Having never lost my fascination for sport, especially but by no means only rugby, cricket and track-and-field athletics, I returned to it as the subject matter of a new book in the noughties. As I write this I have – literally – just finished correcting the proofs on A Critical Realist Theory of Sport, which is due for publication in December of 2022. In some ways this is a follow-up to my Sport and Society: History, Power and Culture, published in 2005, but it breaks considerable new theoretical and empirical ground. I will not attempt a synopsis here, but rather suggest a few ways in which my approach and perspective have shifted in the years between the two volumes. I once again drew inspiration from the critical theory of Habermas and the critical realism of Bhaskar, called upon the notion of rentier capitalism’s fractured society, and used the class/command, stigma/deviance, insider/outsider and party/populist dynamics to strategic causal advantage. But I added a further dynamic, that of the elite/mass, testifying to a now yawning gap between the owners, regulators and managers of sporting endeavours like football and rugby clubs and a fandom more ubiquitous but also more virtual than actual.
As for the salience of the dynamics as causal or generative mechanisms, I repeated my longstanding view that the class/command dynamic permits a hard core of global and nomadic owners of capital to buy power to their advantage in policy making, which has meant some have entered the sporting arena unhindered, indirectly by monopolising new communication technologies, and directly by buying up leading football and rugby clubs and their associated brands. This has led to a multi-faceted polarisation between system privilege and lifeworld participation and fandom. I redeployed the concept of asset flows in this context. The stigma/deviance dynamic was referenced to emphasise the often-overriding ideological appropriation of the notion of personal responsibility. This has led to sporting success and failure being put down to individual talent and effort. While sporting failure in the past might be accompanied by shame, it is now more likely to be accompanied by blame. Young Asian cricketers who failed to make the grade in Yorkshire were blamed for not fitting in or for not working hard enough. This (mis)use of personal responsibility ’absents’ the causal role of social structure and culture. The insider/outsider dynamic is relevant in that there is a new societal intolerance of outsiders and ‘otherness’ that has impacted on sport, particularly in relation to race or ethnicity. The party/populist dynamic has promoted and underwritten the ownership of extreme wealth by the exercise of increasingly executive extra-parliamentary power and – an example of Bhaskar’s dominant power 2 relations – made resistance to Habermas’ system colonisation or lifeworld rationalisation more challenging. This was accelerated by COVID. Reform to sport has become correspondingly difficult. A final dynamic, that of elite/mass, was added in A Critical Realist Theory of Sport. This refers to the growing polarisation in society between elites of all shapes and sizes and the mass of the public. In the context of sport, this is apparent in the governance as well as the ownership of sport, and it is often reflected too in the near-absolute control over teams and individual competitors vested in managers and coaches. But in sporting terms, the elite/mass dynamic is most conspicuous in the gap that has opened-up between system-driven elites and lifeworld-based, increasingly virtual public fandoms.
In some respects, this discourse on sport stands as a companion volume to my Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society. The themes certainly overlap and are sometimes elaborated on and developed. As a form of recap and consolidation, it might be as well to dwell for a moment on my general conclusions to the sport book. I stressed that the relationship between society and sport is dialectical, but that society shapes sport more than sport shapes society. The primary responsibility for us sociologists, it follows, is to acknowledge, define and examine the relations among social structure, culture and agency and sport at any given historical juncture. Critical realism, I insisted once more, offers a useful and subtle philosophical frame for studying these relations, not only within the stratum of the social but also – drawing on the notion of emergence – for accommodating interdisciplinarity via upstream and downstream causal inputs from and to psychological and biological strata. Habermasian critical theory affords an expedient social framework for synthesising macro-, meso- and micro-sociological approaches. Especially useful are theories about the de-coupling of system and lifeworld and the accelerating colonisation of the latter by the former. Many extant, and overlapping, paradigm-based sociological theories of sport afford rich resources for a critical realist/theoretical sociology of sport in the fractured society.
More substantively, I drew attention again to the cracks and fissures that have been probed and enlarged with the advent of the post-1970s fractured society and have had both direct and indirect effects on sport. Directly, and in line with the class/command and elite/mass dynamics, the ownership, governance and control of professional or elite sport, together with its contemporary modes of dissemination in the lifeworld, have become further concentrated in the hands of individuals or consortia featuring super-rich global nomads who profit either financially or in the currency of cultural legitimation. This constitutes an extension of Weberian rationalisation, Marxian commodification and Ritzer’s McDonaldisation and it is reasonable to frame this in terms of a ramping up of the system colonisation of the lifeworld in a phase of financialised or rentier capitalism that remains volatile, unpredictable and, according to some advocates of ‘big sociology’, terminal. More indirectly, lifeworld-based fans have been recast as largely passive, celebrity and avatar-oriented consumers of sport in ever-expanding global and high-tech virtual arenas.
There are no studies examining the salience of my notion of ‘asset flows’ as pertaining not only to health and longevity but, in adapted form, to sporting accomplishment. It is reasonable to hypothesise, however, that in a fractured society further shaken and disrupted by COVID a degree of polarisation will have taken place between those with advantageous clusters of strong asset flows and those without. In the wake of COVID this polarisation will likely have re-affirmed and deepened class, gender and race-based disadvantage, both in the context of lifeworld participation and professional scouting and recruitment.
After the manner of both the class/demand and party-populist dynamics, the state has been subject to class infiltration and grown more unaccountable, non-transparent and given to right-wing authoritarianism. To the extent that politics have become more populist, governments like that in the UK have found the new cultural relativity something of a bonus. Given the absence of any imminent threat of a state legitimation crisis – ironically, given the global financial crisis of 2008/09, Brexit, COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the continuing ‘cost of living crisis’ – the Tories have for the time being consolidated system-based power. The government has shown no more interest in bottom-up lifeworld sporting initiatives like that emerging out of the tragedy of the Grenfell fire than it did in the fire itself.
Phenomena like cultural relativity and the new individualism, together with the switch of focus from structure to identity, can be broached via the insider/outside dynamic. Identities signify insider inclusion and outside exclusion in actual and virtual worlds alike. Moreover, identity has become as relevant to superstars as it has for those pick-and-mix versions of celebrities or avatars projected onto the lifeworld. ‘Identity myths’ abound, fuelled by the Internet and social media. What has been called ‘identitarian politics’ is highly compatible with, and expedient for, rentier capitalism’s neoliberal ideology. It divides people and undermines prospects for structural change and reform in sport as elsewhere. They also provide cover for societal fractures germinated in structural divisions of class, gender and race.
Linked with today’s dominant narratives on individualism, identity and the like is the concept of personal responsibility. It can be argued that in sport this emphasis on personal responsibility – with ‘behavioural conditionality’ the other side of the coin – not only sits comfortably with but is positively related to structural advantage via the clustering of strong asset flows for sport. Put differently, socially structured and underwritten opportunity renders personal responsibility in relation to commitment, training, on the pitch, square or track, much easier to demonstrate. As the stigma/deviance dynamic bears testimony, there is a degree of fluidity to cultural norms and they can be adapted, even ‘weaponised’, to fall into line with system imperatives: those who win are those who deserve to win.
These claims, which I like to think are empirically fortified in the book, centre on the special relevance of system imperatives and what Bhaskar calls ‘power 2 relations’ for sport. This, I guess, echoes a general theme of my theorising for some years.