555166

research-article2014
IRS0010.1177/1012690214555166International Review for the Sociology of SportSugden

ISSA and IRSS 50th Anniversary Article

International Review for the

Assessing the sociology of Sociology of Sport

2015, Vol. 50(4-5) 606­–611
© The Author(s) 2014
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and limits of using sport to DOI: 10.1177/1012690214555166
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promote social change

John Sugden
University of Brighton, UK

Abstract
On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, former IRSS Editor John Sugden, one of the
foremost scholars to advance a critical sociology of sport and to apply its tenets to Sport for
Development (SDP) programmes, reflects on a key question about how the sociology of sport
has and can inform social and political activism that engages sport. Noting a ‘new orthodoxy
that dominates the SDP sector’, there is a pressing need for a more critical sociology of sport in
engaging strategies, and understanding the limits, of sport in the service of conflict reduction and
peace making in divided societies. Building on the tenets of Wright Mills and his notion of ‘the
sociological imagination’ and the work of Brewer connecting it to the ending of violence, Sugden
calls on the sociology of sport community to bring critical engagement to the advancement and
refinement of using sport as a mechanism to bring about changes in social relations and in the
reduction of conflict in divided societies. While it is noted that sport cannot be a panacea for
development and conflict reduction, it can play an important role in practical interventions aided
by a critical sociology of sport.

Keywords
applied sociology, conflict reduction, social change, sport and peace, Sport for Development

Reflections on the sociology of sport: pondering a key

question
This 50th anniversary essay affords the opportunity to complete an answer long overdue
to a testing question. The question was asked of me after a staff and postgraduate stu-
dent seminar I delivered at the University of Loughborough in 2006. Here I highlighted
key challenges that were faced and overcome while instituting sport-based

Corresponding author:
John Sugden, Centre of Sport Tourism and Leisure Studies, University of Brighton, Gaudick Road,
Eastbourne BN207SP, UK.
Email: j.sugden@brighton.ac.uk
Sugden 607

peace-building and conflict resolution programmes in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and
later in the Middle East. Upon finishing my presentation, I was asked a familiar array of
questions by students mainly concerned with project design and logistical project deliv-
ery issues. After such queries, one of the tutors, Dominic Malcolm, raised his hand and
asked, ‘Professor Sugden, what difference does the fact that you are a sociologist make
to your participation in and leadership of development programmes like the ones fea-
tured in your talk?’
It is not often that I hesitate before answering post-presentation queries, but this was
an intriguing question that caused me to pause for thought before eventually blustering
through what was at best an incomplete answer, saying as I recall ‘surely it makes a dif-
ference, inasmuch as being a sociologist isn’t just a job, it’s more a vocation, that is a way
of life, and as such everything you think about interpret and how you act consequentially
is filtered through that tutored sociological gaze’. ‘So, inevitably all of my work, includ-
ing and especially projects like the ones featured in this talk have been and continue to
be strongly influenced by that sociological perspective, which in my experience tends
not to be the case for other sport-based socio-political interventions with which I am
familiar’.
While this off-the-cuff answer was an honest reflection of the way I thought at the
time about the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) work with which I had been
heavily involved for several decades, later back in my hotel room as I reflected on my
performance in the seminar and thought more about the response I had given to Malcolm’s
question I realised that while my bluster may have satisfied the audience that evening it
was an answer that had not quite satisfied me.

Can sport save the world? The sociological lens and Sport for
Development and Peace
Often it is simple questions that demand the most testing and complex answers and for
some years after the Loughborough seminar, as I continued to engage with SDP-related
fieldwork, and propelled by an acquired inner sociological inquisitiveness, I have
searched for a more convincing answer to Malcolm’s intriguing question. Delivering
such an answer is even more important now at a time when the SDP enterprise has been
overcome by a faddish and fashionable bandwagon populated and driven by SDP evan-
gelists who, as Coalter (2010) has pointed out, often enter the sport environment
unshakable in their belief that intrinsically sport is a force for social good. This is an
ideological viewpoint captured by the words of Nelson Mandela, who proclaimed that
sport has ‘the power to save the world’. It is also a mantra often repeated by the SDP
faithful at congresses, seminars and award ceremonies held at regular intervals around
the globe. It embraces a new orthodoxy that dominates the SDP sector and is rein-
forced by corporate carpetbaggers and their allies in international government and
non-government agencies and sport governing bodies whose preening and posturing
leaders and their fawning apparatchiks occupy the commanding heights of the SDP
governing architecture. Here, they frequently use the evangelical and philanthropic
rhetoric of SDP and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to mask their shameless
profiteering and vainglorious power brokerage.
608 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50(4-5)

