Chapter 81: The Sociology of Sport

PETER DONNELLY

The sociology of sport Organized sport, as an area of social life, has become increasingly significant in the last 150 years. Sport now attracts the attention, time, resources, and energy of many millions of people around the world. In addition to the significance of sport itself as a cultural form, it is an activity that is related to and has the ability to shed light on many other aspects of society such as education, the media, health, the economy, politics, families and communities, and to expose social processes such as globalization, democratization, and socialization to sociological analysis. Despite this, sociological attention to such a significant area of social life continues to be limited, with some suggesting that the sociology of sport has been the “Rodney Dangerfield” of sociology. This chapter examines the origins of the sociology of sport and explores its interdisciplinarity particularly in terms of its dual “location” in ...

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