Empiricism, theoretical concepts and the development of the British golf club before 1914

Citation

Vamplew W (2016) Empiricism, theoretical concepts and the development of the British golf club before 1914. Sport in Society, 19 (3), pp. 425-454. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2015.1060724

Abstract
Golf took the concept of the club from traditional voluntary organizations along with the ideas of committee structures, mechanisms for ensuring exclusivity and a place, both geographically and socially, for communal conviviality. It became one of the fastest growing recreational activities of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and the first participant sport to expend and invest large sums of money. By means of a model constructed around the development of the British golf club before 1914, this paper offers a new approach to examining the history of associativity in sport. It uses five concepts of capital – physical, financial, cultural, social, and human – and argues that their formation in the context of club development should not be explored in isolation of each other.

Journal
Sport in Society: Volume 19, Issue 3