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

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.

Keywords:

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

Acknowledgements

This paper won the 2013 European Association of Sport Management New Researcher Award (NRA) and the lead author would like to thank the NRA committee for providing him with feedback that helped a great deal in strengthening this manuscript. The first author would also like to especially acknowledge his advisory team (Dr Terri Byers, Dr Benoît Senaux and Professor Simon Chadwick) for the continuous support throughout this study. Last but not least, the lead author acknowledges the courtesy afforded to him by all the ‘managers’ who took part in this research.