A Critical Realist Theory of Sport

195 Pages·2022·3.079 MB·English

by  Graham Scambler

A Critical Realist Theory of Sport
This book argues that sport in the era of global or financialised capitalism has
undergone a process of fracturing, which requires a re-assessment of longstanding
and consensual accounts of traditional-to-modern sporting activity. Considering
rival concepts of sport, it presents detailed, illustrative studies of various types
of sporting or athletic activity – including soccer, cricket, rugby and track and
field – to advance an alternative sociological understanding of sport rooted in
the philosophies and theories of critical realism and critical theory. As such,
A Critical Realist Theory of Sport will appeal to scholars of sociology and social
theory with interests in sport, research methods and critical realist thought.
Graham Scambler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University College
London and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Surrey University. His recent books
include ‘Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account’
(2018); ‘A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders’ (2020); and
‘Communal Forms: A Sociological Exploration of Concepts of Community’ (with
Tjora, 2020). He is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK.
Routledge Studies in Critical Realism
Critical Realism is a broad movement within philosophy and social science. It is
a movement that began in British philosophy and sociology following the found-
ing work of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and others. Critical Realism emerged
from the desire to realise an adequate realist philosophy of science, social science,
and of critique. Against empiricism, positivism and various idealisms (interpretiv-
ism, radical social constructionism), Critical Realism argues for the necessity of
ontology. The pursuit of ontology is the attempt to understand and say something
about ‘the things themselves’ and not simply about our beliefs, experiences, or
our current knowledge and understanding of those things. Critical Realism also
argues against the implicit ontology of the empiricists and idealists of events and
regularities, reducing reality to thought, language, belief, custom, or experience.
Instead Critical Realism advocates a structural realist and causal powers approach
to natural and social ontology, with a focus upon social relations and process of
social transformation.
Important movements within Critical Realism include the morphogenetic
approach developed by Margaret Archer; Critical Realist economics developed by
Tony Lawson; as well as dialectical Critical Realism (embracing being, becoming
and absence) and the philosophy of metaReality (emphasising priority of the non-
dual) developed by Roy Bhaskar.
For over thirty years, Routledge has been closely associated with Critical Real-
ism and, in particular, the work of Roy Bhaskar, publishing well over fifty works
in, or informed by, Critical Realism (in series including Critical Realism: Inter-
ventions; Ontological Explorations; New Studies in Critical Realism and Educa-
tion). These have all now been brought together under one series dedicated to
Critical Realism.
The Centre for Critical Realism is the advisory editorial board for the series. If
you would like to know more about the Centre for Critical Realism, or to submit
a book proposal, please visit www.centreforcriticalrealism.com.
Big Picture Perspectives on Planetary Flourishing
Metatheory for the Anthropocene Vol 1
Nicholas Hedlund and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens
Working with Critical Realism
Stories of Methodological Encounters
Alpesh Maisuria & Grant Banfield
A Critical Realist Theory of Sport
Graham Scambler
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Studies-in-Critical-Realism-Routledge-Critical-Realism/book-series/
SE0518
A Critical Realist Theory
of Sport
Graham Scambler
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Graham Scambler
The right of Graham Scambler to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-74317-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-74318-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15710-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003157106
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: A Critical Realist Theory of Sport 1
1 The Case for a Revised Sociology of Sport 17
2 A Critical Realist Frame 43
3 From Hyper-Rationalisation to the Fractured Society 67
4 Global System Versus Local Lifeworld 104
5 A Case Study: Rugby as ‘Tribal Warfare’ 119
6 Sociology and Sport in the Fractured Society 141
References 166
Index 175
Acknowledgements
As is invariably the case, writing a book necessarily involves accumulating debts.
This text builds on the expertise and studies of numerous specialists in the sociol-
ogy of sport, and as a non-specialist, it is a pleasure both to thank them and to
ask their forbearance for my departures from received wisdom. I am aware that
I perch precariously on their shoulders.
It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the hospitality of Eamonn, Anne and
Kat in my local, the King William IV in Mickleham, and to express my thanks
to them and to Leigh, Karen and Greg for many lubricated exchanges on sport
in general and rugby in particular. I have occupied ‘my’ corner table in the King
Willie to write for the best part of two decades now and can envisage no environ-
ment more conducive.
The book is dedicated to Annette Scambler and my daughters Nikki, Sasha,
Rebecca, Miranda and their families, with a special mention to my grandchildren
Callum, Elliot, Jamie, Izzy, Daisy and Gertie.
Introduction
A Critical Realist Theory of Sport
It is customary to begin a book on the sociology of sport with a discussion of
how best to define ‘sport’, for all that this is an exercise widely acknowledged
to be fraught with difficulty. I intend here to cut this discussion short by accept-
ing that there neither is nor can be a simple, consensually acceptable definition
of sport. There is an obvious hermeneutic problem. Are we to understand his-
torical and contemporary definitions as reflections of the outlooks and predis-
positions of their authors? As the issue of the cultures in which the authors lived
out their lives? or Should we rather interpret them with regard to the cultures we
ourselves inhabit or the projects we have in mind? Etymological research into
