Anna-Maria Strittmatter

• PhD
• Örebro University

This study explores the relevance, and applicability, of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in relation to Norwegian sport organizations’ sustainability transition. The following research questions guided the study: (1) How do National Sport Governing Bodies (NGBs) strategically address and prioritize SDGs and why? (2) How does the strategic...

Scholars emphasise the need to understand how contested concepts, like social inclusion and legacy , are interpreted within specific contexts. However, there are a lack of critical studies on social legacies of sports mega-events. This study aims to analyse how social inclusion of marginalised groups is constructed in the legacy-shaping process of...

The purpose of this article is to examine the role played by organizational culture in young people’s continuing underrepresentation in decision-making bodies, despite structural changes, in the context of Norwegian sport organizations. Data is based on a questionnaire centred on the experiences of young people in sport governance ( n = 32 youth re...

A focus on good governance in sports organisations is increasingly perceived as a necessity, not least in response to numerous major scandals and crises in the leading international sports organisations, for example FIFA and the IOC. Although many other sports organisations do not receive the same attention in the international media, they face sim...

The aim of this study is to review the literature on lifestyle sports and lifestyle sport contexts with regard to the developmental potential they may represent in young people’s everyday lives. The review applies a relational developmental systems approach to youth development. The eligibility criteria are based on the phenomenon of interest and o...

Private football academies challenge the monopoly of Norwegian voluntary and democratic sport. Using field theory and framing approach as analytical perspectives, this article presents a media analysis that reveals that, first, association football and private academies agree on the fact that Norwegian football is not good enough and must improve....

The purpose of this study is to examine how participating in an international research project (IRP) can impact the way early-career academics (ECAs) perceive academia and thus their professional identity development. Based on neoinstitutional theory, we examine autoethnographic memory stories of six ECAs within sport management who participated in...

Contemporary sport governance contexts are marked by a trend towards efficiency-based board composition and an increasing use of instruments aimed to (re)shape boards. Yet, democratic gov-ernance is integral to many countries' sport systems, and research tells us that representation still matters in sport governance. Considering this, the aim with...

Aim and Research Questions The aim of this study is to map the challenges that sport clubs face in using good governance and ethical leadership principles. The research question can be summarised as: what are the challenges that sport clubs of different organisational capacity face in implementing good governance and ethical leadership principles a...

Research Question: The purpose of this paper is to construct knowledge on the working processes of nomination committees (NCs) in sport and analyze their potential to shape board composition. The significance of such an effort lies in its potential to shed light on the processes preceding the structures and practices created for the wielding of pow...

The aim of this study was to explore how a youth sport development programme in connection with a major event may facilitate sustainable outcomes for the organization of youth sports in Norway. The context of the study involved the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports’ initiative to increase young people’s engageme...

While colonization as policy is formally a historic phenomenon in Norway and elsewhere, many former structures of state organization – including their relationship to sport – remain under post-colonial conditions. This paper is concerned with how the Norwegian government contributes to creating a situation, which includes the Norwegian sports confe...

The organising committee at the 2012 World Snowboarding Championships in Oslo experienced major problems such as uncertainty among the junior managers and general chaos. Despite this, in external communications, the event was declared to be a success. This article draws on the works of Parent and Seguin (2007) and Parent et al. (2009) to examine th...

This study applies ‘European-ness’ to the analysis of internationalization in the sport management labor market and which changes this trend necessitates for sport management curricula. We employed an analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews with key informants from Germany, Norway and Spain. The results reveal various effects of internationalizat...

International Sport Management, Second Edition, takes a comprehensive look at the organization, governance, business activities, and cross-cultural context of modern sport on an international level. As the sport industry continues its global expansion, this second edition serves as an invaluable guide for students whose careers will require an inte...

Research question: The purpose of this paper is to create knowledge on board-selection processes and their outcomes in terms of board composition. We address two research questions: (1) What evaluative criteria are at play in board-selection processes; and (2) what hierarchies of criteria are formed when evaluative criteria are ranked? The signific...

