Pierre Bourdieu’s Critical Reflexive Sociology of Sport and Physical Culture

Bourdieu’s critical reflexive sociology offers a powerful modus operandi for analysing the underlying logics of sport and physical culture. It can be used to illuminate sources of power, processes of continuity and change, and deeply embodied forms of socialisation. The principles of critical reflexivity encourage prioritisation of focus on the spatial and historical contextualisation of sporting practices in society in ways which refuse binary thinking such as agency/structure, mind/body and subjective/objective. To achieve this, Bourdieu’s theory of practice can be used to map the sporting landscape in ways which use practice as a mediating concept. Practices are structured by the emergent affects and effects of the field, capital and habitus in an ongoing recursive structurating process of continuity and change. To use the approach, the sociologist must be prepared to question not only the taken for grandness of the socio-cultural world, but also their instruments of observation, and their own interests in making that observation.