SHIFTING IDEOLOGY AND INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS: INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN ENGLISH COUNTY CRICKET

First-class County cricket in England became socially constructed as an institutional carrier of an ideology of English moral character during the Victorian era from the 1850s. It was structured both as a field of cultural production and as a field of interorganisational collaboration. Located in the institutional theory literature, the thesis explores the theoretical issues of ideology, as a set of normative beliefs and values, and of institution, both as organisations infused with value and as social systems of shared taken-for-granted meaning. Cricket’s ideology embedded particular logics for organising the domestic County game. A historical reconstruction of the institution of English first-class County cricket supports the premise that these ideologically-based logics, as manifested in the structures and practices adopted by County cricket clubs, changed substantively during the period from 1937 to 1967. This raises the questions of how institutional logics change and, more specifically, how new logics which contradict the ideology that constitutes a cultural institution become incorporated into the institution. These questions, along with the research design for the thesis, are framed as emergent from retrospective sensemaking, which was occasioned by paradoxical cues extracted in the early stages of data collection. Data were collected initially through interviews at three first-class County clubs in England and Wales. Refinement of the research question through sensemaking prompted the collection of archival data, in the form of original field-level documents held by the Marylebone Cricket Club, the game’s administrators during the juncture of institutional change. These data were analysed using the method of ‘documents in action’, in which the production, consumption and content of documents are analysed as active agents in the construction and reconstruction of an institutional reality. This analysis focused on (i) the introduction of a knock-out cup competition, as a structural innovation which manifested the earthing of modern logics onto traditional ideology, and (ii) the instant qualification of overseas players, as a process of interest-seeking action at the organisational level to manipulate and redefine the institutional structure. The interview data, collected from County players and administrators 37 years after the rule for instant qualification for overseas players was approved, provided an opportunity to explore more deeply, at the microlevel, how actors negotiate, prioritise and subvert the different dimensions of rationality of institutionalised practices. The thesis concludes that the process of institutional change was an ongoing struggle, driven by functional pressures, between cultural and economic capital in defining the boundaries of County cricket as entertainment, as sporting competition and as vehicle for player development. New logics were earthed as interest-seeking County political action redefined the rules which carried the institutional structure and as actors evaluated the rationalities of those rules against prioritised interests