CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY
3.4 R ESEARCH S UBJECTS
Among the many international sports organisations that would be able to claim an international regime status, the domestic policy influence of the Olympic International Federations is especially visible due to the political and economic magnitude of the Olympic Games. Therefore, this research focuses on the International Federations that govern an Olympic sport (or a number of sports) at the global level, particularly those sports that are established on the Sports Programme of the Summer Olympic Games (s. Table 7, p 72). In addition to their obvious Olympic association, these Olympic International Federations also share a similar sports governance vertical network (Croci & Forster, 2004) (s. Figure 2, p33) as well as an external environment as one of the initial actors of the now ‘total Olympic system’ (Chappelet, 2016, p. 747);
(s. Figure 3, p36). As suggested by Forster and Pope (2004), these international federations serve a collective role in the global civil society and should be considered as a group. As a result, purposive sampling is required to ensure that the data collected
reflect the compliance strategies adopted in the field. In this section, we will first give a general overview of the summer Olympic sports federations and discuss the significance of their Olympic status. Second, we will identify relevant indicators to sample the researched Olympic IFs. Amongst the international sports federations, we intend to draw particular attention to the Olympic IFs on the Summer Olympic Programme. Table 7 (p72) provides a full list of all 28 Olympic IFs.
Table 7 List of IFs on the Sports Programme of the Summer Olympic Games
Federation Title Acronym Official Website HQs Locations Fédération Internationale de Natation FINA fina.org Lausanne (SUI) World Archery Federation WA worldarchery.org Lausanne (SUI) International Association of Athletics
Federations
IAAF iaaf.org Monaco (MON)
Badminton World Federation BWF bwfbadminton.org Kuala Lumpur (MAS) Fédération Internationale de
Basketball
FIBA fiba.basketball Mies (SUI)
International Boxing Association AIBA aiba.org Lausanne (SUI) International Canoe Federation ICF canoeicf.com Lausanne (SUI) Union Cycliste Internationale UCI uci.ch Aigles(SUI) Fédération É questre Internationale FEI fei.org Lausanne (SUI) Fédération Internationale d'Escrime FIE fie.org Lausanne (SUI) Fédération Internationale de Football
Association
FIFA fifa.com Zurich(SUI)
International Golf Federation IGF igfgolf.org Lausanne (SUI) Fédération Internationale de
Gymnastique
FIG
fig-gymnastics.com
Lausanne (SUI)
International Handball Federation IHF ihf.info Basel (SUI) International Hockey Federation FIH fih.ch Lausanne (SUI) International Judo Federation IJF ijf.org Budapest (HUN) Union Internationale de Pentathlon UIPM pentathlon.org Monaco (MON)
Federation Title Acronym Official Website HQs Locations Fédération Internationale des
Sociétés d'Aviron
FISA worldrowing.com Lausanne (SUI)
World Rugby WR worldrugby.org Dublin (IRL)
World Sailing WS sailing.org London(GBR)
International Shooting Sport
International Tennis Federation ITF itftennis.com London (GBR) International Triathlon Union ITU triathlon.org Lausanne (SUI) Fédération Internationale de
The Olympic Status: International Sports Federations. With our exclusive
focus on the Olympic IFs, it is helpful to outline the significance of the Olympic Status to international sports federations. By Olympic Status, we refer to the extent to which an international sports federation is associated with or has an influence within the Olympic Movement which is centred around the IOC and the Olympic Games.
Thorpe and Wheaton’s (2019, p. 469) research on the international governing bodies seeking to become Olympic sports shows that their greatest concern is the “loss of autonomy and control over the development and directions of their sport.” There are two implications of Thorpe and Wheaton’s (2019, p. 469) research. First, the status of
an Olympic sport entails certain restrictions imposed on how IFs govern their sports.
Second, there is a difference between governing an Olympic sport and non-Olympic sport. Furthermore, there are also differences between the 28 Summer Olympic Federations with regard to their political influence and economic significance to the Olympic Games or the IOC. There are two indicators that show this.
First, the Olympic Revenue Groupings demonstrate, largely, the commercial contribution of each IF to the summer Olympic Games. Only these 28 full members of ASOIF whose Olympic Status is claimed through being referenced in the bylaws of Rule 45 in the Olympic Charter are eligible to receive a share of the Olympic Games revenue (ASOIF, 2018a). Table 8 (p75) displays the criteria used to evaluate the performance of each sport during the Games period which are then translated into the Games Revenue Groupings (Table 9, p76). These 28 members of ASOIF are grouped into A, B, C, D and E (Ryan, 2017). The grouping indicates their corresponding share of revenue, hence their Olympic Status. A represents the group that received the highest share of the Olympic revenue.
