National sport organisations (NSOs) play a critical strategic and regulatory role in the Australian sport system. Despite this, there is limited system level evidence on how their strategic priorities, and the institutional logics and complexity those priorities reflect, have evolved over time. The purpose of this study is to examine their evolution across three decades. The analysis draws on a dataset of 281 strategic plans from 83 Australian NSOs spanning 1998–2025 and applies topic modelling, a machine-learning technique for text analysis. Results show that NSOs have pursued 17 distinct strategic priority areas, with Elite Performance & Pathways the most dominant (9.0% overall share of strategic priority content), followed by Participation & Memberships (8.6%) and Policy & Governance (8.4%). The areas experiencing the greatest decline are Federation Administration and Competition Delivery. Conversely, Collaborative Governance and Community & Inclusion register the steepest gains and are now among the most prominent priorities. Strategic priorities were subsequently mapped to four institutional logics (Performance, Commercial, Social, and Professional) for longitudinal analysis. Analysis of these logics shows that their relative prevalence is highly dynamic, with recent convergence bringing the four logics into closer balance, thus indicating increased institutional complexity. Theoretically, this study advances understanding of institutional complexity in sport by providing field-level evidence of a shift from restrained to volatile complexity. Practically, the study provides sport executives and policymakers with system level benchmarks, highlights the governance risks inherent to an increasingly complex strategic environment, and illuminates how Australian NSOs are keeping pace with shifting societal expectations.
McLeod et al. (Fri,) studied this question.