Play up, but don't play the game: English amateur athletic elitism, 1863-1910.

Abstract

Continuing critical investigation of some of the recreational and social realities of the defining period in English athletics which spanned the laternineteenth and early-twentieth centuries can sustain the fertile relationship that has developed in recent years between social theoretical and empirical approaches to previously largely uncritical narrative sports history. Histories of sport and recreation have clearly developed a more immediate pertinence to social theoretical debates that are consistent with Norbert Elias’s basic figurational sociological proposition that recreation is bounded by aworking out of human relations dependent upon the form and extent of power. It is from this initial theoretical standpoint that the dynamic figurations that constituteevolving society can be brought to life by way ofempirical studies examining human agency operating in such areas as class and class relations, social control, common culture and the ‘civilizing process’.’