6–10 Jun 2022
Tübingen
Europe/Berlin timezone

Playing Hardball with At-risk Youth for Social Change: A Case of Baseball Social Enterprise in East Taiwan

8 Jun 2022, 15:50
20m

Speaker

Chun-Chieh Lin

Description

The scholarship intersected by sport, social change, and sport-based entrepreneurship has grown a large body of literature and has called for critically investigating the win-win sport intervention programme with a broader social context in response to the need for targeted groups and structural changes. This article aims to build a contextualised understanding of a baseball social enterprise that initiates a baseball intervention programme to tackle the social issues faced by at-risk youth and East Taiwan. This article adopts a case study approach to collect data from this anonymous social enterprise to examine how this social enterprise implements the baseball intervention programme for at-risk youth, how this programme responses to a broader social context in East Taiwan, and what difficulties in this programme can be identified? To tackle these research questions, the participant observation method has guided the author to volunteer in this intervention programme in 2016 and several return visits after 2016. Also, the semi-structured interview methods led the author to conduct six semi-structured interviews with the director, coach, staff, and other volunteers in 2018. Using the field note and interview data, author identified the key stakeholders and analysed their interactions and tensions in this case and its social meaning toward East Taiwan. Findings indicate the proposed win-win model was challenged by baseball nationalism, elite sport system, local politics, and conventional thinking about sport, thus causing a dilemma to happen. The conclusion addresses these dynamics and meanings of failure for future sport-based social enterprises implementing intervention programmes in East Taiwan.

Key Words: Baseball, Social Enterprise, East Taiwan, At-risk Youth

Primary author

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