Transnational athletic career and cultural transition

Abstract

Transnational movement of sports participants is an important dimension of the internationalization and globalization processes in sports industry and also has become a crucial element of athlete professional development in the 21st century. Since Bale and Maguire’s (1994) pioneering work on athletic talent migration, sports sociology and human geography scholars have made strides in mapping international movement flows of skilled sports migrants. Furthermore, with a recent shift in sports labour migration studies from macro- to microsociological perspectives, there has been an increased interest in the agency and multidimensionality of migrant professionals’ life and work experiences across national borders. However, research on the psychological aspects of transnational career development and transitions is a fairly recent phenomenon (Ryba, Schinke, Stambulova, & Elbe, 2018). As Ryba and Stambulova (2013) noted, there is a void in sport psychology with regards to understanding psychological mechanisms that produce (subjective) transnational careers, in part owing to methodological nationalism – that is, a traditional view on talent and career development as contained within national borders. To fill this gap in the literature would require (1) “refocusing the study of athletes’ careers on processes and connections between psyche and context” (Ryba & Stambulova, 2013, p. 13) in order to understand how psychological processes are enacted by social institutions and cultural patterns, as well as (2) opening up the “local” field of psychosocial phenomena to processes that occur above and below the level of the nation. In this contribution, we review the sport psychological literature on transnational career development and cultural transitions and also provide suggestions for how receiving sport organizations, as well as sport, exercise, and performance psychology (SEPP) professionals, can support migrant athletes in cultural transitions.