ABSTRACT
While writing the concluding chapter to this book I participated on a sub-plenary panel at the British Sociological Association's (BSA) sixtieth annual conference. Sport has had a marginal presence at past BSA conferences, but London's hosting of the 2012 Olympics raised both academic and public consciousness of the social significance of sport. Commenting on the proceedings, a questioner from the floor felt the need to preface his remarks by saying, ‘I don’t really like sport, but … ’ I wondered if anybody attending a round table on race and ethnicity had said, ‘I don’t really like race, but … ’ Had anyone responding to the ‘gender and sociology’ keynote said, ‘I don’t really like hegemonic masculinity, but … ’? That experience reinforced my reflections from researching this book; despite the myriad ways in which the sociology of sport has engaged with the disciplinary ‘mainstream’, and the tangible impact in places, the subdiscipline remains semi-detached. For those outside the sociology of sport (and this includes ‘mainstream’ sociologists as much as the layperson), sport remains something that you like (or dislike) rather than something that you scrutinize from a sociological point of view. As a former head of (a sociology) department said of a colleague of mine, ‘He's not a sociologist. He just writes about his hobbies.’
