ABSTRACT

Women’s professional sport has grown over the last decade and so has academic scholarship investigating it. It is timely to review and consolidate extant scholarship to identify patterns and gaps in research and future directions for research to support continued advancement in women’s professional sport knowledge and practice. This paper presents a systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) of 57 academic peer-reviewed journal articles researching women’s professional sport leagues and published between 2000 and 2019. We provide bibliographic findings, extend the typical SQLR approach and provide an inductive thematic analysis of article findings to synthesise the knowledge base present in the extant research. Based on our SQLR findings, we highlight four key research directions, including the need for (1) diversity in inquiry and reflexivity by researchers, (2) innovative and enabling theories and conceptual frameworks, (3) transdisciplinary research approaches and (4) sustainable business models for women’s professional sport. We emphasise that to advance our theoretical understandings and sport management practices in women’s professional sport, academics must commit to exploring women’s sport in new and different ways, to achieve new and different knowledge and outcomes.

摘要

女子职业运动在过去十年中发展壮大，学术研究也随之发展。现在是时候审查和巩固现有的奖学金，以确定研究模式和差距以及未来的研究方向，以支持女性职业体育知识和实践的持续进步。本文对 2000 年至 2019 年间发表的 57 篇研究女子职业体育联盟的学术同行评审期刊文章进行了系统的定量文献综述 (SQLR)。我们提供了书目调查结果，扩展了典型的 SQLR 方法，并对文章调查结果进行了归纳主题分析综合现有研究中的知识库。根据我们的 SQLR 发现，我们强调了四个关键研究方向，包括需要 (1) 研究人员调查和反思的多样性，(2) 创新和有利的理论和概念框架，(3) 跨学科研究方法和 (4) 女子职业体育的可持续商业模式。我们强调，为了推进我们对女子职业体育的理论理解和体育管理实践，学术界必须致力于以新的和不同的方式探索女子体育，以获得新的和不同的知识和成果。