Institutional resilience of club sport in an extreme context: collective dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic from an institutional work lens

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an enormous challenge for individuals,organisations, and institutions as a collective of actors that constitute a field,such as club sport. In our paper, we define institutional resilience as a field’scapacity of collectively and successfully responding to the challenges of anextreme context. Following a qualitative empirical approach (content ana-lysis of 19 interviews) and an institutional work lens, we aim at analysing ofhow club sport uses institutional work to enable institutional resilience forresponding to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, we show,which actors of club sport (who?) use which institutional work activities(how?) for enabling institutional resilience in the face of the pandemic’schallenges (why?). Results indicate that institutional resilience of club sportin the COVID-19 pandemic had an emergent and dynamic nature with aniterative passing through the phases of resilience. Sport clubs were the leadagents, but also unions and associations as non-profit-organisations appliedmanifold cultural, technical, and political work activities. Beyond the refine-ment of institutional work activities for club sport, we identified COVID-19pandemic specific activities. These are visioning as a new cultural activityand reinterpreting (transforming) core operations for the digital space andlegal networking as new technical institutional work activities. Hence, thenovelty of the paper consists in advancing the conceptualisation of institu-tional resilience by illustrating the nature of institutional resilience (itscharacteristics) and by depicting institutional resilience as an outcome ofinstitutional work.