Table 8 Olympic Revenue Share Indicators Page views on the Games' official website Number of internet searches
Unique viewers on most popular websites Video views on YouTube
Social media user generated content - mentions Social media publication content - reactions Page views on olympic.org
General Public 15 Favourite sports among the general public Spectators 10 Number of tickets requested in host country
Percentage of available tickets sold Press 10 Number of press articles
Favourability - tone of press articles
Universality 5
Number of National Federations that organized National Championships
Number of continents that won medals
Adapted from “The International Olympic & Sports Movement”, by Ryan A., Executive Director, ASOIF, a presentation document for the International Academy of Sport Science and Technology (AISTS) 2017, p. 33.
According to Ryan (2017, p. 35), the sport of track and field is estimated to receive about 40 million for the cycle of Rio 2016, swimming and gymnastics each 32 million. The sports in the groupings B, C, D and E respectively receive 25, 17, 15, and 13 million for the same cycle. It is fair to say that the higher the share of Olympic revenue of an IF, the higher is a sport’s contribution to the commercial success of the
Games; consequently, the higher its Olympic Status.
Table 9 Olympic Revenue Groupings Category Sports
A Swimming, track and field, gymnastics
B Basketball, cycling, football, tennis, volleyball
C Archery, badminton, boxing, judo, rowing, shooting, table tennis, weightlifting
D Canoeing, equestrian, fencing, handball, hockey, triathlon, wrestling
E Modern pentathlon, golf, rugby
Note. Adapted from “The International Olympic & Sports Movement”, by Ryan
A., Executive Director, ASOIF, a presentation document for the International Academy of Sport Science and Technology (AISTS) 2017, p. 34.
The second indicator concerns the athletes’ quotas of each IF at the Olympic Games which particularly indicates the pertinence of a sport in the Olympic Games (s.
Table 10, p76) because the total athletes’ quota is capped at 10,500 (Olympic Charter,
2018, p. 84). As can be seen, athletics and aquatics sports represent the higher percentage of athletes, 17.9 percent and 13.3 percent, respectively. The team sports, namely, football, volleyball, basketball, hockey, rugby, and handball, in general have less events than individual sports.
Table
10
The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 Athletes Quota by SportsSports Athlete Quotas %
1 Athletics 1,900 17.9%
2 Aquatics 1,410 13.3%
Sports Athlete Quotas %
Copyright 2017 by IOC. * stands for team sports.
Sampling International Sport Federations. The international sport federations
examined in past research were often selected based on a sampling of critical or politically important cases (Chen, 2009). Therefore, unicorn policy regimes such as the International Football Federation (FIFA) or the International Olympic Committee (IOC) were almost exclusively chosen to signify the entire sports movement (Clausen, 2018;
Forster & Pope, 2004; Sugden & Tomlinson, 1998, 2002; Tomlinson, 2014). This research aims to proceed with a maximum variation sampling approach (Chen, 2009) which ought to cover a wide range of IF organisational capacities, i.e. annual revenues or operating budgets. Then, interview participants are reached out to through a snowballing approach in order to gain access to those informants with an abundance of relevant information (Chen, 2009). While this research intends to include a wider range of IFs with varying capacities, there are not many existing parameters that are suitable as sampling criteria. The Association of the Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) conducts a biannual assessment of its member IFs and has put in place a categorisation in the Second Review of International Federation Governance by ASOIF (2018b). There, the IFs are categorised into small, medium and large based on the staff number and annual revenue which are self-reported by the IFs. Eight (8) out of twenty-eight (28) IFs are categorised as small IFs, twelve (12) as medium, and another twenty-eight (8) as large (ASOIF, 2018b). Table 11 (p79) gives an overview of the categorisation.
Table 11 Olympic IF Categorisation by ASOIF
Category Criteria Number of IFs (28)
Small <20 staff (<8m CHF revenue with 1 exception) 8
Medium 20-49 staff (revenue varies) 12
Large >49 staff (revenue >20m CHF) 8
Adopted from the “Second Review of International Federation Governance”, by ASOIF, 2018, p. 25. Copyright 2018 by ASOIF.
There is evidence of a correlation between this categorisation (based on staff number /annual revenue) and an IF’s performance in overall governance practice, i.e.
how developed their policies and procedures are and how far these policies are implemented (ASOIF, 2018b). Therefore, the ASOIF categorisation is considered as the most relevant indicator of IFs’ compliance inducement capacity; however, the figures of individual IFs are not published in full in the ASOIF report.
