Sport Without Management

Abstract

This article seeks to unsettle the taken-for-granted epistemological and ontological foundations upon which many curricular and research-based activities in contemporary sport management are grounded. With an emphasis on that academic field's development in the United States in particular, the author problematizes the underlying assumptions that guide many of sport management's concomitant scientific and industrial projects. The article concludes with a brief discussion on how we might reenvisage both the study and praxis of sport management in ways that are not just economically generative, but in ways that might also bring about cultural and social transformation.

Motivation, Satisfaction, and Retention of Sport Management Student Volunteers

“…Given the potential impact of this volunteer force within sport, empirical investigation of what motivates, satisfies, and retains sport management student volunteers is warranted. The need for such an investigation is apparent due to the increase of undergraduate and graduate programs worldwide and a subsequent surge in student enrollment in the nascent academic field of sport management (Newman, 2014). Furthermore, the analysis of motivation, satisfaction, and reten-tion has rarely been examined in tandem, and this paper provides a way to help faculty and volunteer organizers understand volunteer behaviors (from initial motivation to retention), and ultimately assist in the programming necessary to recruit, satisfy, and retain students.…”

University-Industry Knowledge Transfer: Channels of Sport Research Interaction

“…However, the findings of sport management academic journals may not even reach the industry (King, 2013;Newman, 2014;Stotlar & Braa, 2012;Zeigler, 2007). Sport management academic articles may be attending to a narrow audience, while the goal of fostering knowledge transfer with the industry is to make scholarly research accessible to as many people as possible, free of cost, compared with the present situation of traditional, limited-access academic journals (Adler & Harzing, 2009).…”

“…Furthermore, as per the resource-based view, companies will achieve a sustained competitive advantage if such resources are, for example, valuable in the sense that they exploit opportunities and/or neutralize threats in a firm's environment (Barney, 1991). Yet, sport practitioners may perceive sport academic research as having little value because managers consider academic scholarship irrelevant to their work (e.g., Fink, 2013;Miller, 2012;Newman, 2014;Welty Peachey & Cohen, 2016), or sport practitioners do not identify the value related to cooperating with sport management academia in the first place because of transactional barriers, such as finding the right sport research publications or locating the right sport scholars inside a university (Zaharia & Kaburakis, 2016).…”

“…These potential problems can also be related with sport management academia. To exemplify, sport scholars are worried that the academic dialogue among them maintains the distinction between theory and practice (Costa, 2005;Irwin & Ryan, 2013), and that the sport management theory building may not be useful to sport managers (Chalip, 2006;Fink, 2013;Newman, 2014). However, it seems that U.S. sport companies and their sport managers do not have a trust or a research relevance issue, but more of a transactional issue when collaborating with sport management academia (Zaharia & Kaburakis, 2016).…”

Examining The Application Of Experiential Learning Techniques Across Sport Management Programs

“…A concern is that sport management programs have become too focused on the bottom line, business functions of sport organizations and now fail to provide students with critical, thought-provoking, social and political dialogue in the classroom (Amis & Silk, 2005;Frisby, 2005;Zakus, Malloy, & Edwards, 2007). In a more recent response to Weese's (1995) call to action, and to the changing landscape of sport management pedagogy, Newman (2014) argued that sport management scholars have "given their research and teaching over to assumptions and promulgations of sport as industry, the athlete as commodity, the team as brand, the fan as consumer, and the sport facilitator as manager" (p. 604). He calls for a shift away from the current, market-driven focus of sport management, back towards the once society-driven field unfocused on the business element of the sport industry.…”