Bringing the body into sport management research

Abstract

There is a growing body of work that draws attention to the role of bodies and of embodiment in organizations and in management. Sport management scholars seem to have largely ignored the body of sport managers as well as their embodiment, however. This is puzzling since sport management implies working with or for bodies that engage in sport. A cursory review of the Journal of Sport Management suggests that researchers who have published papers in this journal tend to have a Weberian view of the body, that is, they seem to assume implicitly that individuals are disembodied. The only exception to this disembodiment seems to be research on diversity but even that focuses not so much on the body but on meanings and language used to describe constructed differences. Yet bodies are always present in organizations. The extant organizational and management literature suggests that this scholarly lack of focus on bodies and embodiment in sport organizations can mask many organizational dynamics. We draw on theoretical perspectives based on the work of Foucault, Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty and research conducted in nonsport organizations on diversity as examples to make a case for researching the body and embodiment in sport management. We briefly sketch these approaches below and intend to develop them further in the paper.