Transnational athletic career and cultural transition

Transnational movement of sports participants is an important dimension of the internationalization and globalization processes in sports industry and also has become a crucial element of athlete professional development in the 21st century. Since Bale and Maguire’s (1994) pioneering work on athletic talent migration, sports sociology and human geography scholars have made strides in mapping international movement flows of skilled sports migrants. Furthermore, with a recent shift in sports labour migration studies from macro- to microsociological perspectives, there has been an increased interest in the agency and multidimensionality of migrant professionals’ life and work experiences acros…

The Work of Cultural Transition: An Emerging Model

In today’s uncertain, fluid job market, transnational mobility has intensified. Though the concept of cultural transition is increasingly used in sport and career research, insight into the processes of how individuals produce their own development through work and relationships in shifting cultural patterns of meaning remains limited. The transnational industry of sports, in which athletes’ psychological adjustment to cultural transitions has implications for both performance and meaningful life, serves as a backdrop for this article. This study applied the life story method to interviews with 15 professional and semi-professional athletes, focusing particularly on the cultural transition …

Transnational migration in sport and exercise : Co-producing transition spaces

Identity and Cultural Transition : Lessons to Learn from a Negative Case Analysis

In this paper, we present a single case study of identity crisis that unfolded in the cultural transition context. Our participant was ‘Jenni’ – a 26 years old female basketball player with the double (Scandinavian and African American) ethnic identity. In a series of life story interviews, she shared her story of migrating to the USA at the age of 16 for sport and study. Jenni’s transition narrative was extracted and analyzed using several complementary theoretical frameworks, including the intersectionality perspective on identity. The analysis of the transition narrative revealed that in spite of the pre-transition high expectations about the transition success, Jenni experienced a crisi…