ABSTRACT

If the common sense definition of history is ‘the study of past events’, the equivalent definition of sociology might be ‘the study of the development, structure and functioning of human society’. Adding the word ‘sport’ at an appropriate place serves to define the respective sub-disciplines. These definitions imply that the major distinction between history and sociology is temporal; the former encompassing the actions and experiences of our ancestors, the latter focused on contemporary experiences or, at most, how the social world came to take its contemporary form. Of course, there probably isn’t a single mainstream historian or sociologist who would

want to have these dictionary-like definitions rigidly applied, let alone those historians or sociologists whose common interest in sport draws them together into interdisciplinary sports studies. We would argue that every snapshot in time captured in empirical research, be it last week or last century, can only be understood as the abstraction of broader social processes. Yet within the field of sports studies the time-orientated distinction between history and sociology has been increasingly blurred by a number of texts, edited collections and journals (i.e. Football Studies, Olympika, Soccer and Society, Sport in Society) which are explicitly interdisciplinary, as well as the increasing propensity of sports history journals such as Sporting Traditions and Journal of Sport History to publish sociologically informed analyses of sport. More recent debates about the nature and state of sports history, the consequences of the ‘cultural turn’ for history scholars and sociologists of sport and specifically the impact of postmodernism on sports history have also led to critical dialogues about the relationship between time and the interpretation and explanation of sport in social life.1