Julie Stevens

Environmental sustainability in sport facility management: a Delphi study.

Abstract This Delphi study examines environmental sustainability (ES) in sport facility management. The study includes three questionnaire iterations with 31 expert participants from 16 major North American sport facilities. The results reveal the state of sport facility ES, including the reported value, financial support, best practices, challenges and delineated competencies for students seeking to enter the field. In addition, emerging trends are discussed based on a vision of ES in the sport facility industry by the year 2015. The results of this study are applied to sport management education in an effort to guide educators to initiate classroom discussions and debates that can shape discourse on ES. It is hoped that this discourse can provide insights, assumptions, values, options, theory and foster the development of student competencies for ES.

The Assessment of the Environmental Performance of an International Multi-Sport Event

ABSTRACT Despite recent calls to reduce the environmental impact of major sporting events, comprehensive measurements, evaluations, and reports on environmental sustainability (ES) within the sport sector are rare. Consequently, the purpose of this multi-method case study was to assess the environmental performance (EP) of an international multi-sport event. Survey and interview data were collected from 15 event managers and executive volunteers (N=15). The findings indicated the event organization demonstrated a high level of effort towards initiating an ES movement within the Games but ultimately achieved a weak to moderate level of EP. Further, structural, systemic and cultural organization barriers prevented the implementation of many ES policies and programs. Sport event EP success is contingent upon organizers understanding both the operational reality in which they must stage the event, and their strategic capability to fulfill this goal.

Exploring sense of community among small-scale sport event volunteers

Research question: In response to claims that sport event research over emphasizes economic outcomes and mega-event contexts, this research sought to both assess a scale that measures sense of community among small-scale sport event volunteers, and empirically test if the event volunteer experience enhances sense of community. Research methods: The six-factor Sense of Community in Sport Scale (SCS) was utilized to collect pre- and post-event data from a population of 253 (N = 253) event volunteers in the Niagara region of Canada. Results and findings: Model testing indicated all but one SCS factor, Competition, showed statistical fit with the event volunteer data. Analysis of variance revealed three SCS factors, Common Interest, Equity in Administrative Decisions and Social Spaces, were statistically enhanced following the event. Implications: The findings provide theoretical support for Warner and Dixons Sport and Sense of Community theory and highlight the positive social impact of small-scale sport events within a community for volunteers.

The interpretation of environmental sustainability by the International Olympic Committee and Organizing Committees of the Olympic Games from 1994 to 2008

The purpose of this qualitative multicase study was to examine the interpretation of environmental sustainability (ES) within the Olympic Movement. Two research questions guided the inquiry and sought to identify: (1) how the concept of ES has been defined by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and (2) how the concept of ES has been defined and enacted by the Organizing Committees of the Olympic Games (OCOGs). Raufflets model of Corporate Environmental Management (CEM) paradigms guided a content analysis of 134 ES-related IOC and OCOG documents from 1994 to 2008. Findings revealed the IOC reflected a CEM adaptive paradigm. The OCOGs reflected an adaptive paradigm during the bid phase of the Games preparation that shifted to an incremental/detrimental paradigm during Games-staging. In addition, the findings indicated that the IOC and OCOGs CEM paradigms were incongruent.

“Together we can make it better”: Collective action and governance in a girls’ ice hockey association

This paper, drawing on collective action literature and situated within the women’s sport movement, offers a case study of a separate girls’ minor hockey association that formed in Ontario in the mid-1990s. The analysis explores the process of establishing a girls’ hockey association that is separate from the boys’ minor hockey umbrella. Two fundamental collective action themes emerged from the data. First, the data revealed the founders of the separate association acted according to both affective and rational motives. Second, the founders utilized different strategies, namely advocacy and social action, to form the association. These findings support an integrated perspective towards community change as it pertains to female hockey governance, and introduces a novel stream of inquiry into this area of female sport – one that connects collective action, governance, and organizational dynamics.

