THE FIGURATIONAL SOCIOLOGY OF NORBERT ELIAS – POTENTIALITIES AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF SPORT

Abstract

paper we evaluate some contributions as well as theoretical and methodological potentialities of Norbert Elias’ sociology approach. We emphasize his concern about the delimitation of sports as a relevant object of research that can help us to have a better understanding about human behavior. Specifically, the human behavior is understood in terms of emotional economy redirection that has more prevalence in different societies, such as ours nowadays. In the first section, we present very general lines of how the sport came to be conceived by Elias as a sociological problem. In the second part, we have a main purpose to argue that some aspects of the Eliasian approach criticized by Dias (2010), in a text published in this journal, rather than as reserves to constitute an adequate theme of the sport phenomenon, these are, likewise, the main contributions of the model of Elias to the sociological study of sport.