Co-existing logics of change: The case of the Danish associational development championships

ABSTRACT

This article addresses modernization processes within the voluntary sector. It examines how volunteer-based sports associations (VSAs) are encouraged to work with their own self-development, when they participate in the Danish Associational Development Championships (DADC). Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of ‘governmentality’ and ‘dispositive’, the article shows how the governmental rationality of the DADC is pieced together by a number of different logics of change. This makes it ambiguous what the function of VSAs is, who they function for, and why they need to change. The article thus advances our knowledge of the socio-political nature of modernization strategies and techniques.

KEYWORDS:

• Modernization processes
• volunteer-based sports associations
• organizational change
• governmentality
• dispositive

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Danish history of sport and its organization has been well described by others (see e.g., Korsgaard, 1997; Ministry of Culture, 2009; Trangbæk, Hansen, Ibsen, Jørgensen, & Nielsen, 1995), and the purpose of this article is not to add to this already extensive body of literature.

2. Foucault was, as others have stressed (Bussolini, 2010; Villadsen, 2013), not consistent in his use of the concept of ‘dispositive’, and he sometimes used other concepts like apparatus, mechanism and technology interchangeably (see e.g., Foucault, 2007, p. 6ff), as do some of the studies inspired by his work. In this article I use the term ‘dispositive’ in order to avoid the term being confused with the concept of technique, which is also a key concept of the article. Furthermore, the use of the term ‘dispositive’ is in line with several other recently published contributions (see e.g., Kousholt & Hamre, 2016; Nowicka, 2016; Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, & Thaning, 2016).

3. Foucault himself did not use the term ‘pastoral dispositive’ but he referred to a period in which ‘[i]n a sense, everything was pastoral’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 151). This has led others to talk about ‘a pastoral dispositive’ (see e.g., Fogh Jensen, 2005).

4. The quote is found in the official evaluation of the DADC project (Østerlund, 2014).