15265: Using Sports Data to Advance Management Theory

Publishing rigorous and relevant research in top management journals often requires rich and suitable data for investigating challenging and compelling research questions. The surge of accessible sports data in recent years has increased the number of studies that make use of such data to advance management theory. Beyond the fact that professional sports comprise multi-billion-dollar industries worthy of attention per se, sports also provide settings in which fundamental themes of competition and cooperation are at play, making it attractive for scholars seeking to advance management theories. However, sports settings combine research opportunities with non-trivial challenges and dichotomies that require further reflection: First, sports greatly differ in their nature, and it is not always easy to choose the most suitable sports contexts to respond to particular research questions. Second, in sports settings, the generalizability of results is less evident than in traditional industries, and readers and reviewers often display skepticism about external validity and generalizability of findings to business contexts. Building on successful editions of this workshop at AOM in the previous nine years, this two-part PDW celebrates its upcoming 10th-anniversary milestone by (1) bringing together a panel of scholars to share experience in publishing management research with sports data and (2) providing developmental support in the second part of the workshop for scholars that are in the process of using sports data in their projects or who plan to use sports as a setting to study their research questions.