Sport Integrity As a Future-Making Process: Examining the Construction of Anti-Doping Institutional Infrastrcuture in Australia

Aim and Research Questions
This study investigates the integrity of sport as a future making process enacted by the development of anti-doping institutional infrastructure. Incidents of athlete doping act as field configuring events, simultaneously exemplifying dystopian futures that reinforce negative connotations of athletes as ‘drug-cheats’, whilst providing the rationale for political and financial support to incrementally construct anti-doping institutional infrastructure. By demonstrating the process of institutional infrastructure elaboration, we articulate how issue fields change from one type (i.e., an interstitial issue field) to another (i.e., a bridging issue field). Two research questions guide our empirical inquiry: (1) what processes drive institutional infrastructure elaboration? and (2) how does institutional infrastructure elaboration change field types?

Theoretical Background and Literature Review
Cheating via the use of performance enhancing drugs, weakens the legitimacy of sports standing in society and requires ongoing management to maintain the fairness of sport (Read et al., 2019; Kihl, 2020). Institutional infrastructure refers to the “cultural, structural and relational elements that generate the normative, cognitive and regulative forces that reinforce field governance” (Hinings et al., 2017, p. 163) and include elements such as regulators and field configuring events. In the context of this study anti-doping institutional infrastructure refers to the legislative powers, resources, education, and testing powers a national anti-doping agency possesses in order to enact anti-doping measures within a given country.
Analytically our focus is on the issue field of anti-doping within Australia. Issue fields are defined as fields that “become centers of debates in which competing interests negotiate over issue interpretation […] field formation is not a static process; new forms of debate emerge in the wake of triggering events that cause a reconfiguration of field membership and/or interaction patterns” (Hoffman, 1999, p. 351). To assess how institutional infrastructure changed field institutional issue field types we enacted Zietsma et al. (2017) two-by-two typology which produced four types of field conditions: contested, fragmented, aligned/aligning, and established. The typology is based on two elements (1) the degree of elaboration of institutional infrastructure (high, low), and (2) the prioritization of logics within a given field (settled, unsettled). Anti-doping has always maintained a relative settled prioritization of logics, with integrity and fair play central to the phenomena of sport. However, a substantial aspect of anti-doping institutional infrastructure included the creation of international and national anti-doping governance and regulations overtime, consequently it is this elaboration of cultural, structural, and relational elements over time and their role in reinforcing field governance that is the focus of this study.

Research Design, Methodology and Data Analysis
Our study examines how anti-doping institutional infrastructure was created in Australia. To do so, process research was deemed necessary (Langley, 1999). Data were collected from secondary sources between 1972 and 2022 and included over1000 pages of verbatim parliamentary debates on seven pieces of legislation (plus five amendments to these legislative acts) related to mitigating doping by athletes. Supporting these data, we also analyzed several Senate reports related to drugs in sport, 40 annual reports from national anti-doping related organizations, and various support documents such as investigations, public reports, and books (e.g., biographies of key decision makers). Analytically, we adopted a ‘temporal bracketing’ approach common to process studies (Langley, 1999). As its name suggests, temporal bracketing involves decomposing projects into phases or project sequences, that provide temporal units of analysis that can be analyzed to understand progressions over time (Brunet et al., 2021).

Results/Findings and Discussion **
Drawing from Zietsma et al. (2017), our findings reveal that the field of anti-doping evolved from an interstitial issue field to a bridging issue field in three distinct temporal brackets: aligning (1972-1987), aligned (1988-2005), and established (2006-2022). In the pursuit of creating a ‘fair’ future for sport marked by equal competition between athletes. Each temporal bracket (i.e., time period) witnessed an elaboration of anti-doping institutional infrastructure, including substantive increases in funding, legislated powers, and controls over the individual liberty of citizens that are also professional athletes. our research investigates shifts in field conditions from aligning, to aligned, and finally an established anti-doping issue field.

Conclusion, Contribution, and Implication **
The past fifty years has seen the substantive elaboration of anti-doping institutional infrastructure to produce and enact a future of ‘clean’ and ‘fair’ sport – free from performance enhancing drugs and based on integrity. The accumulation and expansion of resources, powers, and legislation (e.g., funding, educating, testing, investigating, and arbitrating doping) means that efforts to produce a fairer future sport environment is now supported with a highly elaborated (i.e., established) and interdependent (i.e., bridging) institutional infrastructure to support the anti-doping issue field. One of the key practical contributions this study makes is as an exemplar for other countries to follow who may be looking to advance their anti-doping approach via legislative interventions.