The Materialist Approach to Sport Study: An Alternative Prescription to the Discipline's Methodological Malaise

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Abstract
Alan Ingham has criticized the prevailing positivist and blatantly ideological methodologies used in sport study and offered a Weberian alternative. This paper presents a different methodological approach; one based on a materialist understanding of the relationship between sport and society. By examining the totality as the real object of study and integrating the conception of dialectical analysis, it is argued that the labor process constitutes the ontological basis of social history and thus of sport study. Using labor as the take-off point, the paper illustrates in some detail how sport study can be integrated into the materialist framework. The final section discusses the ideal-type approach offered by Weber pointing out that it is a redundant methodological construct once the pivotal relations of social history have been identified. Finally, it is argued that the Weberian position also harbors certain ideological elements that often go unnoticed

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