The peculiar economics of sports team ownership

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Mason ◽  
Stacy-Lynn Sant ◽  
Brian Soebbing
Keyword(s):  
Development Strategy ◽  
Field Performance ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Instrumental Case Study ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Sports Team

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how North American professional team owners are engaging in broader urban development projects that have their teams as anchor tenants in new sports facilities, by examining the case of Rogers Arena in Edmonton, Canada. Design/methodology/approach Approached from a constructionist perspective, the study employed an instrumental case study strategy as it facilitates understanding and description of a particular phenomenon and allows researchers to use the case as a comparative point across other settings (with similar conditions) in which the phenomenon might be present. Findings Using urban regime theory as a framework, the authors found that in Edmonton, the team owner was able to align his interests with other political and business interests by engaging in a development strategy that increased the vibrancy of Edmonton’s downtown core. As a result, the owner was able to garner support for both the arena and the surrounding development. Research limitations/implications The authors argue that this new model of team owner as developer has several implications: on-field performance may only be important insofar as it drives demand for the development; the owner’s focus is on driving revenues and profits from interests outside of the sports facility itself; and the team (and the threat of relocation) is leveraged to gain master developer status for the ownership group. Originality/value This paper adds to the understanding of owner interests and how franchise profitability and solvency can be tied to other related business interests controlled by team owners.

Race and State in the Urban Regime

2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-523
Author(s):  
Domingo Morel
Keyword(s):  
State Government ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Urban Regimes ◽  
Changing Role

Over the past four decades, cities have experienced greater oversight from state government. Why have states become increasingly involved in local affairs? How has the increasing presence of state government altered how we understand urban politics? Relying on a case study of Newark, New Jersey, this article argues that the increasing presence of state government in local affairs was a response to the growth of Black political empowerment. Furthermore, the Newark case reveals that the changing role of state actors, particularly governors, in urban regimes requires an expansion of urban regime theory as a conceptual framework. Building on the argument that urban regimes should be viewed as intergovernmental regimes, the findings from the case study suggest that local communities are best represented under cohesive state– local regimes, while localities are exposed to less desirable, even hostile, state-led policies, under disjointed state– local regimes.

scholarly journals Urban Regimes in Russia’s Northern Cities: Testing a Concept in a New Environment

ARCTIC ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Marlene Laruelle
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Urban Activism ◽  
Urban Regimes ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Major Trend ◽  
Sustainability Challenges

At a time when urbanization represents a major trend in human history and when the majority of the world’s population lives in an urban environment, the urban regime theory, developed by Clarence Stone in the 1980s, offers an insightful framework for discussing how urban stakeholders are compelled to work together to achieve their goals. While research on urban regimes has historically focused mainly on democratic contexts, this article argues that it is time to use urban regime theory in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries in order to better understand how urban politics develop. With growing urban activism and huge territorial contrasts, Russia offers a good case study for testing the notion of “urban regime.” This article focuses on three cities in Russia’s Far North—Murmansk, Norilsk, and Yakutsk—that face common sustainability challenges in Arctic or subarctic conditions; it delves into the mechanisms of their urban regimes and categorizes them by type: instrumental, organic, and symbolic.

‘Imagined San Francisco’: Unpacking Urban Regime Theory through Interactive Cartography

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
Ocean Howell
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Digital Mapping ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The City ◽  
Interactive Cartography

American urban historians have begun to understand that digital mapping provides a potentially powerful tool to describe political power. There are now important projects that map change in the American city along a number of dimensions, including zoning, suburbanization, commercial development, transportation infrastructure, and especially segregation. Most projects use their visual sources to illustrate the material consequences of the policies of powerful agencies and dominant planning ‘regimes.’ As useful as these projects are, they often inadvertently imbue their visualizations with an aura of inevitability, and thereby present political power as a kind of static substance–possess this and you can remake the city to serve your interests. A new project called ‘Imagined San Francisco’ is motivated by a desire to expand upon this approach, treating visual material not only to illustrate outcomes, but also to interrogate historical processes, and using maps, plans, drawings, and photographs not only to show what did happen, but also what might have happened. By enabling users to layer a series of historical urban plans–with a special emphasis on unrealized plans–‘Imagined San Francisco’ presents the city not only as a series of material changes, but also as a contingent process and a battleground for political power.

