Sport management: mission and meaning for a new era

Abstract

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