Civil repair and children's sports: The Norwegian welfare-state's reconstruction of unhealthy, undemocratic and unsafe sports

How can state politics reconstruct unhealthy, undemocratic and unsound sports as a common good? This study explores the convergence of state and sport politics. Using cultural sociology, I unearth how the Nordic welfare state reconstructs children's sport and embeds it in its broader purview of civil society. Through document-ethnography of white papers from the Ministry of Health and Care Services, Ministry of Culture, and Ministry of Childhood and Families, I clarify how the Norwegian welfare state criticizes and “repairs” children's sports by classifying its good and bad practices. The paper then reveals how this meaning-making process justifies and shapes the state's use of sport as an integration arena in civil society. The result reveals that the domain-specific politics of public health, volunteerism, and childhood and family hold three empirically interrelated yet analytically distinguishable codes. These binary codes transcend their domains to instantiate a coherent sport model that shapes how democratic integration and social criticism should be carried out in sports. Consequently, state politics can, in a culturally contingent way, (re)form sport organizations that do not have health promotion, representative democracy and “the child's best interest” as their primary functional tasks. In Norway, the state endlessly works to reshape “ bad sports” to reintegrate into its horizon of civil society. The civil repair of unhealthy, undemocratic and unsafe children's sports allows the state to use sports as a formative institution. From the perspective of the state, sport actors do not always solve all social issues, but they can learn, if principally committed, how to engage with a dynamic landscape of social problems.