Theory: The Foundation of Social Change? - Human … · Theory: The Foundation of Social Change? ... and mass communication ... Structuralist theories “concentrate on the continuity

103FOUNDATION OF SOCIAL CHANGE

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Theory: The Foundationof Social Change?

Douglas Booth

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

—Leslie Poles Hartley1

During the first part of the nineteenth century, argued Smith College in-structor and women’s basketball advocate Senda Berenson, “the so-calledideal woman was a small brained damsel who prided herself on her delicatehealth, who thought fainting interesting, and hysterics fascinating.” But by1901 an article appearing in the Salisbury Daily Sun . . . could announce,“The old maid has . . . disappeared completely, and in her place we have thebreezy independent, up to date, athletic and well gowned bachelor girl, whois succeeding in business life or a profession and asks neither pity nor favorsfrom her fellow men.”

—Pamela Grundy2

The term history invokes notions of change. Historians study bygoneeras and elapsed conditions, and understanding the past, and what differ-entiates it from the present, means comprehending social change.3 Thiscan involve comparisons between, and contextualizations of, past andpresent conditions and circumstances, and examinations of the causes ofchange. This article treats social change as a paradigmatic case of causa-tion, analyzing change from a theoretical perspective. Why should histori-ans consider theory integral to understanding change? After all,reconstructionists reject theory. Their inquiries into change typically pro-ceed by empirical investigation of particular actions, events, and ideas ratherthan by abstract concepts and processes.4

Reconstructionists who venture into large-scale social change preferto emphasize the accumulation of modifications, which are often small andgradual, and eventually reach a point that historians agree denotes funda-mental change. In sport history, reconstructionists describe modern sportas the coalescence of sporting and social modifications. These include the

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Sport History Review, 2003, 34, 103-132© 2003 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc.

D. Booth <[email protected]> is with the School of Physical Educa-tion at the University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Scholarly Articles

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introduction of rules, umpires, and administrative bodies; the construc-tion of specialized and dedicated facilities (pools, gymnasiums, fields); andthe development of transport systems (especially rail, which facilitated themovement of sporting teams and spectators), mass production (that low-ered costs of sporting equipment and goods), and mass communication(notably penny newspapers that popularized sport).5 Conceptualizing theaccumulation approach, Tom Bottomore says that it places social change atthe “intersection of separate and distinct quasi-causal chains and the accu-mulation of their effects . . . which produce a dominant tendency toward amajor change.”6

The theoretical dimension of social change emerges from two ques-tions ignored or glossed over by reconstructionists. First, what, precisely,changes? Actors, of course, have relatively short lives and change over time.Even so, although individuals constantly move on, in many instances theyare replaced by like-minded types to the extent that neither new actors,nor even entire new generations, necessarily mean fresh patterns or alterna-tive ways of doing things; the way people play, for example, shows remark-able continuity.7 Hence, change emanates not from simply fresh personnelbut from their beliefs, values, norms, roles, practices, and ways of doingthings that differ from past forms and types and that, most important, havenew structuring effects. Thus, as Grundy notes in the quote at the head ofthe article, changes in values and assumptions about the ideal womanchanged in the second half of the nineteenth century and helped reshapeor structure (i.e., determine) ideas about sporting women; these ideas inturn translated into new patterns of behavior. As we shall see, Grundy alsohighlights the importance of competition as a key structuring idea in mod-ern society. The notion of structuring effects derives from the concept ofstructure as a motor of history, a view widely held by constructionists.

A second question logically follows this perspective of social change:How do structures change? There is no single answer. Structural changedepends entirely on historians’ conceptualization of structure and theirunderstanding of the relationship between structure and human action. Inmy previous article on theory I described determinist and nondeterministconcepts of structures. Determinists (essentialists) view structures as de-termining action independently of the will of human agents; with respectto structural change, determinists “locate the fundamental determiningsources . . . outside the conscious agency of human subjects” in the social orphysical environment or within various psychological or behavioral pre-dispositions. Nondeterminists (constructionists) situate structures in thesphere of human action, and they “locate the fundamental source of changewithin the conscious human agent, albeit an agent who always acts withina structured social, cultural, and geographical environment.”8

This article uses a determinist–nondeterminist framework to analyzeand evaluate different approaches to structural change in sport history.Determinist and nondeterminist concepts of structural change comprise a


variety of broad theoretical traditions. Three have established roots in sporthistory: systematic evolutionism (determinism), structuralism (determin-ism), and relational structurism (nondeterminism). Systematic evolution-ism conceptualizes social change in “relatively autonomous ‘organic’ sys-tems”; change “evolves through several distinct [phases] from lower tohigher levels of cultural complexity, technological development, and geo-graphical scope.” Structuralist theories “concentrate on the continuity ofcultures and economic structures beneath superficial changes in society.Certain visible aspects of society change but the structures of the cultural,social, economic, and ecological determinants change very slowly if at all.”Relational structurism recognizes change as a dialectical (as opposed to ahierarchical) relationship between agents and objective structures.9

At this point the idea of culture as a structure, referred to in the twopreceding paragraphs, demands comment. Whether culture constitutes astructure is the subject of considerable theoretical debate. Some interpreta-tive approaches to social history argue that institutionalized cultural formsdevelop, legitimize, and articulate the social order; in these senses, theyreduce society to culture. The fundamental problem for interpretative ap-proaches remains to account for the “relationship between subjective un-derstandings and the objectivity of society.”10 In sport history, theoreticallydriven interpretative concepts of culture have had minimal influence, withoccasional studies drawing on the works of Erving Goffman (for whomsocial interaction is a dialectic between individuals as each attempts tomanage the impressions that others receive)11 and Clifford Geertz (whoanalyzed cultural structures as the “macro contexts of individual and col-lective action”).12

Structuralist approaches to social change hold that structures, par-ticularly those deemed responsible for social exploitation and disadvan-tage, determine culture that is synonymous with ideology. Culture func-tions to reproduce structures by “redirect[ing] potentially disruptive ac-tion towards support for the determining structure.”13 Theories of hege-mony (discussed as follows) come closest to this approach in sport history.

Arguing from the perspective of relational structurism, ChristopherLloyd maintains that culture “plays a vital role in motivating, channelling,and even dominating human agency.” He believes that “social structuringprocesses . . . have their origins as much in the beliefs, rituals, and ideolo-gies of people,” that is culture, “as in the material, political, and geographicalconnections between them.”14 But Lloyd also warns against conflating cul-ture with structure. Culture includes ways of life, systems of belief, andcustomary habits and how these are transmitted (via language, artifacts,imitation, and example); social structures are institutionalized rules of be-havior (as distinct from behavior) that “define the relations, status and rolesof people.” Structures and cultures obviously overlap, but the former de-fine the social position of people and regulate their behavior, obligations,rights, and privileges; the latter provide us with our ideas about the nature

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of society and social structure.15 Sporting structures include the “ensembleof specific rules, tactics, organizations, facilities, records, and equipment”of sport.16 When Jeff Hill refers to sport as an agent of culture, he is describ-ing it as holding “the power to inscribe and structure habits of thought andbehavior which contribute to our ways of seeing ourselves and others, tomaking sense of our social relationships and to piecing together some no-tion of what we call ‘society.’”17 According to Hill, sport has helped pro-duce and reproduce ideas about gender, nationalism, hero worship, andbodily exercise.

Thus, in analyzing and evaluating different approaches to structuralchange in sport history, this article directs particular attention to the waysin which various theories deal with action and culture. The first two sec-tions look at determinist theoretical traditions of social change—system-atic evolutionism and structuralism, respectively; section 3 examines thenondeterminist theoretical tradition of relational structurism. Examiningconcrete examples, this article demonstrates the substantial theoretical prob-lems that sport historians face when trying to construct accounts of changethat avoid excessive generalization and abstraction and that provide satis-factory accounts of structures, human agency, and culture. As we shall see,some have risen to the occasion.

Deterministic Social Change:Systematic Evolutionism and Modern Sport

A branch of functionalism, systematic evolutionism conceives societ-ies and cultures as organic holistic systems that progressively evolve, be-coming increasingly differentiated and complex.18 Two key (ideal-type)concepts—the traditional and the modern—underpin the highly influen-tial modernization school of systematic evolutionism. Historians commonlyemploy the two concepts to distinguish premodern rural and agrarian so-cieties from contemporary urban and industrial societies. Stability, local-ism, unspecialized social roles, and paternal social hierarchies character-ized traditional societies. Modern societies, in contrast, are dynamic, cos-mopolitan, technological, mobile, industrial, and constantly modified byrational thought.19 Traditional and modern societies support different sport-ing structures. Traditional sport was unorganized, tied to local religiouscustoms, and interwoven with agrarian rhythms; “modern” sport is secu-lar, democratic, bureaucratized, specialized, rationalized, quantified, andgrounded in an obsession with records.20 Although notions of traditionaland modern sport saturate sport history, surprisingly few practitioners theo-rize the changes from traditional to modern sport. Allen Guttmann andMelvin Adelman are prominent exceptions.21

The first sport historian to systematically compare traditional andmodern sports, and the first to provide a typology of the formal structuralproperties of each, Guttmann also identified the processes by which sport


passed from the traditional to its modern structural form. Before Guttmann(and in numerous cases since), sport historians simply attributed the trans-formation to the “end products” of urbanization and industrialization,notably, improved standards of living, communications, and transport; re-duced working hours; and technological innovations.22 Missing from theseexplanations are accounts of the processes that drive human thought andmake change possible, as well as details of the conditions under which“social, ideological, and cultural contexts” change.23 Guttmann located thebasic mechanism of structural change in human desire and the quest forachievement, success, and status that underpinned the all-crucial scientificrevolution.

