Omnivorousness in sport: The importance of social capital and networks

Abstract

There has been for some time a significant and growing body of research around the relationship between sport and social capital. Similarly within sociology there has been a corpus of work that has acknowledged the emergence of the omnivore-univore relationship. Surprisingly relatively few studies examining sport and social capital have taken the omnivore -univore framework as a basis for understanding the relationship between sport and social capital. This gap in the sociology of sport literature and knowledge is rectified by this study that takes not Putnam, Coleman or Bourdieu but Lin's social network approach to social capital. The implications of this article are that researchers investigating sport and social capital need to understand more about how social networks and places for sport work to create social capital and in particular the changing dynamics of social class. The results indicate that social networks both facilitate and constrain sports participation, whilst family and friendship networks are central in active lifestyles, those less active have limited networks. Key wordsSocial capital has been conceptualised and operationalized in a number of ways (Bourdieu, 1984; Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000; Nan Lin, 2001). There are many reasons why social capital has attracted so much attention over the past thirty years or so: the assumption that civil society and democracy depend upon it; that some of the important features that contribute to social life such as networks, norms and trust have been diminishing; that civic engagement, volunteering, and community networks, public service have all been under threat and that the means or the resources for developing shared human objectives and capabilities have been challenged as a result of changing individual and societal priorities.As scholarly interest in the concept of social capital has flourished, the relationship between sport and social capital has gained greater prominence, primarily through the seminal contributions of Jarvie (2003), Delaney and Keaney (2005), Coalter (2007), Nicholson and Hoye (2008), and more recently, Widdop and Cutts (2012a) and Nichols, Tacon and Muir (2013). This body of work has at its core some or all of the following themes: the extent to which sport contributes to the bridging and/or bonding aspects of social capital; the relationship between sports participation and social capital; the role of sport in fostering different aspects of communitarianism; and the role of sport in the development of not just human capabilities but community life as suggested by a former UN Secretary General for Europe who asserted that "The hidden face of sport is also the tens of thousands of enthusiasts who find in their football, rowing, athletics and rock climbing clubs a place for meeting and exchange but above all the training ground for community life" (Jarvie and Thornton, 2012: 255).Yet, despite the saliency of sport in the scholarly work of Bourdieu (1984) and calls by cultural sociologist Richard Peterson (2005) to examin...

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