Social Movements and Sport-focused Security Fields

This chapter advances recent debates on social movement (relational) fields, outcomes, and successes by suggesting that the analysis of such fields must be temporal. The relational interpersonal and intersubjective choices made by interdependent actors in social life take place in fields of interaction, but these interactions and their networks of social relations have a history. Hence, the social movement field is characterized by multiple temporal periods through which the actions of activists both shape and are shaped by the long-term sociopolitical environments in which they are embedded. To develop this analysis, we identify a 40-year-old soccer fan social movement scene in England, revealing the complex interplay of cultural and technological patterns of interaction across the compelling timeframes and orientations of this field. Adopting a theoretical framework which synthesizes research on the strategic interactions of movement ‘players’ and ‘arenas’, and sport-focused security fields, we identify a series of compound and sub-players across the political, discursive, and regulatory arenas which constitute the security field of contention, in what is an under-researched lifeworld in sociology.