Guttmann identifies modern sport as a cultural expression of the sci-entific view of, and approach to, the world. “The emergence of modernsports,” he says, “represents . . . the slow development of an empirical,experimental, mathematical Weltanschauung.” This “intellectual revolu-tion, . . . symbolized by the names of Isaac Newton and John Locke andinstitutionalized in the Royal Society . . . for the advancement of science,”Guttmann continues, explains, for example, the “surge of athletic achieve-ment” in Eastern Europe after the second World War. There the “vestigesof premodern social organization and ideology were suddenly, even ruth-lessly, challenged by a relentlessly modern attitude.”24

At first glance Guttmann’s account of social change rests on an his-torically grounded notion of culture in the tradition of the German sociolo-gist Max Weber. Indeed, Guttmann labels his interpretation Weberian.25

But whereas dialectical interactions between the individual and society,the material and the cultural, and the subjective and the objective under-pinned Weber’s work on structural change (thus classifying his approachto structure as nondeterminist), Guttmann actually embraces an “objectiv-ist and ahistorical approach” that ignores “human intentionality and con-trol.”26 Guttmann’s foundations of modern sport lie on an obsession withrecords, which derives from a combination of an “impulse to quantifica-tion” and the “desire to win, to excel, to be the best.” As we have seen,Guttmann locates the origins of this fixation in the scientific culture of sev-enteenth-century England. Not only is he scant on the detail and silentabout the international diffusion of this scientific Weltanschauung, but alsohe paints the mania for records as the telos of Western society and modernsport. This is evident in Guttmann’s language: “One must count,” “the al-most inevitable tendency to transform every athletic feat into one that canbe quantified and measured,” “the statistics of the game are part and par-cel of the statistics of modern society,” “the ingenuity of Homo mensor mustnot be underestimated,” and “the record becomes a psychological pres-ence in the mind of everyone involved with the event.”27 Seen in this light,Guttmann’s classification of his theory as nondeterminist seems misplaced.28

Guttmann’s approach to social change actually combines elements ofsystematic evolutionism and dispositional behaviorism. In the first instance,

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sport moves between two states of equilibrium (the traditional and themodern), with the greater differentiation and complexity of the moderntreated as a higher evolutionary state. Second, the cause of change is notanalyzed as a cultural mutation (e.g., the rise of a scientific Weltanschauung)but as a combination of an internal psychological impulse to quantify anda lust for competition. Ultimately this tallies to a behavioral-dispositionalistexplanation of human action. Although Guttmann’s modern environmenttechnically affords individuals choices, the opportunity to choose remains“limited,” and no actors appear to consciously work to “alter structuralsituations.” Nor does modern society depend on agents for its reproduc-tion; “it just is and persists as a reified abstraction.”29

Like Guttmann, Adelman analyzes the transformation from traditionalto modern sport and claims to ground his account of social change in cul-tural processes. He also professes a concern with the interactions betweenindividuals and society. “Actions and attitudes,” he writes, are the “prod-uct of human agencies.” But although they will “at times run counter tothe requirements of the modern system,” they also have to be seen “withinthe context and boundaries established by modern institutions.”30 Also likeGuttmann, Adelman’s focus on social complexity and the structural-func-tional organization of modern sport fits the assumptions of systematic evo-lutionism.31 On the other hand, Adelman shows more rigor than Guttmanndoes in searching for a causal explanation of modern sport that he locatesin a rational-behavioralist disposition.

Adelman’s key to modern sport is the modern city—a structure emerg-ing from the centralized nation state, industrial production, and improvedcommunications—which requires “rational order” to function. Accordingto Adelman, rational order lies at the heart of the “modern identity” and“way of life.” He analyzes the impact of the rational order on sport in threeareas: dedicated physical space, organizational structures, and collectivebehavior. Industrial production, which “required a new division of urbanspace based solely on . . . economic utility and value,” removed traditionalrecreational lands. In the competition for urban land, sporting groupsformed their own organizations, which also “performed important inte-grative functions” by bringing together individuals who “shared a com-mon interest” but did not know each other personally. The rational orderof the city also aided the “ideology” of modern sport. Amid fears of “physi-cally degenerating” residents and a “decaying” social order, faddists andfanatics upheld sport as a panacea that would “promote good health,” “en-courage morality,” and “instill positive character values.” But if the mod-ern city was “both a setting and a stimulant for . . . athletics, the creation ofmodern sports structures was not solely a by-product of societal change.”As Adelman notes, “the institutional needs” of sport were “equally respon-sible for the modernization of athletics.”32

Finally, Adelman identifies competition and commercialization asfactors in the modernization of sport. Although sporting competition stems


from a “desire to demonstrate superiority,” the organization of competi-tion helped “formalize” different behaviors, some of which (e.g., special-ized managerial, administrative, and marketing roles) were integral to pro-fessional sport. Commercial sport assisted modernization by providing amethod of financing professional competitions. Moreover, the increase incommercial sporting operations (e.g., staging events, organizing competi-tions) compelled entrepreneurs to “coordinate and rationalize their busi-ness practices to maximize their profits.”33 Adelman insists that competi-tive and professional sport “flowed from the search for superiority” and“always preceded commercialization.” Although he follows Guttmann inreferring to actors’ internal psychological dispositions (i.e., their innatedesire for competition34), Adelman’s incorporation of rational behaviormakes his approach less deterministic.

Rational behavior, that which emanates from actors examining therelationship between means and ends, is Adelman’s lynchpin of the newurban order and modern sport. It produces, for example, a constant scru-tiny and revision of rules and the employment of science and technologyto enhance efficiency. “A consequence of specific environmental conditions,”rational-behavior explanations of social change are stronger than psycho-logical explanations because “actors can learn new strategies and makegenuine choices.”35 Finally, Adelman pays greater attention to structure.His social structures are more than mere epiphenomena at the end of causalchains beginning with the internal states or rational actions of individuals;they play a significant causal feedback role.

Despite his claims of examining social change through nondeterministcultural processes, however, Adelman’s retreat to the “innate and suppos-edly universal disposition to behave in the actor’s self interest” ultimatelylocks him into the ambit of behavioral determinism.36 Despite Adelman’sclaims to develop a theory of social structure and change, the latter re-mains underdeveloped and largely peripheral to concerns with behavior.Where he establishes links between structure and action they appear forcedand contrived. For example, he concludes his rich discussion of the demiseof bear and bull baiting, cockfighting, and ratting, and their failure to mod-ernize, with the claim that these blood sports were incompatible with ur-ban society.37 But this position does no justice to the issues, debates, contra-dictions, and ambiguities expounded in the text. Furthermore, it is too cat-egorical, making no allowance for a continuation of these activities under-ground or for continued vigilance by opponents against any resurgence ofthese pastimes. Thus Adelman situates sporting behavior within a struc-ture that is fixed and does not change—the rationally ordered city.38

Marxist structuralism occupies a second form of determinism in sporthistory alongside systematic evolutionism. Although not propounded bysport historians, Marxist structuralism commonly appears as a launchingpad to introduce theoretical problems associated with structural changeand as a means to attack sport sociologists for their cavalier treatments of

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historical details. Marxist structuralism differs sharply from systematicevolutionism in its conceptualization of structure. In systematic evolution-ism, structures are surface phenomena; in the structuralist tradition theyare “the deep unobservable levels of languages, cultures, minds, economies,and societies.” As noted in my earlier article, the causal powers of deepstructures completely override human agents who virtually disappear be-neath the abstract social order.39 Despite his non-Marxist status, FernandBraudel is worth citing here to reinforce this notion of the absent historicalagent in structuralism. “When I think of the individual,” Braudel wrote, “Iam always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which hehimself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspec-tives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and be-fore.”40 Despite their differences, systematic evolutionist and structuralistapproaches share common ground in dealing with social change: Both fo-cus on the maintenance of social equilibrium. (The difference is that sys-tematic evolutionism views modern society as essentially nonproblematic,whereas left-leaning structuralisms deem the capitalist structure as highlyproblematic and direct their attention to the possibilities of social transfor-mation.) In sport history the influence of Marxist structuralism lies in thequestions that practitioners ask about sport’s role in the structure of tradi-tional capitalism and, increasingly, late capitalism.

