Marktgerichte sportbonden : een paradox?

Abstract

This dissertation deals with a social-cultural change process within sport organizations attempting to change towards market-oriented organizations. Dutch National Sport Organizations (NSO’s) experience pressure to apply marketing techniques. This pressure stems from the outer context as well as the institutional context, represented by the Olympic umbrella organization and a number of large, powerful federations. Therefore in 2005 and 2006, over sixty NSO’s participated in a strategic marketing program (SMP) aimed at creating a marketing strategy. The SMP can be interpreted as a plea for NSO’s to make room for market-oriented thinking instead of merely club-oriented-thinking. Therefore this calls for cultural change. The central question in this dissertation refers to the backgrounds and consequences of external pressure and the top-down controlled application of a market-orientation on a group of NSO’s, which are characterized by a club-oriented culture and which reason for existence is legitimized from organizing sport participation based on a shared passion. This is studied at three sociological levels: the macro, meso and micro level. On the macro level, developments in market share of the traditional organized sports are recalculated. A loss of market share is validated. Based on a literature study, arguments of increasing individualization, expansion of more diverse sports suppliers and an increase in fitness participation are not found to be convincing. It is more likely that a loss of market share is caused by new groups of athletes who feel uncomfortable with the traditional club culture, as also a group of young adults who, experiencing time pressure, choose for more flexible (commercial) sport participation. Another part of the macro analysis is a literature study to the growing popularity of the marketing discourse in a not-for-profit context and in sports in particular. The meso analysis consists of a document study on policy plans of NOC*NSF and eleven NSO’s, as well as in-depth interviews with marketing and management employees and board members of twenty NSO’s. The meso analysis provides insights in the motivation, influences and outcomes of the change process. The neo-institutional framework of Greenwood and Hinings (1996) and Gidden’s (1979) structuration theory are used to analyze and describe the process of change. Four years after starting the SMP, many NSO’s have changed the institutional norms within their policy plans. However, only few people in the organization are affected by this change. The rank and files of most NSO’s don’t support these new norms and in their acting club-oriented values remain dominant. Since they have democratic power, change has hardly been realized. The micro analysis features different applications of the marketing discourse by outlining three case studies. In all three NSO’s, key actors failed to give sense to- and make sense of the new market-oriented norms. This dissertation concludes mentioning tensions resulting in a gap between two discourses as experienced by NSO’s: the club-oriented discourse and the market-oriented discourse. The author pleas for using marketing techniques not to initiate brand new activities aimed at new and different target groups, but to bridge the gap by marketing the club-oriented discourse