ABSTRACT

This chapter examines key principles and concepts relating to Inter-organisational relationships (IORs) and sport development. It explains the theory relating to IORs, using relevant sport examples to demonstrate the importance of IORs in sport development (SD) and sport development legacies (SFD). An IOR is a voluntary, close, long-term, planned strategic action between two or more organisations with the objective of serving mutually beneficial purposes in a problem domain. A useful approach to understanding the structure of IORs is social network analysis (SNA). SNA is a wide-ranging combination of theories and methods that places emphasis on relationships rather than the characteristics of the actors involved. With SNA, organisations are depicted in network diagrams as nodes that are linked by ties. The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm argues that an organisation's sustainable competitive advantage is underpinned by possession of resources that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable and non-substitutable.