Photo of Professor Anthony King

Professor Anthony King

Research Interests

The Sociology of Football:

Anthony King has published widely on football, social theory and, latterly, the military. Although diverse, Anthony King’s research is unified by the attempt to connect broad historical transformations with detailed and situated ethnographies of particular groups, to an illuminate contemporary social change. His first book, The End of the Terraces (Leicester University Press, 1998), sought to explain the institutional dynamics behind the development of the English Premier League in early 1990s and the way the commercialisation of football impacted on fan groups at Manchester United. The European Ritual: football in the New Europe (Ashgate 2003), extrapolated from this study to examine the transformation of European football from the 1950s to the present. The fundamental argument of The European Ritual is that European football is now becoming transnational. From the 1950s to the 1990s, European football was organised on an international basis in which the national federations retained sovereignty over independent national leagues, with more or less discrete player markets, and the competitions between European club sides were conceived as international matches. A new regime is now emerging. A pan-European player market has emerged post-Bosman and the major European clubs have become nodes of economic and playing power. They exploit local talent while simultaneously creating powerful transnational networks which are subverting the autonomy of national leagues and federations. The clubs have paradoxically become more local and transnational at the same time. The emergence of this transnational order has induced parallel responses from fans across Europe who are reformulating their solidarities and social identities. New forms of localism are emerging among the fans in response to this transnational order. The fans are also establishing new transnational links for themselves. Like the clubs, the fans are becoming more local and transnational. In this way, the book has sought to connect the concrete and often visceral expression of identity by fans at a local level with dramatic institutional transformations at the level of multinational media corporations and the state.

He continues to keep up a keen interest in sportcontributing articles and chapters to edited collections and journals. He has written recently on the new European Stadium, regulatory regimes in sport, the reverse sweep (in cricket) and the boat race.

Social Theory:

King’s 2004 book, The Structure of Social Theory (Routledge 2004) is a critical engagement with contemporary social theory. The work argues that contemporary social theory – and sociology more widely – is vitiated by a commitment to ontological dualism which conceives society as consisting of structure and agency. The Structure of Social Theory promotes a hermeneutic sociology which rejects this dualism.

Hermeneutics promotes the study, not of structure and agency, but of ‘life’; human social relations conducted on the basis of shared understandings. Through a series of empirical studies connected to theoretical exegesis and critique, the book demonstrates how hermeneutics offers an adequate basis for sociology in the new millennium.

King seeks in the first instance to demonstrate the dualism of contemporary social theory, through a discussion of Parsons, Giddens, Bourdieu, Foucault, Habermas and Bhaskar. King claims that while all these theorists are dualistic, there is, in fact, a ’hermeneutic’ strand in their writing which is actually critical to their work. This hermeneutic strand should be recovered and re-emphasised to ground a new kind of social theory. In order to ground an alternative form of social theory, King then examines the classical sociology of Hegel, Marx, Weber and Durkheim to demonstrate how each employed a hermeneutic ontology of life, even though they sometimes finally descended into dualism. This reading of classical sociology should provide a new tradition for contemporary social theory. Finally, in the last part of the book, ’Towards a Hermeneutic Sociology’, King lays out a non-dualistic social theory by reference to Heidegger, Gadamer and the interactionist tradition. Through theoretical discussion and empirical elucidation, he argues that hermeneutics is not idealist, individualist or uncritical as its critics claim. On the contrary hermeneutics offers a rigorous account of the rich actualities of human life.

He has written a number of article on social theory since his book including a piece on Wittgenstein and Parsons in the Journal of Classical Sociology in 2009. He is currently planning another monograph on social change which is intended as a companion volume to The Structure of Social Theory.

