Sport as Culture: Social class, styles of cultural consumption, and sports engagement in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The consumption of culture has often been ascribed the power to reflect and reproduce social inequalities. However, most work in this area has focused upon music and the arts. Sport is an important element of culture that can and should be studied in a similar fashion as others (Bourdieu, 1978). This thesis thus seeks to bring the theoretical frameworks and analytical tools of sociologies of culture further into the realm of sport. Substantively, this thesis provides an updated and comprehensive re-examining of the relationship between direct sports participation and social stratification in the relatively unexplored national context of Canada. I also innovatively provide an examination of the relationship between social stratification and professional sports consumption. Finally, this thesis fills a gap in the literature by analysing where the consumption of sport fits within broader cultural lifestyles. For these investigations, I use large-scale survey data and various statistical methods to test the foundational theories of Pierre Bourdieu, the ‘omnivore’ thesis, and individualisation arguments of social action to explain these patterns. The findings show direct sports participation relying primarily on dispositions towards the body which are stratified by education and income, especially for the most elite sports. They also show the two most selective omnivorous profiles for professional sport, rather than the most omnivorous, with the highest levels of education and income. This thesis thus sheds doubt on the omnivore thesis within sport, while also showing elements of individualisation regarding age and sex differentiation in consumption. Sports consumption in Canada thus cuts across all three theories of the relation between socio-economic position and sport. These more delimitated consumption profiles contrast with the general adherence to the omnivore thesis within broader cultural lifestyles. This therefore suggests that sport may be a cultural domain where general omnivores practise more distinctive consumption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".