Managing the compliance of national federations: an examination of the strategies of international Olympic sports federations

ABSTRACT

Research question

The influence of international sports federations (IFs) on domestic settings through their member federations is palpable, but the mechanisms by which these influences are exercised and the ways in which IFs manage the compliance of their member federations are not widely studied. This research aims to contribute to identifying the ways IFs, specifically those responsible for summer Olympic sports, secure the compliance of their member federations and to examining the issues arising from their compliance strategies.

Research methods

The study uses Haas’ seven institutional inducements of compliance, namely ‘national concerns’, ‘monitoring’, ‘verification’, ‘capacity building’, ‘horizontal linkage’, ‘nesting’ and ‘institutional profile’, as our analytical framework through which semi-structured interview guidelines were developed. Eight Olympic IFs were selected via purposive sampling and 12 of their staff members were interviewed based on the interview schedule.

Results and Findings

Five key compliance management strategies were identified: (1) raising awareness, (2) offering capacity-building resources, (3) evaluating national federations, (4) strengthening resources, (5) reinforcing sanctioning capacity.

Implications

This research uniquely revealed an empirical perspective of the process of Olympic IFs managing the compliance of their NFs and explored to pave the foundation for future studies to measure the effectiveness of international sports policy regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• International federations
• international relations
• governance
• sport management
• compliance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Congress is used as a general term referring to the gatherings IFs organised to deal with member affairs, such as general assembly, congress, NF conference, etc.

2 Referees are used as a general term referring to the technical positions of empire, judge, referee in different sports.

3 The umbrella organisations of IFs, ASOIF and AIOWF, run assessments that rank the summer and winter IFs, respectively. Ranking here refers to an overall perception of a sport in the Olympic Movement which may be related to its commercial viability at the Games and in its own competitions, its representation at the IOC political level, ASOIF GTF’s IF governance review, etc.

4 The ‘anti-match manipulation rules’ refers to Rule 43 in the Olympic Charter by which IFs abide.