Deterministic Social Change:Structuralism and Capitalist Sport

Structuralists conceptualize society as a whole composed of a hierar-chy of structures. The nature of the hierarchy determines both the generalform that society takes at any one time and the possibilities for social trans-formation.41 Subscribing to a variety of theoretical tendencies, structural-ists disagree about the nature of the social totality (i.e., about its hierarchi-cal structure). Structural Marxism assigns primacy to the economy. Theeconomy determines the principal characteristic of society, namely, whichsocial class rules, and attributes “major historical transitions” to the riseand entrenchment of new social classes.42 Culture plays a critical role inthis theory, serving an ideological function by persuading people to acceptsituations that belie their class (i.e., their natural) interests. Hence cultureis a function of class structure, and individuals are cultural dupes who areunable to fathom their situations.43 So how does structural Marxism ex-plain social change? According to this theory, change emanates from the“transformation of consciousness” (frequently treated as synonymous withculture), which leads to a “radical alteration of social arrangements.” Incapitalist societies the transformation is deemed an inevitable consequenceof internal processes, namely declining rates of profit, downward pressureon wages, and the growing immiseration of workers. Ideological statementsabout the social relations of capitalism appear increasingly contradictory,


and workers’ organizations, trade unions, and left-leaning political partiesunite the masses that transform the society.44

Early in the last quarter of the twentieth century, corresponding witha new Zeitgeist, several sport historians embraced the Italian Marxist An-tonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In hegemony theory they sought toescape the determinism of structural Marxism and account for the perse-verance of capitalist structures of domination. Hegemony theory infusedsport history. Others turned to postmodernism, whose name signifies radi-cal cultural changes in late-twentieth-century Western society. Observingthat Western culture seemed to offer individuals inordinate choices,postmodernists inspected broadening tastes, opinions, and lifestyles withina framework of collapsing cultural norms and standards. In postmoderntheory “culture and society fuse and interpenetrate,” with the former ceas-ing to serve political ideological functions.45 Among the numerous theo-ries of postmodernism, those put forward by Fredric Jameson and DavidHarvey found resonance among some sport historians. Jameson and Harveyconceptualize postmodernism as an ideological handmaiden of late capi-talism. This section examines hegemony and postmodern theories in sporthistory. As we shall see, neither advances the field’s understanding of so-cial change. On the contrary, too many sport historians conflate hegemonywith ideology to explain how structures perpetuate relations of passivedomination, and postmodern theories of sport remain shackled to the func-tionalist assumptions of structural Marxism. The first part of this sectionlooks at hegemony, the second at postmodernism.

Hegemony and Capitalism

As a “mechanism of bourgeois rule over the working class in a stabi-lized capitalist society,” this Gramscian concept of hegemony gained cur-rency among left-leaning Western academics in the 1970s.46 According tothis concept,

hegemony works through ideology but it does not consist of falseideas, perceptions, definitions. It works primarily by inserting the sub-ordinate class into key institutions and structures which support thepower and social authority of the dominant order. It is above all, inthese structures and relations that a subordinate class lives its subordi-nation.47

Just as they appropriate most of their concepts, sport historians seized theprevailing left-leaning Gramscian concept of hegemony that quickly be-came a standard explanation for the stability of sport in capitalist societies.In so doing, they tended to conflate hegemony with ideology (as a set offalse ideas) and conceptualize it as that which “persuades the general publicto consider their society and its norms and values to be natural, good, andjust, [and thereby] concealing the inherent system of domination.”48 The

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end result has been, in the words of philosopher of sport William Morgan,“an explanation of the staying power of capitalism” and its “forces of con-tainment.”49 In fact, hegemony theory is the means by which sport-studiesscholars explain impediments to any form of change and to which theyattribute the staying power of any structure of domination.50

Most accounts of hegemony are, in Richard Holt’s words, too theo-retically “neat.” John Hargreaves’ claim that sport in Britain helped “frag-ment” the working classes and “reconstitute them within a unified socialformation under bourgeois hegemony” fails to convince Holt, who arguesthat sport did not unite the ruling classes in a “straightforward way.” “De-spite the manifest importance of amateurism,” Holt contends that “north-ern businessmen were excluded from ‘bourgeois’ amateur consensus (as,for example, the Northern Union in rugby revealed).” In addition, Holtsuggests that the “public school ideal of ‘fair play’ was not so much a ‘bour-geois’ doctrine as an adaptation of older aristocratic traditions of honourand style which created the ideal of ‘effortless superiority.’” Similarly, “theextent of working-class incorporation into the ideology of amateurism ap-pears to have been fairly restricted. Working-class sportsmen seem to havebeen more or less indifferent to amateur values.”51

Holt’s criticism contains an irony: Hargreaves (like Stephen Hardy)directs primary attention to the dialectics of hegemonic relationships. Bothscholars see hegemonic patterns “characterized by conflict and consent,[and] coercion and struggle,” and find “outcomes” that are never problemfree for either party.52 Hargreaves and Hardy are less followers of Gramscithan of Raymond Williams, for whom sustaining hegemony is an ongoingand difficult task for dominant groups. For Williams hegemony is not apassive dominance; “it has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended,and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged bya host of pressures.”53 Within this framework, dominant groups can neverguarantee hegemony; they must “anticipate challenges” and assess the best“combination of coercion and persuasion,” and this is “an ongoing processof accommodation and compromise.”54

Consistent with Williams, Hargreaves notes that the “sport-hegemonyrelation cannot be understood simply as a means of maintaining or repro-ducing the dominant pattern of social relations.” Hegemony, he continues,does not “simply reflect,” nor is it “determined by, the mode of produc-tion.”55 Thus his example of a broad coalition of youth workers (includingteachers) tackling the problem of nonconforming youth—those who playedon the street, gambled, trespassed, and slept out—in St. Ebbs (Oxford) inthe 1890s paints a picture of success (hegemony) and failure (resistance).On the one hand, the coalition produced some “respectable,” “conform-ing,” and “clean-cut” youths who joined organizations, enjoyed sport, andsubscribed to “bourgeois norms of respectability.” On the other hand, lowerworking-class youths continued to resist “pressures to conform.” They had


their own model, “the ‘corner-boy’ with a distinctive mode of dress (wideleather belt and bell-bottomed trousers).”56

Even this formulation failed to satisfy some critics. Holt points outthat “it is not enough to show that there were individuals with the inten-tion of exercising control over workers.” Rather, “it has to be establishedthat some kind of moral influence was in fact exercised.” Highlighting thetautology in Hargreaves’ argument, Holt asserts that it “cleverly acceptsthat such control was only partially and incompletely achieved, and in factinterprets this cultural independence as ‘resistance’, thereby providing fur-ther proof of the strength of the concept.”57

Hardy and his collaborator Alan Ingham are more sensitive to Holt’sconcerns in their case study of the playground movement, a campaign ledby middle- and upper-class reformers to provide playgrounds and super-vised activities for children and adolescents in America’s cites in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hardy and Ingham demonstratethat the middle classes did not simply impose playgrounds on social sub-ordinates as a form of control. Instead, the working classes “forced middleand upper class reformers to provide . . . local recreation space,” whichthey used to “pursue their own conceptions of leisure.” Hardy and Ingham’sanalysis has three merits. First, they show that although the agency of sub-ordinate groups remained “bounded by over-arching structures,” thesegroups were able to “win space” and to “warren” into the dominant. Sec-ond, they explain how the actions of subordinate groups oscillated between“pragmatic accommodation” and “conflict.” In the case of the former, therewas widespread consensus about the moral value of playgrounds; in thelatter, the two classes disagreed as to who would “regulate” children’s ac-tivities in the new recreational spaces. Third, Hardy and Ingham shy awayfrom assuming that support for values propagated by dominant groups orruling classes constitutes evidence of hegemony. Nor, conversely, do theyassume that acts of what Holt calls “cultural independence” (e.g., youngimmigrants pulling the trousers of dignitaries visiting urban playgroundsor uprooting shrubbery or corner boys wearing wide leather belts and bell-bottomed trousers) are tantamount to resistance. Genuine resistance is “an-chored in a recognized opposition of interest” and strives to lay the founda-tions for a radical transformation of existing social relations or structures.58

Hegemony is not the primary theoretical focus of Hardy and Ingham’sinvestigation of the playground movement, however, which is more con-cerned with the relationship between agency and structure. Hardy andIngham follow sociologist Anthony Giddens’ approach to structures, con-ceptualizing them as “constituted and transformed over time through so-cial practices.” In other words, they are “constituted by human agency,and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution.”59 In-creasingly, social theorists (and social historians) accept this definition asthe most feasible way to escape the determining constraints of structures

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and the shackles of ideology in structural Marxism.60 It allows Hardy andIngham to talk about subordinated groups winning space from the domi-nant, although to what end they do not explain. The point here is that theiranalysis contains critical elements of a nondeterminist approach to socialchange that Christopher Lloyd calls relational structurism. This is exam-ined in section 3.

In my earlier article on theory, I linked the appeal of hegemony topolitical pessimism about the potential for social change. Among sport his-torians concerned with structures of domination in apparently fixed soci-eties with homogeneous cultures, hegemony offered explanatory power.But in the last decade of the twentieth century a new Zeitgeist attunedsome sport historians to what appeared to be massive cultural changes.Operating under the banner of postmodernism, they directed their atten-tion to the changing nature of sport in an emerging structure—latecapitalism.

Postmodernism: Late Capitalism and Sport

Sport historians have generally shied away from postmodernism.61

The few who embrace it generally follow Fredric Jameson and DavidHarvey in conceiving postmodernism as an ideological handmaiden of latecapitalism and continue to concentrate on the functions of sport in capital-ist societies. They have produced some evocative and rich descriptions andhelp contextualize contemporary sport, but whether they have advancedthe field’s theoretical understanding of social change is a moot point.

