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In an era where a growing segment of fantasy league participating and video game playing sport consumers has become more interested in managing individual major league players than in following the fortunes of actual major league teams, North American major league attendance is dropping. The authors aim to argue that team management could keep their attention, strengthen the team‐fan bond, and increase attendance and overall revenue, by giving their fans input into decisions related to the team's on‐field, on‐court, or on‐ice management.

This paper chronicles the rise of fantasy sport and sport video game participation and argues that a new breed of sport consumer is emerging that values managing sport over spectating. Previous attempts by teams to give fans input into management decisions are outlined and critiqued.

It is suggested that teams wishing to increase the team identification and attendance frequency of these management‐centric consumers should use technology to establish a platform whereby dues‐paying members vote on team‐related management issues. Utilizing a members‐only webpage for some votes will encourage the growth of a geographically diverse fan base, while utilizing in‐stadium hand‐held wireless technology for other votes will encourage game attendance.

This paper has value to marketers of professional sport who are constantly searching for ways to increase fan identification and sell tickets. It also has value to sport fan academics by suggesting that traditional conceptualizations of the team‐fan bond may be becoming outdated in an era where a new generation of sport consumers is becoming increasingly player‐focused and management‐centric.

This paper develops a framework for understanding history as a source of competitive advantage. Prior research suggests that some firms enjoy preferential access to resources as a result of their past. Historians, by contrast, understand past events as more than an objective account of reality. History also has an interpretive function. History is a social and rhetorical construction that can be shaped and manipulated to motivate, persuade, and frame action, both within and outside an organization. Viewed as a malleable construct, the capacity to manage history can, itself, be a rare and inimitable resource.

The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that organizational task interdependence has an impact on the performance of home teams in sport.

The paper uses a cross‐sectional research design. It tests the authors' hypothesis using a probit analysis of nine years of data from Major League Baseball and eight years of data from the National Hockey League.

The paper determines that the underlying task interdependence of a sport has a significant impact on the performance of a sport team.

The paper argues that sport managers need to consider organizational structure when accounting for team performance. Moreover, the structure of the sport(s) needs to be considered when making adjustments to the league(s) that might affect the competitive balance.

The passion of Canadians for ice hockey is well documented; however, university teams in Canada are routinely ignored by consumers and the media. The authors’ goal was to better understand the context in which Ontario university hockey struggles and to address the theoretical question of how best to examine and evaluate the problems of sport‐specific organizations. Using the Value Dynamics Framework (VDF), the purpose of this paper was to examine whether or not this framework fits well with the realities facing not‐for‐profit OUA hockey teams, and if not, to create a framework specific to these teams.

Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with 15 of the 19 (77 percent) OUA hockey coaches during the 2010/2011 hockey season. The interview guide was drawn from the VDF elements and enabled the researchers to understand not‐for‐profit organizational assets, including physical, financial, employee/supplier, customer, and organizational.

This paper offers empirical insights about the assets and obstacles facing the OUA hockey league and its teams. For example, players, coaches, affiliation with universities, and the hockey product are noted assets. Obstacles for strategic growth include arenas, suppliers, media attention, financial sustainability, parity with other leagues in Canada, and leadership. The VDF proved a useful foil to suggest that something is needed that more accurately represents sport management‐specific situations.

The main limitation of this study is that it lacks generalizability. Although motivated to better understand not‐for‐profit sport in general, the authors’ model is specific to OUA men's hockey teams. However, their OUA hockey team‐specific revised VDF does provide insights into the assets available to coaches, and also acknowledges the corresponding challenges or obstacles surrounding the asset classes in the context of OUA hockey.

This paper provides an approach towards making a more generalizable not‐for‐profit sport model that could help explain the success (or lack of success) of such organizations.

This study addresses a need to develop a framework to examine and evaluate not‐for‐profit sport‐specific organizations, such as the teams in the OUA.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect back over his career as a management and business historian so far as to consider opportunities for the future of management and business history as a disciplinary area.

The paper consists of two segments – the first half is an auto-ethnographic personal reflection looking at the author’s research journey and how the discipline as experienced by the author has evolved over that time. The second half is a prescriptive look forward to consider how we should leverage the strengths as historians to progress the discipline forward.

The paper demonstrates opportunities for management and business history to encompass new agendas including the expansion of the topic into teaching, the possibility for the advancement of empirical contributions and opportunities for findings in new research areas, including the global south and public and project management history.

The paper demonstrates that historians should be more confident in the disciplinary capabilities, particularly their understandings of historic context, continuity, change and chronologies when making empirical and theoretical contributions.

The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the special issue on the relationship of performance management to sports teams.

The paper explains the importance of performance management to sports teams and justifies the need for the special issue.

The paper finds that there are a variety of different types of teams that operate in the sports context, including professional league teams, college teams, teams at the workplace, volunteer teams and coaching teams.

This editorial provides an overview of this special issue, which comprises eight original papers that are best practice examples of the latest developments in the research on teams in the sports context. Each of these articles is briefly discussed in terms of its contribution to the literature.

Analyses the career of William Zebulon Foster, a leader of the American Communist Party, and a three‐time candidate for President of the United States under that party′s banner. Foster rose from the slums of Philadelphia to earn the reputation of an accomplished labour organizer and then to embrace communist ideology. The poverty of his immigrant parents, and the endless series of dreary jobs he was forced to enter, beginning at age ten, nurtured his rebellious spirit and cultivated an antagonism towards capitalism. Emphasizes the evolution of his ideology from socialism to syndicalism and finally Marxism‐Leninism. William Foster found his vocation as an organizer of trade unions on behalf of the Communist movement. He was a prolific propagandist for and historian of the Party. Never deterred by tortuous twists and turns of the party line, he followed it faithfully and inflexibly until his death in Moscow in 1961.