Managing cultural change in sport organisations

Michael C. McDougall

Chapter 7 in Handbook on Sport and Culture, 2025, pp 93-105 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the management of cultural change by examining how change occurs and whether cultural norms and values can actually be altered. These considerations are placed within the context of tracing of pro-management positions in sport to generally unacknowledged moorings in structural functionalism, a tradition that, when fused with subsequent management iterations, provides an enduring template for a casual acceptance of the manageability of cultural change. The mainstays of structural functionalism (coherence and stability; internalised values learnt and enacted through socialisation) are unpacked and challenged by four longstanding and related critiques: (1) the illusion of stability, (2) lack of attention to power, (3) lack of attention to agency, and (4) and an inability to describe cultural change. These challenges argue that organisational sport scholars overestimate both their ability to describe cultural change and to manage it.

Keywords: Organisational culture; Normativity; Values; Structural functionalism; Talcott Parsons; Agency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035339976
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