Eric Dunning, who has died aged 82, was a distinguished sociologist and founding father of the sociology of sport, who wrote about aggression and excitement in games, and about football hooliganism.
Seeking an area for postgraduate research at the University of Leicester in the 1950s, Eric considered football, but found that it was regarded as an unsuitable field of study for sociologists. Eric and his colleague Norbert Elias set out to overturn that view.
Eric’s MA thesis traced the development of football from a rough and wild folk game, close to fighting, into the modern sport, with its much lower socially permitted level of violence. Until then, the orthodox sociological view of leisure had been that it met a need for relaxation. Eric and Elias dissented. Their view was that people living in industrial societies were subject to constant pressure towards a demanding level of habitual control over spontaneous impulses, and what was needed from leisure and cultural pursuits was excitement in a socially acceptable form.
Their pioneering essays were collected in 1986 in the book Quest for Excitement. In all, Eric authored or edited 14 books. Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (1979), his study with Ken Sheard of the development of rugby football, is arguably the best sociological study of the development of any sport. And between 1984 and 1990, Eric and his Leicester colleagues produced three highly influential books on football hooliganism. The work of the “Leicester school” is the starting point for all subsequent research work in this area.
Born in Hayes, Middlesex, to Daisy (nee Morton), a school dinner lady, and Sidney Dunning, a London bus driver, Eric went to Acton county grammar school and to what was then University College Leicester. His intention was to study economics, but he switched to sociology after attending and being entranced by Elias’s introductory lectures in the subject.
After completing his postgraduate studies, Eric went to the US for a year, where he worked under Alvin Gouldner at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and where he met and married his first wife, Ellen. He returned to Britain in 1962 to take up an appointment as an assistant lecturer at Leicester, but Ellen was unable to settle in the UK, and the marriage broke up.
Eric was appointed lecturer in 1963 and professor of sociology in 1998. He was my tutor and later my academic colleague at Leicester, and we worked on many research projects together. Eric continued to write and publish after his retirement in 2001, as professor emeritus.
To his friends he will be remembered as a bon vivant who loved wine and jazz, and a teller of jokes and shaggy dog stories, but, above all, as an extraordinarily kind and generous person.
Eric is survived by two children, Michael and Rachel, from his second marriage, to Judith, which ended in divorce, and by his grandchildren, Florence and Isabelle, and a brother, Roy.