the origins and shifting usage of the word ‘sport’ is important and of interest
providing it is recognised that, as Wittgenstein (1953) argued in Philosophical
Investigations, words take their meanings from their usage in ‘language games’,
each of which reflects a ‘form of life’. The word sport can and has stood for a
plethora of different concepts (see Gruneau, 2017). There are what Wittgenstein
called ‘family resemblances’ for sure, but time and place matter. In this book,
I shall try and be clear about my own usage(s) of the word sport, principally
within the language game/form of life which is the contemporary sociology of
modernity.
Giulianotti (2016: xi) offers a sociological definition of sport which will serve
as a useful point of departure. He outlines his five-point characterisation. Sport is
characterised as follows:
1 structured, according to rules and codes of conduct, spatial and temporal
frameworks (playing fields and time constraints on games) and institutions of
governance;
2 goal-oriented, as sport is directed towards achieving particular objectives,
like scoring goals, winning contests, increasing averages, thus making it pos-
sible to identify winners and losers;
3 competitive, as rivals are defeated, records are broken;
4 ludic, enabling playful experiences which generate excitement;
5 culturally situated, in that 1–4 are intertwined with value systems and power
relations within the host society.
DOI:10.4324/9781003157106-1
2 Introduction
He elaborates on this by contending that criteria 1–4 allow sport to be distin-
guished from practices like walking or alternate means of taking exercise which
are non-competitive. They certainly encompass the sports that feature in this vol-
ume, namely, track and field athletics, cricket, football and, in most depth, rugby.
As Giulianotti notes, they also include the likes of darts, bowling, snooker, pool
and motor-racing. Criterion 5 enables recognition that any transformation of the
social context in which sport is played may well lead to a transformation of sport
per se. In other words, sport cannot be examined sociologically in the absence of a
consideration of its historical and cultural contexts, as well as the prevailing social
structures and norms, and the underlying relations of power.
My primary focus will be on sport in the fractured society of the post-1970s
financialised or rentier capitalism of the Occident in general and Britain in par-
ticular (Scambler, 2018b), though references to sport in prior epochs and other
regions and territories will necessarily abound. In anticipation of this, Box 0.1 sets
the scene by offering an approximate periodisation of epochs by type. I recognise
that historians in particular will baulk at the very idea that history can be divided
into discrete epochs. Graeber and Wengrow (2021), in fact, have just published
a detailed account that calls into question often poorly researched and hindsight-
informed views on the early historical stages of societal formation. Nevertheless,
it might be contended with some justification that it is the task of sociologists to
uncover patterns as means to the ends of describing and explaining social phe-
nomena. In any event, the chronology of types of society represented in Box 0.1
provides a broad-brush orientation to societal change over the lifespan of humans.
Box 0.1: A Chronology of Historical Types of Society
From the beginning of the Neolithic revolution, occurring from 8000 to
3000 BC, socio-political evolution encompassed four principal stages:
1 Bands – small nomadic groups of up to a dozen hunter-gatherers; dem-
ocratic and egalitarian (close to Marx’s ‘primitive communism’).
2 Tribes – similar to bands except more committed to horticulture and
pastoralism; ‘segmentary societies’ comprising autonomous villages.
3 Chiefdoms – autonomous political units under permanent control of
paramount chief, central government with hereditary, hierarchical sta-
tus arrangements; ‘rank societies’.
4 States – autonomous political units; centralised government supported
by monopoly of violence; large dense population characterised by
stratification and inequality.
3000 BC witnessed the birth of fully fledged agrarian states, displaying
a number of core characteristics and remaining the predominant form of
Introduction 3
social organisation until around 1450 AD. These core characteristics can be
summarised as follows:
• a division of labour between a small landowning (or controlling) nobil-
ity and a large peasantry; this was an exploitative division backed by
military force.
• the noble–peasant relationship provided the principal axis in agrarian
societies: it was a relationship based on production-for-use rather than
production-for-exchange.
• differences of interest between nobles and peasants, but not overt ‘class
struggle’.
• societies held together not by consensus but by military force.
• societies relatively static and unchanging: there was a 4,500-year incu-
bation period prior to the advent of capitalist states.
The transition to capitalism took place in the ‘long sixteenth century’, that
is, between 1450 and 1640. Marx saw this transition as of major signifi-
cance, noting three vital characteristics of the new capitalist system:
• private ownership of the means of production by the bourgeoisie.
• the existence of wage labour as the basis of production.
• the profit motive and long-term accumulation of capital as the driving
aim of production.
It is customary to discern reasonably distinct stages of capitalism. Thus,
a transition to ‘merchant capitalism’ is typically dates from 1450 to 1640,
followed by a period of consolidation and solidification, characterised by
slow, steady growth between 1640 and 1760. The year 1760 is often cited as
a marker for a switch to ‘industrial capitalism’, which is itself often divided
into stages as follows:
1 Early industrial, 1760–1830: textile manufacturing dominated by Britain.
2 Liberal, 1830–1870: railroads and iron dominated by Britain and later
the USA.
3 Liberal/Early Fordist, 1870-WW1: steel and organic chemistry, with
the emergence of new industries based on producing and using electri-
cal machinery, dominated by the USA and Germany.
4 Late Fordist/Welfare, WW1–1970: automobiles and petrochemicals,
dominated by the USA.
5 Financial, 1970 onwards: electronics, information and biotechnology, plus
global finance, dominated by the USA, also Japan and Western Europe.
Source: Adapted from Scambler (2018b).