The widespread currency of this ideology is much evident in an article in the world’s
most widely read sports magazine, Sports Illustrated. Here a feature article, written by
Senior Sports Writer, Alexander Wolff (2011), entitled ‘Sport Saves the World!’ reports
the conclusions from a worldwide investigation about how the SDP movement has flour-
ished in the 21st century. To research his story, Wolf visited sport development pro-
grammes across diverse and contested socio-political enclaves. These included Palestine’s
West Bank, war-torn communities in the former Yugoslavia, beleaguered townships and
shanty towns in sub-Saharan Africa and the impoverished favelas of South America’s
great cities. En route he interviewed practitioners and experts to shed light on what was
a little explored area of journalistic inquiry. Before he embarked on this journey, I spoke
with Wolff in Boston in 2010.
We had first met almost two decades earlier in Belfast in 1993, at a particularly violent
and murderous phase of the troubles in Northern Ireland, as Wolf was leading a Sports
Illustrated team of journalists and photographers to Northern Ireland to cover a particu-
larly controversial and emblematic FIFA World Cup qualifying match between the
Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Played at Belfast’s Windsor Park, the game
generated an imaginably hateful and vengeful atmosphere. During that visit, he contacted
me for further insight about the socio-political context of sport in Northern Ireland, some-
thing that I had researched and written extensively about (Sugden and Bairner, 1993).
Shortly before Wolff’s visit to Belfast, in an attempt to challenge what looked to be
increasingly corrosive sectarian influences that blighted sport in Northern Ireland, I had
launched Belfast United, one of the world’s first sport-based community relations and
conflict resolution programmes (Sugden, 1991). The day after attending the World Cup
qualifier, I invited Wolff and his team to attend a Belfast United practice session where
he was able to witness Catholic and Protestant children playing football happily together,
in stark contrasted to the hate-filled ambience he and his colleagues had experienced
during and after the combustible Windsor Park international match the night before.
Wolff’s report about these contrasting experiences was featured in a November 1993
Sports Illustrated article, entitled ‘Peacefully Done’ (Wolff, 1993).
During our earlier conversations in Boston, Wolff confided that his memories of
Catholic and Protestant children peacefully playing had stayed with him and provided
impetus for the 2011 ‘Sport Saves the World!’ feature. Despite the quasi-evangelical tone
suggested by the title, it is clear from the article that Wolff is by no means convinced
about the intrinsically palliative qualities of sport when it comes to solving social prob-
lems. He asks ‘can such sport projects make a lasting difference, or is the dream of salva-
tion through sports too grandiose?’ (Wolf, 2011: 65). Indeed, this suggests to me that
article’s title should have more accurately been stated as a question: ‘Can Sport Save the
World and if so how’? Formulating the answer to this question takes us back to the ques-
tion asked of me at the aforementioned Loughborough seminar.

Some ongoing challenges for Sport for Development and

Peace
So what are the main features of a critical sociological gaze that I first advocated to an
emergent SDP world in the late 1970s, and alongside others, helped to develop and
Sugden 609