Reasons, motives and motivations for completing a PhD: a typology of doctoral studies as a quest

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Skakni
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Doctoral Studies ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
Instrumental Case Study ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Theory Of Structuration

Purpose This study aims to examine how PhD students with diverse profiles, intentions and expectations manage to navigate their doctoral paths within the same academic context under similar institutional conditions. Drawing on Giddens’ theory of structuration, this study explores how their primary reasons, motives and motivations for engaging in doctoral studies influence what they perceive as facilitating or constraining to progress, their strategies to face the challenges they encounter and their expectations regarding supervision. Design/methodology/approach Using a qualitative design, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from an instrumental case study (Stake, 2013) about PhD students’ persistence and progression. The focus is placed on semi-structured interviews carried out with 36 PhD students from six faculties in humanities and social sciences fields at a large Canadian university. Findings The analysis reveals three distinct scenarios regarding how these PhD students navigate their doctoral paths: the quest for the self; the intellectual quest; and the professional quest. Depending on their quest type, the nature and intensity of PhD students’ concerns and challenges, as well as their strategies and the support they expected, differed. Originality/value This study contributes to the discussion about PhD students’ challenges and persistence by offering a unique portrait of how diverse students’ profiles, intentions and expectations can concretely shape a doctoral experience.

scholarly journals Preventing a boondoggle: assuring a short term research abroad activity is an educative experience

2019 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly George ◽  
Aaron Clevenger
Keyword(s):  
Study Abroad ◽  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Experiential Education ◽  
Undergraduate Research ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Study ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Instrumental Case Study ◽  
Short Term Study

Purpose At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, an annual short-term, research abroad non-credit program was created in 2012 as a core component of the undergraduate research initiative that achieves learning outcomes in a meaningful way. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach In order to describe, and analyze the short-term research abroad activity, an instrumental case study design was created. The instrumental case study was chosen as a means of allowing the facilitators/authors to communicate how they attempted to assure that the program was educative. In order to determine if the program was in fact educative and that it met its goal of being an effective research experience the authors utilized two additional research methods. The first was a document analysis of the participant’s research artifacts. Each participant was required to communicate their findings by writing a paper that was submitted for publication to an applicable research journal. Findings The study found that an experiential education as a pedagogical framework coupled with a short-term research abroad activity can lead to a substantive educative experience, where the authors described and analyzed attempts to ensure that the short-term research abroad program was educative, it also describes the educational assessment findings which describe what was found when the authors tested whether they, in fact, met this goal. Research limitations/implications During the design phase of the short-term research abroad program, the authors turned to experiential education as a principle for how they would ensure that the program was grounded in an acceptable educational theory. Experiential education is a widely accepted educational practice used in experiences such as co-ops and internships, study abroad, undergraduate research and service learning. Practical implications To frame the short-term cultural research abroad program as something from which student could learn the authors utilized the National Society of Experiential Education’s (2013) list of eight principles of good practice. In order to safeguard that an activity is educative, an assessment or an evaluation of a demonstrative artifact is essential. In assessing the final artifact against a rubric or some other non-biased or less biased criteria, an educator can ensure that the student has gained new knowledge in the form of student learning outcomes (SLOs). In addition, the educator can use the results of this assessment to modify many different aspects of the experience ranging from the timing, the modality, the pre-work, even the learning outcomes themselves. Social implications Given financial and curriculum inflexibility of some students, Universities and faculty could achieve attainment of research-based, program agnostic, SLOs by offering short-term study abroad alternatives to the traditional semester or year-long experiences. With graduates looking to enter the job market where businesses are more globalized and executive’s recognition of a need for more international experience, carefully constructed short-term study abroad programs are meaningful avenues to build those credentials. Originality/value Such offerings can be constructed as customized experiences to achieve highly integrated skills across all degree programs.

The Possibility of a Housing Authority

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-356
Author(s):  
Nicholas Bauroth
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Regime Theory ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Urban Regime Theory ◽  
Urban Regime ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Civic Center

This study uses urban regime theory to understand the events surrounding Fargo urban renewal during the 1950s. Specifically, it focuses upon the struggle between realtors, banking officers, government officials, and other local actors, as they established a plan for relocating Fargo residents displaced by urban renewal. With a downtown Civic Center as their ultimate goal, coalition partners set aside their differences and produced an unprecedented plan: to avoid any reliance on public housing, relocation would be handled via the private sector, specifically the Fargo Board of Realtors. The study demonstrates that this relocation plan and its subsequent revisions reflected the interests of the individual regime members.

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