Logics of practice in movement culture: Lars-Magnus Engström’s contribution to understanding participation in movement cultures

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present a framework for exploring participation in and social stratification of movement culture based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept logic of practice. The background to our approach is Lars-Magnus Engström’s struggle to understand the impact of social stratification on participation in movement culture in a now nearly fifty-year follow-up study. The aim of the article is to elaborate further a framework, which Engström drafted in one of his last publications. Here, we assume that participation in movement cultures is guided by a number of logics of practice that are historically, culturally and socially constituted, and which relate to people’s tastes in particular ways that lead to social stratification. These logics are grouped into three overarching kinds of practices: performing, improving and experiencing, which engender both practice and social stratification. Further, the different logics of practice are linked to a principle of uncertainty, which means that quantitative empirical data must be interpreted rather than measured in a strict sense. The here outlined framework suggests that future research about participation in movement culture needs to take into account information about the structure, rhythm and tempo of the practice, as well as of the directionality of the actions. Information about these issues can hopefully contribute to a more elaborated understanding of the impact of social stratification on participation in movement culture, and in what forms movements are pursued.

KEYWORDS:

• Logic of practice
• movement cultures
• habitus
• participation patterns
• social stratification
• follow-up study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The initiative for this article was taken by Lars-Magnus Engström in 2012. He invited Karin Redelius and Håkan Larsson to take part in the writing, knowing that he was terminally ill. Unfortunately, Engström passed away in January 2014, leaving an unfinished manuscript behind. Eventually, we, his co-authors, decided to make an attempt to finalise the manuscript. Inevitably, our work and all the comments and suggestions for revision that we have received from colleagues and reviewers have made this text into something that Lars-Magnus Engström cannot be entirely held responsible for. Notwithstanding, in honour of Lars-Magnus Engström, we have decided to let him remain as first author.

2 One can of course question whether different researchers approached ‘social stratification’ in the same way in these studies. The researchers’ ambition to explore ‘physical activity patterns’ rather than ‘participation in movement culture’ can also shed some light over as to why the results differ.