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Drawing upon new institutionalist lines of thought, this article examines how the institutional design of contemporary sports betting precipitates match-fixing and frames it as individual ethical failure. Given the inherent trade-off between pursuing: (1) managerial efficiency to insulate players from outside influence and (2) ethical legitimacy to render the business of sports betting socially desirable, this study analyses how the conflicting imperatives are reconciled in two contrasting institutional designs for sports betting: (a) South Korean football betting; and (b) motorboat race betting. Employing a qualitative multi-method approach, the analysis reveals that the football-betting regime sacrifices managerial efficiency for social legitimacy, thus engendering match-fixing; however, such an institutional failure is compensated by shifting the responsibility for match-fixing to individual players. Consequently, it is suggested that who is to blame for failure is not something functionally determined; rather, it is determined politically and justified by institutional power that renders individual ethical failure a much greater crime, only because the institution is too big to fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In speedboat racing in Japan, men and women compete under the same conditions and are randomly assigned to mixed-sex or single-sex groups for each race. We use a sample of over 140,000 individual-level records to examine how male-dominated circumstances affect women's racing performance. Our fixed-effects estimates reveal that women's race time is slower in mixed-sex than all-women races, whereas men's race time is faster in mixed-sex than men-only races. The same result is found for place in race. Moreover, in mixed-sex races, men are more aggressive, as proxied by lane changing, than women in spite of the risk of being penalized for rule infringement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motorboat racing is a sport organised as public gambling in Japan. As well as physical strength and driving technique, skills to adjust equipment are critical for racers to win the race. Most racers participate in small groups to share knowledge and cost of the modification of propellers, which suggests that social capital could constitute another factor in winning the race. Using comprehensive panel data of motorboat racers, this study is the first to analyse determining factors in racers' performance, focusing on social capital as well as physical factors. Estimation results reveal that bridging social capital exerts no effect on performance while bonding social capital has positive impacts on performance. The latter effect is particularly salient for inexperienced racers who most need psychological aid backed by strong ties. The results are consistent with the contingency theory in social capital studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motorboat racing is a sport organized as public gambling in Japan. As well as physical strength and driving technique, skills to adjust equipment are critical for racers to win a race. Based on the contingency theory of social capital, this study analysed comprehensive panel data of motorboat racers and revealed that bonding and bridging social capital had different impacts on performance according to life cycle stages of racers and changes in regulation. First, bonding social capital has a positive impact on performance when racers are less experienced and most need psychological aid stemming from strong ties. Second, bridging social capital has a positive impact on performance when racers are more experienced and have accumulated absorptive capacity to learn efficiently from diverse sources of knowledge. Third, both bonding and bridging social capital lose their explanatory power after the changes in regulation that shifted ownership of propellers from racers to the authority, which could mitigate the significance of the formation of small groups among racers to share cost and knowledge regarding the improvement in propellers. Research and managerial implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether bonding and bridging social capital of professional athletes affect their performance and whether the impacts vary according to their life cycle stages.Design/methodology/approach This study establishes an unbalanced panel of motorboat racers in Japan, and estimates a fixed-effects negative binomial regression model to analyze determining factors in the number of wins in a final, focusing on not only physical factors but also social capital.Findings Bridging social capital, measured by the number of racers in the same regional division, has no impact on performance. Bonding social capital, measured by the number of racers who graduated the training institute in the same period, has positive impacts on performance. This positive effect is more salient among racers who are less experienced, and thus need to extract benefits from social capital to augment limited internal resources.Originality/value This study adds statistical evidence to previous literature on the contingency theory that different types of social capital have different impacts on performance under different environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natura 2000, the nature network based on the European Bird and Habitat Directives, is explicitly grounded on ecological science. To acquire a permit under the Dutch Nature Conservation Act, an appropriate assessment of significant effects must be conducted based on the best available scientific knowledge. In this way the scientific and policy world are directly linked. This article focuses on ‘significant effect’ as a boundary object to analyse how science–policy interactions shape the meaning and assessment of significant effect and how these interpretations influence the decision-making process. To this end, two conflicts over significant effect are investigated: the conflict over the 2006-spring permit for the mussel seed fishery, and the 2011 permit for the planned World Championship powerboat races. In both cases nature organisations started a court process against the government-granted permits in protest to the “no significant effect” claim, stating that there was insufficient certainty for this conclusion. These conflicts are approached as controversies between discourse coalitions with different interpretations of the ecological knowledge. We show how significant effect became a focal point in the controversies, limiting the debate to ecological arguments and science-based expertise, but also creating options for parties to advance their protest by articulating uncertainties. Only uncertainty of incomplete knowledge was explicitly addressed, excluding ambiguity of values and unpredictability of the actual ecosystem. We suggest that acknowledging the value aspect in disputes on significant effect would leave more space for effective solutions of the problems under debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]