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For a good part of the U.S. system of federalism municipal incorporation has been the formal structure for local communities. Over the last 60 years there has been a shift in this structure to special district government. The Woodlands, Texas presents an interesting case study on the incremental development of a former New Town community, the change in formal government organization and the potential for a different model of local governance structure in the 21st Century. The authors explore the four stages of development for The Woodlands over the past 40 years and assess this development through several model theories including institutional, urban regime, and urban governance. Contrary to some current literature on governance, The Woodlands appears to have transitioned from decentralization to more centralization while at the same time avoiding full incorporation as a municipality. It may be indicative of the new governance.

Many years ago, the amazing literary giant and social critic James Baldwin was never more profound when he noted that “Color is not a human or a personal reality in America, it is a political reality” (Baldwin, 1963, p. 139). If we ever had any doubts about the currency of Baldwin's commentary, we have only to remember the remarks by Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) and his subsequent resignation as Senate Majority leader, in the U.S. Congress. Lott was under criticism for his remarks at a party celebrating the 100th birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform. At the birthday celebration, Lott said the nation would have been better off had Thurmond won that election. The damages in Senator Lott's comments are not simply that they are offensive as a characterization of our national past. The damage is that his words imply an intention or acceptance of racial segregation as the continuing reality of America's future. Lott's remarks are but reflective of the Southern Manifesto or the Nixonian strategy, often called the ‘bubba factor.’ The strategy was to reclaim the south by appealing to the fears of southern white men. This blatant Confederate viewpoint was furthered and joined by conservative scholars and activists who developed the counterattack programs to dismantle the civil rights agenda and social programs, aimed at equalizing educational opportunity. The code word was “reverse discrimination.”

In 1969, Warren Nutter left the University of Virginia Department of Economics to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Nixon administration. During his time in the Defense Department, Nutter was deeply involved in laying the groundwork for a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Although Nutter left the Pentagon several months before the successful 1973 coup, his role in Chile was far more direct than the better-known cases of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Arnold Harberger. This chapter describes Nutter’s role in Chile policymaking in the Nixon administration. It shows how Nutter’s criticisms of Henry Kissinger are grounded in his economics, and compares and contrasts Nutter with other economists who have been connected to Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Sport management research that examines children as a distinct group of sport consumers is sparse, and therefore the authors know relatively little about how and why children become fans of sport teams. The purpose of this paper is to explore the game-day experiences of children in order to better understand how these experiences allow children to socialize into the team community and become fans of the team.

The authors examine this through exploratory observational analysis and 26 semi-structured interviews with children at professional sporting events.

Among the results, it was found that children primarily focus on exploring ways to build membership in the fan community as opposed to initially building connections to the team itself. In addition, those children that watched the games with their peers demonstrated greater in-game emotional responses than those children that viewed the game with family.

This study provides support for the importance of community membership in the initial stages of sport team fandom as well as the varying effects of different groups within fan communities on child fans. However, further research is needed to increase the generalizability of the results.

It is recommended that sport teams increasingly target groups that will bring children to games with their peers in order to enhance their game experience and increase their socialization into fandom.

This paper is one of the first in sport management to directly look to better understand children and the ways in which they become fans of sports teams.