Jameson ties postmodern culture to late capitalism. He describes thelatter as a form of global consumer capitalism that expands markets byfacilitating individuals’ ability to acquire. Accompanying global capital-ism has been an expansion of cultural forms largely disconnected fromparticular social contexts. There is, says Jameson, “a prodigious expansionof culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything inour social life—from economic value and state power and practices to thevery structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ insome original and as yet untheorized sense.”62 Jameson identifies three basiccharacteristics of postmodern culture: depthlessness, ahistoricism, and aconceptualization of the world as a technological rather than a natural en-tity. Depthlessness refers to the absence of emotion and intensity in cul-tural products that are decentered from the people who produce them andare nothing more than consumable images. No longer signified by exter-nal forces, postmodern cultures and traditions are disjointed fragments thatindividual actors reconstitute for their own interests. This process of re-constitution gives the postmodern world its senses of ahistoricism, imme-diacy, and timelessness. Finally, information and communication rule tech-nology forms.

The postmodernist interest in information and communication tech-nology draws attention to the media and its relationship to culture. Among


postmodernists the media is no longer simply a medium of communica-tion but constitutes a “network of power” that “constructs” and “controls,”in part by “nullifying our senses of history.”63 Krishan Kumar eloquentlysummarizes one perspective of the modern media, which, “suffused withimages and symbols,” is said to have “obliterated” objective reality:

In the condition of what Jean Baudrillard calls the “ecstasy of com-munication,” the world, our world, becomes a world purely of “simu-lation,” “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality:a hyperreal.” In hyperreality it is no longer possible to distinguishthe imaginary from the real, the sign from the referent, the true fromthe false. The world of simulation is a world of simulacra, of images.But unlike conventional images, simulacra are copies that have no origi-nals, or of which the originals have been lost. They are images thatare “murderers of the real, murderers of their own model.” In such acondition there can be no concept of ideology, no idea of “the be-trayal of reality” by signs or images. There are only signs and images,only the hyperreal. “History has stopped meaning.”64

Sport sociologist David Andrews highlights the “superficial histori-cism” of television advertisers who he says “randomly cannibalize” thesporting past. One of Andrews’ more evocative examples is a televisioncommercial for the sports-clothing and sporting-goods company Reebok.The commercial, broadcast in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, fea-tured Manchester United forward Ryan Giggs.

The commercial opens with nostalgic images of youthful football sup-porters circa 1950, bedecked in red and white scarves and enthusias-tically waving football rattles. Setting the scene, the familiar voice of(Sir) Bobby Charlton (a revered symbol of Manchester United’s pasttriumphs and tragedies) encourages the audience to “just imaginetheir greatest side.” Charlton’s call to historical reflection is subse-quently curtailed by the unfolding televisual narrative, which effec-tively selects Manchester United’s transhistorical XI for the audience.Through computer generated composition—accompanied by thevoice of Kenneth Wolstenhome (a renowned commentator on the his-tory of English football) and the strains of an emotive orchestral back-drop (ironically, an arrangement of the American Civil War song“Marching through Georgia”)—Giggs is seamlessly inserted into atelevisual pastiche of noted players drawn from various periods inthe team’s post-war history. Dismantling historical boundaries, Giggsis depicted as the orchestrator and finisher of a flowing move de-signed to trigger the embodied memories residing within Englishfootball’s collective consciousness (George Best’s hip swerve, SteveCoppel’s scuttling runs, Bobby Charlton’s passing etc.). Having curled

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the ball with the outside of his left foot into the top right hand cornerof the net (a move thus thrust into collective consciousness as a signof Giggsness), he is then flanked in celebration by the talismanic Bestand Charlton, as Charlton himself proclaims “their greatest ever side.Giggs would be in it, and he’d be wearing Reebok boots.”65

What Andrews doesn’t tell us, of course, is how viewers interpret suchadvertisements. In this regard, Ian Harriss’ analysis of one-day cricket of-fers a more plausible account of postmodern superficiality.

According to Harriss, one-day cricket exhibits several unique charac-teristics. Among them are the negation of individual strategies, particu-larly those pertaining to batting (the one-day version confines batters’ “port-folio of strokes” as the game draws to its maximum fifty overs), and a tech-nological infrastructure (including floodlights and electronic scoreboards)that displaces the pitch as the focal point of attention. A “decentred spec-tacle that emphasises a glossy surface without depth,” postmodern cricketis “consumed as a commodity package.” Harriss likens the one-day spec-tacle to “a one-hour television melodrama.”

The paradox of one-day cricket is that, like the television melodrama,while it emphasises action it does so only within the framework of aformula. Also like the television melodrama, the plot of each game iscircumscribed by the structure of the series as a whole. This elimi-nates complexity and allows the viewer to be immersed quickly andeasily in the immediate plot. . . . The story is essentially limited, re-petitive and predictable.66

But how does Harriss explain postmodern cricket as a new sportingform? Harriss contends that traditional and postmodern cricket both serveideological functions. Whereas traditional cricket “masked the contradic-tion and oppression inherent in the labour/capital relationship” (by virtueof serving as an analogy to the “fair contest between capital and labour,which is adjudicated by an impartial legal system signified by umpires inceremonial robes”), postmodern cricket “presents the act of consumptionas though it were totally unrelated to the social relations of production.”67

The problem with this explanation is that it rests on discredited functional-ist assumptions (described in my previous article). It simply assumes, forexample, that cricket performs functions vital to the orderly operation ofcontemporary capitalism. As such, postmodern cricket offers no fresh in-sights into our theoretical understanding of social change.68

Like Jameson, Harvey locates the emergence of postmodern culturein the logic of capitalist development, but whereas Jameson privileges themedia and the way it accelerates the process of commodification, Harveyexamines the methods of capitalist production under the rubric of Fordismand post-Fordism.


In the early twentieth century the principles of scientific managementpropounded by Frederick Taylor (known as Taylorism)69 and the automatedfactory introduced by Henry Ford at his motor-vehicle assembly lines(known as Fordism), underpinned the methods of capitalist production. Inits objective to produce cheap, standardized products for mass markets,however, Fordism did “not stop at the factory gates.” It also “invaded thehome” in an attempt to regulate every aspect of workers’ lives. As AntonioGramsci wrote in “Americanism and Fordism” (1931), “the new methodsof work are inseparable from a specific mode of living and of thinking andfeeling.”70 In the spirit of Gramsci, disciples of post-Fordism maintain thatits hallmarks—diversity, differentiation, and fragmentation—are not purelyeconomic phenomena. Rather, the productive flexibility of capitalism alsospills over into politics and industrial relations, and culture and ideology.The characteristics of post-Fordist politics include “the fragmentation ofsocial classes,” “social movements and ‘networks’ based on religion, race,or gender or on single-issue politics,” “core and periphery” labor forces,and “private provision in welfare.” Among the features of post-Fordistculture are “individualist modes of thought and behaviour,” “fragmenta-tion and pluralism in values and life-styles,” and “privatization in domes-tic life and leisure pursuits.” On the question of social change, post-Fordistsdisagree about the causes of the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Oneof the more persuasive explanations, put forward by the French “regula-tion school,” maintains that the Taylorist–Fordist mode of development,which produced the great postwar economic boom, simply “exhausted itspotential for growth.”71 Following in the vein of Marxist structuralism, thetheoretical logic of this explanation attributes wider changes to the conse-quences of stresses or contradictions within the capitalist structure.72

Several scholars have applied post-Fordist analysis to alternativesports. Duncan Humphreys ascribes the social acceptance of snowboardingto a post-Fordist “celebration of difference and diversification” combinedwith capitalism’s appropriation of snowboarding’s unique “styles, mean-ings and values” to enhance profits. Banned by ski-field operators,snowboarding initially survived as an “underground” culture supportedby a post-Fordist economy in which small businesses produced boards,boots, and clothes for a niche market.73 The situation changed in the 1980s,and Humphreys offers some evidence to support the regulationists’ notionof Fordist economic “exhaustion”:

Skiing reached a growth plateau . . . and snowboarding offered skifields a new market and ongoing economic prosperity. Ski Magazinesummed up the importance of snowboarding when it described it asone of the greatest things that ever happened to the sport: “It attracteda whole new generation of young riders to the ski resorts, giving theski world a much needed shot in the arm.” Ski field managers simplycould not continue to oppose snowboarders.74

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Snowboarding might have given skiing “a shot in the arm,” but, in Hum-phreys’ colorful language, “opening the ski fields gave snowboarding adose of steroids.” Over the course of the 1980s the number of board manu-facturers, for example, escalated from around eight to more than 35. Thecommodification of snowboarding, which proceeded in tandem with thecommercialization of skateboarding, relied heavily on exploiting the twocultures’ “‘irresponsible’ and ‘uncontrolled’ images and attitudes to selltheir products to youth.” Advertising images intended to “shock andstun”—such as the poster for Black Flys sunglasses showing a male withhooks attached to taut strings piercing his nostril, tongue, and ear—illus-trate this point.75

As noted, post-Fordism is not a purely economic phenomenon. Post-Fordists associate changes in the nature of industrial organization and work(e.g., “flatter” organizations, flexible and casual labor, demand for con-stant up-skilling) with “a more far-reaching general move away from large-scale organization, centralization, bureaucracy and hierarchy” and theemergence of individualization and privatization as the “master themes ofcontemporary western life.”76 What are the implications of these specificmaster themes for sport? Post-Fordist theory points toward some greatermeasures of individual freedom and different levels of opposition to sport-ing structures, but Humphreys does not theoretically explore these struc-tures. Moreover, he is wary of equating cultural opposition to a fully fledgedsocial transformation.

