Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociological Study of Sport: Habitus, Capital and Field

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most influential social theorists of his generation, both in his home country France and throughout the international sociological community. For close to half a century he researched a range of anthropological and sociological topics and, as a consequence, has had an enormously influential impact across the academic world. His initial specialism was in anthropology, and his publications in the early 1960s addressed issues concerning gender relations and unemployment in peasant cultures in Algerian society, and were published in rural studies and sociology of work journals. His broadening interests reflected his commitment to a wide-ranging sociology of culture, in the realms of education, art, the media, sport and around the general theme of symbolic power. His initial piece on sport and social class (Bourdieu, 1978) was one of the first commentaries by a major social theorist, apart from the oeuvre of Norbert Elias and his collaborator Eric Dunning, to take sport as a serious sociological issue. In his major study of taste and consumption, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu, 1986), first published in 1979, sport is acknowledged as a major focus of sociological analysis, and his conceptualization of the sociological significance of sport — as both institution and practice — has since influenced many theoretical and empirical investigations into the social and cultural significance and representation of bodily practices, not solely in sport but also in education, arts, and the media.