Making new sport cultures

Trygve B. Broch and Marianna Melenteva

Chapter 4 in Handbook on Sport and Culture, 2025, pp 51-63 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Modern sport emerged gradually at the end of the nineteenth century to replace traditional sports and games. Today, sports are standardized, bureaucratized, and often seen as less playful. While there is truth to these claims, they are less helpful if we aim to explain ‘the making of new sport cultures’. Therefore, this chapter applies cultural sociology to reveal modern sports as meaning-making processes. This perspective not only allows us to understand historical transformations but also the ongoing institutionalization of various play forms. Two cases are drawn upon for illustration. First, ski jumping reveals how culture is central in transforming the ways we understand and practice sports. Second, lifestyle sports that originated as an opposition to rule-bound ‘traditional sports’ show how meaning-making is central to the institutionalization of ‘new sports’. To understand the making of new sports, we conclude, these transformations should be related to their changing social surroundings.

Keywords: Cultural sociology; Lifestyle sports; Play; Social construction; Social performance; Ski jumping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035339976
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