According to Table 11 (p79), there are eight small IFs that have less than 20 staff and less than eight million (CHF) revenue with 1 exception, twelve medium IFs that have 20-49 staff and eight large IFs that have more than 49 staff and over 20 million annual revenue among the 28 summer Olympic IFs. Table 12 (p81) shows the basic information collected about the sampled IFs in this research. The capacity of the sampled IFs ranges from two large, four medium, to two small IFs. We consider this sample as highly corresponding to the actual distribution of IFs’ capacity levels.
Besides the ASOIF categorisation, we consider the operating expenditure an
even more relevant indicator because it indicates the amount of money an IF actually spends every year. We extracted the information of IFs’ operating expenditure from IFs’
audited financial statements published on the respective official websites. We are able to obtain the operating expenditure of all sampled IFs except for FIVB and FIBA. For these two IFs the researcher estimates a 50 million operating budget based on the staff numbers and their Olympic Groupings As can be seen in Table 12, the operating expenditure of the sampled IFs also shows a wide range from 6.5 to 50 million (s. Table 12, p81).
Although we do not consider the Olympic Revenue Grouping a particularly precise indicator of IFs’ capacity, it does give us some supplementary information to approximate the true capacity level of IFs, especially considering that we do not have the full picture of all the sampled IFs’ ASOIF categorisation and operating expenditures.
We rank the indicators available according to their relevance, i.e. to what extent the indicator tells us about IFs’ capacity. The ASOIF categorisation (ASOIF, 2018b) is ranked the highest, followed by the average operating expenditure extracted from IFs’
published audited accounts, and then the last is the Olympic revenue groupings. As can be seen, the first two parameters roughly correspond to each other. However, it stands out that FINA has a large operating expenditure and is ranked in the highest group in the Olympic Revenue Groupings but chooses to remain small in terms of staff number,
and is categorised as a medium IF in the ASOIF Categorisation. After consulting all indicators available to us, we are able to put together Table 12 (p 81), in which we rank the IFs’ capacity level, from high to low, as FIBA, FIVB, FINA, BWF, ITU, FISA, UWW, and WA. Overall, the sampled IFs are diverse enough to be considered as representing the 28 Summer Olympic International Federations.
Table 12 The Basic Information about the Sampled IFs
FIBA FIVB FINA BWF ITU FISA UWW WA
Note. ASOIF’s categorisation does not disclose information about individual IFs. The ASOIF categorisation labelled for each IF in table 12 is based on an estimation arising from staff numbers verified by the interview participants. The data on average operating expenditures (annually) are marked in million and based on the financial statement of 2017 to 2018 published on the IFs’ official websites. FIBA and FIVB’s financial statement is not published; 50 million is an estimated number based on the researcher’
best guess. The data about the number of member federations is from ASOIF’s official website. https://www.asoif.com/
3.4.1 Selection of Interview Participants
The selection of interviewees is based on two criteria, their job function and their seniority or information abundance via purposive and snowball sampling (Chen, 2009):
(1) Job Functions: The researcher targeted staff who are responsible for the relevant functions of an IF, mainly development, legal, governance and membership service, and general administration.
(2) Seniority and information abundance: The researcher aimed to interview staff members serving in the same organisation or targeted function with at least a good level of operational decision-making authority preferably for a minimum of one Olympic Cycle.
In total, 12 interviews have been conducted over the period of February to June 2020 across the eight IFs. All twelve participants are senior staff in leading roles of their relevant functions or of the IF organisation.
We have identified the job junction general administration (top management of an IF) as the most relevant to answer the research questions. When we were not able to approach the top management, we identified the function of NF development as the next relevant to shed light on stage 1 and II. For the strategies in stage III and IV, we identified the function of legal and governance affairs to be the second relevant (s. Table
Table 13 Identification of the Best Candidates For Interviews Within Each of the Four
Stages of the Theoretical Framework
Best Candidate Second Best Candidate national federations legal and/or governance affairs
Stage IV The top management positions, i.e.
general secretary, CEO or equivalent
Leader or senior staff in charge of national federations legal and/or governance affairs
Among the final twelve interview participants (s. Table 14, p84), eight are responsible for the function of development, whose job title includes head of the department, director or senior manager. Of these, five participants have five to ten years’
experience in the same function, and three participants have well more than ten years of experience. Another three of the interview participants are holding a high administrative positon. With regard to the function of general administration (top management of an IF), the job titles of participants include (deputy) general secretary, executive director or managing director, etc. Only one of the interviewees works in a legal or governance function. The fact that not more interviewees with these functions could be recruited is likely due to the sensitivity of the legal or governance function.
