Research project Many sport clubs face expectations and demands they often experience difficult to meet. Club members have opinions on what goals are important and how they best should be reached, while sponsors, authorities and other stakeholders might have other ideas. How do sport club boards navigate this cross-breeze and with what results in terms of the direction of club activities?
Centrum för idrottsforskning
Idrottshögskolan
The background of this project is the increasingly complex and demanding institutional environment of Swedish sport clubs. Key features of this environment are ongoing processes of instrumentalization, professionalization and commercialization, and changes to the Swedish population’s sport participation patterns. At the core of the project is an analysis of the execution of sport club governance within this contemporary institutional environment. In particular, with an explicit empirical focus on sport club board meetings–the primary decision making arena of sport clubs–the purpose of the project is to create knowledge on how boards construct and negotiate meaning as they conceal, frame, handle, and resolve the potential tensions between issues raised by the membership of the club and issues emanating from the club’s institutional environment. The project is theoretically based in an institutional outlook on framing and data are produced through video-recorded, one-year observations of the meetings of four sport clubs.
With this design, the project has enriched the research field concerned with voluntary sport governance, a field that is primarily positioned within a business administration paradigm and wherein studies are preoccupied with discrete factors relating to boards. In addition, with its consideration of how sport club boards handle the potential tensions between issues raised by the membership of the club and issues emanating from the club’s institutional environment, the project has contributed to research concerned with public- and private sector-generated issues’ impact on sport clubs. As such, the project has provided knowledge of the ramifications of sport clubs’ external relations on their autonomy, orientation, and function.
