“It Takes a Village:” Interdisciplinary Research for Sport Management

Abstract

This paper, from the Dr. Earle F. Zeigler Award Lecture presented at the NASSM 2012 Conference in Seattle, outlines the merits and challenges of interdisciplinary research for the field of sport management. This alternative approach involves relating, integrating, and relocating disciplinary thinking to arrive at a mutually-determined research problem that represents new ways of conceptualizing phenomena. It enables moving away from the monodisciplinary research that characterizes much of our field to examine phenomena from different angles, and perhaps more effectively close the research-practice gap with knowledge derived from multiple perspectives. The author argues that it is time to engage in interdisciplinary research in sport management as no one discipline has all the answers; rather, “it takes a village” to solve the complex problems in our world.

Sport Consumer Behavior Research: Improving Our Game

“…Whether from triangulation of combined data approaches (Cohen & Manion, 2000), mixed method approaches (Greene, 2007) or -as have been suggested in sport managementinterdisciplinary and innovative approaches (Amis & Silk, 2005;Doherty, 2013), there is much to be gained from a focus beyond cross sectional studies. Conversely, an analysis of recent published articles reveals that the majority of SCB research relies on cross-sectional studies.…”

U.S. Sport Management Programs in Business Schools: Trends and Key Issues

“…Sport researchers argued for interdisciplinarity as a natural tendency to work across academic units, and disapproved the silo mentality that can be present in the sport management academic field (Amis & Silk, 2005;Chalip, 2006;Costa, 2005;Doherty, 2012;Mahony, 2008). This study's results recognized that the majority of U.S. sport business programs were part of an interdisciplinary department and were well integrated in business schools.…”

University-Industry Knowledge Transfer: Channels of Sport Research Interaction

“…Therefore, sport management patents and licenses, and other sport knowledge transfer activities organized by a university's Technology Transfer Office, may be less frequently exploited by firms in their collaboration with sport management academia, presumably because only a minority of university-industry interactions is motivated by the prospect of directly-realized inventions or commercial products (e.g., D 'Este & Patel, 2007). Moreover, it seems that there are few specific inventions or products originating from sport management academia because the field is still young (e.g., Chalip, 2006;Doherty, 2012). Also, in many cases, faculty do not disclose inventions to their university (Siegel, Waldman, & Link, 2003), plus there is an unrealistic expectation from universities in regard to the feasibility and extent of commercial exploitation opportunities for university research (Clarysse, Wright, Lockett, Mustar, & Knockaert, 2007).…”

“…Sport academia highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary research, and disapproved the silo-mentality that can be present in the sport management academic field (Chalip, 2006;Costa, 2005;Doherty, 2012;Mahony, 2008). One of the potential problems between industry-university research collaborations is that the two groups can have diverging agendas and differing priorities regarding the dissemination of research findings (e.g., Welsh et al, 2008).…”