ABSTRACT

The participation in different forms of leisure has often been ascribed the power to reflect and reproduce social inequalities. While some came before, this intellectual endeavour increased substantially with the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. While Bourdieu’s writings on culture did not neglect sports, sport is often neglected in subsequent studies of culture. Most of the subsequent theoretical and empirical work on culture has focused upon music and the arts, many also arguing that Bourdieu’s work is now dated. This paper seeks to provide an important empirical examination of social position and sports participation. It also seeks to test of the relevance of Bourdieu’s theories today in this area of culture. For these investigations, I use large-scale survey data and various statistical methods to test the relevance of the Pierre Bourdieu’s foundational theories and explain these patterns. The findings show direct sports participation relying primarily on dispositions towards the body which are stratified by education and income, especially for the most elite sports. These results therefore highlight the contemporary relevance of Bourdieu’s theories of the relationship between sports, social class, and the stratification thereof.

摘要

参与不同形式的休闲往往被认为是反映和再现社会不平等的力量。虽然有些人在此之前出现过，但随着皮埃尔·布迪厄 (Pierre Bourdieu) 的杰出著作的开创性工作，这种智力努力大大增加了. 虽然布迪厄关于文化的著作并没有忽视体育，但在随后的文化研究中，体育往往被忽视。随后的大部分文化理论和实证工作都集中在音乐和艺术上，许多人还认为布迪厄的作品现在已经过时了。本文旨在对社会地位和体育参与进行重要的实证检验。它还试图检验今天布迪厄的理论在这个文化领域的相关性。对于这些调查，我使用大规模的调查数据和各种统计方法来检验皮埃尔·布尔迪厄的基础理论的相关性并解释这些模式。研究结果表明，直接体育参与主要依赖于按教育和收入分层的身体倾向，尤其是对于最精英的运动。