Sport in Contemporary Society: A Critical Review of Social Theories and Cultural Practices

This systematic review of the literature sheds light on the generative construction of sport sociology as an academic field, straddled by power relationships, struggles for legitimacy, and gatekeeping disciplines. Acknowledging Malcolm's (2014) seminal critique, theoretical lenses from Bourdieu, Abbott, and Lamont are brought forth to assess how academic capital, jurisdictional claims, and evaluation systems conspire in the configuration of disciplinary boundaries. A PRISMA-guided screening of 15 post-2020 articles published in respected journals produces results suggesting that sport sociology was never generated organically as a disciplinary response to cultural interest in sport but rather was strategically carved within the academic hierarchy-inexcusable resulting in exclusions from feminist, decolonial, and Global South perspectives. Through the interplay of Wacquant's embodied sociology and Connell's Southern Theory, the study offers a critique to the Eurocentric and disembodied posture of dominant paradigms. It also adopts the stirrings of Slaughter and Rhoades' academic capitalism to illustrate how neoliberal evaluation regimes (e.g., REF, ERA) constrict research agendas, thereby impeding critical or practice-based scholarship. Findings further show that sport sociology, as a smaller entity, epitomizes the broader academic fight for epistemic authority, disciplinary legitimacy, and the imbalances afforded by knowledge on a global scale. The review ends by suggesting that the study of the sociology of sport be taken forward in a manner that is more reflexive, inclusive, and politically aware.