Theories of postmodernism find little favor among theorists and his-torians interested in social change. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner accusepostmodern theorists of excessive abstraction and reductionism. Althoughthey praise postmodern theories for analyzing “micro and marginal phe-nomena ignored by much classical social theory” and “valoriz[ing] differ-ences, pluralities, and heterogeneities that were often suppressed by thegrand theories of the past,” Best and Kellner criticize them for ignoring thepatterns and relations of social structures. Similarly, they note that post-modern claims of an historical rupture or a “radically new sociohistoricalsituation” have been neither substantiated nor theorized.77 Indeed,postmodern notions of discontinuity rest on inadequate historical research.78

At least two sport historians echo this latter claim.Although he agrees with Andrews’ notion that media conglomerates

produce “disembodied history,” Hardy remains unconvinced that mediadistortions of history are a new phenomenon.79 In a case study of the NewSouth Wales Rugby League (NSWRL), Murray Phillips contends that themost significant changes in the competition occurred in the interwar years,long before postmodernism. Phillips maintains that “the termination ofclubs and expansion of competitions” are not, as claimed by Harriss andother postmodernists, the “exclusive features of contemporary sport.” Hereminds readers that in the 1920s the NSWRL simultaneously invited newclubs into its competition and excluded others. This does not mean that the


social structures and relations of rugby league have remained static. Onthe contrary, Phillips identifies “essential differences” in motives and ef-fects: The economic potential of sponsors and television has replaced work-ing-class demographics, and non-working-class regional and parochialidentities have supplanted working-class tribalism. Like Hardy and Ingham,and Holt, Phillips steps back from theoretical generalizations: “Neithersimple continuities nor abrupt discontinuities” satisfactorily explain thechanges associated with the “widespread commercialisation and glo-balisation of sport.” Also, like Hardy et al., Phillips finds no substitute forcareful empirical research. In the case of the NSWRL, he accuses commen-tators who focus exclusively on corporate management of ignoring thesubstantial economic contributions from passionate volunteers.80

Unable to reconcile generalizing theories with the demands of theirguild that practitioners present full and complete accounts of their topic,historians overwhelmingly reject determinist theories of social change. Theydeem inadequate any theory that advocates a single motor of change,whether a human disposition or a contradiction in a deep structure. Sowhat do constructionist sport historians look for in a theory of change?The preceding critiques suggest three criteria. First, the theory must avoidassigning primacy to single factors or conditions in explaining change andshould take cognizance of the prevailing economic, social, and cultural situ-ation. Second, it must be attuned to general human motivations, acknowl-edging their complexities and their cultural and psychological orientations.Third, the theory must “retain a central place for the structuring and trans-forming power of individual and collective conscious action” and acknowl-edge that this “often leads to unintended consequences.”81 These three cri-teria fulfill the definition of a nondeterminist framework of social changethat Christopher Lloyd calls relational structurism. The final, following,section sketches the assumptions of relational structurism and examinesan application in sport history.

Nondeterminist Social Change:Relational Structurism and Sporting Culture

Relational structurism examines “human agency, rationality, andpraxis” as essential forces for social change. Agents have “real capacities”and act in accordance with their perceived interests whether they be indi-vidual or collective. Even though structures within this tradition are theproducts of human agents, the capacity of actors to transform structuresremains constrained by various biological, social, cultural, and environ-mental parameters. Thus, “agency is never completely free but always con-strained and enabled by its structural and ideological situation and theexperience of the actor.” In short, people “make history but always in par-ticular enabling and disabling conditions.” Relational structurists also ac-knowledge the “significance of unintended consequences of action and

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unrealised results of intentions for social structure and social change.” Bothintended and unintended consequences of action turn into objective andseemingly unalterable conditions of action and thought.82

Relational structurism is less a theory of social change than a “meth-odological position” or a process whereby the historian looks for “forces”of change in the “relations between action, consciousness, institutions, andstructures.”83 Relational structurists empirically investigate the specific; theyretain general concepts but ally them with particular descriptions insteadof marrying them to sociological theories or general social-historical de-scriptions. In these ways relational structurism bears similarities tocontextualization, but it differs from contextualization in its considerationof causation and structure and in its analytical approach. In relationalstructurism the term structure denotes causation, whereas in the contex-tualization paradigm it merely implies a relationship or a correspondencebetween two sets of conditions or circumstances. The contextualizationparadigm typically leaves structure untheorized and synonymous withbroader general conditions (e.g., demography, geography, human disposi-tion); relational structurism conceptualizes structures around the rules andresources of social relationships and their unintended consequences. Fi-nally, in keeping with their theoretical stance, relational structurists sys-tematically explore relationships between abstract concepts—action, con-sciousness, institutions, and structures—which they present as anonnarrative. In contrast, those working in the contextualization paradigmchoose the forces, events, agents, and convergences and contingencies onthe basis of personal judgment and present their histories as narratives.84

Pamela Grundy’s Learning to Win is an exemplar of relational struc-turism in sport history.85 Seeking to understand how sport became “a modelfor a conservative view of the American social and economic order,” Grundyfinds the answer in a new ideology that emerged in the nineteenth centuryto portray competition as an inevitable and generally admirable fact of life.Such was the power of this ideology that it effectively obscured the darkside of sport (e.g., violence, bribery, corruption), shrouding it in a“celebratory rhetoric” that accompanies most sporting discourse.86 Histo-rians’ analytical process, rather than their obedience to predetermined con-clusions, is the key to good relational structurism, and Grundy exploressix theoretical relationships as she constructs her history: action and con-sciousness, action and institutions, action and structures, consciousness andinstitutions, consciousness and structures, and institutions and structures.87

These are discussed here in turn.

Action and Consciousness

Relational structurism conceives actors as reflective rational beings,and what they know or believe about their social situation will shape theiractions. Learning to Win contains rich examples of sportsmen and -women,usually from minority groups, consciously appraising their social world


and strategizing accordingly. For example, as young women stepped intothe abounding opportunities of a late-nineteenth-century North Carolinasociety in transition, they “cautiously negotiated their changing roles, seek-ing to expand their realm of action while avoiding overt threats to the sta-tus quo.” Early advocates of physical culture for middle-class womencouched their programs in terms of nonthreatening “genteel respectability,evoking the images of dignified self-control associated with conventionalideals of well-bred ladies.” 88

Action and Institutions

North Carolina society includes a myriad of institutions that serve associal bulwarks and appear timeless, but Grundy reminds readers that the“shape and purpose” of all institutions, and the rituals associated with them,are the products of endless political battles. Far from fixed, eternal, andchangeless, institutions are “contingent” and “freighted with the circum-stances and assumptions that influence their making.” The decline ofwomen’s competitive basketball after the second World War is an apt illus-tration. By the 1930s women’s school and college basketball in North Caro-lina boasted high-quality play, large crowds of spectators, and enthusiasticmedia coverage. Proponents of this style of basketball, however, confrontedopposition from the national women’s physical education movement, which“championed ‘moderate’ exercise over high-level competition,” and by the1950s competitive women’s college basketball had virtually collapsed.89

Action and Structure

Grundy acknowledges both the determining effects of structure andthe power of agents to transform structures. She refers, for example, to“residents from every walk of life . . . refashion[ing their] lives and identi-ties” under the “demands of industrial labor, urban life, and the ideas andimages of national mass culture” and to “athletic fields” as sites whereminority groups could, on occasion, “effectively challenge the assumptionsthat cast them as unworthy of full participation in US society.” Throughsport, women and African Americans demonstrated that they “possessedthe discipline, intelligence, and poise to contend for position or influencein every arena of national life.”90

Consciousness and Institutions

Political struggles within existing institutions, and those leading tonew institutions, invariably occur when actors are conscious of their socialsituations and are willing to defend their interests and beliefs. In this re-gard Grundy refers to “female activists” in the 1970s who “saw sports as away for women to throw off physical and emotional restrictions, develop-ing skills, pride, and confidence” and ultimately to winning their “place inthe public spotlight.”91 In this instance, however, Bruce Kidd offers a better

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example than does Grundy, who is sparse on detail. Kidd analyzes thecompeting values and political activities of the National Hockey League,the Amateur Athletic Union, the Workers’ Sports Association, and theWomen’s Amateur Athletic Federation in Canada during the interwar years.Whereas the primary objectives of the union and the federation were tomake ideal men and to promote the health and well-being of sportswomen,respectively, the association acted as a vehicle for socialism, whereas theLeague sought to promote financially lucrative spectacles.92

Consciousness and Structures

Conscious actors interrelate with the broader structures of society invery complex ways. Grundy describes “a broad range of citizens” usingsport to “pursue their own ends” amid widespread social changes in NorthCarolina during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Sport, shesays, enabled “North Carolinians to engage this new society”; it became“an arena where residents could school themselves in the discipline andcoordinated effort that were becoming hallmarks of American achievement,experiment with the pleasures of self-expression and public performance,and negotiate the boundaries between local cultures and national ideals.”African American intellectuals who subscribed to institutionalized sportnegotiated a “troubling dilemma” between “artistic creativity rooted invernacular culture” and “disciplined organization.” These negotiationsenabled them to “claim allegiance both to [white] middle-class ideals . . .and to a specifically black heritage.”93

