Topics and trends: 30 years of sociology of sport

Abstract

What is and was the sociology of sports all about? Through the method of topic modelling, I will investigate the content of all articles (full text, N = 1923) from what has historically been the three leading sociology of sport journals – Sociology of Sport Journal, International Review for the Sociology of Sport and Journal of Sport and Social Issues – from 1984 to 2014. The study extracts 20 dominant topics: from the vague but central topic of Culture via Organization & Politics, Gender, Race, and Body to the less central, but more specific, topic of Football, Nationalism and Globalization. Additionally, I look at how the three journals have their strongholds in these topics, and how the topics have fluctuated over time. The results are discussed against the background of previous reviews and studies in the sociology of sports.

Keywords:

• Sociology of sport
• themes
• topic models
• history
• journal

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Ørnulf Seippel, is a Professor of Sociology of Sports at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences. Seippel’s research interests are sport and organizations, sport politics, social inequality, social capital/integration and social networks. Seippel’s works are published in, among others, Acta Sociologica, European Journal of Sport and Society, European Sociological Review, International Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, International review for the Sociology of Sports, Soccer & Society, Journal of Civil Society, Journal of Youth Studies, Sport in Society and Voluntas.

Notes

1 The status of descriptions (e.g. ‘mere descriptions’) tends to be low in the social sciences; a thought-provoking interpretation, an elegant explanation, or a timely critical discussion is what counts (Gerring, 2012). Successful versions of all these ‘real’ social science achievements – the interpretation, the explanation, the critique – depend, however, on descriptions. So, even though this study first and foremost presents a description of a situation (and mostly avoids the larger questions of how we got here, strengths and weaknesses of the situation, and where to head from here), the hope is that it could be important as a premise for such ‘larger’ and consequential questions.

2 Sociology of Sport Journal is the official journal of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. The first volume appeared in 1984. Journal for Sport and Social Issues is the official journal of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, and has been published since 1977. International Review for the Sociology of Sport is published in association with the International Sociology of Sport Association, and the first volume appeared in 1966.

3 Given that the influence of the latent dimensions (i.e. topics) is assumed to work through random samples from a set of distributions of words (i.e. topics), there is an element of randomness in the estimations: They have to start from somewhere. To be able to reproduce the results, a ‘set seed’ of 1234 were chosen.

4 To avoid confusion, I distinguish between topics (themes) in italics and ‘concepts’ (words, terms) hyphenated.