This study addresses the governance of the London 2012 Olympics legacy. It presents legacy not as a retrospective but a prospective concept concerned with shaping the future through interactions between the state, market and society. This entails designing systems of governance to guide and steer collective actions towards a consensus amongst various parties concerned. Four modes of governance and a range of policy instruments were examined in the delivery of sustainable London Olympics sport legacy including coercive, voluntarism, targeting and framework regulation. The British government actively created a new policy space and promoted institutional conduct consistent with its legacy visions. The current global legacy framework is lacking the governance dimension and its logic needs to be reconsidered. A meaningful sport legacy requires not top-down approaches but locally informed strategies supported by a developmental design of the Olympic Games informed by sustainable principles.

This study attempts to develop a research agenda for understanding the process of constructing a sustainable Olympic sports development legacy. The research uses a social constructivist perspective to examine the link between the 2012 London Olympic Games and sustainable sports development. The first part of the paper provides justification for the study of sport policy processes using a constructivist lens. This is followed by a section which critically unpacks sustainable sports development drawing on Mosse's ( 1998 Mosse, D. 1998. “Process-oriented approaches to development practice and social research”. In Development as process: concepts and methods for working with complexity, Edited by: Mosse, D. , Farrington, J. and Rew, A. 1–30. Oxford: Routledge. [Google Scholar] ) ideas of process-oriented research and Searle's conceptualisation of the construction of social reality. Searle's ( 1995 Searle, J. 1995. The social construction of reality, London: Penguin Books. [Google Scholar] ) concepts of the assignment of function, collective intentionality, collective rules, and human capacity to cope with the environment are considered in relation to the events and discourses emerging from the legacy vision(s) associated with the 2012 London Olympic Games. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for engaging in process-oriented research and highlights key elements, research questions, and methodological issues. The proposed constructivist approach can be used to inform policy, practice, and research on sustainable Olympic sports development legacy.

Strengthening the work of national voluntary sport organisations (VSOs) is of strategic importance as they are considered custodians of their sport and have been entrusted with its governance, management of significant public funds and provision of services to a vast network of clubs and millions of participants. Using a mixed method approach, the study examined how VSOs in the UK and Russia leveraged the 2012 London and 2014 Sochi Olympics for capacity building. The political framing of the Games as a leverageable resource stimulated VSOs’ engagement, but it was more on a tactical than strategic basis. Three main leveraging processes were employed by VSOs including aligning organisational objectives with the Games’ strategic visions, using structured Olympic programmes and teaming up with a development partner. VSOs used the Games to enhance their organisational capacity in three areas of staff qualifications, organisational learning and performance management and created public value.

Purpose: Intangible legacy encapsulates the essence of Olympism and its manifestation, the Olympic Games. Despite significant interest in the capacity of the Olympics to produce notable changes in society, conceptual difficulties in defining and measuring intangible legacy persist. The study develops a conceptual definition of intangible Olympic legacy.Design/methodology/approach: The study follows a four-step concept definition approach. It examines and integrates three strands of literature including intangibles, social interactions and public value, which is combined with insights from a longitudinal empirical investigation of intangible Olympic legacy for National Sport Organisations (NSO).Findings: The proposed concept of intangible legacy defines it an emerging combination of attributes, interactions, processes and technology, with the goal of creating public value which is the ultimate goal of the Olympic Games. Since intangible legacy is qualitative rather than quantitative, a reconsideration of the current research paradigm is also proposed.Research limitations/implications: The study develops a new analytical device for the investigation of intangible legacies for specific publics such as NSO.Practical implications: The study carries practical implications for Olympic and events/festival promoters as it allows defining and operationalising the key attributes of the concept.Originality/value: This is the first study to conceptualise intangible legacy of mega events.

This paper addresses the under-explored culture–sport management nexus and answers the question “why does it matter?”. After reviewing the current culture debates, seven main aspects of culture and related underlying processes, which provide both the focus of and the milieu within which sport management operates, are identified, including (i) normative, (ii) innovative, (iii) nomos, (iv) singular and plural, (v) dialectic of system and practice, (vi) determined by production and (vii) political. The implications of these aspects for studying sport management are then examined, and research and practical recommendations are put forward. It is argued that by focusing on culture the field of study of sport management changes. The researcher is no longer interested only in what makes people participate in sport, watch a game or how organizational structures are designed; rather, s/he is seeking to understand the underlying cultural processes that drive and facilitate people's and organizations' behaviours in sport. Sport management is interpreted both as a representation of the symbolic cultural system within which it operates and as a means of actively shaping this system. Sport managers are seen as mediators of meaning; sport organizations as institutions for socialization, acculturation and control. A call is issued for scholars working in this field to promote greater cultural sensitivity.