Book Description

Sport and Entrepreneurship combines perspectives derived from business history and sports history, focusing on the important but relatively unexplored relationship of entrepreneurship and sport. This important volume offers clearer definitions of both sports products and sports entrepreneurship, gives due regard to social entrepreneurs, and assesses the continuing relevance of Hardy’s pioneering study from the 1980s. Hardy himself provides an introduction to the volume, and chapters by Wray Vamplew and Dilwyn Porter supply an overarching theoretical framework, offering new ways of identifying and describing sports-related entrepreneurial activity. Each chapter explores a particular case study, focusing on specific examples of entrepreneurship as it has been practised in a variety of sporting contexts from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, ranging from 19th century equestrianism, to 20th century ice hockey, and football in the 21st century and covering entrepreneurship in North America, Europe and the United Kingdom. Each, in its own way, adds depth and complexity to the discussion. Bridging the gap between sports history and business history, too often seen as separate spheres, Sport and Entrepreneurship will be of great interest to scholars of sport history, business and sport, business history, and entrepreneurship. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.