Athletes' Careers Across Cultures

Book excerpt: Athletes’ Careers Across Cultures is the first book of its kind to bring together a truly global spread of leading sports psychology career researchers and practitioners into one comprehensive resource. This extensive volume traces the evolution of athlete career research through a cultural lens and maps the complex topography of athletes’ careers across national boundaries exploring how social and cultural discourses shape their development. The area of athlete career development has traditionally been dominated by a Western perspective, an imbalance which has had a considerable influence on the shaping of career studies more generally. Stambulova and Ryba adopt a more culturally sensitive approach, offering a comprehensive analytical review of athlete career research and assistance in 19 different nations. The authors employ diverse theoretical, methodological and practical ideas to demonstrate how local knowledge enables a better understanding of the dynamics of cultural diversity within the field. Athletes’ Careers Across Cultures considers the ‘cultural praxis’ of athletes’ careers as a practical implication of the cultural turn. As such it will stimulate the development of culturally situated career research and assistance and be an invaluable and internationally relevant resource for academics, professionals and students working in sport and exercise psychology.