Contemporary sport policy in Sweden is the result of a century-long relationship between national and local governments and voluntary, non-profit and membershipbased club sport which has resulted in extensive financial support to organised sport. The relationship is defined by an 'implicit contract' in which the government decides on the extent and the purpose of the funding, and the recipient, the Swedish Sports Confederation, determines the details of the distribution and administration. These funds are distributed to 20,164 sport clubs and their 3,147,000 members in exchange for the realisation of social policies on public health and the fostering of democratic citizens. While an important cornerstone of the relationship has been the autonomy and self-determination of the recipient of the funds in their capacities as civil society organisations, recent decades have witnessed an increase in demands on performance outputs. These demands have explicated a wider social responsibility for organised sport and entailed a system for follow-up and control of the results of the government support via key performance indicators. In these ways, the corporatist agreement and consensus traditionally characterising the public-civil society interaction has been accompanied by governing mechanisms associated with neo-liberal ideologies which in turn are putting the sustainability of the implicit contract to the test.
The aim of this study is to contribute to the ongoing discussion of sports clubs' propensity to act as policy implementers. Theoretically, we conceptualize this propensity as contingent on an alignment between a sports club's organizational identity and the cultural material, that is, ends and means of a given policy. Building on data from short, qualitative interviews with representatives of 218 randomly selected sports clubs, we construct 10 organizational identity categories. Between these categories, there is a variety of clubs' core purposes, practices and logics of action. The implications of this heterogeneity, in terms of sports clubs' propensity to act as policy implementers, is discussed with reference to what clubs in each category might 'imagine doing'. Also discussed are three avenues by which institutional conditions might affect the formation and change of sports clubs' organizational identity, in turn having implications for their role as implementers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.