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The purpose of the 2008 Earle F. Zeigler Lecture was to highlight some of the issues involved in the globalization of sport that affect the field of sport management. In particular, four issues were presented: a division of labor undertaken on an international scale where transnational corporations are drawing on developing countries’ work forces to manufacture sportswear and sport equipment; the increasing flow of athletes where country of birth and origin are no longer a limitation on where an athlete plays and competes; the increased involvement of global media conglomerates in sport; and the impact of sport on the environment. The impact and inconvenient truths of these issues on sport management were addressed.

Although sport management is now well established in higher education and is an increasingly popular major for students, there are a number of critical issues that face the discipline. The purpose of this lecture is to identify some of these critical issues and what can be done to address each of them. The primary issue for sport management is a lack of qualified faculty to (a) teach the increasing number of students enrolling in sport management programs and (b) conduct the research necessary to build a distinct body of knowledge. In addition, sport management faculty also need to work together to make a better case for the contributions of their programs to their respective universities to avoid being a very low priority in their home units. The lecture focuses on the need for sport management faculty to work together to address each of these issues.

Academic life invokes creative tensions within and among teaching, research, and service. Work–life balance plays a prominent role in those tensions and in the conversations that they engender. As NASSM’s strategic plan demonstrates, sport management has grown to the point that it will benefit from closer attention to the content and potential of those conversations. Systems thinking in the scrutiny of tensions provides insight that can further inform our conversations. The resulting discourses will engage our thinking about our discipline’s values, content, and environmental influences. As a result, they will move us forward.

The current malaise over sport management’s place and future as an academic discipline provides a useful basis for envisioning the needs and directions for the field’s growth and development. The field’s development requires two complementary streams of research: one that tests the relevance and application of theories derived from other disciplines, and one that is grounded in sport phenomena. The legitimations that sport advocates advance for sport’s place on public agendas are useful starting points for research that is sport focused. The fi ve most common current legitimations for sport are health, salubrious socialization, economic development, community development, and national pride. The value of sport in each case depends on the ways that sport is managed. Factors that facilitate and that inhibit optimization of sport’s contribution to each must be identified and probed. Identifying and probing those factors will be aided by research that confronts popular beliefs about sport, and by research that explores sport’s links to other economic sectors. The resulting research agenda will foster development of a distinctive sport management discipline.

Critical social science is an underused paradigm in sport management. It can, however, help reveal the bad and ugly sides of sport, so we can uncover new ways to promote the good sides of it. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the relevance of this paradigm for sport management teaching, practice, and research. A key assumption of the critical paradigm is that organizations are best viewed as operating in a wider cultural, economic, and political context characterized by asymmetrical power relations that are historically entrenched. Research is not neutral because the goal is to promote social change by challenging dominant ways of thinking and acting that benefit those in power. Conducting critical sport management research requires a specific skill set and adequate training is essential. Drawing on the work of Alvesson and Deetz (2000), the three tasks required to conduct critical social science are insight, critique, and transformative redefinition. These tasks are described and a number of sport-related examples are provided.