ABSTRACT

There will always be some debate about how any concept is defined, and sport is no different. At the outset it is important to note, as Trenberth and Collins (1999: 13) did, that there is no ‘pure essence’ or ‘pure nature’ of sport. Rather sport is a socially constructed phenomenon, situated within a social context and shaped by social processes creating that context, and comes to mean different things within different settings over time. Chapter 4 demonstrates this through its discussion of the changes of emphasis in government sport policies in Britain. If sport has no fixed or static state then sport business managers must be constantly monitoring change and be flexible enough to adapt structures and processes to suit (see also Chapters 5 and 6). This book adopts the broad definition of sport as outlined in the Council of Europe’s European Sports Charter (1992) where ‘sport means all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aims at improving physical fitness and mental wellbeing, forming social relationships, or obtaining results in competition at all levels’ (see also Chapters 3 and 14). As Wolfe et al. (2002) stated, sport as an organised and codified activity is a late nineteenth and twentieth-century phenomenon and its current significance comes from a complex interplay of social, economic, technological, legal and cultural factors in industrial and post-industrial society. These factors are considered in more detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 16 and are introduced briefly below.