Research project This project maps and conceptualises the properties and organisational transformative effects of instruments implemented to tackle unethical conduct in sport.
In the wake of revelations of unethical behaviour, sport organisations across the globe have introduced a wide variety of ethics instruments that are meant to prevent, detect, and discipline unethical conduct. Although well-intended, such instruments may have transformative effects in terms of undermining ideas, structures, and practices that are meant to shape moral individuals. This project unpacks ethics instruments’ properties and effects in terms of (re)shaping of roles and their interrelation, (re)distribution of resources, and (re)drawing of lines of authority and accountability.
Centrum för idrottsforskning
Umeå University
Given the variety of governmental-, commercial-, and non-profit- interests that have a stake in claims around sport’s ‘moral high grounds’, it is perhaps unsurprising that sport actors have met revelations of ethical breaches with the introduction of a range of instruments that are meant to prevent, detect, and discipline unethical conduct (Gardiner et al., 2017). This project provides a critical analysis of such instruments and their system-wide effects.
The project maps and conceptualises the properties and transformative effects of instruments implemented to tackle unethical conduct in sport. Two research questions (RQs) are addressed:
Instruments meant to tackle unethical conduct are implemented under the label ‘good governance’ (Centrum för idrottsforskning, 2021; Donnelly et al., 2016). As such, they are part of broader efforts to ‘modernise’ sport.
While intuitively appealing, modernisation processes, marked by a strive for efficiency and effectiveness, have been shown to have the unintended consequence of undermining some of the essential principles on which non-profit sport is built (e.g., Stenling & Sam, 2019; Stenling & Sam, 2020a, b). These principles include ideological and material volunteerism and bottom-up democracy, and they are indeed significant because they are considered essential for sport’s societal role and impact, including its contribution to social networking and integration, reciprocity and trust, and, ultimately, to a well-functioning participatory democracy.
At a more fundamental level, ethnics instruments have the potential to transform everyday interactions through which organisation members are meant to build interpersonal trust and the ability to deliberate on and judge ethical problems. By rearranging social orders, instruments may therefore create effects that are in tension with the moral appeal of the aims and intentions attached to them.
