Dubbelspel: over instrumentalisering van de sportvereniging

Abstract

In a time of social liquefaction and a network approach to governance citizens and their organizations are increasingly expected to contribute to the revitalization of society. Civil society organizations are valued and used by governments for contributing to a diverse range of public issues. Sports is one of those domains in which voluntary organizations are expected to contribute to society. A range of governments increasingly use voluntary sport clubs (VSCs) as partners for contributing to public issues, like counteracting overweight among youth, improve social integration of immigrants, improving social cohesion in neighbourhoods and activating the elderly. In this dissertation this process is conceptualized as instrumentalization. In this dissertation the construction of the instrumental role of voluntary sport clubs in municipal sport policy and the way in which two VSCs in the Dutch municipality of Utrecht enact this instrumental role are studied in depth. The dissertation has three aims. First, it aims to describe and understand the process of instrumentalization of VSCs, showing tensions between instrumentalization by government and the relative autonomous position of VSCs. Second, the dissertation aims to conceptualize instrumentalization as such. The concept is used in a range of academic subdisciplines, but has not yet been extensively conceptualized. Therefore, this dissertation provides a foundational contribution for further use of this concept. Third, the dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing development of a more on agency oriented institutional approach, by combining two recent streams in this theory. It belongs to a very select number of studies that combine the institutional logics approach and the institutional work approach. The dissertation answers the follow research question: How do voluntary sport clubs enact the instrumentalization by governments and what does that mean for the dominant institutional logic(s) in voluntary sport clubs? The design of the study was inspired by studies on sense making in organizations and policy implementation. For this research an extensive interpretive policy analysis was conducted on formal sport policy documents of the twenty largest Dutch municipalities. To analyze the way in which voluntary sport clubs enact the instrumentalization by governments three case studies were conducted. Data has been collected by making use of a range of qualitative methods, like observations, shadowing, document analysis, and interviews. This dissertation concludes that voluntary sport clubs operate strategically in their relation with government. A new insight that arises out of this dissertation is that voluntary sport clubs instrumentally use sport policy programmes for their own ambitions. They use the instrumentalization by government as a chance to fulfil their own organizational ambitions. In this way they contribute to institutional change; sport clubs assimilate a public logic into their organizational actions. At the same time they maintain a community and a competitive logic as dominant institutional logics. Instrumentalization thus works both ways; when governments use voluntary organizations as instruments for public policy implementation, they expose public policy itself for instrumental use by civil society. In this way instrumentalization can be interpreted as double play.