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's capacity of collectively and successfully responding to the challenges of an extreme context. Following a qualitative empirical approach (content analysis of 19 interviews) and an institutional work lens, we aim at analysing of how club sport uses institutional work to enable institutional resilience for responding 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's challenges (why?). Results indicate that institutional resilience of club sport in the COVID-19 pandemic had an emergent and dynamic nature with an iterative passing through the phases of resilience. Sport clubs were the lead agents, but also unions and associations as non-profit-organisations applied manifold cultural, technical, and political work activities. Beyond the refinement of institutional work activities for club sport, we identified COVID-19 pandemic specific activities. These are visioning as a new cultural activity and reinterpreting (transforming) core operations for the digital space and legal networking as new technical institutional work activities. Hence, the novelty of the paper consists in advancing the conceptualisation of institutional resilience by illustrating the nature of institutional resilience (its characteristics) and by depicting institutional resilience as an outcome of institutional work.