Chuligaństwo czy figuracja w procesie cywilizowania? Recepcja szkoły Leicester a świat polskich kibiców piłkarskich

The main aim of this article is to consider the topicality of the theoretical achievements of the Leicester School, formed by the students and continuers of Norbert Elias’s ideas, with Eric Dunning at their head. The author presents the main theses on stadium hooliganism which Dunning and his team formulated on the basis of a socio-historical analysis. The English researchers connect the behaviour of football fans with their class origins, with patterns of ‘street’ socialization, with masculinism, and with violence constituting an important aspect of daily life. They show that the social environment from which the majority of hooligans originate has not been included in the broader stream of the civilizational process. Then the author, in describing Polish football fans, makes use of certain elements of Norbert Elias’s process sociology (constituting Dunning’s analytical tool). History shows that the sub-culture of football fans is ‘becoming civilized’, although not in a uniform manner. The concept of figuration could be a valuable analytical tool for describing the community of football fans, as it is not a society separated from the outside world, but remains in a specific interdependence with it. In the analysis, the dichotomy between ‘settlers’ and ‘outsiders’ is also helpful.