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Drawing upon new institutionalist lines of thought, this article examines how the institutional design of contemporary sports betting precipitates match-fixing and frames it as individual ethical failure. Given the inherent trade-off between pursuing: (1) managerial efficiency to insulate players from outside influence and (2) ethical legitimacy to render the business of sports betting socially desirable, this study analyses how the conflicting imperatives are reconciled in two contrasting institutional designs for sports betting: (a) South Korean football betting; and (b) motorboat race betting. Employing a qualitative multi-method approach, the analysis reveals that the football-betting regime sacrifices managerial efficiency for social legitimacy, thus engendering match-fixing; however, such an institutional failure is compensated by shifting the responsibility for match-fixing to individual players. Consequently, it is suggested that who is to blame for failure is not something functionally determined; rather, it is determined politically and justified by institutional power that renders individual ethical failure a much greater crime, only because the institution is too big to fail.

Globally, "integrity" has emerged as a critical concept for sport, with scholars, government agencies and NGOs proposing the establishment of "integrity systems", comprising measures such as new policy units, ombudsmen and mediation services. The purpose of this study is to assess the coherence of this reform agenda, to determine its core features and gauge whether it constitutes a new governing paradigm and departure from "professionalisation". Drawing on case material from Australia and New Zealand, we trace the sport integrity agenda and its adoption into each country's government policies and programmes. The emerging agenda focuses on diverse risks at the periphery of "old" professionalised management, while demanding a sector-wide response and universal adherence. Coordination and regulation are emphasised (at national, state/regional and local levels), supported by central government policy frameworks and grievance detection regimes. While the integrity agenda has distinctive elements of a reform movement, preliminary evidence suggests it may become integrated under the existing logics of performance, audits and risk management. It nevertheless signals substantive changes to the conduct of sport organisations at multiple levels of the system.

Many (inter)national governments and sports organisations are implementing standardised Safe Sport policies and guidelines. However, the Western-born, rights-based norm that underlies Safe Sport can collide with pre-existing geo-sociocultural norms of local contexts. Drawing from a case study of South Korea's elite sport pathway where tightened regulations on abuse challenge the long-lasting relational hierarchy based on Confucianism, this paper examines how athletes and coaches manoeuvre within the fast-changing social order shaped by the new safeguarding policies and practices. Analysing data from semi-structured interviews with 48 participants around two Elite Sports Schools, the paper shows that the rights-based norm integral to Safe Sport is sifted through the Confucian hierarchy, generating two main shifts respectively in coaches' roles (from caring disciplinarians to professional service providers) and senior athletes' (from potential abusers to benevolent superiors). That is, individual actors re-script their relational template by negotiating between the familiar and new relational ethics. From this, the paper suggests that Safe Sport is not a straightforward process of modernising less advanced practices up to a certain standard; it requires understanding how individuals make sense of the process in their own socio-cultural contexts.

The purpose of this article is to (re)assert the importance of an organizational lens in the socio-cultural study of sport. Specifically, we aim to demonstrate the often self-perpetuating and always value-infused nature of rational design, and the organizational processes through which problems, objectives, structures, roles, identities, and knowledges are (re)constituted and privileged in the context of sport. Drawing on an institutional understanding of organizational life, we examine Swedish sports' adoption of a new integrity platform as a case of rational design. Analyzing documentary and interview data, we demonstrate how positing organization as the object of knowledge allows us to unpack how, why, and with what effects, social issues and domains become subsumed into processes of rationalization and rational organizational design.

The global expansion of sports betting has resulted in the formation of (inter)national governing regimes aimed at sustaining revenue and regulating attendant issues, including match-fixing. This article explores the workings of these regimes vis-à-vis the management of match-fixing issues in sport. More particularly, this article focuses on betting monitoring programmes as countermeasures against match-fixing and conceptualises these as social instruments that ultimately define issues and influence the wider integrity agenda of anti-match-fixing campaigns. Analysing documentary, observation and interview data from two disparate monitoring programmes, the results show that betting monitoring is a technical extension of corporate risk management, invariably reflecting the business interests of the betting industry. Therefore, the operating logic of betting monitoring defines match-fixing as an act of sabotaging the competitive edge of betting companies. Moreover, this interest-laden paradigm reigns within the broader policy agenda of sport integrity by equating the betting industry's interest with that of sport. From this, the article suggests that betting monitoring plays a part in the legitimation of commercial gambling by reframing the issue of match-fixing as a common enemy that gambling and sport join forces to combat, not a risk that gambling brings to sport.

As match-fixing has emerged as a global problem, states and sports organisations have proposed a range of countermeasures. However, despite their neutral, technocratic appearance, these instruments produce their own political effects. Drawing from a case study of the 2011 South Korean 'K-League' football match-fixing scandal that resulted in a raft of countermeasures, this article examines how match-fixing countermeasures (re)organise the power relations within the sports betting industry. Using a qualitative, interpretive multi-method approach, three consequences are suggested. First, the education programme redefines sports ethics by delivering new codes of conduct that are aligned to the demands of betting. Second, regulations instituted by the K-League and the government frame the illegal activity as infringing upon the key stakeholders' economic interests, further privileging the importance of the betting regime. Third, the sports betting monitoring system itself empowers the sole betting company as a trustworthy 'fixer' of the match-fixing problem through co-optation into its policy framework. Consequently, this study shows that key stakeholders manage the risk of losing legitimacy by showcasing their efforts to fight against match-fixing, while also taking advantage of the countermeasures to normalise the business of sports betting, thus furthering their own interests.