No abstract

This study examines media discourses of the naturalized athletes of the South Korean men’s national ice hockey team. Building on the conceptual frameworks of imagined community, ethnic nationalism, and previous studies on athlete migration and naturalization, we further an understanding of the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of South Korean ethnic and national identity. We use Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis to explore how South Korean media legitimized the naturalization of foreign athletes without Korean ancestry and suggest three themes found from the discourses. First, the discourses highlighted the significance of the South Korean team’s Olympic success, which provided a legitimate reason for the recruitment of foreign athletes. Second, the naturalized athletes were described as “saviors” who possessed superior careers, physicality, and playing skills. Lastly, the media complimented the naturalized athletes’ acculturation to Korean culture by emphasizing their commitment to the nation. We argue that by forming and distributing discourses that favored the naturalization of athletes, Koreans have expanded the boundary of Koreanness. We discuss, then, the expansion of Koreanness in relation to the notion of flexible citizenship in the era of neoliberal globalization.

The purpose of this study was to explore and examine the constraints faced by managers as they attempt to scale up their sport for development and peace (SDP) organizations, and to identify the strategies they are employing to mitigate these constraints. Previous research has not examined constraints to scaling up in the SDP nonprofit space. Findings revealed three major themes related to challenges within four types of scaling up (quantitative, functional, political, organizational); skepticism about sport as a development tool, funding challenges leading to an entrepreneurial mind-set, and challenges associated with a general lack of business acumen among key leaders. Within each of these three themes, strategies for addressing these constraints are illuminated. These constraints and strategies are positioned within the broader nonprofit context, and theoretical and practical implications for scaling up SDP organizations are also explicated.

This study offers a critical discourse analysis of media representations of coach Sarah Murray, the first foreign, the first female, and the youngest head coach of the South Korean women's national ice hockey team at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. We focus on the South Korean media, which framed and manipulated coach Murray's credibility, especially the caliber of her coaching, while constructing a familial tie and restating the global hierarchy between North America and South Korea in the sport of ice hockey. We suggest how the media (re)produced denotative/connotative meanings of the recruitment of Coach Murray and her leadership through determinant moments by engaging a discussion of the discourse that both constructed coach Murray as subordinate to male figures and affirmed whiteness as the center of the global context.

In this study, the authors sought to understand the influence of the Olympic Games on a host community’s globalization and development using world-systems theory and theories of globalization (i.e., glocalization and grobalization). The host community for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics (Daegwallyeong-myeon in South Korea) was the focus of this investigation. Using a global ethnographic approach, the authors collected diverse data through interviews, observations, archival and media documents, and field notes. Findings identified five key themes: (a) perception of underdevelopment, (b) the Organizing Committee’s institutional management of the global standard, (c) the Organizing Committee’s role as a negotiator between the global standard and the locality, (d) resident perspectives on global standards and regulations, and (e) aspirations to globalize Daegwallyeong-myeon. Through this study, the authors advance the use of world-systems theory and expand the concept of grobalization in the context of sport megaevent management by discussing global–local configurations and local agents’ desires to transform the community through Olympic-driven development and globalization.