From professional identity to organizational membership and back. Narrative sense-making in sport organizations: The case of referees

Purpose – Narrative is believed to be a crucial component of sense-making in organizations, and previous research in the field suggests that multiple levels and forms of narrative are inherent to the definition of professional identities (Clarke et al., 2009; Ybema et al., 2009; Brown and Lewis, 2011). For example, narrative can be found in the stories told by organizational actors as they informally interact in the workplace, in the formalized basic assumptions that support organizational strategymaking, in the accounts people give of their work, and in the artifacts they produced and experienced while engaged in accomplishing tasks. The purpose of this paper is to consider narrative as a way of giving sense to organizational membership, of constituting an overall and possibly shared sense of direction, of focussing one’s professional identity, and of enabling and/or constraining the ongoing activities of actors. The context of the research was given by a group of sport federations enrolled within the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), which is the national most authoritative network of professional local sport organizations. Design/methodology/approach – Participants involved in the study were 42 professional referees belonging to this network and active in different sport disciplines and 12 people from the CONI management. In-depth narrative interviews were collected in the aim to investigate the narrative cues revealing the organizational sense-making processes that animate the representation of this professional identity both at a subjective and at an organizational level. Data have been explored adopting the semiotic square and diatextual analysis as to highlight the strict relationship between text, context and interlocutors. Findings – Data have been explored adopting the semiotic square and diatextual analysis as to highlightthestrictrelationship betweentext,contextandinterlocutors. Resultsshowedthatthere was an evident gap between what the management formally defined as strategic vision, mission and culturalguidelinesthatactuallyshapetheorganizationalidentityoftheCONIandwhatwasconcretely experienced by its actors, in this case the referees. Originality/value – Most of the studies conducted in sport organizations focussed either on an intra-organizational level investigating the specific features of given professional categories such as athletes and/or coaches, or at an inter-organizational level, paying attention mostly to the marketing andnetworkingstrategiesorientedtowardstakeholders.Ontheotherhand,moststudiesconductedon referees have devoted attention strictly to performance assessment, that, in line with a positivist approach, considered the latter as an output of situational and psychological variables (e.g. Marie, 1999; MacMahon et al., 2007). Conversely, the findings coming from the present study contributed to support the promotion of an alternative organizational approach, more specifically based on the strategic relevance of horizontal (within the federations) and vertical (between the federations and the center of the network) communication as to enhance the identification process which give sense to the organizational basic assumptions.