The other day a new paper that I published with my PhD Student, Stirling Sharpe and colleague, Anthony Beaton about professionalization of sport organizations came out in the Journal of Global Sport Management. We used the ACT Brumbies Super Rugby Club as our case. The abstract of the article is below and can be accessed here. The full title of our paper is Considering Ongoing Professionalization in Sport Organizations: A Case Study of the ACT Brumbies Super Rugby Club.
The increasing commercialism of sport has been accompanied by pressure for sport organizations to become (more) professional. The kitchen table or boardroom approaches that may be ingrained in accepted values within organizations are being challenged by contemporary business principles of sport organization governance. While considerable work has been conducted under the banner of the professionalization of sport, there has been limited research addressing the ongoing professionalization of organizations which have already moved away from being volunteer based and are operating in a business-like manner. This research provides a case study of the ACT Brumbies rugby union club in Australia addressing this issue with interviews conducted within three key stakeholder groups of this organization: Board members, operations staff, and players. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of twelve stakeholders. Results indicated that the ongoing professionalization process had differing impacts on operations for various employees
Olan Scott 