Speakers
Description
During the past decade or so, much hope has been placed in various instruments’ (e.g., reporting mechanisms) ability to prevent, detect, and discipline unethical conduct. Ethics instruments may fundamentally transform how behaviour is governed in sport due to their capacity to structure action according to their logic of appropriateness, for example by casting new institutional roles.
The purpose of this presentation is to interrogate the organizational transformations associated with the shift in management of (un)ethical behaviour that is currently taking place in sport. We do this by exploring the ‘sport integrity officer’ as an emerging institutional role located in broader integrity governance frameworks.
Relying on data from interviews with 37 employees in Swedish sport who are variously involved in what we term ‘ethics-work’, we convey an analysis of the nature and organizational implications of the sport integrity officer role. Our analysis shows that role prescriptions are underpinned by a logic of standardisation, specialisation and professionalisation, and that they centre on clarification of the mandates, responsibilities, competencies, and modus operandi associated with “reactive case management”.
One important organizational implication of this role construction is that favourable role performance come to be about building procedural legitimacy and evaluating the internal effectiveness of the system, rather than its external effects on ethical behaviour. Thus, while ethics management systems enable sport’s underbelly to be exposed and the severity of the ethical breaches to be properly acknowledged, they also produce a fragmentation that implies that ethics work becomes someone’s, rather than everyone’s, responsibility.