By providing an analytical framework that draws on a conceptualisation of legitimacy in organisation studies, this paper demonstrates that the sport policy process can be understood as an interlinked chain of legitimating acts. Based on recent suggestions in organisation theory literature on how to approach legitimacy and legitimation, we applied t...

This article examines the current governance structures in international competitive snowboarding and analyses empirically how key actors operate within the diverging logics that shape such structures. We expand upon the existing literature on professional snowboarding by offering a more contemporary understanding of the constantly evolving process...

The Youth Olympic Games (YOG) resembles the Olympic Games in many ways but it has its own identity and characteristics. In this article, we analyse patterns of influence between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and local organisers prior to the YOG 2016. The findings show that these patterns vary over time and between different areas of go...

The 12th European Youth Olympic Festival (EYOF) was arranged in Austria and Liechtenstein in January 2015. By using a stakeholder framework, the study aims to: (a) identify and differentiate between primary and secondary stakeholders based on their level of influence in planning, implementation and impact of the event; and (b) analyze the challenge...

This paper reports findings from a study on a policy by the Norwegian Olympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) aiming at the recruitment of young voluntary leaders into organized sports, the so-called young leaders program (YLP). Utilizing the 2016 Lillehammer Youth Olympic Games (YOG) as contextual motivation, 223 young people (between...

Being a leader at large-scale sports events involves many diverse and fragmented activities and responsibilities. In this demanding setting, the staff often consists of young professional leaders (here paid leaders with a minimum of five years of leader experience). Research about young leaders at sports events has revealed that organizational boun...

This article discusses the successful bid for the 2016 Lillehammer winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG) and its incorporation within the broader youth sport strategy within organised sport in Norway. Although it is widely accepted that the argument that major sports events are a solution to problems of low levels of involvement in sport is not generall...

Ongoing discussions within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about possibly incorporating skateboarding and surfing into the Olympic program for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, has received attention because of conflicts between different skateboarding organizations campaigning to be the governing international sport federation (IF). An inclu...

While research into leadership has increased considerably over recent decades, leadership by young people is little explored (Murphy and Johnson 2011), yet at sport events it is common to see young managers (Parent and Smith-Swan 2013). A reason for this could be that sport events tend to have a restricted budget, and highly qualified and experienc...

Neo-institutional concepts of organizational change and organizational reproduction combined with implementation theory are employed to examine the implementation of the Norwegian youth sport policy (YSP) associated with the Youth Olympic Games. The YSP also called ‘youth campaign’, aims at increasing the number of young leaders, young coaches and...

ID: EASM-2015-113/R1-(627) Abstract: AIM OF THE PAPERR Mega and major sport events, especially the Olympics, are often assigned to be part of a national sport political agenda. In that respect, the 2016 Lillehammer Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG) is defined as a part of the national youth sport policy defined by the Norwegian Olympic Committee and...

ID: EASM-2015-90/R1-(598) Synopsis: This investigation shed light on the structure of co-host an event, the actors involved and the challenges and advantages that the co-host Organizing Committee (OC) met when organizing, implementing and evaluating the EYOF. The OC members had to deal with an increasing number of small stakeholders, and perceived...

Increased participation in mass sport and youth sport is often utilized by Olympic host cities and nations as a justification for bidding for major and mega sport events, such as an Olympic sports event (Girginov & Hills, 2009; Veal, Toohey, & Frawley, 2012; Coalter, 2004; Veal & Frawley, 2009; Gratton & Preuss, 2008; Hanstad & Skille, 2010). The N...

This research examines the representation of females in the executive committees of the national football associations of Germany and Norway and their international influence. Pettigrew’s contextual approach to change is used to identify the change process in governance, with a focus on pressures from outside and within sport in general and especia...

1. AIM OF ABSTRACTT The commitment of the Norwegian Olympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) to host the Winter Youth Olympic Games 2016 (YOG) in Lillehammer is a significant part of the Norwegian youth sport policy which should ensure to increase the participation of young leaders, volunteers and sportsmen within organized sport. The bi...