Physical Fit: The Role of Sports in Elite Hiring in Norway

Abstract

Sports participation serves as an important marker of elite distinction that is useful for getting in and getting on in elite workplaces. However, much of the work on the stratifying power of sports in the workplace has focussed on highly unequal societies, like the United Kingdom and the United States, and workplaces within the economic elite. In this paper, we examine elite hiring in Norway, a country that is more egalitarian with respect to social class and gender than countries that are typically the focus of elite research. Drawing from 50 interviews with hiring agents and ethnographic observation of hiring processes in nine organisations, we examine whether and how (1) sports are used in elite Norwegian hiring, and (2) these processes vary between elite labour market sectors that have different compositions of economic and cultural capital. We find that sports are indeed a salient basis of elite hiring in Norway. As in more unequal countries, elite employers intentionally seek out candidates with extensive sporting histories, especially in traditionally high-class, stereotypically masculine sports. However, we find two departures from prior research. First, we find that the emphasis on sports participation—especially extensive participation in high-level organised sporting leagues during adulthood—was strongest in the economic and balanced fractions of the Norwegian elite and least pronounced in the cultural fraction. Second, employers in the economic and balanced fractions favoured current athletes in part because they believed the bodies of athletes brought direct symbolic and economic value to their firms, due to unique aspects of the Norwegian employment landscape. Our work highlights how local features of labour markets shape the construction and deployment of evaluative criteria in hiring. It also shows that physical capital has economic conversion value in certain elite labour markets.