Volume 9, Issue 1

For sports clubs to function successfully as mutual interest organizations, it is vital that their goals are in line with their members’ interests. However, the reality is that this process of alignment does not always take place, and that more often than not, club goals and member interests diverge. This paper addresses the causes and effects of such goal-interest divergences in sports clubs. Based on multi-level actor theory models, it analyses the structure and action conditions in sports clubs that lead to divergences in goals and interests at both club and member levels. To identify the underlying causes, corporate club structure and members’ individual objectives are examined. The results show that divergences are caused by increasing levels of differentiation and hierarchy in clubs (e.g., size of club, networks, oligarchization) and by the members’ pursuit of individual interests. The effects of divergences are then analyzed by assessing the responses of individual members and club leaders to apparent divergences. The results show that both club members and club leadership respond in predominantly constructive ways (e.g., through discussion of problems, trust, compromise), so that many clubs are clearly able to deal with, process, and withstand goal-interest divergences, at least to a certain extent.

German soccer seems to have no difficulties integrating players with an immigrant background, as seen in the number of such players in the national teams of the German Football Association. The teams of the German Handball Association, in contrast, have only managed to recruit German players up to now. In this country, handball appears to be not only a distinctly “German” sport but also one that fails to reach almost 20% of the population, and thus almost completely excludes the largest immigrant group: those with a Muslim background. This article aims at identifying all the mechanisms of exclusion that contribute to the under- or non-representation of immigrants in handball, and at integrating these into a theoretical model. This model is then used to derive key questions for an empirical study of the mechanisms of exclusion.

There exist a number of theoretical approaches to organizational change, which differ in the relationship of this change to the surrounding environment. The population ecology approach expands the intra- organizational perspective to consider collectives of similar organizations. On this theoretical foundation, this article distinguishes systematically among three levels of analysis, the individual sports club, the collective of existing sports clubs, and the overall population of sports clubs, and analyzes panel data from two surveys of sports clubs in the Pfalz region. The results confirm the population ecology assumptions of stable core characteristics with highly malleable-that is, adaptable-peripheral characteristics in existing sports clubs. Furthermore, they suggest that organizational change takes place primarily on the population level, that is, through the replacement of sports clubs.