The IOC and the doping issue—An institutional discursive approach to organizational identity construction

Highlights

•	We examine the construction of organizational identity of the IOC when confronted with doping in sport.
•	We embed our study in a new institutional and discourse analytical set-up.
•	After the 1988 Seoul doping scandal the IOC employs a warfare genre.
•	The 1998 doping scandal reveals the failure of the IOC war against drugs in sport.
•	The World Anti-Doping Agency is an outcome of the IOC institutionalization failure.

Abstract

To show why the 1998 doping scandals led to the establishment of the World Anti-Doping Agency, this paper investigates how the IOC has created its organizational identity once confronted with the emergence of doping in sport. The paper endorses a new institutional understanding of organizations, which is combined with a critical discourse analytical framework. Through a systematic reading of the Olympic Review between 1960 and 2003 four main anti-doping discourses are outlined: health scientific, ethical, legal and educational discourses construct the meaning-providing horizon of IOC anti-doping commitment. The 1988 Ben Johnson doping incident is crucial for the understanding of the organizational changes occurring 10 years later. Immediately following the Seoul Olympic Games the IOC applies a warfare genre, which frames anti-doping as a declaration of war and constructs a narrative of the IOC as leading a successful battle against doping. The 1998 doping scandals reveal the opposite. Subsequently, WADA can be labelled IOC's institutionalization failure.

Keywords:

• Critical discourse analysis
• New institutionalism
• Genre
• Metaphors
• World Anti-Doping Agency
• Warfare

Notes

1 The Olympic 2012 special issues published by Taylor & Francis journals represent exceptions.

2 On the historical background, see Brown (2001).

3 Digital archive of the LA84 Foundation, accessed 15 February 2009. http://search.la84foundation.org/search%3Fsite=default_collection%26client=default_frontend%26output=xml_no_dtd%26proxystylesheet=default_frontend%26proxycustom=%3CHOME/%3E. The foundation was established with surplus funds from the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

4 Henceforth, we refer to the IOC as many of the published articles in the Olympic Review are anonymous.

5 The German Democratic Republic entered the Olympic scene at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

6 Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) was created on the initiative of the IOC to solve disputes in sport independently from political, legal and sports organizations. Its statutes were ratified by the IOC in 1983 and took effect from June 1984.

7 The notion of manifest intertextual references was introduced by Fairclough (1992). The notion relates to how texts explicitly refer to other texts.

8 Among the codes and charters launched by the IOC are the ‘Medical Code’ in 1997, the ‘International Olympic Charter Against Doping in Sport’ in 1988, and the ‘Anti-Doping Charter’ in 1994 (Todd & Todd, 2001).

9 It must be noted that Samaranch's statement appeared in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo on 26 July 1998. It was not reported in the Olympic Review.