Sport management: mission and meaning for a new era

Sport management has developed as a scholarly discipline in an era marked by increasing professionalization, commercialization, commoditization, and globalization of sport (Shilbury, 2022). Put differently, since sport management became a ‘field of study’ at the end of 1980s (Costa, 2005), the sport ecosystem has seen tremendous expansion and integration. We have seen a remarkable increase in athletes’ movement across borders and regions, quantum leaps in technology (i.e. TV and Internet), and revenue generation that have rendered modern sport a powerful vehicle of commercial and political branding.

Under these circumstances, our discipline has initiated an increasing number of education programs, research projects, journals, academic books, conferences, as well as associations in all continents. For instance, since the Journal of Sport Management (JSM), the first academic journal in the field, started to publish in 1987, scholars writing on sport management may now submit their research to a number of international outlets directed particularly towards sport management. European Sport Management Quarterly (ESMQ) has contributed to this development for the last 22 years. Consider this: in January 1987 one could read eight new articles focusing on sport management, whereas the same month 35 years after a reader can choose from 45 available. However, despite the surge of empirical research and publications in a growing number of journals and books, it looks as if the field suffers from a lack of consolidated debate about the discipline’s overall orientation and its contribution to the development of sport and society (Gammelsæter, 2021). Indeed, despite the expansion of academic publishing in sport management over the past 35 years, to our knowledge this is the first special issue on the state of the art of the discipline. We are grateful, and proud, that the editorial board of ESMQ, widely recognized as a leading journal in the field, has supported this special issue and the call for state-of-the-art reflection on our research field.

At the heart of sport management’s expansion is multi-disciplinarity and an impressive variety of research on sport activities and actors. Despite this, it is a small sub-discipline of management studies, and perhaps more precisely; a collection of research areas in sport drawing on a variety of mother disciplines, such as economics, sociology, psychology, political science and more. While this can produce potency and magnitude, there are also risks. One is that multi-disciplinarity translates into fragility and fear that groundbreaking discussion across disciplines reveals cleavages and seemingly insurmountable conflict within the field, with wider consequences being impotency and incapability to challenge the development of sport and its effects on society. Despite its possibilities, multi-disciplinarity challenges us all to work profoundly to grasp a diversity of ontologies, terminologies, assumptions, and research results. Faced with this almost unsurmountable task, groundbreaking debates across the field may seem too much to ask for. However, according to some critics, the field of sport management has drifted with the neoliberal political and commercial project that has swept much of the world concurrently with the establishment and development of sport management as an academic discipline (e.g. Coakley, 2011; Newman, 2014). Arguably too, if sport management has lost its way, it is perhaps drawn into the vortex by the alleged crisis in management studies (Alvesson et al. 2017; Tourish, 2019). In any case, these are concerns that deserve continuous attention, and we should not stop asking whether we are doing work that matters to society, and if we can do better.

To us, it seems that a scholarly community can approach research wearing three hats: the fiduciary, strategic, and the generative (Chait et al., 2005). We suggest it is fair to accept that our community’s focus and energy have been devoted more to the fiduciary and strategic modes of research whilst we do less, and perhaps too little, in the generative mode. So, what are these modes?

We see ourselves, our colleagues, and our graduate students engage with research that meets all the basic normal science criteria: solid literature reviews; development of research questions and hypotheses; sound designs and data analyses, clear findings reporting, and a decent set of practical recommendations. We tick all the necessary boxes, and we make it through to publishing. This is the fiduciary work we have learned to do and that we must do.

The purpose behind the strategic type of research seems to be more towards capitalizing on and/or exploiting business and/or societal trends to build or strengthen academic profiles and secure research grants and tenures. By utilizing the strategic type of research, we, like scholars in most other fields, take steps to fill theoretical gaps through small, almost unrecognizable, elements (e.g. including or removing a variable in an existing model). The danger is that research becomes more about being seen and recognized than pursuing curiosity and ‘truth’. Needless to say, we are not insulated from the wider pressures and developments in our universities, including incentive systems that push us towards competition and struggling for survival.

