Sports Organizations and Organizing Sports: Critical Reflections

From June 5 to 8, 2018, the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) will hold its World Congress at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. The conference theme is Sports Organizations and Organizing Sports: Critical Reflections

Lausanne, the Olympic capital, is home to the headquarters of no less than 46 international sports federations, and therefore provides the opportunity to foster connections and debate between the scholarly community and the (inter)national sports community.

The aim of the main theme of this annual conference will be to tackle the links between the social sciences, especially sociology, and sports organizations.

We will address how the social sciences and sports organizations influence each other. This will be achieved by exploring two main aspects of this relationship. On the one hand, we aim to consider how research is integrated into sports organizations and what its influence is on factors such as gender, ageing, social class and power relations, violence, risk and globalization. This will involve key areas of interest, such as the contribution of the social sciences and their ability to transform sports organizations, its actors, policies, representations and values, as well as the role and added value of social scientists in sport organizations, as well as interrogating policy coherence within the sport sector as a cross-cutting theme. On the other hand, we will also examine how sports organizations impact the social sciences. For example, which theoretical and methodological issues are raised by the way sports organizations function, and how can the study of sports organizations help to further extend wider sociological knowledge?