Governmental power in elite sport networks: a resource-dependency perspective

ABSTRACT

Research question: The contemporary elite sport policy arena is highly complicated with a plethora of stakeholders relying on each other to reach their shared goal of international sporting success. Interactions among stakeholders have a large impact on outcomes. Therefore, these interactions are crucial to analyze when examining elite sport policy implementation. This study draws from network theory and resource-dependency theory to gain an understanding of the governance of elite sport networks by analyzing the impact of resource dependency and power dispersion on two collaborative processes, decision-making and coordination.

Research methods: An empirical qualitative study was conducted within the Flemish sport context. Data were collected through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with 64 respondents.

Results and findings: Decision-making in the elite sport network was mainly influenced by the large power ascendancy of the government agency. Coordination was streamlined through clear administrative procedures to overcome distrust. However, coordination issues were often the result of power plays between network partners. Some interesting instruments were revealed that enhanced legitimacy and trust in the network; namely, leveraging expertise and knowledge; engaging in collaborative goal setting; establishing a task force; and engaging in co-optation tactics.

Implementation: This research adds to the collaborative network literature by explicitly linking perceptions of power and resource-dependency to the decision-making and coordination processes. The results contribute to research on elite sport by bringing insights into the relationships among resource-dependency, power, decision-making and coordination; and into the usefulness of the instruments to handle potential pitfalls inherent to these relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Coordination
• decision-making
• elite sport network
• power
• resource-dependency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Sport federation’ refers to organizations having sport clubs as their members, organizing competition in a particular sport in their country or region in case of a federal state; and are similar to National Governing Bodies (NGBs) in the UK or National Sporting Organizations in Australia and the US.

2 Sport Flanders was named BLOSO at the time of data collection but shortly after ending the data collection phase renamed into Sport Flanders.