Class, Sports, and Social Development

by Richard S. Gruneau

When Class, Sports, and Social Development was published in 1983 it stood the world of sport sociology on its collective head. The original edition brought social theory to sport studies and signaled sport sociology's coming of age. Gruneau brilliantly captured the current conditions within the field and anticipated where it was going. Unfortunately, this classic has been out of print since 1993. But no longer. The new edition features the original ground-breaking text, a foreword by R.W. Connell of the University of Sydney, and a postscript by the author. In his postscript Professor Gruneau places the book within a scholarly, historical context 15 years after its first printing. He also explains how he might have written the book differently had he written it today. When you read this book you'll understand why Contemporary Sociology called the first edition “The most ambitious, provocative, and penetrating effort yet undertaken by a North American sociologist to locate sport within the framework of the classical tradition of sociological theory....” If you already own the book, the new edition brings the author's perspective full circle. And if you don't have a copy of the original you'll want to buy the new edition of Class, Sports, and Social Development to round out your collection of essential works in the field.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sociologist Richard Gruneau was inspired to write Class, Sports, and Social Development by his ambition to develop a model of modern sports that reconciles a belief in some level of human agency with that of a Marxist emphasis on materiality. Dissatisfied with previous approaches from both liberal and Marxist perspectives, Gruneau comes up with a new theory that posits that modern sports are forms of social practice that are constitutive of our social existence. As such they reflect the limits and realities of social structures, particularly as determined by class and economic inequality, but at the same time leave room for free agency in the form of opportunities that bestow the power and ability to engage in interpretive development.

Through an examination of four major theorists (Johan Huizinga, Michael Novak, Jean-Marie Bohm, and Allen Guttmann), Gruneau highlights the key problem in the study of modern sport: the reduction of theory to the dichotomy of treating play as an idealized, unattainable spirit unbounded by reality versus as a mirror of social structures. In other words, scholars attempting to reconcile the dialectical tension between human agency and material constraints have strayed to the extremes of this dichotomy. Gruneau’s solution is to conceptualize play and sports as “social practices existing in, and constitutive of, historically shifting limits and possibilities that specify the range of powers available to human agents at different historical moments”.

Gruneau expands upon this notion in the second chapter and highlights the idea that economic inequality is the most important and visible phenomenon through which social contests between free agency and structural constraints are waged. Sports and play, therefore, are cultural creations that act as interpretive exercises meant to reproduce capitalist social relationships. Dominant classes, as socially hegemonic powers, set limits and possibilities on what sports can be played and how they can be experienced, but their hegemony is constantly in flux and attacked by subordinate classes, who are able to shape their own, unique interpretation of the social structure within the boundaries imposed by the dominant ones. His third chapter uses Canada as a case study and identifies four stages in the history of the development of the nation’s sport. Each of these stages, he argues, is related to particular changes in the country’s capitalist structure, with a major theme being the tension between amateurism and commercialization.

The most significant problem with Gruneau’s work is its inaccessibility to an outside reader. Packed with jargon and discussed in extreme levels of abstraction, portions of his work are nearly unintelligible (a concern raised even by the author of the foreword!) and, although he does an excellent job of repeating himself and summarizing his major arguments, he makes no attempt to phrase his ideas so that they could be understood by someone outside of the discipline. His case study of Canada is more approachable, but still leaves one wanting for a clearer picture of the ideas that he is attempting to convey. Overall, however, Class, Sports, and Social Development is a landmark text in the field of sociology and ground-breaking in its attempts to escape the extremes of the dichotomies framed by its predecessors. It is a must ready for anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of sports theory.