Approaches to Social Inequality in the Sociology of Sport

Sport, by its very nature, produces and reveals inequalities in terms of physicality and athletic performance. In social terms, however, sport has often been considered the great social leveller. This paper considers the production and reproduction of social inequality in sport in regard to the development of ideas and research about social inequality in the sociology of sport. Specifically, inequality in sport is considered in terms of the progression from reflection to reproduction to resistance theses and the progression from categorical to distributive to relational levels of analysis. The paper concludes with a consideration of some ways in which sport may be involved in the production of social equality.