Matters of Sport

Essays in Honour of Eric Dunning

Dominic Malcolm, Ivan Waddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415348331
• eBook ISBN: 9781136982033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Matters of Sport is a tribute to Eric Dunning, the leading sports sociologist in the English-speaking world. This book addresses Dunning's contributions to the sociological and historical study of sport, covering key topics such as hooliganism, celebrity and gender relations.

A broad range of leading academics from Europe and North America reflect on the ways in which Dunning's work has influenced their own research and understanding of sport.

This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society.

Eric Dunning: This Sporting Life

Ivan Waddington & Dominic Malcolm

Eric Dunning's first publication in the sociology of sport was an article entitled ‘Football in its Early Stages’, which was based on his MA thesis and which was published in History Today in 1963.[1] This was followed a year later by an article on ‘The Evolution of Football’, which was published in New Society.[2] It is important to note the dates of these publications, for they were among the earliest, and in Britain were probably the very first, published pieces of research to examine sport from a properly sociological perspective. Writing many years later, Dunning recalled how he had become involved in the sociological study of sport and how his postgraduate supervisor, Norbert Elias, had suggested that his first task as a young graduate student was to construct a relevant bibliography. Dunning recalls that ‘even the most exhaustive literature search came up with only one unambiguously sociological item’, Gregory P. Stone's classic ‘American Sports: Play and Display’.[3] Dunning noted that in addition there was, of course, Huizinga's Homo Ludens, plus ‘a handful of useful items by psychologists and some extremely valuable work by physical educationalists such as Peter McIntosh’.[4] But, he continued, ‘little of that was really sociological in the sense of being oriented around sociological and sociologically relevant concepts and theories so I decided – this really was my idea rather than Norbert's – to orientate my research around his work on “civilizing processes”.’[5] Dunning's decision to apply Elias's theoretical framework to sport marked the beginning of a long and very productive relationship between Dunning and Elias, and a significant point in the genesis of a theoretically informed sociology of sport.

It is important to locate Dunning's work in its proper historical context, and more specifically in the context of the development of the sociology of sport, if we are to appreciate fully his contribution to the development of what is now a major sub-discipline within sociology. When Dunning began his research in this area in 1959, the sociology of sport did not exist as a sub-discipline. At that time there were no organized academic groups concerned specifically with the sociology of sport, and no specialist journals in the field; indeed, as Dunning has noted, there was among some sociologists at that time a ‘contemptuous dismissal of sport as an area of sociological enquiry’.[6] It was not until 1964 that the International Sociological Association established an International Committee for the Sociology of Sport, which later became the International Sociology of Sport Association. The International Committee held its first symposium in Cologne in 1966, and in the same year the first specialist journal, the International Review of Sport Sociology (relaunched as the International Review for the Sociology of Sport in 1984, with Dunning as an associate editor) began publication in Warsaw. Even after the establishment of the IRSS, however, the development of the sociology of sport as a sub-discipline was, for many years, a slow and difficult process.

A second specialist journal, the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, began publication in 1977. By this time, Dunning had already published his first book in the area, The Sociology of Sport: A Selection of Readings (1971).[7] But the continued slow development of the field is indicated by the fact that, in a paper on sport and violence which was published in the second issue of the new journal, Harry Edwards and Van Rackages noted that ‘In the new International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, neither “sport” nor “violence” rates entry as a subject worthy of social scientific investigation in its own right’.[8] Both areas have, of course, subsequently become the focus of a great deal of sociological research and the relationship between sport and violence is an area to which Dunning has made an outstanding contribution, as Mennell, Bairner and Maguire point out in their essays in this volume.

One year after the Journal of Sport and Social Issues began publication, the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) was established with 21 founding members. The NASSS website indicates that a small group of North American sociologists felt a growing need at that time to establish a specialist study group in what it describes as this ‘newly emerging field’.[9] It might be noted that, by that time, Dunning had already been working and publishing in this ‘newly emerging field’ for almost two decades.

