Internships in Sport Management are the modus operandi (Schneider & Stier, 2006, p. 35; Brown et al., 2018, p. 75) for Sport Management, as between 80-90 percent of Sport Management programs in the United States require completion of an internship before graduation (Jones et al., 2008; Sattler, 2018; Schoepfer & Dobbs, 2010). The purpose of this study is to, firstly, conduct a Foucauldian genealogy on internships in Sport Management and, secondly, to understand the experiences of Sport Management students as informed by the genealogy. A genealogy focuses on the intersections of power and truth to deconstruct how the former forms and maintains Sport Management internships. Data collection methods included the analysis of internship manuals, surveys, and interviews with Sport Management students who have participated in an internship over the past two years. An abstractive form of data analysis was used, relying on themes from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977[1995]), to inform the research findings. The findings of the study include a) the intersection of power and positivist regime of truth focused on production that reduces the Sport Management student to functional nuances of the internship experience, b) that the internship manual objectifies the Sport Management student as the object of statements, fashioning a Sport Management intern around a specific form of neoliberal subjectivity, c) that this neoliberal subjectivity constitutes a self-reflexive, self-governing Sport Management student for practicing refinement, and d) that refinement is the goal of the internship or, according to Foucault (St. Pierre, 2004), its telos.
