Abstract

History of the Field of Sport Management: Relationship between the Intellectual Structure of Sport Management and Business Studies.

This study explores how studies from the field of business have influenced sport management scholarship historically. For this, we identify central themes, theories, paradigms, and methods to investigate how the subfields establish the intellectual structure and how these subfields are related to each other espoused in the Journal of Sport Management (JSM). We employed principal component analysis of 20,839 citations of 664 JSM articles published between 1987 and 2015. The results show that the central themes between 1987 and 2000 are management studies, reflective studies, and quantitative method-related studies. Between 2001 and 2005, new central themes emerged such as marketing, sport tourism, and qualitative method-related studies. While the sport management area developed with the studies of organizational behavior in sport from a post-positivistic view at the beginning, divergent paradigms such as feminism and social constructivism tended to anchor studies since 2000. Additionally, since 2000, sport marketing studies became more convergent and centralized towards consumer behavior. Keywords: sport management, business studies, bibliometrics, knowledge development, business history