ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu is widely recognized as one of the leading social theorists of contemporary times. According to Wacquant (2002: 549), Bourdieu transcended his social background as the son of a sharecropper to rise ‘to the apex of the French cultural pyramid and became the world’s most cited living social scientist’. Despite his globally renowned status and scholarly interest in sport (see Bourdieu 1978, 1988a, 1999b), throughout the 1980s and 90s his theoretical tools remained somewhat marginal in the (intersecting) fields of the sociology of sport and sport pedagogy. Over the last decade, however, recognition of his theoretical efficacy has grown and his work has now ‘attracted considerable interest among scholars of the sociology of sport, physical culture, and physical education’ (Brown 2006: 162). Indeed, citations to his work increased somewhat dramatically after 2003. 1
