Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management
First Advisor
Khalid Ballouli
Abstract
The democratization of intelligent systems and their ubiquitous presence across the sport industry have created an urgent need to understand the current environment and how stakeholders perceive artificial intelligence (AI) as it reshapes decision-making, engagement, and organizational design. This three-manuscript dissertation conceptualizes artificial intelligence as a contested domain shaped by stakeholder meaning-making, consumer perception, and shifts in organizational practice. The first manuscript provides a systematic review of AI in sport management using the PRISMA framework, mapping how AI has been conceptualized as a methodological tool or contextual innovation across the sport industry segmentation (performance, production, and promotion). The second manuscript introduces the Artificial Intelligence Perception Index (AIPI), a multidimensional and domain-general scale developed and validated to measure and understand consumer perceptions of AI through functional and psychological lenses. The AIPI advances prior foundational technology models by conceptualizing perception not as a single attitude or precursor to behavior, but as a second-order structure composed of functional evaluations and psychological orientations. The scale was developed using a deductive item generation approach, expert review, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and predictive validation, aligning with the processes outlined by Churchill (1979). The third manuscript reconnects the AIPI within the confines of sport management to facilitate a discussion of its theoretical, applied, and methodological implications for the field.
This dissertation makes a theoretical contribution by reframing perception as a central construct in AI scholarship, elevating it from a behavioral antecedent to a complex psychological and semiotic mechanism, while also addressing the epistemological fragmentation in sport management through a systematic synthesis and the extension of the AIPI into a culturally saturated domain where identity, narrative, and spectacle shape human-AI interaction. Practically, the findings provide a diagnostic and strategic tool for organizations to assess and calibrate stakeholder perceptions of intelligent systems, emphasizing that in emotionally charged contexts, such as sports, perceptual misalignment can undermine trust, engagement, and legitimacy.
Rights
© 2025, Kemardo Tyrell
Recommended Citation
Tyrell, K.(2025). Artificial Intelligence in Sport Management: A Systematic Review, Scale Development and Validation, and Implications. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8560