Resources at the Grassroots of Recreation: Organizational Capacity and Quality of Experience in a Community Sport Organization

Grassroots recreation organizations are volunteer-run informal organizations that deliver sport and recreation at the local level. Using a qualitative case study approach, this study examined how the quality of experience in one community sport organization was affected by organizational capacity, or the ability of the organization to mobilize financial, human, and structural capital to fulfill its mission. While the volunteers mobilized social capital, the league experienced significant shortages of human capital including the professional competencies to meet increasingly complex administrative demands. This finding raises concerns about potential disenfranchisement of volunteers.

Keywords:

• grassroots organizations
• social capital
• human capital
• leisure services delivery
• volunteering

Notes

¹ Although human capital and cultural capital are treated as analogous forms of “embodied capital” here, it is worth noting that Bourdieu (1984), (2005) distanced himself from the term “human capital,” a term that has its roots in traditional economic theory. Bourdieu critiqued the term for how it tended to be applied in a functionalist manner, in that analyses assumed that human capital was acquired through “natural aptitude,” rather than recognizing that one's “aptitude” is embedded within a cultural field that differentially favors the dominant class of that field.