Change and grassroots movement: reconceptualising women's hockey governance in Canada.

In Canada, female hockey governance structures vary as different regions of the country may better suit integrated or partially-integrated governance approaches based upon their unique local histories and individual dynamics. Indeed, the Ontario Womens Hockey Association (OWHA) is the only female hockey provincial association in Canada that endorses and endeavours to maintain a separatist philosophy. However, womens hockey governance in Canada as a whole has not progressed in a manner where the authority of female hockey participants and leaders has increased. This paper initiates dialogue about womens sport governance by utilising womens hockey in Canada and specifically a case study of the OWHA, as a context in which to develop a new perspective and renew efforts to place womens sport governance on the agenda. In order to develop a sport and governance dialogue for womens hockey specifically and womens sport more broadly, we present a theoretical discussion that integrates critical feminist and grassroots movement perspectives.

Heads up: violence and the vulnerability principle in hockey revisited

Violent play in the National Hockey League (NHL), and in other hockey leagues, has been debated for decades; however, recent discussion has focused on particular actions related to body checking. Due to a concern for player safety, calls for a ban against blindside body checking and shoulder-to-head hits have been voiced. The main argument we critique is based on the vulnerability principle. In this paper, we assess the arguments for and against a ban on these actions. Those against the ban who prefer the status quo refer to ‘slippery slope’, ‘blame the victim’ and rules-based utilitarian arguments. Those in favour of a ban stress player safety, the role of referees, lack of enforcement of current rules, league accountability and declining respect among players. In offering an ethical analysis of blindside checking and shoulder-to-head hits in hockey, this paper offers a convincing basis to condemn morally questionable violent play in the NHL.

Rinkside: new scholarly studies on ice hockey and society

In the scholarly study of sport, ice hockey is a relatively new addition to the gallery of fascinating subjects that occupy the field. Until the early 1990s, only a handful of university-based scholars took the game seriously as a place where academics might find real, meaningful fodder for the study of society and culture, and the expression of power in a variety of forms, physical and psychological. As others have stated, the publication of Gruneau andWhitson’sHockey Night in Canada was perhaps the most important event in breaking open the field of ‘Hockey Studies’. It showed all of us, scholars in fields as far flung as sociology, geography, law, sport management, kinesiology, history and political science, how rich are the prospects for examining how this sport, Canada’s national winter game and a hugely popular pastime in select regions of the United States, Europe and Asia, simultaneously reflects and helps shape structures, behaviours and identities within our societies. Since 1993, the field of hockey studies has grown impressively but unevenly. The bulk of the scholarly attention to ice hockey has come from historians and literary scholars whose interests focus on the lost or misunderstood meanings of signal past events in the sport. They have been concerned chiefly with the ways that hockey represents symbolically and figuratively – the identities of the communities that sponsor the game. This literature is rich and growing and intellectually profound. We need more scholarship that continues to pursue those lofty questions about, for example, representations of hockey in film, prose literature, poetry and graphic novels. And we need more hockey history. But, we need even more than that. The dominant perspective of the field is a rarified one, and its high diction has sometimes separated it from the sport (and the people) that it seeks to describe, inform and reform. All this brings to mind the very funny Saturday Night Live skit from the late 1980s, in which the erudite (okay, pompous) US TV journalist-cum-baseball philosopher, George F. Will (played by Dana Carvey), hosts a television sports quiz game show called ‘George F. Will’s Sports Machine’, in which the contestants (comedians playing Dodgers’ manager Tommy Lasorda and the Phillies’ Mike Schmidt) are asked a series of impossibly contrived questions about the meaning of baseball. ‘Like freedom’, Will asks the sportsmen, ‘baseball is that state where energy and order merge and all complexity is purified into a simple coherence. Piffle? Or not piffle?’ The dazed looks on the contestants’ faces are hilarious. Their frustrations boil over, and Will is challenged by Lasorda: ‘Have you ever played the game?’ After an uncomfortable