Developing the Concept of Financial Modernization within a Historical Review of College Football Stadium Construction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17161/jis.v19i2.24306Abstract
The present study examined the financing approaches employed by football-playing institutions in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) between 1869 to 2025. The goal of the current research aims to contribute to the literature on mod-ernization by presenting a process of financial modernization. Previously, the notion of financial modernization has only been inferred and not explained or theorized. To date, the researchers discovered cost information on roughly 76.4% of the 2,834 new construction or renovation projects produced by the sample. Using a sport-based historical research approach, a 7-stage chronological ideal-type was developed to showcase the evolution of financing practices and to inform the subsequent development of an 8-stage process model of financial modernization. The process model developed for this study was inspired by previous scholarship focused on explaining the modernity of financial systems and shows it to be complementary of both reflective and ecological modernization. The stages of the model illustrate how financing for products, services, or phenomena start with self-funded private interest before new mechanisms are created by external and internal public interest. Institution purse holders and developed institutional fields (e.g., intercollegiate athletics) follow as new financing sources. Collectively, private and public interest develop institutions and institution-al fields which collectively create conditions and inspiration for government funded programs before societies of support emerge to establish new financing mechanisms. Lastly, the present study discovered entrepreneurial activities emanating from established phenomena emerge as a final process stage in financial modernization.
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