champion thereafter? They are the defining features of the approach to research and
scholarship adopted by the University of Brighton’s Sport and Leisure Cultures (SLC)
research group. They are comprehensively spelled out in Power Games: A Critical
Sociology of Sport, which I edited with joint-SLC leader Alan Tomlinson (Sugden and
Tomlinson, 2002). The essays in this anthology adopt a lens that Charles Wright Mills
encouraged in his landmark work, The Sociological Imagination.
I have long been influenced by the critical sociology of C Wright Mills. My first
encounters were during my undergraduate years studying politics and sociology at the
University of Essex in the early 1970s. Further influence came during my postgraduate
years spent studying for a doctorate at the University of Connecticut. Here, my critical
sociological thinking was shaped further by a former student and disciple of Wright
Mills, Kenneth Neubeck.
The strongest argument for the value of deploying a Wright Mill’s influenced critical
sociological perspective in SDP contexts can be found in John Brewer’s excellent thesis
on the subject, entitled C. Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence (Brewer, 2003). Here,
Brewer uses Wright Mill’s sociological template to comparatively make sense of the
complex processes of peace-building undertaken in Northern Ireland, South Africa and
Israel and Palestine. For me, the attractiveness of Brewer’s comparative approach had
ready relevance my SDP work, which was carried out in many of the conflict regions
featured in Brewer’s book. Thus, Brewer helped accelerate my own attempts to make
theoretical sense of the SDP world, one in which I had been operating for many years,
but which had not diminished my appetite for socio-political activism.
By engaging with Brewer’s arguments, I was finally able to formally spell out a more
satisfactory and complete answer to Dominic’s Malcolm’s question. My ‘answer’ was
eventually published in an article in this journal entitled ‘Critical left realism and sport
interventions in divided societies’ (Sugden, 2010). A main motivation for this article was
to provide an analytical framework and personal manifesto for my own SDP practice. In
part, it also offered a response to some fellow liberal and/or left-leaning academics who,
content to stay in their theoretical and methodological comfort zones, were somewhat
sneering of my hands-on efforts to engage in peace-building activities in some of the
more controversial conflict zones in the world.
In this article I show how Brewer’s interpretation and operationalisation of Wright
Mills’ thesis helps us to understand how we can climb down from the fence to become
effective critical sociologists and activists, while at the same making informed, real-
istic and pragmatic judgements about participation in progressive political and cul-
tural interventions. Indeed, Brewer goes further in arguing that the participation of
critical social scientists, in designing and organising forms of social and political
activism, is essential if those interventions are to be progressive, impactful and mean-
ingful in ways that allow us to contribute to the advancement of human rights and
social justice goals. In short, paraphrasing the words of political philosopher Edmund
Burke, ‘for the triumph of evil all it takes is for good people to do nothing’. Perhaps
by using a critical sociological perspective in the manner outlined here concerning
SDP, it at least becomes possible for the sociology of sport to contribute to progres-
sive social change without resorting to naïve proclamations about the intrinsic power
of sport.
610 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50(4-5)

Looking ahead: on new praxis, Sport for Development and

Peace
Since the 2006 Loughborough seminar there has been a groundswell of interest in SDP
work. This has brought with it a new wave of critical social science and commentary
(Darnell, 2012; Darnell and Hayhurst, 2009; Giulianotti, 2011; Kay, 2009; Kidd, 2008;
Levermore, 2010; Rookwood and Palmer, 2011). While this new critical wave of think-
ing about SDP is encouraging, a word of caution is necessary. There is danger that, in this
scramble for academic legitimacy, the value of using a critical sociology of sport in the
service of social and political practice may be washed away as theoretical sophistication
and positivistic methodological rigour is prioritised over the production of evidence and
practice-based insights that will aid activists in the field. To forestall this happening,
what may be required in the world of SDP in particular, and perhaps the sociology of
sport more broadly, is some fresh thinking about the nature of the relationship between
research practice, theory building and socio-political activism.
In my own work, I have tried to show, in the development and application of the
Ripple Effect model (Sugden, 2010: 269), that these three theatres of sociological
engagement should not be considered in isolation. Rather, they benefit from interrelated/
symbiotic consideration, in so doing facilitating praxis infused with critically informed
research strategies, sociologically framed field practices and calibrated interventions. All
of this aims at the generation and accumulation of data and evidence that can stimulate
opportunities for on-going critical reflection and re-evaluation. In such processes, theo-
retical construction and model modification can come about, leading to further dissemi-
nation and ongoing modification as working models are implemented in the diverse
theatres that may benefit through the adoption and adaptation of tested sport-based,
peace-oriented conflict resolution programmes. Thus, in the end, providing opportunities
for ongoing critical reflection and model refinement can enhance not only our theory
construction and research strategies, but advance our goals with practical interventions
that may help sport play a role in saving the world.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Sugden 611

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