Agency and institutions in sport

ABSTRACT

Much like the social phenomenon which it seeks to explain, institutional theory has become an institutional and dominant theoretical research traditional within sport management. In the context of sport, institutional theory can be used to examine the complex relationship between sport organisations and their broader environment. Specifically, it explains how sport organisations are influenced by and in turn influence, broader social, political and economic forces, as well as how these institutional forces shape the behaviour and practices of athletes, coaches and fans. The five original contributions contained within this special issue seek to advance institutional scholarship and bridge the growing theoretical divide between sport management and management. Taken together, the papers in this special issue represent the potential for not only further illumination of how institutional theory can advance sport management, but also how sport management might hold the possibility for further articulation and advancement of institutional theory. In doing so, we set out a future research agenda that calls for a return to the original motivations and concepts of institutional theory and a further appreciation of the distinctiveness of the sport context for understanding institutional arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional theory
• agency
• institutional work
• change
• sport organisations

Much like the social phenomenon which it seeks to explain, institutional theory has become an institutionalised and dominant theoretical research tradition within sport management. The theoretical tradition emphasises institutions, which are broadly understood as ‘cultural, normative, and regulatory structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behaviour’ (Scott, 1995, p. 33). In the context of sport, institutional theory can be used to examine the complex relationships between sport organisations and their broader environment. Specifically, the approach can help explain how individuals (e.g. athletes, coaches and fans) and organisations (e.g. teams, leagues, companies) are influenced by, and in turn influence, broader social, political and economic forces within the sport industry. The utility and relevance of institutional theory are evident by the fact that nearly 200 studies have utilised institutional constructs to investigate sporting institutions (Robertson et al., 2022).

Rather than a singular theoretical perspective, institutional theory can be more accurately described as a research tradition, with several key concepts that can be employed and are particularly relevant to understand and explain the changing nature of sport. These perspectives include legitimacy, change, isomorphism, fields, logics and institutional work. Part of the reason why institutional theory has emerged as a research tradition is because there were so many different origin stories that emerged from varying strands of scholarship. The work of DiMaggio and Powell (1983) on isomorphism and fields, Meyer and Rowan (1977) on institutional myths, Zucker (1977) on legitimacy, and Tolbert and Zucker (1983) on diffusion contained a common thread. That is, while each of these scholarly contributions led to novel theoretical advances, they also each started with a range of simple empirical questions: what makes organisations become similar? Why do organisations adopt practices that are seemingly irrational? And how can we explain organisational change?

The phrase ‘neo-institutionalism’ was first articulated by Powell and DiMaggio (1991) in their ‘orange book’ and more recently further explicated by Greenwood and colleagues in Organizational Institutionalism (Greenwood et al., 2008; 2017). A central assumption underpinning early institutional approaches was that individuals and organisations are subject to, and therefore at the mercy of, broader institutional forces (e.g. Slack & Hinings, 1994). More contemporary institutional research has begun to challenge the underlying assumption of structural determinism that positions actors as ‘cultural dopes’ subject to the ‘iron cage’ of institutional forces (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Arguably, this shift in thinking, or ‘agency turn’, has marked a fundamental departure from earlier institutional studies by focussing on institutional work¹ which Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) define as ‘the purposive action of individuals or organizations aimed at creating, maintaining and disrupting institutions’ (p. 215). More recently the institutional work perspective has expanded to include scholarship on ‘how, why, and when actors work to shape sets of institutions, the factors that affect their ability to do so, and the experience of these efforts for those involved’ and the ‘practices and processes associated with actors’ endeavours to build, tear down, elaborate and contain institutions, as well as amplify or suppress their effects’ (Hampel et al., 2017, p. 558). It is this latter, more contemporary inclusion of the role of agents in shaping institutional arrangements, which we use as the basis to advance and extend institutional scholarship in sport management within this special issue.

Contemporary uses of agency in institutional studies provide a distinctive opportunity for sport management researchers looking to leverage the sport setting to extend and develop theory. In its more basic sense, sports are ideal institutions to examine as all sports at their core are made-up systems of rules agreed upon by a field of stakeholders. In addition, sport also consists of institutions that matter to and are reflective of society, encompassing a range of normative systems and cognitive understandings around issues of development, governance, health, identity, inclusion, (in)equity, integrity, media, participation, socialisation and technology. Individuals and organisations collectively shape these institutions via their actions. Consequently, while sport management scholarship has an extensive history of institutional analysis, placing individuals at the heart of this analysis opens a range of interesting and exciting opportunities to advance our understanding of sport.

