Sport management or the management of sport? Reframing the theory debate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a field, sport management is arguably divided into two perspectives related to theory: sport management or the management of sport. This division hinders the development and credibility of the field in the broader academic community. Thus, we adopt a perspective style of theorizing to critically discuss and reframe the sport management theory debate, suggesting an integrated perspective in the process. Each perspective’s central tenets, supporting arguments, and contentions are presented. The Sport-Management Theory Development Framework is proposed, which combines each perspective and includes four main facets: the what; the how; the why; and the who, when, and where of sport management research. Sport management scholars can use the proposed conceptual framework to critically appraise and advance research to establish a credible body of knowledge in sport and beyond. The framework allows the field’s existence to be defended according to its distinct knowledge, thus demonstrating its value in academia.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".