TY - JOUR
T1 - Sports Diplomacy: An Integrative Review
AU - Postlethwaite, Verity
AU - Jenkin, Claire
AU - Sherry, Emma
N1 - © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Funding Information:
The authors would like to acknowledge the generous funding and support from the University of Hertfordshire’s Department of Psychology, Sport and Geography Fifty for Fifty fund and Swinburne University of Technology’s Sport Innovation Research Group internal fund. We would also like to thank a number of contributors to this publication and the larger project, including all the reviewers and staff who hugely improve this script during the Sport Management Review publication process. Finally, we would like to extend gratitude to colleagues at the European Sport Management Association and UK Sport for dialogue and feedback on earlier iterations of this integrated review and the wider project. 1
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/9/7
Y1 - 2022/9/7
N2 - In the fields of politics, history and international relations, the phrase sport diplomacy has attracted a growing multi-disciplinary interest in debate around relations between different actors. In this article we trace the emergence of academic literature connected to sport diplomacy and further identify the relevant empirical, conceptual and theoretical frames used to study sport diplomacy. Using an integrated review approach, we collected peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2000 and 2020, with 224 articles subsequently analysed for key attributes such as research location and type of diplomacy. The results and discussion support and challenge some current tropes connected to sport diplomacy research, such as the overreliance on case studies, lack of theoretical consistency and dominance of research from higher-income countries. Further, we highlight opportunities for scholars to develop empirical and theoretical bridges between fields to overcome disciplinary differences and engage with the growing organisational interest to operationalise sport diplomacy. This review of sport diplomacy literature and opens up lines of inquiry for sport management and sport development scholars to further advance our understanding of sport diplomacy.
AB - In the fields of politics, history and international relations, the phrase sport diplomacy has attracted a growing multi-disciplinary interest in debate around relations between different actors. In this article we trace the emergence of academic literature connected to sport diplomacy and further identify the relevant empirical, conceptual and theoretical frames used to study sport diplomacy. Using an integrated review approach, we collected peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2000 and 2020, with 224 articles subsequently analysed for key attributes such as research location and type of diplomacy. The results and discussion support and challenge some current tropes connected to sport diplomacy research, such as the overreliance on case studies, lack of theoretical consistency and dominance of research from higher-income countries. Further, we highlight opportunities for scholars to develop empirical and theoretical bridges between fields to overcome disciplinary differences and engage with the growing organisational interest to operationalise sport diplomacy. This review of sport diplomacy literature and opens up lines of inquiry for sport management and sport development scholars to further advance our understanding of sport diplomacy.
KW - Sport diplomacy
KW - integrated review
KW - international relations
KW - nation building
KW - sport development
KW - sport management
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85138282359&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/14413523.2022.2071054
DO - 10.1080/14413523.2022.2071054
M3 - Article
JO - Sport Management Review
JF - Sport Management Review
ER -