Even though voluntary sport organizations make up the largest part of the voluntary sector in many western countries, few studies have been carried out focusing on sport as part of civil society. Against this background, the aim of the article is to study how voluntary sport organizations operate and what social and political effects they might have through the concept of social capital. The theoretical part of the article identifies the most useful dimensions of the social-capital concept for this topic, lists hypotheses and suggests three relevant social mechanisms. Empirical studies show how social capital related to participation in voluntary sport organizations is distributed and the consequences this has for various forms of social capital: generalized trust and political commitments. Analyses are based on Norwegian data. The results show that being a member of a voluntary sport organization involves social capital which is conducive to generalized trust and political commitment. Yet, the effect of sport organizations is weaker than for voluntary organizations in general, stronger when membership in sport organizations goes together with other memberships (more weak ties) and stronger the less politicized the social effect in question.

It is well known that sport and physical activity is important for medical health and subjective well-being and thereby functions as a kind of social good. How sport also operates as a social good in light of the meaning athletes attach to their activity is a much less analysed topic. Accordingly, this essay sets out with a theoretical analysis of which meanings people most commonly attach to their sport activity, and seven reasons are identified. Next, the essay interprets these reasons as part of a larger social setting including social background (age, gender, class) and characteristics of the sport activity (team sport versus individual sport, competitive level) itself. The empirical analyses, based on Norwegian data, give a rather complicated picture of how sport carries meaning to different group of people, but three findings stand out. First, social background is more important than aspects of the activity itself. Yet, for five out of seven 'meanings of sport', aspects of the sport itself also have significant implications for how the activity is experienced. Finally, the explanatory factors produce a rather complicated picture of how sport matters to people; gender and age are especially important, but also type of sport and competitive level have significant effects.

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What is and was the sociology of sports all about? Through the method of topic modelling, I will investigate the content of all articles (full text, N ¼ 1923) from what has historically been the three leading sociology of sport journals-Sociology of Sport Journal, International Review for the Sociology of Sport and Journal of Sport and Social Issuesfrom 1984 to 2014. The study extracts 20 dominant topics: from the vague but central topic of Culture via Organization & Politics, Gender, Race, and Body to the less central, but more specific, topic of Football, Nationalism and Globalization. Additionally, I look at how the three journals have their strongholds in these topics, and how the topics have fluctuated over time. The results are discussed against the background of previous reviews and studies in the sociology of sports.

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