Sport and Civil Society
| Author | Lincoln Allison |
| Published date | 01 September 1998 |
| Date | 01 September 1998 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00163 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Sport and Civil Society
LINCOLN ALLISON
University of Warwick
Political science lags behind social history and sociological theory in its contributions
to the academic understanding of sport. One remedy for this lag might be the analysis
of the concept of civil society in relation to sport, since sporting institutions ®t many
of the de®nitions and ful®l many of the supposed functions of civil society. An
analysis of sporting institutions in Georgia, Thailand and South Africa shows that
they do `re¯ect' the general condition of civil society in those countries, albeit in a
distorted or exaggerated way, and that it is possible, though not necessary, for sport
to be a major component of civil society.
Political Science and Sport: the Story So Far
Over the twenty years to the time of writing, the study of sport in United
Kingdom universities has advanced from an obscure and rather technical
territory within physical education to a clear place of its own in several centres
and courses and a foothold in a wide variety of social studies departments. The
idea that an academic career might be founded in the study of sport is no longer
so surprising or amusing as it was. Before I proceed to the main objective of this
essay, which is to attempt to advance the political understanding of sport
through a consideration of the concept of civil society, it would be useful to
sketch out the context of the change in status of academic sports studies. Why
has it happened and what does it amount to?
I have argued before thatwhat kept sport o the academic agenda was a `myth
of autonomy', a belief that the causes and eects of sporting events were con-
®ned to sport itself.1The myth did not necessarily imply, of course, that sporting
events were thereby uninteresting, but the unstated assumptions of the study of
society were that physical production and the system of class based on the
organization of production were the important and determinant areas of social
life. Under these assumptions, sport was not of much importance, but when
that paradigm broke down and culture, meaning and leisure came to be seen as
important in themselves, sport could be seen as more relevant to the central
concerns of the study of society.
The autonomy of sport was always a pretty thin piece of ideology. The
development of modern sport in the nineteenth century had overtly moral and
undeniably social purposes and nobody could study (say) the life and thought of
Baron de Coubertin without accepting that therewere moral and social purposes
#Political Studies Association 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Political Studies (1998), XLVI, 709±726
1L. Allison, `Sport and Politics', in Lincoln Allison (ed.), The Politics of Sport (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 1±26.
to the establishment of the modern Olympics. Yet it has takensome fairly crude
changes to ram home the `relevance' of sport: it is now,broadly de®ned, the sixth
most important industry in Europe; it was an important bargaining chip in
South African political change; football `hooliganism' on several occasions
during the 1980s forced its way into the headlines and to the top of the govern-
ment's agenda. One would like to think that it was heroic academic ®gures like
my colleague Tony Mason with his history of football who, without much
immediate prospect of rewardor esteem, insisted that sport was worthy of study.2
They did, but the eort was much assisted by Nike and the hooligans; that isthe
way life works.
It is less easy to see what outside recognition of the importance of sport
amounts to or even what signi®cance its practitioners think it has. Both often
start with a banality, that `sport re¯ects society'. How odd, even inconceivably
odd, if it did not and nobody would have bothered to assert this were it not for
the existence of an elite myth that playing games was about getting away from
the problems of `society' and that it gave you, temporarily at least, more in
common with the ancient Greeks than with non-sportsmen in your own society.
But the claim that sport re¯ects society often assumes that it only re¯ects society,
that it cannot actually be causal or important in itself. Thus academic analysis
often looks to the ways in which ideological, class, ethnic or gender relations in
society as a whole are exempli®ed by sport. The stronger and more interesting
claims, that sport creates interests, principles and meanings which do not exist if
there is no sport and which have an eect on other aspects of society, is less
frequently asserted or accepted. It is these claims which amount to saying that
sport is really interesting and important and which are the basis of the belief in
the academic study of sport which I am attempting to develop.
Although there are now scholars from law, economics, politics and several
other disciplines who have turned their main attention to sport, the two discip-
lines of social history and sociological theory have dominated its study. In each
case the time has already arrived that a textbook can be written which draws on
and surveys a large established literature: thus Holt's Sport and the British and
Jarvie and Maguire's Sport and Leisure in Social Thought.3Yet the two discip-
lines are in important respects opposites. The social historians are rooted in a
very British, archive-oriented empiricism which regards theory and method-
ology with suspicion. On the whole, they regard detail as the key to a high level
of understanding and admire the writer who can tell a detailed story well.
Sociological theory, by contrast, is concerned from ®rst to last with the argu-
ment between dierent whole approaches to the interpretation of human action,
with `methodology' which is also `theory'. It is, therefore, highly sectarian and
consists of arguments between ®gurationalists (key concept: the civilizing pro-
cess) and feminists (patriarchy), as well as Marxists, neo-Marxists, functional-
ists, Weberian neo-empiricists and so on. Its advantages, to an outsider, appear
to be that it sees things as a whole and debates them vigorously. Its disadvan-
tages are that it hides and confuses evaluation in its interpretative explanations
and it seems dicult to see how the exponents of each watertight `ism' can ever
persuade those of another once their minds are made up.
2Tony Mason, Association Football and English Society 1863±1915 (London, Harvester, 1980).
3R. Holt, Sport and the British: a Modern History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989);
Grant Jarvie and Joseph Maguire, Sport and Leisure in Social Thought (London, Routledge, 1994).
710 Sport and Civil Society
#Political Studies Association, 1998
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