ABSTRACT
Almost all text-books purporting to introduce the sociology of sport contain sections on the work of Norbert Elias and subsequent researchers who identify themselves as gurational sociologists. Almost all introductions to, and critiques of, Elias’s work devote key sections to his writings on sport. This is no doubt partly a consequence of Elias being ‘one of the pioneers of the sociology of sport’ (Dunning, 2002: 213). Elias was conscious of his role in this regard, reecting on his collaboration with Dunning by saying, ‘I think we helped a little’ to make sport a respectable subject for academic study (Elias, 1986a: 19) – indeed, while otherwise something of a serial monogamist when it came to publication, Elias published extensively with Dunning (Waddington and Malcolm, 2008). Although Elias’s prominence in the sociology of sport stands in sharp contrast to his centrality to the sociology of leisure and Leisure Studies, as we will show, Elias neither neglected leisure through his empirical focus on sport, nor envisaged their study to be mutually exclusive. Indeed it is characteristic of Elias’s more general approach that such dichotomous thinking, and academic divisions, are counter-productive to the generation of socially useful knowledge
Comparison with Bourdieu is illustrative in outlining Elias’s orientation towards sport and leisure. Both Elias and Bourdieu have been described as ‘unusual’ amongst leading social theorists to treat sport and leisure as important areas of investigation and to have applied their central theoretical concepts to the empirical study of these practices (e.g. Jarvie and Maguire, 1994; Tomlinson, 2004). Both stand as relatively early examples of authors who sought to combine, to use Bourdieu’s phrasing, ‘immense theoretical ambition with extreme empirical modesty’ (Bourdieu in Wacquant, 1989: 51); to treat the everyday aspects of life as sociologically signicant; and to take such areas as sport, art, and shifting ‘tastes’ as legitimate objects of social analysis. In this respect, Elias and Bourdieu share a considerable degree of common ground with regard to their sociological practice (Dunning and Hughes, 2013). Indeed, mirroring Elias’s self-reection, Bourdieu has similarly claimed that he ‘is virtually alone among major sociologists – Elias being the other one – to have written seriously on sports’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 93). While we might take issue with the degree to which the respective authors seriously engaged with sport and leisure (Malcolm, 2012), more pertinent for present purposes is the degree to which their theoretical insights have been embraced in the respective elds. Our central aim in this chapter is to illustrate how
Elias has inuenced the Leisure Studies eld. However, a supplementary aim is to highlight the considerable potential for scholarly development in this area.
