The governance of basketball across the taiwan strait: The case of migration of the team/players

Abstract

Introduction: As previous studies had highlighted the importance of local dynamics in the interactions between groups of key stakeholders in processes affecting the development of basketball in Taiwan, for example, the establishment/collapse of the Chinese Basketball Alliance, the operation of the Super Basketball League, the development of High School Basketball League, and so on. Other than local dynamics, the sporting link with China also represents an important contextual element in the governance of basketball in Taiwan. This study therefore moved from a ‘local’ focus onto sporting links with China to explore the macro context relationship across the Taiwan Strait in the basketball system for governance issues. Methods: This study adopted a qualitative case-study approach, which was based on documentary material and semi-structured interviews, to generate a framework by which to analyze governance of Taiwan’s specific basketball system. Empirical work involved interviews with stakeholders within the elite basketball system from eight groups, namely 5 government officials, 3 politicians, 3 club representatives, 3 members of staff of sports agencies, 2 business representative/sponsors, 5 coaches/players, 3 media representatives, and 1 academic expert. Interview transcripts were subject to coding by employing Nvivo 10 qualitative data analysis software. Coding and analysis were undertaken by employing a content analysis approach in order to deal with policy making for sport and its consequences for the development of basketball. Results: The basketball link across Taiwan Strait is a critical contextual set of factors which is more than simply the basketball business and it has significance for understanding the governance system and the changing of the structure of key stakeholders as (political or sport) issues change. Conclusion: The two events in this paper, though government was a key stakeholder, the department, which ultimately took responsibility to negotiate with the club, was not the Sports Affairs Council but the Mainland Affairs Council. This reflects the fact that the government’s main concern was not sport development but national dignity. The issues of club migration and player migration illustrate how the Taiwan government, the club and the Chinese government dealt with the issue of cross-strait basketball exchange, and the actors and the interests represented in the systemic governance illustrated in this paper are almost entirely different when comparing to the operation of the CBA and the SBL. Combined with previous research including incident and process, and the two events which discussed in this paper, allows us to evaluate governance issues at different levels of specificity.