Strategic Change in Response to an Environmental Jolt: Rugby and the Olympic Games

Abstract

The sport management field is relatively new, but there are now over one thousand sport management programs in universities around the world. This ubiquity spawned Chalip’s (2006) call for sport management to become a distinct and legitimate academic discipline. Sport management has borrowed theory and models from a range of disciplines including health sciences, psychology, management, economics, and communications. Rightly, those are well-established, highly credible disciplines. However, a prominent way to advance any academic discipline is through theory development. This thesis introduces a new model, the Integrated Change Model (ICM), which collaborates and extends sport management research in organisational design, organisational change, and institutional theory as a contribution to the theoretical base of sport management. To further develop and evolve the ICM past a conceptual framework, the present research set forth to explore organisational change in response to an environmental jolt. The context chosen was the Olympic Games’ inclusion of rugby, specifically rugby’s abbreviated version of “Sevens,” to begin at the 2016 Games. The need for the ICM created three aims for the present study: 1) what; 2) how; and, 3) why changes occur in organisations (in this case, rugby national governing bodies) due to an environmental jolt (i.e. Olympic inclusion). It was of particular interest to understand the different responses among organisations in the same sector (i.e. international rugby competition). The research question was developed to satisfy those three aims, and therefore inform the new model: To what extent do organisations within the same sector vary in their response to the same environmental jolt?