Practitioner perspectives of legacy: insights from the 2015 Pan Am Games

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Although legacy frameworks exist in academia and legacies are oft discussed in relation to publicly- and privately funded events, there remains a dearth of knowledge on practitioner conceptualisations of the concept. A case study of the Toronto 2014 Pan Am and Parapan Am Games was conducted using semi-structured interviews with event organisers and city officials to understand how practitioners conceptualise legacies, and what their goals are in relation to legacies. The findings show that organisers conceptualise legacies as solely positive, and include Games-time impacts and outcomes as part of the legacy. The positive frame supports the three central legacy goals: justifying public spending on events, boosting public support for event hosting, and advancing city development goals through event hosting. This research contributes to the discourse on event legacy and takes an important step in expanding understandings of practitioner conceptualisations of legacy

The role of corporates in creating sustainable Olympic legacies

The Olympic Games is a major stimulus for increased tourism. In recent years there have been greater calls for this and other mega events to leave sustainable positive legacies for the host city, partly to offset the massive cost of hosting. To date, little consideration has been afforded to the role of corporates might play in contributing to event legacies. This gap is compounded by the lack of research examining stakeholder engagement in legacy planning more generally. This paper adopts Holmes, Hughes, Mair and Carlsen’s (2015) sustainable event legacy timeline to conceptualise how corporates through the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives of sponsorship and employee volunteering can engage across the Olympic event planning cycle to generate volunteering legacies. Drawing upon a comparative study of the Sydney 2000 and London 2012 Olympic Games, tentative evidence of corporate engagement was noted but for the most part it was fragmented and CSR initiatives primarily focused on the immediate planning and delivery stages of the event cycle. The paper advances new knowledge of how volunteering legacies can be generated through the best practice engagement of corporates as key stakeholders involved in legacy planning and governance across the Olympic planning cycle

Sport Event Legacies: Implications for Meaningful Legacy Outcomes

Within the sport and event management context, legacy has emerged as an important justification for public sector involvement and investment since the late 1980s. Legacy is recognised as the long-term economic, tourism, social, and/or environmental outcomes for a host city from staging events (Gratton & Preuss, 2008; Hiller, 2003; Preuss, 2007). Despite the growing popularity, the concept of legacy has largely evaded any meaningful critique for the planning, implementation and evaluation of sport event outcomes. This paper aims to address this gap in the literature by empirically testing five key considerations of legacy, identified in previous work (Thomson, Schlenker, & Schulenkorf, 2009). The five key considerations include

Scoping reviews and structured research synthesis in sport: methods, protocol and lessons learnt

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Research synthesis is an essential part of the research process that we argue has been underutilised by sport policy and management researchers. This commentary seeks to advance the discussion surrounding research synthesis by introducing scoping reviews as a potentially useful approach to synthesising research evidence. In doing so, we provide an overview of current methods and protocols of the scoping approach and critically reflect upon the value and utility of scoping reviews by highlighting the lessons learnt from two previous scoping studies within the field. Our analysis indicates that scoping reviews provide a useful alternative approach to synthesising research for select research topics providing that strict protocol is adhered to and are appropriately operationalised. More broadly, our intention is to generate further discussion and debate surrounding research synthesis within the sport policy and management domain and to encourage sport scholars to adopt more structured approaches to synthesise research evidence

Institutional Theory in Sport : A Scoping Review

Institutional theory has generated considerable insight into fundamental issues within sport. This study seeks to advance Washington and Patterson’s review by providing an empirical review of institutional theory in sport. We follow Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping review protocol to identify 188 sport-related institutional studies between 1979 and 2019. Our review provides evidence regarding the state of institutional scholarship within sport via an analysis of authorship, year, journal, methodology, method, study population, and use of institutional constructs (legitimacy, isomorphism, change, logics, fields, and work). Rather than a hostile takeover or a joint venture proposed in Washington and Patterson’s review, the relationship between fields is more aptly described as a diffusion of ideas. By developing an empirical review of institutional studies in sport, we hope to expedite the diffusion of ideas between the two fields and work toward realizing the collective benefits any future joint venture may bring