ABSTRACT
This chapter presents theoretical ideas as inherently linked to, or in Norbert Elias’s terms highly interdependent with, their sport-related application, rather than in abstracted form. It examines Elias’s orientation towards the dualisms of macro- and micro-sociology, objectivity and subjectivity, structure and agency, past and present, and nature and nurture. The chapter demonstrates the potential applicability of Elias’s theoretical principles to some of the major future research challenges for sociologists of sport. Specifically, Elias sought to develop ideas which helped re-conceptualize sociological debates over macro- and micro-sociology; objectivity and subjectivity; structure and agency; nature and nurture. His central theory, and one of the clearest illustrations of his rejection of the macro-micro dichotomy, is the theory of civilizing processes. As a consequence of Elias’s conceptualization of nature and nurture, figurational sociology was somewhat re-invigorated by the emergence of a ‘sociology of the body’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
