ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Physical Education and Pedagogy
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1641914
This article is part of the Research TopicAdapted Physical Activity: Inclusion in Physical Education and SportsView all 4 articles
One Sport, One Family: Negotiating Inclusion, Identity, and Difference in National Sports Organizations
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Education, Faculty of Social Sciences, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
- 2Umea Universitet, Umeå, Sweden
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Efforts to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in sports aim to challenge systemic discrimination and promote equitable participation for all. In Sweden, Strategy 2030 represents a national initiative to integrate parasports into mainstream sport structures by embedding inclusive practices across all national sports organizations (NSOs). This study explores how key stakeholders within Swedish NSOs construct, interpret, and implement inclusion in this policy context. The study is grounded in social identity theory (SIT), which provides a framework for understanding how social identities shape intergroup relations and policy implementation in institutional contexts. Drawing on SIT, this research examines how social categorization, identification, and comparison processes shape ingroup/outgroup boundaries and influence inclusion practices. Based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 12 stakeholders formally mandated to implement inclusion, the study investigates how inclusion is navigated in organizational settings where ableist norms persist. Thematic analysis revealed recurring tensions between formal commitments to inclusion and the structural conditions that reproduce hierarchies of ability and belonging. While participants expressed normative support for inclusive values, many described challenges in aligning these ideals with entrenched organizational cultures and resource disparities. Notably, stakeholders negotiated identity boundaries not only in terms of ability but also across intersecting dimensions, suggesting that inclusive sport practices are shaped by more than the abled/disabled binary. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how identity, power relations, and normative assumptions influence the implementation of inclusion policy at the organizational level. This study offers critical insights into the complexities of fostering inclusion in sport governance and suggests strategies for developing more equitable and reflexive policy frameworks.
Keywords: Equity, inclusion, ability, Disability, Ingroup/outgroup, Sport, ParaSport, power relations
Received: 05 Jun 2025; Accepted: 05 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wickman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kim Wickman, Department of Education, Faculty of Social Sciences, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
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