For this special issue, we are particularly interested in publishing a body of work that demonstrates clear theoretical contributions to advance our understanding of agency in institutions (e.g. multi-level studies, emotions, institutional work, novel methodological approaches). More specifically, our aim is to build upon and directly respond to the recent work of Robertson et al. (2022) and Nite and Edwards (2021) to begin to bridge the growing theoretical divide and ‘time-lag’ between mainstream management and sport management scholarship (Dowling et al., 2023). And, within this shared empirical context (sport) and theoretical tradition (institutional theory), help facilitate the development of a joint venture (Washington & Patterson, 2011) and a diffusion of ideas (Robertson et al., 2022) between the fields of management and sport management.

Contributions to the special issue

McSweeney et al. examined the relationship between (individual and collective) emotions elicited by forced migration, the institutional work of a sport for development and peace (SDP) organisation, and the ability of refugees to challenge the institution of social inequality in their host community. The authors partnered with Young African Refugees for Integral Development (YARID), an NGO based in Kampala Uganda, to undertake participatory action research (PAR) that allowed them to co-produce knowledge with participants and better understand their lived experience. Their findings suggest positive and negative emotions influence both the institutional work of an SDP organisation and the ability of the refugees to impact upon institutions of social inequality, stimulating both the maintenance and disruption of extant institutions. These findings contribute to our understanding of institutional theory by focusing on lived experience to illuminate how the strategic use of collective emotions can act as a catalyst for institutional work and subsequently facilitate the disruption of institutions.

Also employing a novel methodology to scholarship in sport management, Flaherty undertook an autoethnography to examine the co-construction of gendered institutional logics in her experiences coaching and playing elite US sport. Across four identified dominant logics (less than, conform socially, protect girls and vision of value) she narrated her experiences as both someone who was shaped by gendered discourse and practices, and someone who reproduced those same actions and assumptions. In doing so, she illustrates how micro-level understandings of behaviours, sensemaking and power structures impact the institutional work of co-constructing gendered logics.

Rich et al., examined multi-level, regional governance through an institutional lens by undertaking an instrumental case study. They sought to understand how regional policy impacts field structuration and policy implementation in the organisational field of amateur sport in Ontario, Canada. They found the dynamic positioning of sport within varying sectors impacted resourcing and planning which, in turn, offered implications for field structuration. They also found there to be an emphasis on economic accountability and self-sufficiency prescribed at the municipal and local levels which influenced field-level change and regional policy implementation. Theoretically, they contribute to our understanding of multi-level governance in organisational fields by highlighting how the agency of an ever-changing group of actors (regional government) can alter a field and the implementation of policy within it. Furthermore, they call attention to the role of policy in the translation of ideas and the need to balance competing logics at varying levels of governance within this framework.

Using the development of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) as a case study, Zheng and Mason investigated the role of emotion in the emergence of new sports. Specifically, they examined the influence of discursive institutional work on negative emotions during the legitimation of MMA as a new sport. The authors identify various forms of emotion-specific discursive institutional work which aided in addressing negative emotions (substitution, pacification and disruption) and creating positive emotions (stimulation, cultivation and substitution) to bring about legitimation. In each of the three phases of MMA’s development, differing combinations of these forms of work were recognised. Their study promotes the primacy of emotion alongside cognition in institutional legitimacy work. They note that emotions themselves can and should be the target of institutional work and ultimately be influenced by institutional change. With this in mind, and given the difficulty of altering emotions, the authors suggest that emotion-specific institutional work is vital in the overall work of maintaining and disrupting institutions.

Oja and colleagues expand our understanding about the dichotomy of structure and agency within sport organisations. More specifically, the authors examine how institutionalised work practices impact employee agency (i.e. their ability to make changes to practices and structures in their organisation) within the US college system (i.e. NCAA). Using a purposive data collection strategy, 13 interviews representing individuals in non-coaching positions across separate universities were amassed and analysed using a thematic analysis procedure. Findings revealed how workplace norms and bureaucracy impacted employee’s abilities to create modifications and improvements in their organisation. Thus, raising the question of whether current work arrangements within sport are sustainable.

