Barbusse, Béatrice
Sports and Business: Converging Logics?
- 2002.
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The purpose of this contribution is to analyse the relationships that the corporate world and sports have developed in France since the eighties. More specifically it stresses out how they no longer belong to separate spheres (work/non-work) and how for diverging reasons they are both converging towards a doctrine of effectiveness. On the one hand, sports integrate corporate reasoning as a cultural referral and a production and management model; on the other the corporation relies on the virtues of sports to stimulate human resources. This study surveys a field that is seldom examined in the sociology of sports. It is at the crossroads of several alleys of sociology—the sociology of sports, organizations and labor. This study offers a description and a characterization of the main changes that French sport has experienced during the last decennia on the one hand, and of how sport has become a management tool in organizations on the other.