English Level 7
Management
and
Organisation
Studies
★
Sports and Society
★
Sport Management
2 PART 1: SPORTS & SOCIETY
GROUP DISCUSSION:
1. Do you agree with the idea expressed by Mandela? Why / Why not? 2. In what way is sport relevant in society?
Watch the following video and discuss the questions below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZY8c_a_dlQ
1. Have you watched this film? What is it about? 2. Do you think sports can change people’s minds?
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT
3 PART 2: SPORT MANAGEMENT
1. Read the text and underline key words/phrases. 2. How is the text organised?
Fields of Study - Sport Management: Definition and Nature of the Field
Sport management involves any combination of skills related to planning, organizing, directing, controlling, budgeting, leading, and evaluating within the context of an organization or department whose primary product or service is related to sport or physical activity (DeSensi, Kelley, Blanton and Beitel, 2003). Sport managers carry out these skills in a variety of organizational settings (for example): college sports; professional sports; amateur sports (Olympics); sport marketing and management firms; sport communications and news media firms; corporate sponsorship and advertising firms; sporting goods firms; arenas, stadium, and civic centers; community recreation sports programs; social service agency sports programs (YMCA, YWCA, JCC); private club sports programs; and military sports programs. According to Parkhouse (2005), the most recent research on the economic impact of sport identifies it as a $213 billion-a-year industry, making it the sixth largest industry in the United States (“The answer is,” SportsBusiness Journal, p.23, December 1999). The wide range of organizational settings where sports occur means that individuals can select and pursue careers in the kind of work environment of their choice and for which they are best suited (public/private organization; profit/non-profit organization; professional/amateur sports; participation/spectator sports).
Besides traditional sports, the sports industry now involves new alternative, action, and extreme sports (skateboarding, ice climbing, snow kayaking, etc) and new professional sports, especially for women. An upsurge1 in the numbers and variety of sports publications, sports related internet sites, and enhanced mass media presentation and exposure of sports events and activities is resulting in an increase in the need for individuals with special qualifications in sport communications/media. Hence, some sport management programs now offer courses in sport communications/media and there are a few programs of study now being offered in sport communications/media. Likewise, growth in the number and variety of specialized sports facilities, an increase in sports tourism and adventure travel, the rapid progression of the globalization of sports, and the provision of sport related goods and services for diverse market segments, is contributing to the continued growth of the sports industry. These developments ensure that the sports industry will continue to rank among the largest and most diverse industries in the nation, thereby, sustaining career opportunities for the future.
Education Requirements
Individuals who want to pursue a sport management career should pursue an academic degree program that provides them with a thorough understanding of sport, business/management, and significant and meaningful practical work experiences related to managing sport organizations/events. A “major” in sport management is preferable to completing a “minor” or “concentration” in sport management where the degree is actually earned by fulfilling academic requirements in a related academic discipline, for example:
4
physical education, human movement, business administration; management; communications. Since the sports industry is so large and diverse, it is possible to pursue some specialized degree programs for specific segments of the sports industry, for example: golf management; sport communications/media; sports tourism/travel/hospitality.
Related Work Experiences
Other work experiences that individuals can obtain to strengthen their backgrounds in preparing to study sport management in college include: officiating sports; coaching youth sports camps/clinics, assisting with the management and operations of sport camps/clinics; serving as a volunteer worker with professional sport teams/events; serving as a volunteer worker with college/amateur sports teams, camps, clinics, or events.
Career Opportunities
Since the sports industry is so large and diverse, a wide range of career opportunities exist in a wide range of organizational settings as mentioned in the section titled “Definition and Nature of Field.” Some examples of career opportunities for some of the management function areas in the sports industry include:
Administration: Owner; General Manager; Executive Director; Vice President; President/Founder; Athletic Director.
Communications/Media: Vice President for Sports Communications; Media Relations Assistant; Sport Video Manager; Sports Video Production Assistant; Assistant Manager for Sports Web Page/Internet Site.
Facilities & Events: Executive Director of Facility Operations and Entertainment; Facility Manager; Special Events Director; Event Coordinator; Food and Beverage Manager; Special Events Promotion Manager; Customer Relations Manager; Guest Services Manager.
