Identity regulation in the North American field of men’s professional ice hockey: An examination of organizational control and preparation for athletic career retirement

Identity Work in Athletes: A Systematic Review of the Literature

“…A related finding expands on role models, where athletes engage in identity exploration under the influence of role models that share similarities with themselves [82]. Additional factors that influenced athletes' identity work included group membership [90], sports culture [6], prolonged injury [54], racial identity [79], retirement [75,86,90], and multiple role experiments [13,29]. Collectively, the literature pointed out the significance of the identity work of athletes while implying that such processes are facilitated and affected by personal explorations, critical life events, and social contexts.…”

“…Next, at the bottom left corner (cluster 2, n = 18) and the top middle (cluster 3, n = 13) of the figure, studies that shared numerous similarities in terms of theoretical approaches (i.e., identity theory and narrative theory) and methodology (i.e., qualitative) were identified. These two groups of literature focused on athletes' identity work during critical life events, such as career transitions, e.g., [86,90,94] and identity conflicts and crises, e.g., [51,59,64]. However, only cluster 3 referred to significant life events related to injuries and athletes facing disabilities, while the sample characteristics of being a professional athlete were only present in cluster 2.…”

The New Normal

“…The work of Byers et al (2007), followed in the footsteps of Hopwood (1974) analyzing organizational controls of voluntary sport organizations via administrative, social, and self-control, control mechanisms. More recent sport management scholarship addressing organizational controls has focused primarily on employee/organization identification (Andrijiw, 2020;Parker & Manley, 2017). The lack of focus on organizational control theory by sport management scholars has presented a gap in the scholarship this paper intends to address.…”

‘Falling Upward’ into Sports Retirement: A Rohrsian Exploration of the Sports Retirement Experience

“…As Denison and Winslade (2006) suggest, moving towards a sports sociology lens helps us think more readily about common problems in sport in a way that takes the focus away from the individual athlete, thereby disrupting the entrenched idea that the 'athlete' should be the location where change needs to occur. To this end, whilst socio-cultural scholars have similarly found that retirement from competitive sport is an extremely challenging experience that can have profound implications for physical and mental health (McMahon et al 2012), this growing field has also helped to frame the retirement transition as a social rather than isolated individualized process (Hickey and Roderick 2017;Stamp et al 2021), where identities are significantly influenced and regulated over time (Andrijiw 2020).…”

“…Retirement from sport is widely reported as a challenging time of transition in the lives of elite athletes and one that has been explored from a range of different perspectives both by sport psychologists (Park et al 2013;Stambulova et al 2020) and socio-cultural scholars of sport (Andrijiw 2020;Hickey and Roderick 2017;Stamp et al 2021;Jones and Denison 2019). The majority of academic work in this area has focused on the initial aftermath of transitions away from sport (see Barth et al 2020) and the ongoing social and psychological adjustments to life thereafter (Cavallerio et al 2017).…”