Development through sport and the sports-industrial complex: the case for human development in sports and exercise sciences

This paper attempted to provide an alternative view of sports science and future sport worlds. For reasons to do with fundamental science, involved advocacy and committed service, and in a period of intensified globalization, I argued that it is necessary to reconfigure the nature and scope of teaching and research within the sub-discipline of sport, exercise and health sciences. However, just as the military-industrial complex dominates aspects of broader global processes, and of the academy in particular, advocates of the sports-industrial complex may well seek to thwart such alternative possibilities. Sadly, this has proven to be the case -in university departments across the world this logic appears to hold greater sway. As a result, the role of academics are increasingly confined either to the production of world and Olympic medals -sports scientists will be the technicians, and student-athletes the cogs, in the machine or offering `health solutions' to complex social problems. In contrast to the performance efficiency ethos, a human development model was advocated: though I am less optimistic then when I first wrote this work, the case still needs to be made.