The social construction of Queens Park Rangers' greatest season

This article appraises critical social agents, occurrences and situations related to the performance of one professional football team in a specific season. While in 1975-76 Queens Park Rangers (QPR) were lauded for their entertaining and attractive playing style and overachieved in relation to the club’s history, they fell agonisingly short of winning the top English division. The interpretive institutional ecology approach of Everett Hughes, a prominent sociologist of the second Chicago School, is employed as a frame of reference within which to consider the social construction of this team performance, and Hughesian conceptual tricks of the trade are utilised in analysing key turning points, dilemmas and contradictions of status, and going concerns, featuring in this sociological case study narrative.<p></p>