So, when fiduciary and strategic research is the nitty-gritty of our scholarly work, the question is if this is enough or if we engage as well in what Chait et al. (2005) call generative thinking, and to bring to the fore what Argyris (1977) refers to as our ‘hidden theories of action’ (p. 115). To stay healthy, research communities, like other social communities, need to research their own hidden theories and basic assumptions. Doing fiduciary and strategic research is not enough, we must also ask ourselves if we advance research that matters, and to whom it matters, and it is through the generative mode we may broaden the meaning of impact and, subsequently, produce sport management research that makes a difference (Wickert et al., 2021). The intention behind this special issue was to stimulate generative thinking, and indeed, we believe that the papers herein succeed, to various degrees of explicitness, to exercise this generative thinking by raising profound questions on how we could (re-)frame sport management so we understand its mission and meaning, historically and for the future.

The contributions to the special issue

This special issue is motivated by the notion that our field can do better in terms of generative thinking, in exploring the discipline’s overall orientation and hidden theories and its contribution to the development of sport and society (Gammelsæter, 2021; Newman, 2014; Shilbury, 2022). To start to remedy this situation, we set up a call for scholars that were willing to reflect on our field and contribute texts that we hoped have the potential to provoke further debate. It is notable that we wanted texts that are themselves controversial and amenable to critique, because we believe critique is a necessary stimulant for reflecting upon our hidden theories and hence development of our exposed theories, models, and the practical organizing and management of sport. It would be untrue to say the response was overwhelming, which perhaps is a testimony to the lack of debate in the field. Neither did we reach our aim of presenting a fairly gender balanced issue, despite directed invitation. We lament this outcome but relate it to the extra strain and stress many colleagues have experienced in the pandemic period that we have been through. We certainly do not think that female scholars are less interested or able to deal with the topic of this special issue. Nevertheless, we think the four papers we present below are strong papers that should reach out to all scholars in the field, promoting further debate, reflection and discussion.

The next article in this issue is ‘Taking stock of sport management research in the new millenia – Research contributions, worthwhile knowledge, and the field’s raison d’être’ by Cecilia Stenling and Josef Fahlén. The article links to recent critique of management studies (e.g. Alvesson et al., 2017; Tourish, 2019, 2020) and set out to measure how papers that are accepted in our journals frame their contribution to the research field in their introductory sections. This piece of sociology of science shows that spotting and filling gaps in the literature overwhelmingly passes as good research among reviewers and editors. In contrast, papers that questions assumptions underpinning existing knowledge, where researchers take issue with the underlying assumptions of each other’s work (i.e. ones with a more generative approach), are very few. Based on these findings, Stenling and Fahlén challenge the community to move beyond gap spotting to clarify the significance of a gap and why it is important to address, and furthermore, to discuss the balance between gap spotting and disruptive modes of thinking and to work to achieve this balance. We agree this is important, although obviously there is no final answer to what is significant research and what the balance should be (and for what time span) between incremental and disruptive research contributions. However, the discussion itself is significant and should push us all to think more profoundly about our contribution in research and to society. In what way and to whom is it meaningful?

In the article titled ‘Naming the ghost of capitalism in sport management’, Chen Chen departs from two observations. The first is that the term ‘capitalism’ hardly figures in sport management academic texts, an observation foregrounded by a study in published texts in journals, textbooks, and conference abstracts. The second observation is the increasing inequalities in wealth and power cemented through recent crises such as the Covid 19 pandemic, global warming, and the increasing alienation of the working class, the dispossessed, and the racially marginalized. Chen’s basic assumption is that capitalism as ideology frames both sport and the management of sport and that not naming it is a way for us to ignore a ghost that haunts the world of sport with inevitable disruptions and contradictions. In sport management, capitalism is a hidden theory, to use Argyris’ words. Chen’s list of misdoings in sport is long, and it cast shadow on the common dictum that sport is beneficial to society. Naming capitalism makes it analyzable, argues Chen, and it ‘opens up intellectual space to support multi-racial, multi-gender working class and anti-colonial struggles within and beyond the sport industry.’ We agree, but simultaneously we caution that ideological terms such as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ (or even ‘monarchism’) in some environments are more ghostly than ‘capitalism’ and that further debate should avoid both silencing and throwing such labels at each other. Instead, naming capitalism should open possibilities to theorize non-capitalist and other-capitalist forms of organizing sport that challenge the default logics of the sport ‘industry’ to the betterment of conditions for those suffering from sport’s production of inequality and human rights violation.

