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Rugby World Cup 2011: sport mega-events and the contested terrain of space, bodies and commodities
Research on sport sponsorship–fan relationships rarely explores the duration of fans’ feelings towards a sponsor, even though research demonstrates that management of this relationship is crucial. In addition, little research in management, sponsorship, marketing, or public relations explores contexts in which sponsorship involves a national sports team that attracts significant patriotic sentiment. The purpose of this study was to address these absences by exploring the longevity of public responses to a sponsor transgression crisis. The results identify the central role played by perceptions of respect and disrespect in New Zealanders’ responses to a jersey-pricing crisis and the sponsor’s response to public criticisms. The results indicate that national team sponsors who explicitly galvanize intense feelings of patriotism need to understand and respect the national public’s emotional stake in their national team rather than narrowly pursuing sales or the bottom line. The study also highlights the importance of implementing respectful crisis management strategies during a crisis involving patriotic feelings.
This study analyses the experiences of exiles within international rugby union in Britain. The emphasis is on challenging existing sociological assumptions surrounding national identity and sports labour migration. Eight international rugby exiles were invited to take part in semi-structured interviews and several themes emerged. The major findings from the study demonstrate that exiles are subject to an array of cultural attachments and personal experiences which shape their national identities. As migrants, their repositioning in relation to the nation is increasingly deemed to be the norm in rugby union. However, additional influences were also shown to persist to varying degrees.
Despite the importance of facilities as primary sites for delivery of leisure and sport services, there has been a scarcity of academic literature on the provision of community sports facilities and the processes through which they are developed. In particular, this paper provides empirical analysis of leisure facility provision with a focus on practice and experience of policy and planning actors. By employing a case study approach and semi-structured interviews, the study identified a sharp contrast between the discourse of neo-liberalism and the realities of a highly regulated environment for the private sector under a national legislation of New Zealand, namely the Resource Management Act 1991. While both public and private actors recognised benefits of the resource consent process in mitigating the negative environmental impacts and facilitating public input, the findings also revealed its potential impediments to both private and philanthropic developments and their potential resultant benefits to communities and social citizenship due to its costly, restrictive and undifferentiated nature. Consequently, the paper suggests that future research needs to examine empirical evidence of how social citizenship and citizen engagement are enhanced by both public and private sectors through planning and development of community sports facilities and services.