soc construction soc sport revised2.pdf (132.75 kB)
The social construction of the sociology of sport: a professional project
This paper presents a historical sociological analysis of the sociology of sport. It draws on theoretical insights from the sociology of professions to examine ‘state-of-the-field’ reviews written by sociologists of sport. The paper argues that in establishing why the sociology of sport emerged, how people identified its earliest manifestations, and how the subdiscipline’s boundaries were drawn, the political dynamics and consequences of the social construction of the field become apparent. This social construction is conceived of as a ‘professional project’ through which a knowledge domain, and this group’s authoritative status, was established. Sociologists of sport sought to validate their professional project through appeals to the sociological ‘mainstream’ and the correlative distancing from physical education. These reviews consistently obscure this professional project and portray a lineage that is logical, inevitable and consensual.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
INTERNATIONAL REVIEW FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORTVolume
49Issue
1Pages
3 - 21 (19)Citation
MALCOLM, D., 2014. The social construction of the sociology of sport: A professional project. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 49 (1), pp. 3 - 21Publisher
© SAGE Publications LtdVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014Notes
This article was published in the journal, International Review for the Sociology of Sport [© SAGE Publications]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1012690212452362ISSN
1012-6902Publisher version
Language
- en