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The social construction of the sociology of sport: a professional project

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-09-25, 12:33 authored by Dominic MalcolmDominic Malcolm
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 SPORT

Volume

49

Issue

1

Pages

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 - 21

Publisher

© SAGE Publications Ltd

Version

  • 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

2014

Notes

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/10.1177/1012690212452362

ISSN

1012-6902

Language

  • en