 

The Transformation of Europe ’s Armed Forces: From the Rhine to Afghanistan

King has finished  his current project on the transformation of Europe’s armed forces with the publication of his new CUP book; 'The Transformation of Europe's Armed Forces; from the Rhine to Afghanistan'. This research was supported by the British Academy and the ESRC. This research plots the trajectory of Europe’s armed forces. Focusing on Britain, France and Germany, as the major European powers, and NATO as the institutional framework in which development is occurring, he has conducted research on their rapid reaction brigades (3 Commando Brigade, 16 Air Assault Brigade, 9 Brigade Légèr Blindée de Marine and Division Spezielle Operationen), staff colleges (Joint Services Command and Staff College, Führungs Akademie, College Interarmee de la Defence, NATO School) and operational headquarters (including ISAF HQ in Kabul (see photos), the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, France’s new Rapid Reaction Corps at Lille (see photo), Einsatzführungs Commando and Joint Forces Headquarters Brunssum). Although apparently distant from his work on football, the themes and methods which underpin this military project are closely compatible. Paralleling European football, the military is currently undergoing a process of transnationalisation. Concentrated nodes of military power are emerging at the operational and tactical level in each country and are coming into closer transnational relationship with each other to fulfil their missions. The project seeks to connect detailed changes at the tactical and cultural levels to wider transformations of the military and political institutions in Europe. Closely related to this monograph, King has published a number of papers on the armed forces including ones on commemoration in the British Journal of Sociology, a critical sociology of British operations in Helmand in International Affairs and a historical analysis of the cohesion in the armed forces in Armed Forces and Society.

The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: combat and cohesion in the armies of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

During the Second World War, SLA Marshall ('SLAM') (1968) famously observed that only one in four US riflemen fired his weapon (known since that time as the SLAM effect). There have been numerous criticisms of his work (Glenn 2000; Spiller 1988; Smoler 1989), but none have actually empirically demonstrated his findings to be fundamentally wrong. The mass armies of the twentieth century demonstrated low levels of military skill but tended to be united by a common national, ethnic or gender identity; typically, armies consisted of men from the same nation or ethnic group with a 'latent [or sometime not so latent] ideology' (Bartov 1992; Fritz 1995; Moskos 1970; 1975). These extraneous social criteria were often used to unite soldiers in these armies and encourage tactical performance. The professional army of the twenty-first century seems generate cohesion in a quite distinct way. Today, the mass army, with its virtuosic individual firers, is being replaced by highly drilled teams who, through intense training, display collective virtuosity (Henriksen 2006; Ben Shalom et al 2005; Biddle 2004; King 2006b, 2008a; Strachan 2006). Collective drills have allowed professional militaries to exceed the performance of the mass army. The emergence of professional tactical drills has potentially important implications in terms of equal opportunities for women. Increasingly, inclusion into the professional armed forces now depends not on arbitrary social criteria (sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality) but primarily on competence. A soldier can be gay or female and still accepted as a professional. This paper explores the question of cohesion in the armies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to address the question of whether women can be in the infantry.

Responses:

King has been engaged in a debate about structure and agency with Margaret Archer (Sociological Review, 48(3)) and the sociology of masculine football fans see The British Journal of Sociology 51(3) and 52(4). More recently he has discussed the issue of cohesion in the military with Guy Siebold (Armed Forces & Society 33(2) and 33(4)).

Working Papers:

Please contact the author by email for an electronic or hard copy or download direct from list below:

 

Media Appearances

Anthony King has made numerous appearances in the media, writing for a number of journals including Prospect and the Guardian and appearing on the Radio and Television, including Newsnight and Thinking Allowed in 2010.

Research Supervision

  • Social Theory/Philosophy of the Social Sciences
  • Sport and Football
  • Consumption and Identity
  • Contemporary Britain
  • Europe, European integration and European identity
  • Masculinity
  • Violence
  • The Media
  • The Military

Prospective postgraduates interested in any of King’s specified research areas are encouraged to contact him direct. He is actively looking to recruit new doctoral students especially in the areas of football/sport, social theory and the armed forces.

He has examined PhDs at Liverpool and Warwick Universities.

Research Students

1999-2002: Ahmed Al-Mansoori, ‘Camel Racing in the United Arab Emirates’, PhD awarded February 2002.
2007-2010: Paola Innocenti ‘RU 486 and the status of women in Italian Society’
2007-2010: Mark Doidge, ‘New Localism and Italian Fan Culture; a sociology of Livorno Football Club’