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This chapter narratively chronologizes the life of a man, now in his late 1960s, who has been key in promoting sport as a vehicle for community development in one of the most economically and politically challenged of all Southeast Asian countries – Cambodia.

Popular in a number of disciplines but rarely applied so far in the field of sport, social development and peace, the main strength of life history analysis is its ability to let stories speak for themselves. The focus on “narrativization” not only provides a rich account of a given topic, but also allows storytellers to shape their accounts, identify their audience, and detail the settings in which these accounts take place.

Cambodian sport (especially football in the northwest province of Siem Reap) and Cambodian society more broadly owes much to the committed efforts of Mr. Ouk Sareth. Not only does the chapter help to better understand the various phases and trajectories of Sareth’s colorful life and the fascinating experiences he has encountered, but also the unique challenges his country has faced and overcome during the seven decades of his life.

We hope that others involved in studying the link between sport, social development and peace will consider narrative method and life history approaches to showcase the pivotal individuals who have operated in the “engine room” of this link.

This chapter provides readers with a summary of sport sociology in the United States. It begins with a brief overview of sport in the United States before describing the development of the sociology of sport in the United States and some of the major contemporary patterns in sport research. They key movement in US sport sociology was the critical-cultural turn that took place during the 1980s and 1990s when critical theory and feminism became dominant approaches to research. Scholarship in the 21st century has largely developed upon that turn and is generally qualitative and cultural. Contemporary US sport sociology is a critical endeavor heavily influenced by cultural studies, post-structuralism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, post-colonial theory, and theories of globalization. Despite a fairly consistent approach to sport research in the United States, sport sociology remains contentious and in disunity. This chapter argues that the contention and disunity results from broader structural patterns that guide sport sociologists’ social actions.

Sport ecology research has finally reached a point of critical mass where it is time to see it as a subdiscipline within the sport academy. Researchers have worked to grow the quality of this research over the years. This improvement is due, in part, to the deeper collaboration that those working in the sport ecology field have made with industry professionals. These partnerships have led to richer data and deeper influence on common practice and deeper integration of sustainability in the sport sector.

This chapter discusses the progress and the challenges that have come with legitimizing this line of research, which some now refer to as sport ecology. We approach this chapter based on research specific to partnerships in and out of sport focused on advancing environmental sustainability. However, we draw on our own experiences as they pertain to the role that academics can play to enhance and contribute to the integration of environmental sustainability into industry practice by advancing sport ecology research.

Academics have an integral role to play through contributing a foundational understanding of research methods and specific content areas (e.g., marketing, consumer behavior, policy development, governance, and organizational behavior) to the sport sector's efforts.

The difficulties of engaging the sport sector are discussed and an optimistic, albeit idealized, “preferred future” is proposed on how academics and practitioners can collaborate to promote the sport sector's role in advancing worldwide efforts to address climate change through climate action.

The purpose of this chapter is to adopt and demonstrate the value of a political ecology approach in examining sport stadia, particularly stadia in the United States. We attempt to highlight how in the development of stadia key decision-makers sometimes overlook questions of community and environmental health and security.

We took an ontological approach in considering what it means for the stadium to exist in the current political ideological time period. For us, this meant raising questions about how we understand the varying human and nonhuman components of the stadium, and how they connect and influence one another. From there, we outline why political ecology is a useful framework for examining the environmental costs of stadia and their development. We utilize the city of Detroit's decision to provide funding for Little Caesars Arena – home to professional basketball and hockey competitions – to argue that investment in sport stadia creates environmental opportunity costs to the “host” community.

In the case of Detroit, we argue that private economic gain took precedence over community and environmental health and security when decisions were made on infrastructure. Specifically, despite the city going through bankruptcy and locking citizens out of water, the decision was made to provide millions of dollars for the construction of Little Caesars Arena and the development of the land immediately surrounding the arena. Through this, we suggest the need to produce informed case studies surrounding the environmental consideration.

The focus on community and environmental health and security is lacking from the discourse of stadia development in the United States. This chapter seeks to bring this consideration to the forefront by offering a way to examine these issues from a political ecological standpoint, and we urge researchers to conduct case studies using a political ecological framework with a community focus.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to gain insight into fans' perceptions, attitudes and behavioural responses toward their favourite college football team in the context of a new beer sponsorship agreement. Specifically, the chapter examines differences in fans' attitudes and behaviours based on their gender, team identification and drinking habits.

Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was employed. The sample was comprised of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers who self-identified as college football fans. A hypothetical scenario was used as a manipulation, whereby participants were asked to imagine their favourite college football team had entered into a new alcohol sponsorship agreement while completing a questionnaire.

Findings: Highly identified fans exhibited more positive attitudes and behaviours after being presented with the hypothetical scenario than less identified fans. In terms of gender, female fans had increased attitudes toward sponsorship compared to males, and highly identified females had the most positive attitudes and behavioural intentions toward their favourite teams of any of the four subgroups in the study.

Research limitations/implications: The small sample sizes of some fan subgroups affected statistical power, which may have led to falsely insignificant findings. The range of favourite teams among the participants (50 universities) meant there was likely a high degree of variation between fans' previous experiences with beer/alcohol at college sport venues.

Originality/value: The study offers valuable insight into the intersection of sport fandom and gender in the context of alcohol sponsorship in US college sport, and is also among the first investigations of the effects of team identification on perceptions toward alcohol sponsorship.

In the highly competitive professional sports industry, managers of a newly established competition face many challenges, including “converting” or gaining the allegiance of new groups of consumers (fans, spectators) to their colors. One critical aspect in the converting process relates to the “ideal” game-day experience as perceived by would-be consumers. Gaining knowledge about this area could be critical to professional sport marketers in enhancing the perceived quality of sport events. This study examines the ideal football experience among 1,412 fans of an Australian A-League football (soccer) club. The importance of a lively atmosphere, that of high turnouts of spectators and the opportunity to watch quality and attacking football are highlighted in most comments, even relegating the game’s final score (winning) to a more marginal level of importance. Some of the implications of the findings for professional football marketers and avenues for future research are presented and discussed.

This chapter outlines the extent to which the traditional characteristics of masculinity in sport – initially played out in sports stadia and the traditional media in the late nineteenth and throughout most of the twentieth century – are now also a feature of social media and digital technology platforms in the twenty-first century. At the outset, this chapter discusses the historical association between masculinity and sporting competition and how this has played an important role in presenting a normative heterosexual identity among players, fans, and the traditional media. The chapter then discusses the introduction of social media and digital technology platforms and the impact this history is having in these rapidly consumed spaces, with a particular focus on language, such as hate speech.

This chapter examines and discusses a myriad of literature from inside and outside of academia that explores masculinity, sport, and the internet. These discussions are backgrounded within a historical context and connected to contemporary examples.

Social media and digital technology platforms have provided opportunities for athletes, the media, and fans, to engage in more of an active debate on masculinity in sport than existed in the twentieth century. However, the chapter also addresses the traditional characteristics of masculinity that remain in the culture of sport and in online environments, especially surrounding hate speech.

This chapter, while engaging in an emerging topic of discussion, offers important recommendations for future research and the ways in which this can be methodologically carried out on the internet on a variety of topic areas surrounding masculinity in sport from a sociological perspective.