The Role of Central Brokers and Their Influence on Effectiveness in an Intentionally Created Sports Professionalization Network

This chapter is concerned with understanding how the role of the central broker influences the effectiveness of an intentionally created network in an elite sports context. Intentionally created networks, in contrast to organic or naturally occurring networks, are a conceptually undeveloped area (Benson-Rea and Wilson, 2003; Pihkala, Varamäki and Vesalainen, 1999; Tikkanen and Parvinen, 2006). Few studies have been undertaken into networks in either the sports sector context (Cousens and Slack, 2005; Erickson and Kushner, 1999; Thibault and Harvey, 1997; Wolfe, Meenaghan and O’Sullivan, 2002) or the not-forprofit sector, making this particular study a newer context for network research. Our work also answers calls by Håkansson (2006) and Möller and Rajala (2007) to identify and categorize the different types of network structure and their important features. The study seeks to develop a deeper understanding of causal events for the effectiveness of networks, and to discover conditions under which these events occur and how they are related to network effectiveness.