ABSTRACT

Fans are a central entity in the sport ecosystem, and their importance in the sport value chain needs no emphasis. Despite extensive scholarly work around fans in sport management, the discipline lacks a unified view from a relational perspective. In this study, we present a bibliometric and content analysis of the fan-sporting object relationship literature. We conduct citation and cocitation analysis across 1704 journal documents, having 91,071 references. Our study finds that six intellectual clusters depict the realm of this relationship. Further, we report the centrality attributes of the most influential works of the domain. Our work thereby presents the intellectual structure of the literature of the fan-sporting object relationship and depicts it in an integrated framework. We complement our bibliometric review with a content analysis of relevant recent scholarly work to incorporate contemporary viewpoints. In doing so, we contribute to sport management by taking an expansive perspective of fans and accordingly provide future research directions.

摘要

球迷是体育生态系统中的核心实体，他们在体育价值链中的重要性无需强调。尽管在体育管理方面围绕球迷开展了大量学术工作，但该学科缺乏从关系角度出发的统一观点。在本研究中，我们对球迷-体育对象关系文献进行了文献计量和内容分析。我们对 1704 份期刊文件进行了引文和共引分析，其中有 91,071 篇参考文献。我们的研究发现，六个知识集群描绘了这种关系的领域。此外，我们报告了该领域最有影响力作品的中心属性。因此，我们的工作展示了球迷与体育对象关系文献的知识结构，并在一个综合框架中对其进行了描述。我们通过对相关近期学术著作的内容分析来补充我们的文献计量审查，以纳入当代观点。通过这样做，我们通过扩大球迷的视角为体育管理做出贡献，并相应地提供未来的研究方向。