Institutions and Structures

Institutions can reinforce or challenge social structures. PrestigiousNorth Carolina universities sponsored sports programs in the late nine-teenth century to reinforce a view that society reflected the competitiveorder of the natural world. College sport, especially football, became thedomain of “educated,” “ambitious,” young White men, who “representedan emerging elite, the pinnacle of the state’s new social hierarchy,” in thenew capitalist society.94

Other theories of social change incorporate some of these relation-ships, but only relational structurism captures them in their entirety. AsGrundy demonstrates, it is the totality of these relationships that providesan ideal nondeterminist template for the social-change explanatory para-digm in sport history. Grundy’s approach shines through in Learning toWin, which deals with the three essential criteria of social change theory:structure, human action, and culture. Historians seeking to understandsocial change cannot avoid dealing with structure, and one structure isinescapable in the contemporary world: capitalism.95 Capitalism occupiesthe prime seat in Grundy’s text. It is the structure that determinednineteenth-century North Carolina society, economy, and culture (includ-


ing sport). As Grundy puts it, competitive sport “meshed neatly” with thegoals of capitalism; sporting and capitalist endeavor were one and the same.In both capitalism and sport, citizens must not only “win” their own places,they must “win [them] anew each day.”96

Grundy provides a convincing account of human action. Althoughshe links the ideology of sport to the logic of capitalist accumulation toprovide a materialist account of human action, her explanation isnonreductionist because she also shows sport fostering nonmaterial no-tions such as status and pride. Grundy’s comparison of the different mean-ings of sport among industrialists and workers illustrates these differingaccounts of human action. Sport offered industrialists a “mirror” on thematerial world. Here Grundy cites the football pioneer and clock-manu-facturing executive Walter Camp, who described the game as the “‘bestschool for instilling into the young man those attributes which businessdesires and demands.’” Wage laborers, in contradistinction, joined indus-trial sporting teams to earn status and prestige and thereby “blunt the dis-dain” often accorded manual laborers.97

In addition to showing different motives for human action, industri-alist and worker sporting teams highlight the distinction between socialstructures and symbolic cultures. They demonstrate that the relationshipbetween structure and culture is not necessarily one of correspondence orsimple resemblance. Indeed, relational structurism deems the relationship“fundamentally problematic.”98 Not surprisingly, this is the weakest as-pect of Learning to Win. Notwithstanding her emphasis on agency and cul-tural autonomy and the ability of minority groups such as African Ameri-cans to negotiate their own cultural space within institutionalized sport,Grundy ultimately privileges structure. As she concludes, the very institu-tion of sport—which is built on a “model of competition and individualeffort”—offers participants little space in which to question the “largermeaning of competition” that structures contemporary American society.99

Conclusion

Constructionist sport historians have toyed with numerous theoriesin their efforts to explain social change. As we have seen, success has beenlimited. At one level this is understandable given that theories of socialchange are, by definition, vulnerable to abstractionism, reductionism, andhistorical inaccuracy. Of course, no theory could escape such charges fromreconstructionists who insist that history’s sole objective is to find the causesof unique events. Neither general concepts and categories nor consider-ation of long sweeps of time have any place in such an approach. Perhapsonly a minority of conservative reconstructionists subscribes to this view—they’re the ones who never explain how they deal with their own mentalcategories or cultural biases when selecting their facts. Nonetheless, mosthistorians maintain that a single exception suffices to debunk a theory or

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that incorrect claims deriving from a particular theory are grounds for re-jecting the corpus of a theory.100 As this article shows, however, historiansinterested in social change cannot realistically avoid theory, irrespective ofhow much detail is available to them.

The critical question for sport historians is, Which theory? Many ofthe logical dead ends that sport historians run into stem from their failureto seriously explore this question. Just as they appropriate their conceptsfrom outside the discipline, so too they appropriate their theories and ap-ply them in a shallow and uncritical manner, and often the choice of theoryis more a reflection of the social mood than a concern with scientific orintellectual issues. The evidence from this article is that theories of socialchange cannot avoid the concept of structures and how they change. Logi-cally, this means delving into relationships between structures and agentsand between structures and cultures. Although avoiding structural deter-minism is no easy matter, adopting a concept of structure as sets of rulesand behaviors both constituted by, and constituting of, human agency giveshistorians a theoretically manageable account of change. Nonetheless, eventheories that see the motor of historical transformation as deriving frominternal contradictions within structures recognize that these contradic-tions “establish only the preconditions, or potentiality, for large-scale so-cial change.” “Nonstructural processes” such as “new social groups,” “newinterests and values,” and “new culture and consciousness” must occurbefore change is realized.101

Culture, rather than structure, currently holds the attention of sporthistorians. Like their colleagues in social history, historians of sport areincreasingly investigating the “production of meaning,” especially “by re-lations of power rather than for ‘external’ or ‘objective’ class structures, orother ‘social’ referents.” 102 Sport is a key producer of meaning, especiallyidentity. “To race or shoot a puck is,” in Bruce Kidd’s words, “not only toexercise a skill, but to embody, express, and elaborate a complex code aboutself and culture—in short, to acquire an identity.”103 Sport historians areslowly beginning to approach culture in more diffuse ways, most notablythrough language or discourse. Grundy, for example, observes the fusionof sporting and business language solidifying sport’s place in modern so-ciety. Whereas coaches refer to teams as “well-oiled machines” and de-scribe winning combinations as “clicking on all cylinders,” business lead-ers (and politicians) broadcast their successes “in terms of home runs, offast breaks, and of hitting the line hard.” Such language, Grundy says, “blursdistinctions between athletics and society.”104 Of course, this shift raisesnew questions. What is language? How do actors receive and formulatelanguage? Are actors passive recipients of language? Paradoxically, thesequestions also introduce notions of language as an objective structure andhow it changes. Although I am not aware of any sport historians who haveaddressed these issues, it is only a matter of time.


Notes

1Leslie Poles Hartley, The Go Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), 9.The first part of this aphorism appears in David Lowenthal’s classic history textThe Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).

2Pamela Grundy, Learning to Win: Sports, Education, and Social Change in Twen-tieth-Century North Carolina (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001), 41.

3Not unexpectedly, historians disagree about the concept of social change.Some conceive society as “a fixed, stable and persisting structure”; others view it asa “process in which there is continual breakdown and renewal, development anddecline, the disappearance of old forms and the creation of new ones” (TomBottomore, “Structure and History,” in Peter Blau, ed., Approaches to the Study ofSocial Structure [New York: The Free Press, 1975], 159). Nancy Struna recently pro-posed that historians focus on social change as a nondeterministic process of “mov-ing away from the past” rather than “moving toward” the creation of new socialforms (Nancy Struna, “Reframing the Direction of Change in the History of Sport,”International Journal of the History of Sport 18, no. 4 [2001]: 1-15).

4Booth, “Theory,” 2.5See, for example, Steven Riess, Sport in Industrial America 1850–1920 (Wheel-

ing, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1995), 11-42.6Bottomore, “Structure and History,” 164.7Stephen Hardy, “Entrepreneurs, Structures, and the Sportgeist: Old Tensions

in a Modern Industry,” in Donald Kyle and Gary Stark, eds., Essays on Sport Historyand Sport Mythology (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1990), 45-82. Althoughsport historians must guard against overemphasizing change at the expense of con-tinuity (Jeffrey Hill, Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth Century Britain[Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002], 3), few practitioners focus on continuities overlong periods. Stephen Hardy and Allen Guttmann are two exceptions. See StephenHardy, “The Long Residuals of Sport,” paper presented to the Tenth Yale-Smithsonian Seminar on Material Culture, Washington, D.C., May 1997, and AllenGuttmann, The Erotic in Sports (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996).

8Christopher Lloyd, Explanations in Social History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1988), 192 and 193.

9Lloyd, Explanations, 192.10Lloyd, Explanations, 18-19, 263, 267.11Lloyd, Explanations, 266-67. See, for example, Clare Simpson, “Respectable

Identities: New Zealand Nineteenth-Century ‘New Women’—On Bicycles!” Inter-national Journal of the History of Sport 18, no. 2 (2001): 54-77; Douglas Booth, AustralianBeach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand, and Surf (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 9-10.

12Lloyd, Explanations, 265. See, for example, Michael Oriard, Reading Football:How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: Univ. of NorthCarolina Press, 1995).

13Malcolm Waters, Modern Sociological Theory (London: Sage, 1994), 213-15.14Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993),

98.15Lloyd, Structures, 152; Ian Heywood, “Culture Made, Found and Lost,” in

Chris Jenks, ed., Cultural Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1993), 105. See also ChrisJenks, Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), 26.

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16Hardy, “Entrepreneurs, Structures, and the Sportgeist,” 53.17Hill, Sport, 2, no. 4: 12-13. Similarly, Maguire et al. argue that “sport and

culture cannot be separated” and that “sport is structured by culture” (JosephMaguire, Grant Jarvie, Louise Mansfield and Joe Bradley, Sport Worlds: A Sociologi-cal Perspective [Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 2002], 128).