Simon Chadwick’s paper ‘From utilitarianism and neoclassical sport management to a new geopolitical economy of sport’ argues that sport management scholars need to reorient from understanding sport in micro-economic and neoclassical terms and instead turn towards a new perspective, the geopolitical economy of sport. Old perspectives are less relevant because the players at the global scene, notably Eastern and Middle East states and the companies, funds, and oligarchs they control, increasingly define the rules of the sport industry. Without dismissing utilitarian and neoclassical conceptions entirely, Chadwick poses a series of relevant research issues and questions which he argues sport management must address within the frames of a geopolitical economy. We would argue that geopolitics is not a new phenomenon in sport, but with the massive influx of powerful non-Western stakeholders and networks it has become easier to pinpoint and its repercussions look different from e.g. the Cold War era (although with the Ukrainian war this might change again). Sport leaders and managers are increasingly faced with geographic, cultural, political, and macroeconomic issues and therefore we agree that our research and teaching must broaden to better capture what happens at the macro level and how we can make sense of it and deal with it. What we miss in Chadwick’s paper is reflection on if and how utilitarian, neoclassical, and geopolitical paradigms and structures constitute or contradict each other. Geopolitics, we think, is not ideological in the same way as utilitarianism and even neoclassicism. In the recent war in Ukraine, for instance, the sport boycott of Russia can be conceived as both utilitarian and geopolitical. It is certainly not neoclassical as competitions are truncated and Russian sponsors cut off, rather it is undertaken in defense of liberal democracies and what we take to be moral virtues.

Whilst Chadwick tends towards historical determinism in which new paradigms render old ones outdated (or marginalized), Ian Henry sees increased fragmentation in the macro-environment of sport policy and management in the article titled ‘Processes of political, cultural, and social fragmentation: changes in the macro-environment of sport policy and management: c.1980–c.2022’. Henry notices change in international relations from a bi-polar to a multi-polar model (exemplified by the increase in hosting of major sport events in nonwestern locations and increase of non-Western investment in Western sport enterprises); the replacement of the Western model of modernization with multiple modernities (‘glocalization’); the emergence of powerful populist politics and political leaders (‘thick’ ideologies such as socialism, neo-liberalism, and conservatism give way to ‘thin’ cultural, socioeconomic, or antiestablishment populist ideology); and the undermining of notions and common criteria of truth in the public discourse (‘fake news’). These changes at the macro-level have relevance for sport managers because managers, if we believe they are important, can mediate the impact of global influences, glocalize, and resist the use of sport to promote ideologies such as cultural populism. The premise is that sport managers are equipped to understand such changes, and Henry’s text is a powerful reminder of the cultural and political variety in the world of sport and hence the contextual nature of management. In essence, Henry, like Chadwick and Chen, argue for a sport management that in its mainstream increasingly engages with disciplines such as political economy, political science, and cultural sociology.

Concluding notes

The papers included in this special issue provide but a small sample of the ‘generative’ type of research that we feel the sport management scholarly community needs. As the articles illustrate, there are many complex and interesting avenues of inquiry that warrant further investigation. We very much hope that these papers, both individually and collectively, will encourage further significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances. As a final note, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to all who submitted their work to this special issue, including the authors of the accepted articles, those whose articles did not make the issue, as well as the reviewers – from inside and outside the editorial board of ESMQ – who devoted their voluntary time to provide valuable feedback to the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).