Social Contexts,Scholarly Inquiry,and Physical Education

Physical education lacks a set of superordinate research questions to guide our crossdiscipline, and it also lacks an overarching mission and set of goals to guide our profession. It is contended here that clarifying the possibilities and limitations that exist in our society for provision of services by experts in exercise and sports could help us to clarify the mission and goals of our profession, and this in turn could facilitate the development of a set of vital, superordinate scholarly questions around which our crossdiscipline could coalesce. This enterprise requires scholarly investigation of sports and exercise in relation to the social contexts in which they are most frequently embedded—health, leisure, and education. Sociocultural inquiry is ideally suited to examine such phenomena, and therefore it is contended that sociocultural scholars are of crucial importance to the future of our field