Embracing Cultural Contexts and Critical Reflexivity: (Re)presenting the Global Sports Industry in Research and Practice

Abstract

Management arises out of ordinary human relationships within which people make individual and collective choices based on their cultural values and beliefs. To date, however, there has been limited analysis of the centrality of “culture” and “cultural issues” within the social practice and scholarly study of sport management. The author champions the case for a more conceptually-reflexive approach to sport management in theory and practice—one rooted in the problematical engagement with “culture.” It is argued that a “culturalist” approach would enable sport management students and practitioners to better understand the dynamics of diversity within the sports industry and the appropriate cross-cultural and multicultural skills needed. The development of cultural sensitivity within the field of sport management requires deliberate personal, theoretical, methodological and practice interventions. The article features the author's own personal journey toward embracing and articulating a wider historical, multicultural, critically-reflexive approach to the field of sport management. The author encourages practitioners to exude less certainty about the existing range of topics and program benchmarks and experiment more with conceptual approaches which engage the concepts of cultural identities and praxis.

Acknowledgements

Some of the material in this article has appeared in Pope and Nauright (2010, pp. 3–11) and Nauright and Pope (2009, pp. xvii–xxiv). I wish to acknowledge John Nauright's incisive work on these two books which help to inform the first section of this article. I also wish to gratefully acknowledge Vassil Girginov's incisive comments and support for this essay.

Notes

1. For a couple of useful overviews of this critical debate, see Anderson (1980) and Kaye (1984).

2. Although we were well aware that the national/regional organizing schematic may (unduly) compartmentalize analysis, we realized that much of the sport historiography remains nationally focused. As Editors, we are both English speakers and, therefore, the collection is biased towards sports history written in the English language and coverage of sporting cultures in countries where English is the first language. As a result, the Companion was not fully comprehensive (an allusive goal which could not be achieved in a single volume covering sports history around the world). Some of this can be attributed to contributors pulling out along the way, not being able to submit their commissioned pieces on time or simply not being able to adequately cover the desired topic at all. The other constraint lies in finding scholars with the time frame to write a detailed piece in a second or third language.

3. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Pope and Nauright (2010, pp. 3–11), as well as prominent social historian Peter Stearns’ (2010, pp. x–xv) insightful “Foreword”.

4. I interviewed for the position of Director of the International Center for Performance Excellence within which the publishing operation of Fitness Information Technology (FiT) is situated. FiT is a leading publisher of books and journals in the area of sport management.

5. Nauright's Power Point presentation at GMU characterized the field of sport management in 2007 as essentially divided between two major schools of thought—applied research (particularly within marketing and sponsorship) and the operation of sport as a social institution and technology, as well as the ethical, moral and social implications of sport. John was primarily interested in the latter school of thought within the field and thereby focused his presentation on the following themes (which underpinned his widely-varied and ambitious personal research agenda): political economy of sport; globalization and sport management; international sport management; sport, events and tourism; and sports development. His “Vision for the Future of Sport Mangement” Power Point file is in this author's possession.

6. The North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) was founded in 1985 and organized its first conference a year later. The European Association for Sport Management (EASM) was established in 1993, while the Sport Management Association of Australia and New Zealand (SMAANZ) emerged in 1995. Together these three associations form the International Sport Management Alliance. Some of the key sport studies journals include the Journal of Sport History, International Journal of the History of Sport, Sport History Review, Sociology of Sport Journal, International Review of the Sociology of Sport, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Sporting Traditions and Sport in Society. In addition to the vast periodical literature in sport studies there is an expansive body of specialized monographs, edited collections and invaluable reference books dealing with the social and historical development of the global sports industry.

7. For an another preliminary effort of setting a more comparative, international research agenda, see the special issue on “Sport management and marketing at the global–local nexus”, edited by S. Jackson (2005).

8. I wish to thank V. Girginov for helping me to articulate this point.

9. For an authoritative statement, see Zeigler (2007). For a detailed examination of the development of methodology within sport history, see Booth (2005) and Pope and Nauright (2010). For incisive evaluations of sport sociology past and present, see Gruneau (1999), Ingham and Donnelly (1997, pp. 364–395) and Andrews (2008). For a review of developments within sport psychology, see Ryba, Schinke and Tenenbaum (2009).

10. The classic and pioneering discussion of this comes from Richard Gruneau's (1983) Sport, Class and Social Development (see the 1999 edition with an Afterword in which Gruneau considers the book fifteen years later). For a valuable overview of the development of a contextual, relational (cultural studies) approach to “sport”, see King (2005).

11. For an excellent, recent overview of the history of sports entrepreneurship, see Porter (2010).

12. Hardy originally introduced a model closely akin to this one twenty years earlier in his pioneering exploration “Entrepreneurs, Structures, and the Sportgeist” (1990).

13. For an earlier, but still useful, primer on a “culturalist” approach to sport, see Hardy and Ingham (1993).