ABSTRACT
As was argued in the previous chapter, in order to understand the contemporary landscape and salience of sport policy it is important to acknowledge the specific institutional context in which it developed and continues to operate. One way of constructing a framework for the analysis of the significance of institutional arrangements is through the use of the metaphor of levels of cultural embeddedness (Benson, 1982; Sabatier, 1998; Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier, 1993) where each level is partially autonomous, but embedded in a deeper level which sets limits on the degree of autonomy. While each level is rooted in the culture and history of a country, policy predispositions have a longer history and are more deeply embedded in culture than, for example, the location of responsibility for sport in the machinery of government. Consequently, it is especially important to identify deep-seated policy predispositions or ‘storylines’ (Fischer, 2003), but it is also necessary to acknowledge that while the historical and ideological (or mythological) context of policy will be significant so too will be factors such as the structure of the machinery of government and the pattern of interest group activity.
