Although the sport industry continues to evolve, one thing has not changed—the need for sport managers to be good citizens. What does it mean to be a good citizen and how does that relate to us as sport management educators and researchers? This lecture suggests what we as sport management educators can do to help our students become better citizens in this day and age. As new issues emerge, our graduates will be forced to make decisions which often place the Temple and the Agora—the spirit of sport and the business of sport, the conscience and commerce of sport management— in opposition to each other. These new issues encompass topics such as social entrepreneurship, technology, environmental respect, sport for development and peace, and sport and human rights, and need to be woven into the fabric of our sport management curriculum.
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The Conscience and Commerce of Sport Management: One Teacher’s Perspective
Mary A. Hums
Wrapping Up IJSC’s Second Year
Edited by Paul M. Pedersen
Globalization of Sport: An Inconvenient Truth1
Lucie Thibault
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.
Back for Seconds: What You’ll Find in This Issue
Paul M. Pedersen
The Journal of Sport Management: Making Progress
Lucie Thibault and Richard Wolfe
Sport Communication: What We Hope to Achieve
Paul M. Pedersen
No One Can Whistle a Symphony: Working Together for Sport Management’s Future
Daniel F. Mahony
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.
Creative Tensions and Conversations in the Academy
Sue Inglis
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.
Introducing “From the Field” A New Section of JSM
—Laurence Chalip and Lucie Thibault
Toward a Distinctive Sport Management Discipline
Laurence Chalip
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.