Challenging the sports-industrial complex: human sciences, advocacy and service

This article is an attempt to provide an alternative view of sports science and future sport worlds. For reasons to do with fundamental science, involved advocacy and committed service, and in a period of intensified globalization, it is necessary to reconfigure the nature and scope of teaching and research within the subdiscipline of sports sciences. However, just as the military-industrial complex dominates aspects of broader global processes, and of the academy in particular, advocates of the sports-industrial complex may well seek to thwart such alternative possibilities. As a result, the role of academics will be confined to the production of world and Olympic medals - sports scientists will be the technicians, and student-athletes the cogs, in the machine. In contrast to the performance efficiency ethos, a human development model is advocated.