A third major journal in the area, the Sociology of Sport Journal, did not begin publication until 1984, just two years before the publication of Elias and Dunning's seminal Quest for Excitement,[10] which has since been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese and Greek editions. Even at this time, however, the sociology of sport was not fully accepted within the parent discipline. In the first issue of the SSJ, the editor (Jay Coakley) noted that, ‘Although the field has grown considerably over the past 15 years, it still does not enjoy a “critical mass” of scholars as large as that associated with other subfields within sociology’. Moreover, while the ‘contemptuous dismissal’ of work in the sociology of sport, which Dunning had encountered in the 1960s, may have been less evident in the early 1980s, the SSJ editor still felt it necessary to point out that ‘a number of sociologists remain sceptical about the significance of work on sport’.[11]

Enough has been said to indicate that Eric Dunning was a genuine pioneer in developing what, in the 1960s, was not only an unfashionable field of enquiry, but one which was then considered by many sociologists as a field not worthy of serious academic study. In this regard, Dunning has a strong claim to be considered as a genuine ‘founding father’ of the sociology of sport.

In addition to his contribution to the sociology of sport, Dunning has, as Mennell points out in his essay in this book, also made significant contributions to several other areas of sociology (friends and colleagues who have played sport with, and perhaps more particularly against, Dunning will smile at Mennell's mischievous sub-heading, ‘The Unsporting Dunning’). However, and notwithstanding his contributions to other areas – most notably, sociological theory, the sociology of development and race relations, as well as his translations of some of Elias's major works into English – Dunning is without doubt best known for his work in the sociology of sport. Indeed, in many ways, Dunning's own career has developed co-relatively with the development of the sub-discipline to which he has made such a distinguished contribution over a period of some 40 years.

However, as Mennell notes, Dunning himself accepts the label ‘sociologist of sport’ only as a matter of convenience, for he has always seen research on sport only as a means of contributing theoretically and empirically to the development of the discipline of sociology as a whole. In this regard, the central object of Dunning's work has been not merely to add to our knowledge of sport but, more particularly, to test, extend and develop, through its application to the specific field of sport, the more general theoretical approach initially developed by Norbert Elias, that is figurational or process-sociology. In this regard, it might be said that Dunning's writings, together of course with those of Elias, have helped to establish figurational sociology as a particularly influential theoretical framework within the sociological study of sport.

The prominence of figurational sociology within the sociology of sport is a matter to which Dunning himself has drawn attention. Writing in 1992, he noted that:

When he died in August 1990 at the age of 93, Elias had come to be a widely respected, if still in some ways controversial figure, in the sociological world. Nevertheless, recognition of his work remains patchy and his influence has penetrated less widely and deeply into the world of Anglo-American sociology than those of such continental countries as The Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy. There is, however, one exception to this pattern. It involves not a national sociological community but a particular sub-discipline. I am referring, of course, to the sociology of sport. In this field Elias is a well-known name, even in Britain and America, so much so that some people seem erroneously to think that figurational or process-sociology, the type of sociology for which he sought to lay the foundations, is concerned solely with the study of sport!

He continued:

An interesting question is posed in this connection. Why, in countries where Elias's contributions are widely ignored in ‘mainstream’ sociology, should they have been granted a degree of recognition in what is, in my view wrongly, generally defined by the ‘guardians’ of the currently dominant paradigms as one of the subject's marginal byways? A friend once suggested that I might have had something to do with it. It is not modesty that leads me to reject such an idea. It is rather that a sociologically more plausible explanation is ready to hand, one that does not involve according too much weight to the contributions of a single individual. This more plausible explanation relates to the fact that, as Horne and Jary … have rightly noted, Norbert Elias and I were among the first to enter the field. A consequence of this was that, when the sociology of sport started to expand in the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly when, in that connection, Marxists began to develop an interest in the problems that it poses, they found themselves entering a terrain already occupied by a paradigm in some ways similar to but in others different from their own. They responded with cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Original Title
• Sport in the Global Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors' Foreword
• 1 Eric Dunning: This Sporting Life
• 2 The Contribution of Eric Dunning to the Sociology of Sport: The Foundations
• 3 Civilized Mayhem: Origins and Early Development of American Football
• 4 Boxing Blind: Unplanned Processes in the Development of Modern Boxing
• 5 ‘Amateurism’ as a Sociological Problem: Some Reflections Inspired by Eric Dunning
• 6 The Leicester School and the Study of Football Hooliganism
• 7 Millwall and the Making of Football's Folk Devils: Revisiting the Leicester Period
• 8 Sport and Gender Relations
• 9 The Gendering of Sports Injury: A Look at ‘Progress’ in Women's Sport through a Case Study of the Biomedical Discourse on the Injured Athletic Body
• 10 Physical Education and Figurational Sociology: An Appreciation of the Work of Eric Dunning
• 11 Illusio in Sport
• 12 Sports Celebrity and the Civilizing Process
• Index