The social patterning of sport: dispositions in regular sports participation and stratification in Canada

ABSTRACT

The participation in different forms of leisure has often been ascribed the power to reflect and reproduce social inequalities. While some came before, this intellectual endeavour increased substantially with the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. While Bourdieu’s writings on culture did not neglect sports, sport is often neglected in subsequent studies of culture. Most of the subsequent theoretical and empirical work on culture has focused upon music and the arts, many also arguing that Bourdieu’s work is now dated. This paper seeks to provide an important empirical examination of social position and sports participation. It also seeks to test of the relevance of Bourdieu’s theories today in this area of culture. For these investigations, I use large-scale survey data and various statistical methods to test the relevance of the Pierre Bourdieu’s foundational theories and explain these patterns. The findings show direct sports participation relying primarily on dispositions towards the body which are stratified by education and income, especially for the most elite sports. These results therefore highlight the contemporary relevance of Bourdieu’s theories of the relationship between sports, social class, and the stratification thereof.

KEYWORDS:

• Bourdieu
• Canada
• cultural consumption
• social class
• sports participation

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Statistics Canada for providing data spreadsheets of the GSS results.

Disclosure statement

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

Disclaimers

This paper is the sole work of the author and should not be construed to represent Statistics Canada or the Government of Canada.