Sport club consultants as street-level bureaucrats in sport policy processes: conceptualising micro-level interaction styles and their macro-level consequences

Abstract

The focus of this paper is sport club consultants, an under-researched role that is uniquely situated at the interface of sport policy systems and clubs. Incumbents of this role—the label of which varies between countries—conduct club-directed developmental work to align clubs with centrally issued policies and programmes. Conceptualising sport club consultants as a sport-specific street-level bureaucrat, the paper’s purpose is, first, to analyse sport club consultants’ interaction style vis-à-vis clubs and, second, to demonstrate that broader and unintended transformative effects may follow from this rather micro practice. We propose that sport club consultants’ institutionally shaped interaction style may be operationalised along four dimensions (e.g. case prioritisation principle, shaping of interaction context, interactor positioning, communicative strategy). The substantive empirical content of these dimensions may vary between systems and the policy in question. Nonetheless, we show that system-level fragmentation, professionalisation, and centralisation are potential consequences of the work through which sport club consultants attempt to reconcile tensions between centrally distilled policies and clubs’ readiness, willingness, and ability to change.