global spread of sport. Modern sport thus entered the non-Western world as a disciplinary regime, colonizing mind and bodies, consciously as well as subconsciously (Bale and Cronin, 2003). In postcolonial times, the “global media sport complex” (Maguire, 1999) succeeded the early prompters as a powerful alliance of principal agents seeking to spread sport all over the world. Pursuing their own interests, these institutional actors accomplished the task of globalizing sport, thereby constructing the sanitized cosmopolitan air of universal sport and disguising its vernacular roots and local shoots. Yet, if sport in its most general and open meaning can be dismantled as a system consisting of particular forms of body practices, body control, training routines, rules of game and conduct, and the ritualized handling of equipment and facilities, then the great variety of physical games and sport practices – as well as the huge diversity of ways of performing according to situational definitions like the level of the game, the formality of its rules, and the purpose of its participants – defies a hasty and reductionist understanding of sport in an Olympicist or “FOX Sports” fashion.

Future directions for the sociology of sport

Yesterday’s as well as today’s manifestations of sport are inseparably linked to the global political economy of modernity, which must equally be taken into account when studying the body culture of sport in any particular place. Within a transnational perspective, the traditional holism of culture is increasingly inappropriate for the production of taxonomic difference. Rather, the meaning of culture now acquires interactive and refractive characteristics. Transnationalism in sport has led to the penetration of the double helix of culture and “race” with the consequence that the notion of culture nowadays implies difference as well as emphasizing sameness. Not long ago Houlihan (1994: 358) noted that sport had become a “vehicle for the demonstration of differences” in a globalizing world. But when difference is no longer geographically represented, arguably the “other” is interwoven with the “us” (Lithman, 2004: 46). In this regard, the “culture” of sport in a given locality does not so much only have indexing, but also relating qualities, facilitating the hierarchical ordering of the world around us.

As the appearances and meanings of sport are under constant transformation, and because the meaning of “national” in this context itself has become blurred, the future sociology of sport should assess its research object as a motor and a metric of transnational change. One promising way of theorizing sport and body culture would begin with questioning how consciously and routinely performed practices of the body are legitimized by meanings within a certain field, and how these “normalized” practices are giving shape to those structures and institutions in which they are taking place. Equally, it would be necessary to analyze how practices present and re-present meanings that are embodied in structures that, in the first place, have a major effect on the way in which practices can occur.

On a micro level, such a social scientific study of sport would locate the inquiry in particular times and places to find out the commonalities of body practices, games, and contests that a society subsumes under the notion of sport and/or alternative concepts – and by the same token, identify the categorical differences and boundaries that are giving shape to a field of common interest. On a macro level, such a study would have to demonstrate how the production and consumption of sport reflects the social structure of society in time and in transition. Translating the historical timeline of sport development into a matrix that relates a nation’s or culture’s positioning in the world to global hegemony evokes debates both on continuity and discontinuity and on connectivity and disconnectivity at the same time. Freed from the containment by nation-states and national cultures, such a study of sport in the light of globalization is able to analyze social, economic, and cultural relations in sport on a transnational level. In such a configuration, social rather than geographical hierarchies (as in traditional developmental trajectories of West vs East) structure the universal in and of sport, its consumption as well as its production. Laudable examples for such an approach have been provided by William Kelly or Alan Klein on the global sport of baseball in localities such as Japan or the Latin American regions.

A transnational investigation into sport can, and in my eyes should, attempt to bridge the gap between local memories, archives, and national knowledge systems on the one hand, and transnational discourses and universal theories that consciously transcend the particularistic boundaries of Western epistemology on the other. Rather than strictly separating the structural from the actors-based approach, as well as the symbolic from the material analysis, I advocate an integrated research program that combines questions and insights of both fields of inquiry and theoretical claims (Manzenreiter, 2014).