Tag: fitness industry

Mads Skauge, frequent contributor to idrottsforum.org from early on in his PhD education, as a book reviewer, blogger and writer of a number of feature articles, has completed his dissertation, which is about social inequality in organised youth sport participation and the rise of fitness gyms. The inequality dimensions analysed are gender, social class and ethnicity with the aim to contribute to the understanding of inequality in sport and fitness participation.

Christina Gjestvang’s PhD-project aimed to gain an increased understanding of those individuals who choose to join a fitness club, and are able to stay active, and continue with, regular exercise in a group of novice exercisers in their first year of a fitness club membership. A fitness club membership was not associated with increase in total physical activity level or numbers meeting the physical activity recommendations.

Antti Laine works as a Senior researcher and lecturer in sport sociology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests focus mainly on sport media, private sport sector (e.g. ice hockey and fitness) and sport as a societal phenomenon. Dr Laine has published numerous articles and acted as an editor in academic publications.

Aurélien Daudi is a Ph.D. student at Malmö University. The subject of his research is the thriving domain of social media, particularly the digital culture surrounding fitness which, through the advent of social media, has grown immensely in popularity and appeal, recruiting into its midst young people from all over the world. He posits a dialectical synergy between fitness as a social practice and the governing values at the heart of social media.

This informative and accessible volume pulls no punches in scrutinizing the plausibility of, and evidence for, the most popular sports products and practices on the market. Readers are encouraged to confront their conceptualizations of the industry and, by the book’s end, they will have acquired the skills necessary to independently judge the effectiveness of sports-related products.

The aim of this special journal issue is to focus on how sport entrepreneurship is related to the fitness and lifestyle entrepreneurship, emphasising the way sport fits into individuals lifestyles based on cultural and social trends. Thus, the issue will be the first to explicitly focus on how sport, fitness and lifestyle entrepreneurship need to be integrated in order to advance the entrepreneurship literature. 

Sport entrepreneurship is rapidly gaining ascendancy as a legitimate sub-area of entrepreneurship that combines health, wellness and fitness aspects that are increasingly important in today’s global society. The aim of this special journal issue is to focus on how sport entrepreneurship is related to the fitness and lifestyle entrepreneurship.