Experiencing Sport Tourism

Co-Guest Editors

Dr Richard Shipway, School of Tourism, Bournemouth University, UK
Dr Nancy Stevenson, University of Westminster, UK

Deadline for submission: 1st November 2011

One particular area that sport and tourism have in common is that they provide consumers with experiences; and as such, one approach towards understanding the interaction between sport and tourism is to consider sport tourism as an experience.

Sport tourism experiences are subjective and emotional, laden with symbolic meaning. From the perspective of the sport tourism consumer, a focus on experiences has arisen in response to the limitations of seeing consumer behaviour purely in terms of cognitive information processing (Morgan 2007). Similarly, within the context of the development of the more youthful area of sport tourism research, it has previously been suggested that focusing on sport tourism as an experience can assist with addressing the concerns expressed by both Gibson (2005) and Weed (2006), respectively, that there should be a greater focus on understanding rather than describing sport tourism behaviours. It is with this in mind, and with an aim to assist with the academic progression from description to explanation, that this special issue encourages research papers which follow this emerging path and continue to move studies beyond the profiling of sport tourists to a deeper understanding and a more meaningful explanation of their profiles.

As such, this special issue seeks high quality papers that address issues concerning sport tourism experiences. Papers can be conceptual or empirical and a selection of indicative topics which, in a range of different circumstances, might comprise the sport tourism experience could include:

• Motivations;
• Behaviours;
• Satisfactions;
• Perceptions;
• Consumption;
• Authenticity;
• Lifestyles;
• Self-expression.

The nature of the subject area being explored, ‘experiences’, is one that would encourage interdisciplinary contributions from a diverse range of areas within the social sciences such as anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, gender studies and sociology to name but a few.

Requests for further information and expressions of interest should be directed to the Co-Guest Editors for this special issue, Dr Richard Shipway (rshipway@bournemouth.ac.uk) and Dr Nancy Stevenson (stevenn@westminster.ac.uk).

Manuscripts should be sent electronically as an email attachment directly to rshipway@bournemouth.ac.uk. All submissions will be subject to JS&T’s standard double-blind peer-review process. Authors should prepare manuscripts according to JS&T’s instructions for authors available on the journal webpages: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjto20

Key Dates

Call for Papers May 2011
Expressions of Interest July 2011
Deadline for paper submission November 2011
Feedback on paper February 2012
Final manuscript submission August 2012
Publication (estimate) November 2012