Crises

The purpose of the present study was to identify barriers to implementing innovation in sports clubs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research approach was mixed. In the qualitative part, interviews with 13 owners of sports clubs were conducted. The statistical sample in the quantitative part, based on Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), included 200 sports club owners in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Iran. The results showed that barriers to implementing innovation in sports clubs were individual, structural, and environmental obstacles. Considering the entrepreneurial ecosystem and all stakeholders involved in the sports community, providing favorable conditions such as intellectual property protection, financial support, research, and development support, as well as improving access to financial capital, can pave the way for the creation and implementation of sports innovations in clubs, especially in crises. 

For Edmund Husserl, the crisis of the modern sciences consists in the reduction of beings and the world to the mathematically measurable. Yet the lifeworld with its things that we fashion and use with our hands is no less real than the objects of science, and the scientific attitude is always nested within this lived world. Martin Heidegger by contrast finds the major source of our crisis in the Cartesian conception of subject and world. This has culminated in Nietzschean theory of the will to power, which in its unity with technology has despoiled our environment. In all of this Heidegger retains a tenderness for the small-scale products of human handiwork, which are preferable to machines and machine tools. In his own philosophy of technology Gilbert Simondon shares some of these concerns, whilst contending that technological objects have untapped potentials in relation to those who invent, use and develop them. Common to all these philosophies is a worry about abstract theory and mechanization reducing our direct engagement with things. This worry is compounded by a sociocultural tendency identified by Matthew Crawford, a tendency to denigrate a career in the practical trades. Drawing on Crawford’s experience of manual engagement in the world, I argue that a revalorization of such skilled work and of caring and repairing would help to ameliorate the climate and pollution crises and improve our lives. Many of our problems come from the discarding of things through our carelessness or through planned obsolescence by their makers.