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

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 processoriented approaches and (3) it adds to the limited number of studies that have utilised grounded theory in a rounded manner.