ABSTRACT
A lifetime could be spent in recording the multiple stories and events involved. The emergence of cycling studies as a distinct area of academic and popular research has shown that it also involves different ways of looking at the phenomenon and some radically contradictory ways of thinking about its current significance, its future, and even its past. This chapter explores some of the ways in which theorizing cycling has developed and examines some of the key ideas. It shows some of the functions that they have had in cycling studies, and how abstract conceptualizations may serve practical purposes. While investigations of cycling may appear to be self-evident explorations of fact, meanings and interpretations are subject to analysis and construction. Realist approaches, more properly, realist ontologies, view reality as existing independent of the individual.
