Looking Beyond the Jockocracy is an article by Bob Barcelona, an assistant professor from the Department of Recreation Management and Policy. It is about recreation sports management, the existed competence, and the ideas of how to hire sports managers properly. Mr. Barcelona also touches upon the functions of authority and underlines the purposes, which people have to achieve to become sophisticated sports businessmen. The function of authority and the tone, Bob Barcelona chooses for his article, are urgent topics to discuss: the desire to be clear to his readers and analyze the problems of sports business makes this author really interesting to pay attention to.
The tone of the article deserves much attention as the author chooses a quite interesting way to criticize modern conditions in sport and business and, at the same time, focus on the most important details, which help to comprehend why hiring sports managers becomes so crucial. Bob Barcelona (2004) admits that lots of professional organizations are ready to devote their energy and abilities to provide “professional training and continuing education opportunities for recreational sport professionals” (p. 22). This is why hiring is all about competence because sport managers have to enlarge the knowledge of the employees. By means of researches, conducted by other sophisticated in the same sphere people, Bob Barcelona underlines that his intentions and his ideas have a solid background that cannot be called into a question. He also tries to explain how important understanding of jobs in recreational sport is. The recreational sport aims at providing people with an opportunity to choose interesting activities and get positive experience only. (Mull et al., 2005, p. 4) It is necessary to comprehend that the function of authority remains significant: to be competent in order to provide people with a chance to train recreational sport professionals and to be ready to play different roles in business and substitute each other. This is why the tone is considered to be rather friendly and educative at the same time.
It is not that easy to create a proper article in order to explain the conditions of the sports business and the difficulties, people face. Bob Barcelona chooses an appropriate tone for his article to explain how the hiring of recreational sport managers should happen and why this very issue becomes crucially important. Lots of reasons are connected to the function of authority, which lies in the necessity to train and teach recreational sport professionals.
References
- Barcelona, B. (2009). Looking Beyond Jockocracy. Parks & Recreation. p. 22-29.
- Mull, R. F., Bayless, K. G., & Jamieson, L. M. (2005). Recreational Sport Management. Human Kinetics.