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This article empirically investigates media coverage of 23 publicly financed stadium projects in 16 U.S. cities. Typically, media coverage uncritically supports these initiatives but, occasionally, it offers a far more critical view. In addition, the media in many cities take a "hybrid" approach, which is neither completely critical nor uncritical of these projects. The authors contend that media approaches matter a great deal in helping or hindering a stadium initiative. However, this impact is highly dependent on the unity and strength of the city's local growth coalition, which usually develops and champions these projects. A relatively critical media can seriously impede a stadium project, but only when the local growth coalition is weak or fragmented. Conversely, an uncritical media often becomes the primary institutional booster of stadium projects in cities with a weak growth coalition.

Sports economists have created a sizable literature on the costs and benefits of publicly funded major-league sports stadiums. This research suggests a growing consensus that stadiums provide little economic advantage for local communities. In response, some stadium supporters have modified their tactics to increasingly avoid claims of tangible economic benefits. Instead, they insist that new stadiums offer communities more intangible social benefits. These alleged intangible benefits can take many specific forms but usually have something to do with a community's self esteem or its collective conscience. This article draws on the authors' primary research in 10 U.S. cities that are involved in different stages of new stadium construction. The authors demonstrate how local elites socially construct ideas such as community self-esteem and community collective conscience to help them reap large amounts of public dollars for their private stadiums.

Abstract. Classical or neo‐classical economic theories do not adequately explain institutional investment patterns in troubled corporations. Macroeconomic perspectives contend that abstract market forces direct investment capital away from troubled companies, and that bankruptcy weeds weak firms out of the economy for the general good. Microeconomic perspectives focus on the seemingly autonomous decisions of firms and their managers, where bad management leads to troubled and bankrupt firms and a corresponding loss of investment in these companies. Neither perspective is useful for understanding recent patterns of institutional investment. A more critical, sociological perspective for understanding these investment patterns has two main threads. First, investment activity is embedded in more general social relationships and cannot be understood strictly on "economic" grounds and with "economic" ideas. Second, social power—rather than abstract market forces—is critical in fostering specific investment patterns. More specifically, the organizational power of large financial firms may be the pivotal factor shaping investment patterns in troubled companies. Recent case studies of troubled and bankrupt corporations demonstrate the usefulness of this more sociological perspective, and suggest areas for future research.

University policy makers and many outside observers generally believe that highly visible intercollegiate athletic success increases the quantity and quality of prospective student applications, as well as bolstering a school's financial and academic standing. This is sometimes referred to as the "Flutie Factor" in reference to Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie who led his team to a last-minute 1984 football victory on national television, resulting in an alleged windfall of undergraduate applications and other organizational largess. Using previously untapped data from the 2005 Educational Longitudinal Survey, underanalyzed data from the Art & Science Group, and original data from three universities, this study challenges the conventional wisdom that highly visible and successful intercollegiate sports programs necessarily improve a school's undergraduate population. We suggest that continued uncritical adherence to empirically problematic ideas like the Flutie Factor reflect a commercialized and corporatized "neoliberal" university, where branding, marketing, and profit maximization trump educational substance. In addition to being empirically suspect, this expensive, neoliberal approach toward sports-based marketing remains strangely unindicted as a contributor to undergraduate education's skyrocketing cost.

This article analyzes the role of economic and sociological studies in the debate over using public subsidies to build new professional sports stadiums. We show how academic studies have been neutralized by supporters of stadium subsidies, thereby making them less effective in policy debates. We illustrate how pro-stadium elites have ignored the studies, criticized them without competing evidence, commissioned contradictory studies, or shifted the debate to non-measurable endpoints. We speculate on some of the reasons why pro-stadiums advocates — in particular politicians and corporate elites — have chosen to support subsidies despite academic findings that suggest little economic payoff from subsidies. This article is drawn from primary research in nine American cities involved in new sports stadium construction.