Institutional work as response to institutional complexities in hybrid elite sport and sport for all organizations

ABSTRACT

Research question

This study aimed to examine how actors across different organizational levels respond to institutional complexity when facilitating elite sport and sport for all. By applying institutional work to understand responses to institutional complexity better, we examined the individual actors’ organizational roles and why and how they transformed the complexity in performing day-to-day work.

Research methods

Data were collected in a bottom-up approach using qualitative focus groups and in-depth interviews. 149 representatives within Norwegian sport organizations contributed to the study, including coaches, club managers, directors, managers in national sport organizations, and the president of the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF)

Results and findings

Institutional complexity is differently characterized at the different organizational levels. One common issue across levels is that the institutional complexity of sport for all and elite sport is seen as challenging, especially in the local sport clubs where institutional logics turn into day-to-day activity. The main source of the challenge is unifying the youth players and practitioners’ different skills and ambitions, which propagates upwards in the organization. How actors respond to complexity varies within the organizational levels and the different sports. Tensions stemming from complexity are often neglected by the political argument of ‘the trickle down and up effects’, which to a considerable extent lacks empirical evidence.

Implications

We recommend local sport managers prioritize expectation management to counteract a conflict of interests between institutional logics. It is necessary that national governing bodies better align their policies with the interest and organizational capacity of local clubs.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport policy
• sport participation
• institutional logics
• expectation management
• multilevel analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments which helped improve the article. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Bård Erlend Solstad for initiating and co-leading the project, and Oddbjørn Sindland for the help in data collection and analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

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