18Lloyd, Explanations, 200-201. See also 176.19Modern is, of course, a relative term. Fifth-century Roman Christians called

themselves modern to distinguish their religiosity from heathens and Jews, andmedieval scholars reinvented the term modern to differentiate cultivated learningfrom custom and ritual. Since the Enlightenment, modern has meant notions of ra-tionality, science, and progress, which are also often arbitrary signifiers (JeffreyAlexander, “Modern, Anti, Post, Neo,” New Left Review 210 [1995]: 65).

20Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (NewYork: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978), 15-55. For good descriptions of traditional folksports, see Dennis Brailsford, Sport and Society: Elizabeth to Anne (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1969), 52-53, and Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, Barbarians,Gentlemen and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football (Ox-ford: Martin Robertson, 1979), 29-30.

21Sport sociologist Eric Dunning is another leading theorist of the change fromtraditional to modern sport. His figurational approach, however, lies within thebroad tradition of relational structurism. See Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentle-men and Players.

22Melvin Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Ath-letics, 1820–1870 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1986), 3; Hill, Sport, 2. See, for ex-ample, John Lucas and Ronald Smith, Saga of American Sport (Philadelphia: Lea &Febiger, 1978), 125-33; Ian Jobling, “Urbanization and Sport in Canada, 1867–1900,”in Richard Gruneau and John Albinson, eds., Canadian Sport: Sociological Perspec-tives (Don Mills, Ont.: Addison-Wesley, 1976), 64-77; Harold Seymour, Baseball: TheEarly Years (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), 75-85; Wray Vamplew, Pay Up andPlay the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1875–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press, 1988); and Wray Vamplew, “Sport and Industrialization: An Economic Inter-pretation of the Changes in Popular Sport in Nineteenth-Century England,” in J.A.Mangan, ed., Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad,1700–1914 (London: Frank Cass, 1988), 7-20. Of course, most sport historians sim-ply refer to traditional and modern sport as static structures and pay little attentionto processes of change (Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c.1780–c. 1880 [London: Croom Helm, 1980], 193).

23Lloyd, Explanations, 208.24Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 80-82 and 85-86.25Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 80.26Lloyd, Explanations, 300. See also Jenks, Culture, 55.27Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 47, 48, 50-51, 51, 52, 54, and 55.28For a quite different perspective on the nature of modernity, and one more

fitting of the nondeterminist label, see Glen Norcliffe, The Ride to Modernity: TheBicycle in Canada, 1869–1900 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2001). Norcliffe fol-lows Marshall Berman in highlighting the dialectical and Janus-faced natures ofmodernity (Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air [Harmondsworth: Pen-guin, 1982]). Berman also provided the foundation of my critique of From Ritual to


Record (Douglas Booth, “From Ritual to Record: Allen Guttmann’s Insights Into Mod-ernization and Modernity,” Sport History Review 32, no. 1 [2001]: 183-91).

29Lloyd, Explanations, 215, 217, and 219.30Melvin Adelman, “Academicians and American Athletics: A Decade of

Progress,” Journal of Sport History 10, no. 1 (1983): 89. See also 90, and Adelman, ASporting Time, 294 fn. 15.

31For example, “modern society is . . . marked by a functional social struc-ture,” and modernization facilitates examinations of “the relationship between sportand the modernization of society and/or its component parts” and “the evolutionof modern sports structures and ideology” (Adelman, A Sporting Time, 5).

32Adelman, A Sporting Time, 7-9.33Adelman, A Sporting Time, 9-10; see also 102, 146-51, and 244. Guttmann is

all but silent on the issue of commercialized sport in From Ritual to Record.34At the conclusion of his text Adelman appears to modify his earlier insinu-

ation of innate prerational competition by incorporating notions of “ideologicalreasons for the surge of competitive sport after the middle of the nineteenth cen-tury” (Adelman, A Sporting Time, 284-86).

35See Lloyd, Explanations, 220 and 221.36Lloyd, Explanations, 220.37Adelman, A Sporting Time, 243.38See also Cunningham, Leisure, 9-10.39Lloyd, Explanations, 237, 238, and 239-40. See also 242 and 246.40Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of

Philip II, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 1244, cited in Lloyd, Explanations,251. For accessible summaries of Braudel’s views on structures and Marxism seeFernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980).

41Lloyd, Explanations, 256; Bottomore, “Structure and History,” 165.42Bottomore, “Structure and History,” 165.43Waters, Modern Sociological Theory, 174. See also 182.44Waters, Modern Sociological Theory, 177-8.45Waters, Modern Sociological Theory, 206. Postmodernism is an elusive and

thorny subject. Even after three decades of discussion, little general consensus hasemerged as to its meaning. Krishan Kumar offers a useful starting point for discus-sion by likening the prefix to the “post of post-mortem: obsequies performed overthe dead body of modernity, a dissection of the corpse.” In this sense postmodernityis a “condition of reflectiveness,” “the occasion for reflecting on the experience ofmodernity” (Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theo-ries of the Contemporary World [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995], 66-67).

46Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review100 (1976/77): 20, emphasis added. There is a “persistent slippage” in Gramsci’s useof the terms state, civil society, political society, hegemony, domination, and directionthat poses fundamental problems for an analysis of the bourgeois state (Anderson,“Gramsci,” 25). For details of the arrival of hegemony in sport history see Booth,“Theory,” note 114. See also note 70 in this article.

47Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds., Selections From the PrisonNotebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 164.

48George Sage, Power and Ideology in American Sport: A Critical Perspective(Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1990), 19. One exception to the tendency to

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conflate hegemony with ideology is Kevin Wamsley’s history of rifle shooting innineteenth-century Canada. Proceeding from a belief that hegemonic analyses ofsport must examine the interrelationships among economy, politics, and culture atspecific historical conjunctures, Wamsley illustrates the potential of hegemonicanalysis. A popular cultural practice in Canada during the nineteenth century, rifleshooting was “predicated on the pleasures of competition, fraternization, socialprestige and monetary rewards,” but the cultural and the political fused as fears ofmilitary intervention from the United States rose with preparations by regular Brit-ish troops to withdraw from North America. The Canadian government identifiedcitizen shooters as a readily available coercive force and not surprisingly promotedtheir activities. The fusion of the cultural and the political, however, rested on farmore than public officials patronizing clubs, the administration’s construction andmaintenance of ranges, or annual grants, peppercorn rents, and free and discountedammunition to the Dominion of Canada Rifle Association. Canadian “state” hege-mony derived from the freedom of individual rifle shooters to internalize theirown experiences and apply their own interpretations to the activity from a range ofpotentially contradictory political positions—patriotic–unpatriotic, loyal–disloyal,Canadian–unCanadian, active–apathetic. Two conditions swayed most participantstoward a dominant interpretation: the cultural significations of rifle shooting asmanly, comradely, and challenging and a political threat that “valorized” shootingas a “cultural signifier of patriotism, duty, contribution to collective purpose, andprotection of territory and society” (Kevin Wamsley, “Cultural Signification andNational Ideologies: Rifle-Shooting in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada,” SocialHistory 20, no. 1 [1995]: 65 and 66-67). Although it is rich in detail and introduces anagency-driven account of culture into a nonhierarchical holistic structure that avoidsthe simple economic determinism of Marxist structuralism, Wamsley’s history pri-marily focuses on the initiation of social consensus at a specific moment in Cana-dian history rather than social change or the lack thereof.

49William Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction (Ur-bana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994), 95. Allen Guttmann makes the same point withrespect to “ludic diffusion,” observing that “most discussions . . . refer not to cul-tural hegemony but rather to cultural imperialism,” which is tantamount to simplecultural domination (Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cul-tural Imperialism [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994], 5). Morgan’s concep-tualization of, and views on, hegemony sparked intense debate within sport soci-ology. See Alan Ingham and Rob Beamish, “Didn’t Cyclops Lose His Vision? AnExercise in Sociological Optometry,” Sociology of Sport Journal 14, no. 2 (1997): 164-75, and William Morgan, “Yet Another Critical Look at Hegemony Theory: A Re-sponse to Ingham and Beamish,” Sociology of Sport Journal 14, no. 2 (1997): 187-95.

50This is particularly pronounced in historical investigations dealing withgender relations and masculine hegemony. For a brilliant critique of the limitationsof incorporating masculine hegemony into studies of sport, see Mike Donaldson,“What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 643-57.

51Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1989), 364; John Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and HistoricalAnalysis of Popular Sports in Britain (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 209. For furthercriticisms of Hargreaves’ arguments, see Tony Collins, Rugby’s Great Split: Class,Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 232. Seealso Guttmann, Games and Empires, 179.


52John Hargreaves, “Sport and Hegemony: Some Theoretical Problems,” inHart Cantelon and Richard Gruneau, eds., Sport, Culture, and the Modern State(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), 134-35. Hugh Cunningham was anotherearly critic of determinist approaches to hegemony and an advocate for more care-ful analysis of its real historical conditions (Cunningham, Leisure, 11 and 195-9).

53Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,1977), 112.

54Sage, Power and Ideology, 20. See also, Alan Ingham and Stephen Hardy, “In-troduction: Sport Studies Through the Lens of Raymond Williams,” in Ingham andJohn Loy, eds., Sport in Social Development: Traditions, Transitions and Transformations(Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1993), 1-19; Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Cul-ture, 7.

