Abstracts Vol. 4 (No.1 / 2007)

Heinz-Dieter Horch and Norbert Schütte

Change in community sport departments in Germany

To what extent and in what ways are sport departments of local governments changing in Germany and why are they changing? These questions were examined in the year 2000 through the use of a mailed questionnaire which was distributed to the population of sport departments in Germany (response rate 67%). The examination resulted in the following findings: Since the 1990s, sport departments in Germany have undergone considerable changes, although the greater the change, the less often it takes place. The empirical analysis revealed that economic theory – which is at the heart of new public management theory and which argues most of all using expected effects (benefits and costs) of change – can fruitfully be supplemented in explaining the different extent of change by various other competing general theories of organizational change such as coalition theory (power of advocates and opponents), resource dependence theory (amount of fiscal crisis of community) and contin¬gency theory (size of community, position in East or West Germany). The three influencing factors which predicted the change best were the size of the community, the amount of fiscal problems of the community, and the lack of fear that the change will lead to abandoning the governmental goal that sport should be available for the poor.

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