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This study assesses the engagement of academic programs in sport management with global problems by using the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals as a proxy measure of these problems, and gauges the degree to which sport management programs are positioning themselves as providers of knowledge and expertise in the area of sustainable development. To this end, the authors examined the program descriptions, learning outcomes and curricula of 84 graduate programs in sport management or closely related fields at 65 R1 universities in the United States. Using inductive thematic analysis, they identified seven themes that are shared across multiple program curricula. The seven themes were labeled: sport sociology and sport ethics; globalization and economic growth; sport for development and peace; health; climate, environment and sustainability; gender; and inequality, discrimination and social justice. The overall results indicate that the discipline has coalesced around a key set of skills and content areas. This standardization may come at the expense of adaptability and responsiveness to changes in sport and in society. Academic programs are generally unwilling to depart from a twentieth-century model of education built around a supposition that the sport manager's primary responsibilities are revenue generation and liability mitigation. As the unsustainability of late capitalism becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, students and educators will find it correspondingly complicated to reconcile the contradiction between sport-as-business-enterprise and the notion that sport itself can contribute to social or moral development. This long-standing compromising attitude and failure to acknowledge the need for wholesale change will only require much more disruptive and perhaps radical reform in the future. Faced with pressure from various stakeholders, many sport organizations employ sustainability units or departments. Although imperfect, these efforts often exceed those made by academic programs.

Published in the Journal of Sport Management in 1995, Laurence Chalip's "Policy Analysis in Sport Management" persuasively argued that effective sport managers should equip themselves with a particular set of critical policy analysis tools. Since that time, the study of sport policy has gained a strong foothold in the academic literature, but sport policy analysis is not often linked to managerial practice. This paper offers a critique and synthesis of a number of policy analysis frameworks (including Chalip's), and offers a refreshed set of robust and pragmatic analytical precepts that sport managers might employ to understand and influence policymaking. Following Chalip's original approach, this paper relies on an empirical case involving the development of national sport policy (the United States' Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and SafeSport Authorization Act) to illustrate and support its broader arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1966, the National Hockey League (NHL) expanded for the first time since the 1920s, doubling its size from six teams to twelve. Although hockey was still perceived as a distinctly Canadian passion, none of the NHL's six new teams were located in Canada. The disappointment across the country was palpable, especially in Canada's third-largest city, Vancouver, which had applied to be one of the expansion locations. A stable presence in minor league hockey on Canada's west coast for decades, it seemed only natural that Vancouver, as the lone bidder from the ostensible birthplace of ice hockey, would be tapped for NHL expansion. This paper examines Vancouver's attempted entry into the NHL and argues that the forces of commercialism and national identity, combined with political maneuvering among NHL owners, not only influenced the content and trajectory of the Vancouver bid, but also contributed to its ultimate failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent state-level legislation and NCAA rule changes have created new opportunities for college athletes to be compensated (typically by private sector firms) for the use of their names, images and likenesses (NIL). In light of this recent development, this study uses qualitative content analysis to assess how elite women athletes competing in swimming and track and field construct and communicate their personal brands. Using a modified version of the Model of Athlete Brand Image (MABI), athlete branding elements were identified in social media content produced by champion athletes in these sports. The results indicate that most of the sampled athletes across both sports are comfortable with and capable of promoting their athletic identities, but relatively few have leveraged their status to develop more holistic personal brands that would be attractive to NIL sponsors. The study also identifies interesting between-sport disparities in athletes' approach to personal branding. The findings suggest that while some athletes have proven adept at navigating the changing NIL landscape, more education and institutional support is needed to enable athletes in these and similar sports to adequately develop their brand identities and market themselves to potential NIL partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UNESCO has played an integral but often overlooked role in international sport. This article, drawing primarily on UNESCO archival material, examines the early history of the organization's efforts to involve itself in international sport governance. Tracing UNESCO's relationship with international sport organizations, especially the International Olympic Committee (IOC), this article specifically examines the creation, in 1978, of institutional elements that significantly expanded UNESCO's capacity for sport governance. However, for political and ideological reasons, UNESCO did not directly challenge the IOC's authority, illustrating the distinctive ways in which political power is constrained in international sport. More generally, this article expands the historical understanding of international sport governance by looking outside the Olympic movement, complicating the narrative of stable, independent, private governance in international sport, especially in the postwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International sport governance is often described as both a significant and unique part of international politics. Simultaneously, proponents of this view lament the lack of (especially academic) attention paid to international sport governance as a political phenomenon. In this essay, the author argues that remedying this problem requires an understanding of sport as a product of the international system, and that the existing system of transnational sport governance organisations should be studied in much the same way as other international governance institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. This conceptualisation of international sport governance as an institution is used to demonstrate how paradigms and theoretical frameworks from the field of international relations (IR) can be usefully applied to international sport governance research. Integrating IR theory with sport governance research can enhance the understanding of international sport’s political status and impacts, as well as the nature of international institutions more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]