ABSTRACT
It perhaps seems incongruous to be confronted with a book about the sociology of deviance in sport when in the wider realm of orthodox sociology the subject area was pronounced dead a decade ago. Indeed, invoking a Barthesian interpretation, Colin Sumner (1994) in announcing the death of the sociology of deviance set about writing the obituary of the field of study. Sumner is the most important chronicler of the sociology of deviance and his eschatological account suggested that the academy no longer had a part and purpose for the sociology of deviance as its utility had been exhausted (Downes and Rock, 1998). In pronouncing this ‘death’, the central premise underpinning Sumner’s argument was that it had become increasingly impossible to justify the existence of the concept of ‘social deviance’ – whereby what he meant was ‘that which is censured as deviant from the standpoint of the norms of the dominant culture’ (Sumner, 2001: 89). What is could no longer be conceived as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘normal’ or ‘deviant’ – it had become merely is. The crux of Sumner’s argument was that even before the 1990s it had become increasingly impossible to justify the existence of the concept of ‘deviance’ in a plural world in which no one distinctive meaning of what was supposed to be ‘deviant’ should be allowed to gain ascendancy. Since no social group should be able to dominate, no person was being dominated in any singular sense, and no ground existed for any one principle of what could or should be constituted as ‘deviant’.