Finally, Nite et al., dive into a relatively new sporting context by examining the rivalry between LIV Golf and the Professional Golf Association (PGA). Specifically, the authors are interested in the interplay between legitimacy work and emotions. Their research questions aimed to better understand how dominant organisations create messages to influence perceptions of legitimacy while at the same time examining how these messages provoke emotional responses from evaluators of newer, less dominant organisations or rivals. The authors engage with sociologically based framing theory (cf. Frederick et al., 2021; Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2009) to guide their emotional discourse analysis of 38 news articles to understand how the frames or messages in this case are packaged, constructed and understood. Findings demonstrated how the dominant PGA framed themselves as ‘true golf’ attempting to delegitimise their rival as posing threats to legacy and tradition, destruction of the game, and negating the meritocratic structures of the sport while playing on emotions rather than rationality. This novel study contributes to our understanding of how human emotion influences perceived legitimacy and institutional work.

Future research directions: advancing institutional scholarship through sport

Taken together, the papers in this special issue represent the potential for not only further illumination of how institutional theory can advance sport management, but also how sport management might hold the possibility for further articulation and advancement of institutional theory (Fonti et al., 2023). Like most special issues, when we put the call together, we had some suggestions for the type of research that could not only extend sport management studies, but also institutional theory. The papers in this special issue, address many of our original suggestions: the role of individuals in creating, maintaining and disrupting institutional sport settings, the role of emotions, and papers that combine institutional theory with other perspectives. However, in a similar vein, some topics were not addressed, including: the origins of sport institutions, or societal consequences for institutional arrangements in sport, as well as materiality and institutional work.

As a call for more research that could advance institutional theory, we suggest three future directions. First, we want to encourage scholars, in some ways, to return to the original motivation(s) of institutional theory. As previously mentioned, the original motivations of some of the seminal papers in institutional theory were an effort to make sense of an empirical phenomenon. For example, DiMaggio and Powell were concerned with why two totally different organisations resemble each other, Tolbert and Zucker sought to understand how various practices diffused even though the organisations adopting these practices did not have any use for them. Here is where we think sport management could help further develop contemporary institutional theory. As such, rather than starting with the question how does current institutional theory explain a sport phenomenon? Future researchers could instead seek to understand a problem or issue in the sport domain and then discuss how the answer to this problem or issue might extend to a variety of institutional questions that are present within current institutional scholarship. For example, how does temporality of major event cycles help (de)stabilise sport institutions (Reinecke & Lawrence, 2023)? How does the embodied world of concern of an athlete-activist animate broader institutional processes within society (Creed et al., 2022)? By virtue of its presence at the forefront of so many issues ranging from diversity, gender issues, to sustainability, sport has clear utility in advancing contemporary theory development (Fonti et al., 2023). Knitting together these conversations – as we have tried to within this special issue – will only continue to advance this body of knowledge.

Second, future research could (re-)connect concepts of neo-institutionalism to some of the original concepts, such as field-level contestation and institutional leadership (Zietsma et al., 2017). One of the common elements of most sport leagues and fields is that there is a ‘leader’ (often called commissioner, or president, or executive director). Asking how these leaders navigate their institutional environment and what their role is in shaping institutional settings provides a potentially fruitful path of integrating sport management and institutional theory work (Heinze et al., 2016). Similarly, leagues and mega-sport events (such as the Olympics) are always locations of conflict in sport (e.g. drug use in sport, sustainability, transgender issues) and as such, scholars could use sport to advance our concepts of organisational fields in general and field configuring events in particular (Lampel & Meyer, 2008).

Lastly, we feel that sport management scholars should return to the big question of why sport? What is it that makes it a unique (or at least a distinctive) context by which to explore institutional arrangements? We suggest that sport is well-positioned to explore the societal consequences or outcomes and the micro-level foundations of how actors navigate and shape institutional arrangements in sport. It also has significant potential to contribute meaningfully to contemporary theoretical debates surrounding materiality (sport is highly visible), plurality and hybridity (sport operates across and is nested within multiple institutional arrangements), and – as demonstrated by some of the articles with our special issue – emotion (sport is highly emotionally charged). Furthermore, there is a need to expand the theoretical plurality of institutional sport scholarship to explore how institutional theory can be utilised alongside a variety of other complimentary theoretical approaches (e.g. institutional theory and governance; institutional theory and corporate social responsibility; institutional theory and professionalisation) which largely remain unexplored.

As a final note, the guest editorial team would like to extend our sincere appreciation for all those who submitted and contributed to this special issue, including the many reviewers who gave up their time and contributed their expertise willingly to help produce this special issue, without their support this important body of work would not have been possible. We would also like to thank Paul Downward and Caron Walpole, who provided us with valuable guidance throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Here we include related (albeit distinct) concepts such as institutional entrepreneurship within our broader understanding of agentic approaches to institutional scholarship.