Creating a Corporate Anti-doping Culture: The Role of Bulgarian Sports Governing Bodies

Abstract

The World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) vision to promote a new moral order in sport and new forms of organization and management through the World Anti Doping Code (WADC) amount to creating a new corporate culture. The WADC's emphasis on policy implementation places sport governing bodies (SGBs) and managers at the heart of the enterprise. This represents a double challenge: (i) to the organizational culture of SGBs as it entails creating shared systems of meaning that are accepted, internalized, and acted on at every level of an organization, and (ii) to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the WADA in regard to universality and particularity, where the general organizational difficulty is how they are to operate at a global (universal) level whilst such apparently intractable differences exist at the particular (local) level. This essay employs Morgan's metaphor of organizations as cultures to develop an understanding of the process of endorsing a global anti-doping policy. It explores the enactment of the WADC using the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation as a case in point. While a good level of universal approval of the WADC has been achieved, the main issue remains how to get SGBs' practices in line with it.