Overall, the two criteria have been fulfilled by the interview sample. The total number of interview participants and IFs was determined based on the level of information saturation, i.e. no more interviews were conducted when additional interviews no longer added any new emergent themes (Chen, 2009; Saunders et al., 2018).
To ensure personal data is well protected, any summary interview content or direct quotations from the interviews that are made available through academic publication or other academic outlets will be anonymised so that the interviewees cannot be identified, and care will be taken to ensure that other information in the interview that could expose their identity is not revealed.
Table 14 The List of Interview Participants
# Function, Seniority & Relevance Date Duration Via A Senior role in development, five years, 9 Feb 42m46s Face-to-Face B Leading role in development, ten years 17 Feb 1h55s Face-to-Face C* Leading role in development, five years 20 Feb 1h13m6s Face-to-Face D Leading role in development,15 years 2 Mar 38m6s Conference call E Top management, 15 years 10 Mar 33m Conference call F* Leading role in legal and governance,
five years. 12 Mar 43m9s Face-to-Face
G* Leading role in development, 15 years 23 Mar 32m36 Conference call I* Leading role in development, ten years 20 Mar 1h8m21s Conference call J Top management, five years 15 May 1h12h44s Conference call K* Top management, 15 years 2 May 1h45m31 Conference call L* Senior role in development, 5 years, 17 April 42m35s Conference call N* Leading role in development, 20 years 1 June 1h 15m30s Conference call Note. All interviews were conducted in the year of 2020. *The participants who answer the researcher’s follow-up some questions with emails
3.4.1 Interview process and data treatment
As of February 2020, the researcher started to identify potential interview participants based on the selection criteria set out in 3.4.1, and sent out invitations to schedule an interview meeting. In the invitation, the interview participants were provided with the interview questions, the research topic and objectives, as well as the ethical standards applied regarding anonymization as well as data storage. A research consent form can be found in Annex A. Most of the interview participants and the researcher were acquainted due to previous professional encounters. However, to be able to interview the senior staff of international sports federations, the researcher reached out to ASOIF for stronger referrals.
In the daily context, ‘compliance’ is often referred to as a legal matter, having the connotation that non-compliance entails consequences, such as sanctioning. The working definition of compliance in this research is the inducement of compliant behaviours of member federations, which includes but is not limited to the legal proceeding implied in the daily context. Therefore, the working definition of compliance is specifically elaborated before the interviews to avoid reservation of the interviewees.
The interviews were recorded with an audio recording device and transcribed using a certified software Sonia.ai, an online automatic transcription service based on
artificial intelligence computing techniques. The average transcription accuracy of said service is around 80 percent. For each processed interview transcription, the researcher then manually edited the script according to the audio or video file.
After anonymising personal or specific subject information as well as cleaning colloquialism, an edited transcript of the interview was sent back to the interviewees for review, a common ‘member checking’ validity procedure utilised in qualitative study
(Creswell & Miller, 2000, p. 127).
According to the ethical standards in qualitative research (Wiles, 2013), we ensure full anonymization of the interview participants, and a data treatment protocol is in place. First, any information that could disclose their sports is neutralised. Second, specific activities and terms used in their statutory documents, for example, congress, general assembly, or general meeting that are equivalent to one another in terms of their statutory status, are randomly used to replace one another. Third, if specific countries are mentioned, only the continental information will appear in the interview transcript quotation, e.g., an African Country. Not only anonymization protects the privacy of interview participants, but also the promise of proper anonymization by the researcher can increase the trust from interview participants to disclose more trustworthy information. Gaining the trust of the interview participants is crucial, as the context of international sports federations is highly political.
One major obstacle amid the interview invitation process was the outbreak of Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic. As of March 2020, Switzerland had imposed a strict social distancing restriction. Not surprisingly, the inconvenience of daily mobility as well as the ongoing public health concerns were an added complication to interview data collection. A number of the face-to-face interviews had to be rescheduled to a much later date and changed into an on-line conference call. Without face-to-face interactions, some of the emotional nuances of the interviewees might not have been optimally grasped (Janghorban et al., 2014; Salmons, 2014; Weller, 2017), but it did provide us with an opportunity to interview participants outside of Switzerland.