Finance: Vice President for Finance; Associate Athletic Director for Finance; Ticket Manager; Accounting Manager; Director of Corporate Sales; Manager of Group Sales.
Law: General Counsel; Assistant General Counsel; Sports Agent; Vice President for Labor Relations; Sports Arbitrator/Mediator; Special Events Contract Lawyer;
International Sport Lawyer; Intellectual Properties Lawyer.
Marketing: Vice President for Marketing; Director of Marketing; Director of Special Events and Promotions; Director of New Business Development; Director of Fan
Development; Corporate Sales Manager; Tournament Operations Manager.
Public Relations: Vice President for Public Relations; Director of Sports
Information; Director of Sports Publicity; Director of Sports Media; Director of Community Relations; Corporate Communications Assistant.
Travel/Tourism: Tournament Planner; Guest Relations Specialist; Adventure Travel Coordinator; Travel/Tour Guide; Special Events Coordinator.
3. Which area/job would you choose? Why?
4. Write a brief text about your career prospects in 10 years’ time.
By the year 2025, I will have graduated and been working in ...(area)... for some time...
Source: http://www.shapeamerica.org/career/fields/sport-management.cfm
5 PART 3: WOMEN’S RIGHTS
Group discussion:
What do class struggle and women’s struggle have in common?
Watch the following trailer and answer the questions below:
1. What’s the film about?
2. How do you interpret the following quotation: “We break windows, we burn things, 'cause war is the only language men listen to”?
Read the text below and underline connectors and main ideas:
A History of International Women's Day: "We Want Bread and Roses Too"
FROM WOMANKIND (MARCH 1972) https://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/interwomen.html
(Editor's note: This is a historical look at the origins of International Women's Day in the USA and how it spread throughout the world.)
International Women's Day, a holiday celebrated world wide, honors working women and women’s struggle everywhere. Taught that women's place in history is relatively undistinguished, it should be a real source of pride and inspiration to American women to know that International Women's Day originated in honor of two all women strikes which took place in the U.S.
“It’s not possible to radically change the situation of women
without radically changing society in terms of class”.
6 On March 8, 1857, garment workers in New York City marched and picketed, demanding improved working conditions, a ten hour day, and equal rights for women. Their ranks were broken up by the police. Fifty-one years later, March 8, 1908, their sisters in the needle trades in New York marched again, honoring the 1857 march, demanding the vote, and an end to sweatshops and child labor. The police were present on this occasion too.
In 1910 at the Second International, a world wide socialist party congress, German socialist Clara Zetkin proposed that March 8th be proclaimed International Women's Day, to commemorate the US demonstrations and honor working women the world over. Zetkin, a renowned revolutionary theoretician who argued with Lenin on women's rights, was considered a grave threat to the European governments of her time; the Kaiser called her “the most dangerous sorceress in the empire."
The labor struggle in the US is an exciting one, but it traditionally concentrates on men. A little examination shows that women carried their weight and their share from the beginning, both supporting the men’s organizing and quite soon, after realizing that women's needs were ignored in the existing unions, forming women's caucuses or all women's unions. The first all women strikes took place in the 1820's in the New England tailoring trades. The idea of women striking and demanding better conditions, decent wages, and shorter hours, apparently provided great amusement to the townsfolk of the peaceful mill towns. It would be interesting to know how our sisters a century and a half ago felt about not having their lives and aspirations taken seriously.
The most famous of the early strikes took place at the Lowell cotton mills in Massachusetts. Here young women worked eighty-one hours a week for three dollars, one and a quarter of which went for room and board at the Lowell company boarding houses. The factories originally opened at 7 am, but foremen, noticing that women were less ‘energetic’ if they ate before working, changed the opening hour to 5 am., with a breakfast break at 7 a.m. (for one-half hour). In 1834, after several wage cuts, the Lowell women walked out, only to return several days later at the reduced rates. They were courageous but the company had the power; a poor record or a disciplinary action could lead to blacklisting. In 1836 they walked out again, singing through the streets of the town:
Oh, isn't it a pity such a pretty girl as I Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die.
Again they returned to work within a few days. In l844 serious organizing led to the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Their prime demand was the ten hour day. The leadership and activity of this union is credited with initiating some of the earliest reforms in the conditions of the textile industries.
