The IOC and the doping issue—An institutional discursive approach to organizational identity construction

•We examine the construction of organizational identity of the IOC when confronted with doping in sport.•We embed our study in a new institutional and discourse analytical set-up.•After the 1988 Seoul doping scandal the IOC employs a warfare genre.•The 1998 doping scandal reveals the failure of the IOC war against drugs in sport.•The World Anti-Doping Agency is an outcome of the IOC institutionalization failure.

To show why the 1998 doping scandals led to the establishment of the World Anti-Doping Agency, this paper investigates how the IOC has created its organizational identity once confronted with the emergence of doping in sport. The paper endorses a new institutional understanding of organizations, which is combined with a critical discourse analytical framework. Through a systematic reading of the Olympic Review between 1960 and 2003 four main anti-doping discourses are outlined: health scientific, ethical, legal and educational discourses construct the meaning-providing horizon of IOC anti-doping commitment. The 1988 Ben Johnson doping incident is crucial for the understanding of the organizational changes occurring 10 years later. Immediately following the Seoul Olympic Games the IOC applies a warfare genre, which frames anti-doping as a declaration of war and constructs a narrative of the IOC as leading a successful battle against doping. The 1998 doping scandals reveal the opposite. Subsequently, WADA can be labelled IOC's institutionalization failure.