Vassil Girginov and Katerina Girginova (Eds.), <i>Handbook on Sport and Culture</i>

Vassil Girginov and Katerina Girginova, consolidates a vast and often fragmented literature by treating sport not as a domain that merely "reflects" culture, but as a consequential arena where culture is made, produced, circulated, contested, institutionalized and monetized.The volume's most important achievement lies less in offering a single canonical theory, which handbooks rarely do, than in providing an integrative conceptual map that makes sport's cultural work legible across research traditions that do not always converse well: cultural sociology, media and communication, political economy, organization studies, and critical theory.As such, the book becomes an interesting resource to scholars and graduate students in sport studies and cultural sociology, and is equally relevant to communication researchers who treat sport as a high-density site of mediated meaning-making.At the same time, the book is also likely to serve policy-oriented readers interested in cultural governance and legitimacy, given that contemporary sport is increasingly assessed through public-facing narratives about integrity, inclusion, sustainability, and social impact (Manoli et al., 2020).In a field characterized by rapid platformization and intensifying political contestation (Petersen-Wagner & Lee Ludvigsen, 2025), a synthetic and agenda-setting reference work is itself a valuable intervention.