Is There Anything Unique About Sport Management? An Introduction to the JGSM Special Issue on “The Uniqueness of the Sport Context”

More than twenty years have passed since Trevor Slack’s (1998) seminal query, “Is there anything unique about sport management?” Given that a premise for the establishment of specialized sport management education programs is the uniqueness of the sport industry, this special issue challenged authors to highlight or even demonstrate the uniqueness of the sport context, whether by proposing or testing a theory unique to sport, demonstrating how a commonly accepted theory in a different context would need modification in the sport context, or highlighting an emerging unique aspect of sport through an empirical or theoretical/conceptual approach. Collectively, the resulting manuscripts highlight a number of unique aspects of the sport context while also underscoring the need for more conceptual and empirical research on this crucial topic.