Sport Advocacy: The Art of Persuasion and Its By-Products

Abstract

Despite an increase of advocacy by established nongovernmental sport organizations, little is known about how advocacy is enacted and with what effects. Building conceptually on frame alignment theory and empirically on interview data from 19 Swedish Regional Sport Federations, this article investigates how advocates politicize sport to gain “insider status” and analyses the by-products of such efforts. This research demonstrates that the architecture of advocacy claims perpetuates a separation between organizations that “sell” sport from those that “produce” it. Framing also impels centralized authority because advocates safeguard their credibility as political actors by taking up a “leadership-position” vis-à-vis clubs. Advocacy frame alignment has further by-products insofar as they narrow advocates’ room for maneuver and become institutionalized over time.

Sport club consultants as street-level bureaucrats in sport policy processes: conceptualising micro-level interaction styles and their macro-level consequences

“…transformative effects of CCs' interaction style), we follow the views of Sieber (1981) and Hood (1991) around the propensity for policy instruments and organising more generally to have effects beyond what was intended. This has been shown in several studies situated in a sport context (Fahl en, 2017;Fahl en et al, 2015;Fahl en & Stenling, 2019;Sam, 2011;Stenling & Sam, 2020a, 2020bThompson et al, 2021; for conceptual discussions, see also Sam, 2009;Nagel et al, 2015) and can be attributed to the trade-offs between values that are invariably made in policy and organising processes. As an illustration, Thompson et al (2021) showed that English NSF sport development officers' management of tensions between centrally mandated policy priorities and sport clubs' orientation reduced SDO club relationship building, thus undermining long-term NSF developmental trajectories and sustainability.…”

“…In addition to analysing CCs' institutionally shaped interaction style vis-a-vis clubs, another aim with this paper was to build on ideas (Sieber, 1981;Hood, 1991) and sport-specific empirical research (Fahl en, 2017;Fahl en et al, 2015;Fahl en & Stenling, 2019;Sam, 2011;Stenling & Sam, 2020a, 2020bThompson et al, 2021) around unintended effects of policy and organising processes to draw attention to the systemlevel transformative effects that may follow from what appears to be a rather microlevel practice. In this final part of the paper, we outline our second contribution by providing some illustrations of such possible effects of Swedish CCs' interaction style.…”

Can sport clubs be represented? Pre-packed policy advocacy and the trade-offs for democratic responsiveness

“…This paper emerged from a project that explores the emergence and various aspects of advocacy conducted by Swedish sport's 19 RSFs, and from which three papers have been published previously (Stenling and Sam 2019a, 2020. These three papers focused on why RSFs are taking a more active advocacy approach (Stenling and Sam 2019a), who conducts advocacy (Stenling and Sam 2019b), and the building blocks and architecture of externally directed messages (Stenling and Sam 2020). The focus of this paper is indeed salient, considering that Swedish sport -at all levelsconsists of voluntary associations, and that high emphasis is placed on its democratic selfgovernance system.…”

“…However, for contextualisation, it is notable that RSFs carry out a wide range of advocacy activities (i.e., meeting with elected officials and administrators of public bureaucracies, submitting news-paper opinion pieces, participating in radio-shows, releasing self-produced film-clips, etc.) during which they translate internally shaped advocacy content into strategically fitted messages that aim to convince policy-makers and their administrators to make decisions that benefit Swedish sport and RSFs' own standing as political actors (Stenling and Sam 2019a, 2020.…”

“…In turn, this may promote a further 'division of representative labour' (Halpin 2010, p. 195), where professionalised federations take responsibility for 'deciding the long-term best interests of their membership' (Halpin 2010, p. 193) and for carrying out the resource-demanding and expert-driven advocacy presumed to be required by the logic of influence (c.f. Stenling and Sam 2020). In that sense, RSFs' understandings of interests as objective are significant because they may precipitate a further professionalisation of advocacy, including the establishment of centralised bureaucratic structures and practices dedicated to conducting sport's external influence-work (Schmitter and Streeck 1999).…”