ABSTRACT
Organized sport plays a rather unimportant part when it comes to the essence of social life, compared to, for instance, the law or questions of how to avoid famine, war and diseases. In sum, sport – and its characteristics – has developed into an essential – and important – phenomenon in popular culture and in (post)modern society and has a great deal to tell us about human life and (post)modernity. An alternative strategy for dealing with the question of importance – status and relevance – in sport and in sport science is to discard the normative imprint as well as the incentive of repeatedly adding additional and external values to sport. The study of sport is more or less instrumental, for the purpose of improving sporting results, or contextual, with the aim to understand the specificity of the sporting culture. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
