Sport plays an important part in cultural life around the world, but until recently it has remained on the sidelines of academic Cultural Studies. Putting sport at the centre of cultural enquiry, The Uses of Sport investigates the implications for sport in the pre-Cultural Studies tradition of cultural commentary, before moving on to a critical engagement with a number of themes pertinent to contemporary Cultural Studies, including: community and social capital, cultural populism, cultural materialism, ethnographic enquiry, sport and the city, and the link between sport and cultural policy. Overall, The Uses of Sport provides a resource for the theoretical location of sport within culture and popular culture. It takes a provocative stance, challenging theoretical trends that have emerged within Cultural Studies since the 1980s, arguing that sport and other cultural phenomena are usefully examined by more traditional modes of cultural analysis.

John Hughson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Physical Education, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He is co-author with David Inglis of Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas (Polity, 2003). David Inglis is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Aberdeen. He is a founding editor of the journal Cultural Sociology. Marcus Free is a lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He has published various articles on football fandom and national identity, sport and media representation, and television drama.