SPORT 1913 - 2013

REVISITING THE STRUCTURES AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CSIT A 20 Years Follow-Up Study

Introduction Sport seems to have strengthened its position and role in society. Its acceptance and power are based on its positive effects on man and society. Sport and physical activity play a role with growing importance in school physical education, health care, working places, reha- bilitation centres, homes for the elderly and the disabled as well as leisure for all popula- tion groups. In addition, sport has become an actor in business, industry and in the media. Originally sport stems from play and games with voluntary participation. Today it is a pro- fession for many top athletes, coaches and managers. In a changing society, sport as an institution is changing as well (Hentilä 2010). But in which ways and to which directions? This question calls for research in the field. The purpose of this study is to find out how the CSIT (International Workers and Am- ateurs in Sports Confederation) is doing to- day. How have its structures and functions changed since 1990 to 2010 – that is, during 20 years? And how have the assessments of the key persons of the member organizations – that is, the executive officers – changed the future of the worker sport movement? To be more precise, the purpose is to de- scribe what kind of structures the CSIT carries out in terms of national and individual mem- berships, sport clubs and other type of local units, paid personnel as well as financial sources. How does the future of the interna- tional and national worker sport movement look like? Will its status and significance in-

crease or decrease? Furthermore, the purpose is to find out which kinds of changes relate to the above mentioned issues. The origins of the approach lays in a study on structures and functions of the worker sport that we conducted for the CSIT’s International Seminar in Pajulahti, Finland in 1991 (Olin 1992). The seminar was organized by the Finn- ish Workers Sport Federation (TUL) under the theme “New Dimensions of Workers’ Sport”. At that time, it was found that there was neither systematically collected information nor data available to get a holistic picture about the worker sport movement in different countries, not even within the CSIT, except for some stud- ies (Deveen 1988; Jyangura 1990). Therefore, a decision was made to carry out an empirical study with data gathered mainly from English questionnaires in the CSIT member unions (Olin 1992). This study was repeated in 2011 us- ing the same survey method (Olin 2012). If the study had not been carried out 20 years ago, the kind of information needed to cover – at least to some degree – the lack of knowledge on change in worker sport organi- zations would still be missing, and also the neglected area of sport sociology would have still been waiting for researchers. Today it is known that the most comprehensive publica- tion in the world so far on history of the inter- national worker sport movement is presented by Kruger and Riordan (1996) as editors of the book entitled ”The Story of Worker Sport”. It describes the historical development of the worker sport in different countries and re-

Kalevi Olin / Finland

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