Key Terms:

Hegemony: Basically leadership and dominance

• Concept developed by Antonio Gramsci

• Was interested in how social structures were developed without the use of force

• To establish dominant systems of meanings and ideologies as “common sense or for us, sport and leisure

Agency: The act in which people make their own decisions and are responsible for their actions, the ability of individuals to act independently in a goal-directed manner to shape society.

• Is part of Symbolic Interactionism as it plays a part in how people act

Power: The ability of a specific group to influence others and exercise control onto them while pursuing their goals with the possibility of resistance

• Power can be seen in many aspects of sociology in sport

• It’s seen in Structural Functionalism and Critical Social Theory

Ideology: Cultural beliefs that justify particular social arrangements

Importance of Ideology

• Affects what we see

• Affects how we interpret what we see

Social Theory: Set of theories about the nature of the social world and people’s roles in that world

• Social Theory has to be tested and verified thru stats or observations

• Results can sway common sense notions of our social world

• Myths and individuals experiences and the story behind them

Structural Functionalism: This topic focuses on the evolution of society and the importance of social integration during the evolution, which includes social conditions when bonds between individuals and collective structures and values break down

• Anomie: Idea of when individuals get isolated from society and how they feel and act throughout it all.

Symbolic Interactionism (Microsociology): Theoretical perspective focussing on everyday experiences

1. Symbolic nature of human thought

2. Social context/ role of social interaction in shaping our behavior at micro (personal) levels

Social Interactionism:

• Mead’s Social Theory: How we develop as a person overtime, the evolution of us as a human

Critical Social Theory: Set of social theories blending the best of conflict theory and symbolic interactionism

• Focuses on agency: ppl aren’t dupes/fake

• Focuses on an expanded notion of power: gender, sexuality

• Bridges and analysis of structure

Sport and Social Stratification: Social hierarchy and reward system where an individuals demonstrated performance determines where they are in the hierarchy

• Genuine meritocracies must possess two fundamental “qualities”

1. Equality of opportunity: participation equally available to everyone

2. Equality of condition: athletes take part in competitive system under the same conditions

Pierre Bourdieu: He attempted to integrate human agency and social structure to understand social action, power and social change

• Field: Hierarchy of network and structured space where individuals with different resources, skills and capital compete for positions and power.

Habitus: Embodied dispositions/tacit knowledge providing a practical sense of how to interpret one's actions

• Class structure an objective, hierarchical field, within which an individual’s subjective class habitus is formed and operates

Capital: How individuals act within a field drawing upon their habitus and diff types of capital that they possess: usable resources

Karl Marx: One of the most influential and notorious writers ever

• Always comes back to the economic structure of the society