55Hargreaves, “Sport and Hegemony,” 134. See also Richard Gruneau, Class,Sports, and Social Development (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 89.

56Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture, 62-3.57Holt, Sport and the British, 363-64. Holt’s critique appears in a theoretical

appendix that is consistent with the widespread view that historians should notmake explicit either their methodology or theories (Richard Holt, “Sport and His-tory: The State of the Subject in Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 7, no. 2[1996]: 251; Don Morrow, “Canadian Sport History: A Critical Essay,” Journal ofSport History 10, no. 1 [1983]: 73).

58Stephen Hardy and Alan Ingham, “Games, Structure, and Agency: Histori-ans on the American Play Movement,” Journal of Social History 17 (1983): 290, 295-96, and 297; Alan Ingham and Stephen Hardy, “Sport: Structuration, Subjugationand Hegemony,” Theory, Culture and Society 2, no. 2 (1982), 94; Morgan, Theories,100. Jeff Hill provides an alternative approach to hegemony, regarding it “less con-spiratorially as ‘knowledge formation,’” “that is, as a process of ‘knowing’ and‘understanding’ in which sport is intimately implicated” (Hill, Sport, 4).

59Hardy and Ingham, “Games, Structure, and Agency,” 286. See also, Inghamand Hardy, “Sport: Structuration, Subjugation and Hegemony,” 100, notes 1 and 2.

60Patrick Joyce, “The End of Social History?” Social History 20, no. 1 (1995):89-90.

61Arguably because of the jargon rather than the content! For reviews by sporthistorians, see Jeffrey Hill, “British Sports History: A Post-Modern Future?” Journalof Sport History 23, no. 1 (1996): 1-19, and Murray Phillips, “Deconstructing SportHistory: The Postmodern Challenge,” Journal of Sport History 28, no. 3 (2001): 327-43.

62Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review146 (1984): 87.

63Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Lon-don: Verso, 1991), 38.

64Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, 123-24.65David Andrews, “Dead and Alive? Sports History in the Late Capitalist

Moment,” Sporting Traditions 16, no. 1 (1999): 79-80. Another interesting Andrewsexample is the “renaissance” of Muhammad Ali. In the 1990s, Ali appeared in “care-fully and consistently choreographed advertising campaigns for Apple, Wheaties®,Morton’s steakhouses, Rockport® shoes” and in so doing “corroborated his statusas a cultural icon of historical proportions, while simultaneously erasing” his pastas “an outwardly Muslim, Pan-Africanist, anti-colonial, and anti-American impe-rialist” (80-81). See also Hardy’s example of ESPN’s presentation of the fiftieth

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anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s integration into Major League Baseball (StephenHardy, “Where Did You Go, Jackie Robinson? Or, the End of History and the Age ofSport Infrastructure,” Sporting Traditions 16, no. 1 [1999]: 97).

66Ian Harriss, “Packer, Cricket and Postmodernism,” in David Rowe and GeoffLawrence, eds., Sport and Leisure: Trends in Australian Popular Culture (Sydney:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 117-19.

67Harriss, “Cricket and Postmodernism,” 116 and 120.68Indeed, this argument shares many similarities with hegemony. Supporters

of hegemony direct particular attention to the mass media’s portrayal of sport, whichthey deem critical to the stabilization and persistence of the twentieth-century capi-talist order. Media sport, writes Hargreaves, “often reads like a handbook of con-ventional wisdom on social order and control. There are homilies on good firmmanagement, justice, the nature of law, duty and obligation, correct attitudes toauthority, the handling of disputes, what constitutes reasonable and civilizedbehaviour, on law and order and on the state of society in general. Media sportencodes an ideology of order and control, in the way the conduct of participants insports events and that of spectators is depicted” (Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Cul-ture, 145). This view became particularly popular among historians looking at therelationship between the media and gender in sport. Referring to the developmentof organized netball in New Zealand, for example, John Nauright and JaneBroomhall conclude that “the media . . . hailed it as a great game for women espe-cially as it fits into the dominant conceptions of proper female behaviour and physi-cal activity. As a sport, netball does not challenge notions about ways in whichwomen should express themselves physically and therefore does not pose a threatto the gender order” (John Nauright and Jane Broomhall, “A Woman’s Game: TheDevelopment of Netball and a Female Sporting Culture in New Zealand, 1906–-70,” International Journal of the History of Sport 10, no. 3 [1994]: 404).

69After working as the chief engineer at a Philadelphia steelworks, Taylor(1856–1915) consulted in “scientific management,” a field that advised on efficientand economical ways of performing physical tasks.

70American workers’ tolerance of regimented Fordist working conditionsperplexed Gramsci, and their position embodied hegemony. From their perspec-tive, however, workers were well paid and able to enjoy American consumerism.

71Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, 50-56.72Bottomore, “Structure and History,” 165-66.73Duncan Humphreys, “Snowboarders: Bodies Out of Control and in Con-

flict,” Sporting Traditions 13, no. 1 (1996): 13, 14, and 15.74Duncan Humphreys, “‘Shredheads Go Mainstream’: Snowboarding and Al-

ternative Youth,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 32, no. 2 (1997): 152.75Humphreys, “Snowboarders,” 13, 14, and 15-16.76Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, 168-70.77Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations

(London: Macmillan, 1991), 256, 257, 261, and 263. See also Kumar, From Post-In-dustrial to Post-Modern Society, 109, 126, 131, 154, and 192. As Kumar puts it, thehistorical distinction between Fordist and post-Fordist forms of production is largelyarbitrary. Both have existed side by side throughout the twentieth century, andsmall-batch production is in fact a “general tendency of capitalism.” Kumar refersto a “comprehensive rejection” of all notions of a “new order” of capitalism: “In sofar as new features can be distinguished, they are simply the expressions of


capitalism’s well-known disposition to change and modify its practices in accor-dance with the requirements of survival and growth” (Kumar, From Post-Industrialto Post-Modern Society, 167-68).

78Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Pol-ity Press, 1989), 5.

79Hardy, “Jackie Robinson,” 96.80Murray Phillips, “From Suburban Football to International Spectacle: The

Commodification of Rugby League in Australia, 1907–1995,” Australian HistoricalStudies 110 (1998): 39 and 48. As well as Harriss’ work, Phillips also questions someof the claims made by Bob Stewart. For an example of the latter’s work, see BobStewart and Aaron Smith, “Australian Sport in a Postmodern Age,” in J.A. Manganand John Nauright, eds., Sport in Australasian Society (London: Frank Cass, 2000):278-304.

81Lloyd, Structures, 186 and 285.82Lloyd, Explanations, 193, 281, 282, and 283. See also John Tosh, The Pursuit of

History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 2nd ed.(London: Longman, 1991), 161.

83Lloyd, Explanations, 287, 288, 289, and 310.84For a good comparison of a contextualization and social-change approach

to one subject, see, respectively, Malcolm MacLean, “Football as Social Critique:Protest Movements, Rugby and History in Aotearoa, New Zealand,” in J.A. Manganand John Nauright, eds., Sport in Australasian Society (London: Frank Cass, 2000),255-77, and Shona Thompson, “The Tour,” in Brad Patterson, ed., Sport, Society andCulture in New Zealand (Wellington: Stout Research Centre, 1999): 79-91.

85See also Bruce Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport (Toronto: Univ. of TorontoPress, 1996), and, notwithstanding his descent into functionalism, Malcolmson’schapter on social change in Robert Malcolmson, ed., Popular Recreations in EnglishSociety 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973),158-71.

86Grundy, Learning to Win, 299.87Although Lloyd identifies the relationships, readers will have no difficulty

finding copious examples throughout Grundy’s text.88Grundy, Learning to Win, 42-43.89Grundy, Learning to Win, 229 and 301.90Grundy, Learning to Win, 296 and 297.91Grundy, Learning to Win, 295. Examples from the North American and in-

ternational fronts would include the professional leagues in softball and basketballand a professional circuit in tennis (Susan Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexu-ality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,1995], 254).

92Kidd, Canadian Sport. See also Mike Cronin’s analysis of the competing na-tionalist versions of Irish sport propagated by the Gaelic Athletic Association andthe Irish Football Association (Mike Cronin, Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: GaelicGames, Soccer and Irish Identity Since 1884 [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999]).

93Grundy, Learning to Win, 180 and 296-97.94Grundy, Learning to Win, 296 and 300.95David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of

Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 344; Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory,262. See also Hargreaves, “Sport and Hegemony,” 109, and Hargreaves, Sport, Powerand Culture, 121.

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96Grundy, Learning to Win, 5, 100, 217, and 220.97Grundy, Learning to Win, 19 and 120; see also Kidd, Canadian Sport, 262-70.98Lloyd, Explanations, 282.99Grundy, Learning to Win, 301.100Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York: Aca-

demic Press, 1978).101Bottomore, “Structure and History,” 167.102Joyce, “The End of Social History?” 82.103Kidd, Canadian Sport, 5.104Grundy, Learning to Win, 298.

Acknowledgments

This article builds on an earlier piece, “Theory: Distorting or Enriching SportHistory?” published in Sport History Review 34, no. 1 (2003): 1-32. I am grateful toSteve Hardy and Brian Moloughney for their comments on earlier drafts of botharticles.

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