Sport as culture: Social class, styles of cultural consumption and sports participation in Canada

Abstract

Cultural consumption writ large has had a prominent place in the sociological discipline since Pierre Bourdieu. While Bourdieu often considered sport in analyses of culture, there have since been relatively few studies that are focused on considering sport within the broader landscape of cultural consumption. This paper seeks to assess the place of sports participation within the cultural lifestyles of Canadians. To this end, this paper employs multiple latent class analyses of various cultural and sporting variables from a large-scale Canadian government survey. It also employs regression analyses of those latent class groups. The results show three primary groups of consumers, pointing strongly to confirming the omnivore thesis in Canada. The results of the core of the analysis show, however, strong delineations in which sports these different groups consume. Ultimately then, the cultural domain of sports may be an area where omnivores practise more distinctive consumption, eschewing the sports of other consumer groups.

Sport as high culture in the USA

“…Thus, to test Bourdieu's theory at the peak of relatively uncontested neoliberalism I chose the 2002 SPPA. 4 This also has the virtue of closely matching the time frame of Bennett et al (2009), Gemar (2020), Stempel (2005) and other key studies. The response rate for SPPA was 70%.…”

“…Importantly, he summarized the second dimension of the correspondence analysis as mapping a division between “popular” and “traditional” highbrow practices with the former featuring playing golf and attending amateur sporting events and the latter featuring attending classical music concerts and visiting art museums. Gemar’s study of sport and cultural practices in Canada in 2005 did not look for CDC–EDC divisions, but at the end noted that the two engaged latent classes “populars” and “omnivores” were possibly class divided along CDC–EDC lines, “cultural capital, the primary predictor of omnivorousness here, is to the feminine what economic capital is to the masculine” (Gemar, 2020: 20).…”

“…Gemar’s (2020) study of Canada most clearly tests sport’s relationship to omnivorism. He found that in 2005, education or income levels were positively associated with participation in 15 of the 16 sports with participation rates of 0.5% (1 in 200) or higher.…”

“…However, patterns of sport participation pose a challenge to those applying omnivore theory to sport. While much research shows that the dominant classes participate more in many types of sport, indicating that they are likely operating as cultural capital, sport does not map well onto the class cultural divisions highlighted by omnivore theory (Bennett et al, 2009; Gemar, 2020). Does this mean that sport plays little role in processes of cultural distinction and class exclusion?…”

Economic Social Cultural Analysis of Sports Coaching Program in East Nusa Tenggara Province

“…According to Delaney & Madigan (2015: 5), the sociology of sport is a sociological sub-discipline that focuses on the relationship between sport and society. Meanwhile, sport have connected with culture lives and develops in a variety of environments, one of which is in a work organization, commonly known as culture (Gemar, 2018). The relationship between sports and society and also culture as an integral part of the sociocultural systems of a particular society, sport activities in a society that is different from sports activities that exist in other communities (Setyaningsih & Yuliandi, 2019).…”