Sport management, gender and the ‘bigger picture’: Challenging changes in Higher Education—A partial auto/ethnographical account

Abstract

This paper focuses mainly on a the author's current experience of Higher Education and of a module concerned with gender, difference, sport and leisure made available to students studying for sport and leisure management degrees. It reviews the changed nature of the curriculum in the shifting socio-economic climate, suggesting that the neo-liberal 1 1 I refer here to neo-liberalism as, ‘associated with the extension and enhancement of the market economy during the late 1990s and early twenty-first century’ (David, 2005: 113 [David, M. (2005). Feminist values and feminist sociology as contributions to higher education pedagogies and practices. In S. Robinson & C. Katulushi (Eds.), Values in higher education (pp. 107–116). Shropshire: Aureus Publishing Ltd]). The main aspects of neo-liberal ideology might be identified as the rule of the market, cutting public expenditure for social services, deregulation, privatisation and so forth. Chiapello and Fairclough [Chiapello, E., & Fairclough, N. (2002). Understanding the new management ideology. A transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and new sociology of capitalism. Discourse and Society, 13(2), 185–208] critically analyse Neo-liberal Discourse and its hegemonic practices in management, providing a theoretical framework for the ‘new spirit of capitalism’. Capitalism is slippery, ‘it constantly transforms itself’. turn influencing Higher Education in UK is reinforcing an organisational (university) culture which is counter productive to fostering critical gender and race awareness in both staff and students within restructured sport management programs. The approach I adopt in writing this paper is partly auto/ethnographic and as such, on occasion, it looks at the previous research and current experiences through the eyes and emotions of a senior woman academic located within a changing ‘new’ university culture. Auto/ethnography as research approach and autobiography as learning medium are considered. Like this abstract, I move in and out of centring myself in the text whilst interweaving writing in a more neutral ‘academic’ form.