TY - JOUR
T1 - Corporate social responsibility in professional team sport organisations
T2 - Towards a theory of decision-making
AU - Anagnostopoulos, Christos
AU - Byers, Terri
AU - Shilbury, David
PY - 2014/5
Y1 - 2014/5
N2 - Research question: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly important to business, including professional team sport organisations. Scholars focusing on CSR in sport have generally examined content-related issues such as implementation, motives or outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to add to that body of knowledge by focusing on process-related issues. Specifically, we explore the decision-making process used in relation to CSR-related programmes in the charitable foundations of the English football clubs.Research methods: Employing a grounded theory method and drawing on the analysis and synthesis of 32 interviews and 25 organisational documents, this research explored managerial decision-making with regard to CSR in English football.Results and findings: The findings reveal that decision-making consists of four simultaneous micro-social processes ('harmonising', 'safeguarding', 'manoeuvring' and 'transcending') that form the platform upon which the managers in the charitable foundations of the English football clubs make decisions. These four micro-social processes together represent assessable transcendence; a process that is fortified by passion, contingent on trust, sustained by communication and substantiated by factual performance enables CSR formulation and implementation in this organisational context.Implications: The significance of this study for the sport management literature is threefold: (1) it focuses on the individual level of analysis, (2) it shifts the focus of the scholarly activity away from CSR content-based research towards more process-oriented approaches and (3) it adds to the limited number of studies that have utilised grounded theory in a rounded manner.
AB - Research question: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly important to business, including professional team sport organisations. Scholars focusing on CSR in sport have generally examined content-related issues such as implementation, motives or outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to add to that body of knowledge by focusing on process-related issues. Specifically, we explore the decision-making process used in relation to CSR-related programmes in the charitable foundations of the English football clubs.Research methods: Employing a grounded theory method and drawing on the analysis and synthesis of 32 interviews and 25 organisational documents, this research explored managerial decision-making with regard to CSR in English football.Results and findings: The findings reveal that decision-making consists of four simultaneous micro-social processes ('harmonising', 'safeguarding', 'manoeuvring' and 'transcending') that form the platform upon which the managers in the charitable foundations of the English football clubs make decisions. These four micro-social processes together represent assessable transcendence; a process that is fortified by passion, contingent on trust, sustained by communication and substantiated by factual performance enables CSR formulation and implementation in this organisational context.Implications: The significance of this study for the sport management literature is threefold: (1) it focuses on the individual level of analysis, (2) it shifts the focus of the scholarly activity away from CSR content-based research towards more process-oriented approaches and (3) it adds to the limited number of studies that have utilised grounded theory in a rounded manner.
KW - CSR
KW - charitable foundations
KW - decision-making
KW - grounded theory
KW - sport
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84902885381&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/16184742.2014.897736
DO - 10.1080/16184742.2014.897736
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84902885381
SN - 1618-4742
VL - 14
SP - 259
EP - 281
JO - European Sport Management Quarterly
JF - European Sport Management Quarterly
IS - 3
ER -