ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a Bourdieusian approach to sport needed to be seen in terms of a ‘metanoia’, a new gaze, or way of seeing it. It sets out a framework for such a ‘gaze’ in terms of methodological issues of constructing sport as a research object and field analysis. The intellectual reputation of the French social theorist cum sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has gone from strength to strength since his death from cancer in 2002. For Bourdieu, sport needs to be understood in just the same way as any other field, and thus ultimately as a field of production, which itself implies specific conditions of possibilities. All aspects of sport can be thought of in these ways: as a relationship to the body; as an activity; as a source of consumption; as an official institution – and the shared structures that both constitute and are constituting of them.
