Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Critical Realist Theory of Sport
1. The Case for a Revised Sociology of Sport
2. A Critical Realist Frame
3. From Hyper-rationalisation to the Fractured Society
4. Global System versus Local Lifeworld
5. A Case Study: Rugby as ‘Tribal Warfare’
6. Sociology and Sport in the Fractured Society
