'Ireland' and the British Empire Games 1930

Today’s presentation is the outcome of an ongoing collaboration between Joe Maguire and me that started in March 2012. Like all good researchers, we share an intellectual and personal passion for today’s subject matter. We assume that you take the study of sport seriously, from a sociological perspective so our analysis today rests on three assumptions: first, the present has emerged from the past; second, that sport can be used as a laboratory in situ, as a critical case study of wider socio-economic and political processes; and, third; that process sociology is well equipped to help make sense of the relationship between sport, culture and society, and of ongoing relationships between the peoples of the North Atlantic, through the use of concepts like habitus, established-outsiders, the personal pronoun (I/we/they group images) and double bind processes. For that reason, we could equally be next door in the parallel session on established-outsiders. But also relevant here today are those aspects process sociology that deal with identity – that which is proclaimed and that which is imposed – and further developments of Elias’s work that take account of zones of prestige (not in the sense used by Collins), emulation and resistance.