National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Division I schools compete with the Canadian Hockey League for top Canadian youth minor hockey players (ages 14–18). To address the challenges of adhering to NCAA’s eligibility and recruitment regulations, the NCAA commissioners created College Hockey Inc. (CHI). One challenge facing new institutions such as CHI is establishing legitimacy as a means of penetrating a crowded organizational field. In this paper we examine what forces, actions, and events contributed to the creation of CHI and what forces, actions, or events contribute to maintaining CHI’s relevance in their attempt to leverage NCAA Division I hockey with Canadian players and parents. Educational Opportunities, Student Life Experiences, Player Development, and Professional Hockey Opportunities were found to be discursive strategies used by CHI to gain pragmatic legitimacy and maintain the institution. Exploration of these strategies makes a number of practical and theoretical contributions to the field of sport management.
This paper offers a review of institutional work and its utilization in sport management. We detailed how institutional work offers a modern paradigm of institutional theory that addresses calls for examining how institutions are created, maintained, and disrupted in sport. Upon review of the institutional work research in sport management, we argue for more studies of embedded agency and provide insights into how scholars may effectively implement institutional work within studies of sport phenomena. We advocate for the expansion of methods and analyses to provide empirical relationships between embedded agency and institutional outcomes. Further, we concluded that there is a need for more research with institutional work and other core institutional elements. Thus, we offer important insights into the progression of institutional theory research in sport management.
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