Pollination, cultivation, and perennialization: creating the amateur logic in collegiate sport

While there is a rich tradition of understanding the impact of institutional logics on sport organizational activity, questions remain about how the logics themselves are created and remain historically dominant. This research is an attempt to address this concern by examining how the dominant logic of a sport institution was created and institutionalized. Drawing on historical institutionalism as our methodological guide, this research provides the account of how the NCAA created its amateur logic. The findings of this work suggest three processes: pollination (changing the British notion of amateurism to a US ethos), cultivation (creating and enforcing policy), and perennialization (creating new terms to withstand legal scrutiny, creating executive director role, and building “place”). We introduce the notion of logic work to explain how sport institutions craft their dominant organizing rationales to accommodate diverse interests within institutional settings.