Corporate social responsibility in professional team sport organisations: Towards a theory of decision-making

Christos Anagnostopoulos*, Terri Byers, David Shilbury

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

72 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)259-281
Number of pages23
JournalEuropean Sport Management Quarterly
Volume14
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • CSR
  • charitable foundations
  • decision-making
  • grounded theory
  • sport

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