Fourteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a widely used shorthand term to cover a multitude of corporate activities. In this research project, the concept of CSR is used to describe the way in which football clubs in England have mobilized resources in the service of a variety of community-related programs. The present study follows recent developments within the broader sport management research and builds on the theoretical grounding of institutional work to offer empirical insights on how the formulation and implementation of CSR-related programs actually happen. In doing so, it largely responds to recent calls of “how does institutional work shape policy and practice to address the world’s grand challenges?” Thirty-two CSR managers were interviewed through snowball and purposive sampling. The sample provided a good mixture of football-playing status as it consisted of twelve clubs from the Premiership and thirteen clubs from the Championship. The present study makes two key contributions. Firstly, it unpacks implementation of CSR in sport by elucidating the specific institutional works caried out by the people assigned the responsibility for doing so. It offers a conceptual model that explains how the implementation process unfolds through four types of institutional work.