7 The clothing workers formed some of the most famous unions in U.S. history, notably the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, founded about 1900. The garment trade shops in the big cities, such as New York, were deplorable. Fire hazards were rife, light was scant, the sound of machinery deafening, the environment polluted. Women were fined for virtually anything - talking, laughing, singing, machine oil stains on the fabric, stitches too large or too small. Overtime was constant and required, but pay for it was not. With the support of the National Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903 - a combination of working women and middle-class, often professional women who supported the working women's struggle - the shirtwaist makers launched a series of strikes against Leiserson and Company and Triangle Waist Company, two of the most notorious shops in New York. Called the "Uprising of the 20,000", these actions culminated in the first long-term general strike by women, putting to death tne tiresome arguments that they were unable to organize and carry out a long hard struggle.
For thirteen weeks in the bitter dead of winter, women between 16 and 25 years of age picketed daily, and daily were clubbed by police and carried off in "Black Maria" police vans. The courts were biased in favor of the sweatshop owners; one magistrate charged a striker, "You are on strike against God and Nature, whose prime law it is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God." This elicited a cablegram from George Bernard Shaw, who with other Europeans was following the course of U.S. labor history. He wrote: "Delightful. Medieval America always in intimate personal confidence of the Almighty."
The strike was ultimately broken, as settlements were made shop by shop, but the talent and endurance of the women made it impossible for people to go on claiming that labor organizing was for men only. One year after the strike was broken the infamous Triangle fire occurred. Trapping women on the upper floors (the fire doors had been bolted from the outside to prevent walkouts by the workers) the fire took l46 lives, most of the women between the ages of 13 and 25, most of them recent emigrants to the U.S.
The employers were tried; one was fined $20. A settlement was made to the families of the dead women for $75 per death. Rose Schneiderman, a Garment Workers organizer, berated the community for supporting the law and institutions that made such tragedies possible. "I know from my own experience that it is up to the working people to save themselves," she proclaimed. "The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement."
This has been but a fraction of the history of American working women; part of this fraction was enough to inspire an International holiday. Russia first celebrated March 8 after the Revolution; it is not often recognized that one of the major sparks of the Russian Revolution was a mass strike in 1917 by Russian women textile workers. Chinese women began celebrating in l924, paralleling a strong women's movement in the Chinese Communist party. When the women’s liberation movement began in the U.S. and Britain, Women's Day was rediscovered and revived as a feminist holiday. In 1970 the revolutionary Uraguayan Tupamaros celebrated March 8 by freeing 13 women prisoners from Uraguay's jails.
8 Truth, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. These were remarkable women and so were their stories. A good cure for depression is to read a chapter of Flynn's autobiography or reread the account of Mother Jones terrorizing scabs and participating in the 1919 steel strike at the age of 90. But it should not be forgotten that these were individual women, and that the bulk of the' organizing, struggling, as well as succeeding and failing, was done by ordinary women whom we will never know. These were women who, realized the tactical necessity of standing and working together lest they be destroyed individually, women who put to shame the ridiculous theories of "woman's place'," women who in the famous Lawrence textile strike carried picket signs reading "We want Bread and Roses, too", symbolizing their demands for not only a living wage but a decent and human life, and so inspired James Oppenheim’s song "Bread and Roses":
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses For the people hear us singing, bread and roses, bread and roses.
As we come marching, marching, we battle too, for men, For they are in the struggle and together we shall win. Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes, Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses.
As we come marching, marching, un-numbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread,
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew Yes, it is bread we. fight for, but we fight for roses, too.
9 PROJECT: GROUP WORK
1. Choose a feminist writer or activist.
2. Research: biography, works, achievements.
3. Prepare a presentation. You can use PowerPoint, Prezi, videos, etc.
Read the following statements and discuss their meaning in group: Why are these ideas relevant for women’s struggle?
Do they reflect today’s society in any way?
“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless for at least twenty years of their lives”.
“Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.”
Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)
Compare them with the following ideas. What has changed? “We will be victorious if we have
not forgotten how to learn”.
Rosa Luxemburg
(“The Crisis in German Social Democracy”, 1915)
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked
in.”
Virginia Woolf
(A Room of One’s Own, 1929)
“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”
Gloria Steinem, 1970
“It’s possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time”.
