Beyond Access:
Value, legitimacy, and commodification in school-age sport.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46661/socioldeporte.13239Keywords:
school-age sport , commodification, Sporting value , Legitimacy , InequalityAbstract
School-age sport retains strong normative legitimacy as a site of health, inclusion, and positive youth development. Yet this legitimacy may obscure a less visible transformation: the institutional reorganization of the conditions under which certain trajectories come to be recognized as valuable, sustainable, and worthy of investment. This article develops a theoretical-conceptual intervention aimed at reconstructing the commodification of school-age sport beyond its most visible manifestations, such as rising costs, privatization, or competitive intensification. Drawing on a relational reading of recent work on access inequalities, early specialization, quality of experience, dropout, and datafication, and in dialogue with institutional sociology, the sociology of childhood, and Bourdieusian field theory, the article articulates three analytical dimensions: sporting possibility, the legitimate temporality of sporting childhood, and the institutional production of sporting value. It concludes that commodification produces not only distributive inequality, but also mechanisms of social closure and unequal legitimation through which socially produced differences may be converted into legitimate signs of talent, potential, or sporting merit.
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