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This chapter reviews the sociology of sport as a subdiscipline in the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The review is based on analyses of central documents, scholarly contributions, as well as interviews with some key scholars in the field. The review describes both similarities and differences across the three countries. The sociology of sport as a subdiscipline and research field is a relatively new area. Among the decisive factors that prompted the field to grow were the expansion of higher education and the institutionalization of sport studies as an academic field during the 1970s. Each country today has approximately 15–20 scholars who identify themselves as sport sociologists. None of the Scandinavian countries have special research programs for research funding in the social sciences of sport, and the main funding derives mostly from the research resources linked to the scholars’ professorships/scholarships and external funding. The research trajectories of the field are mostly concentrated around areas like youth sport, participation studies, sport politics, and team sports. Besides scholars involved in gender studies and body culture, most of the key contributors also belong to these areas. Scholars make use of multifaceted theoretical and methodological approaches. One of the main future challenges of the research field is to maintain and strengthen its critical traditions against the strong influence from neoliberal sport management discourses.

Sport organizations hold substantial ideological power to showcase and reinforce dominant cultural ideas about gender. The organization and portrayal of sporting events and spaces continue to promote and reinforce a hierarchical gender binary where heroic forms of masculinity are both desired and privileged. Such publicly visible gender hierarchies contribute to the doing of gender beyond sport itself, extending to influence gender power relations within sport and non-sport organizations. Yet, there has been a relative absence of scholarship on sport organizations within the organizational sociology field. In this paper, we review findings of studies that look at how formal and informal organizational dimensions influence the doing and undoing of gender in sport organizations. Subsequently, we call for scholars to pay more attention to sport itself as a source of gendered organizational practices within both sport and non-sport organizations. We end with suggestions for research that empirically explores this linkage by focusing on innovative theoretical perspectives that could provide new insights on gender inclusion in organizations.

The paper criticizes current directions in research on women and management. The purpose of this paper is to propose new directions for such research.

The paper is conceptual and is based on a review of recent literature on elites and the gendering of elite positions internationally and in the Nordic countries. This literature is discussed using studies of changing power dynamics and the development of welfare state services in a context of globalization.

The paper argues that one needs to move away from the focus on individual traits and “female management” to study the processes and practices that (re)produce power differences between men and women in the organisations where they take place. Two contextual factors make new directions in research necessary. The first is the knowledge economy changing organisations from bureaucratic towards democratic forms at the level of production and the financialization of the economy centralizing power at corporate level. The second is the challenging of Nordic welfare states by globalization of the economy. The welfare state results in a “democratization of motherhood” that increases women's participation in the economy, but may limit their opportunity to obtain elite positions.

To understand women's exclusion of elite positions, new research should combine multidimensional analyses of gender and power to explore the symbolic connections between masculinity and “big money”.