مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مرور مدیریت ورزش – Sport Management Review

always wanted my research to make a difference. It came as a huge shock to me when I did my PhD that the people in the organisations that I was conducting my research with didn’t embrace it. One or two people ‘got it’, but for others it was dismissed as ‘biased’ and ‘anecdotal’. I was astonished! How could my carefully constructed research be rejected in such a cavalier manner? Perhaps my reaction to this criticism was so sharp because I was invested in that research: I wanted to make a difference to sport organisations. This investment is a feature of all of my research; whether to help organisations work out how to govern better, enter into more productive partnerships, or become places where people want to go to work regardless of their gender or sexuality. Qualitative research provides opportunities to do this, using participants’ experiences to understand a topic and then possibly frame alternatives, whether those alternatives are radical or incremental change (Alvesson & Gabriel, 2013). These alternatives can be explicit, for example policy driven, or implicit such as providing alternative ways to create an organisation. Even the status quo might be the outcome, as long as it is considered after critical organizational engagement. Qualitative research also provides the opportunity to ‘write ourselves into’ the research, that is to recognise our personal interest in research but also remember that we are researchers and so have to have some distance from our work.

In short, I think that qualitative research has great potential to help improve sport management and, in order to harness this potential, we need to use it to its fullest. My experience as a reviewer for Sport Management Review, Journal of Sport Management and occasionally for European Sport Management Quarterly is that we shy away from such efforts in our qualitative research. We don’t push qualitative research or ourselves hard enough to articulate those potential changes. In part, this may be because we are afraid to push the boundaries in a competitive educational system that rewards the status quo. It may also be that we don’t know what else to do, so we stick with the tried and true semi-structured interviews and case studies. Larena and I have talked about this on many occasions. What follows is an attempt to put our stake in the ground regarding the role of qualitative research in sport management and to articulate a way through which researchers might use the strengths of qualitative research to their fullest to promote social change?.