Corporate social responsibility through sport: a longitudinal study of the FTSE100 companies

Abstract

Purpose -Under growing public scrutiny of their behaviour, the vast majority of multinational enterprises have been undertaking significant investments through corporate social responsibility in order to close legitimacy gaps. The purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive account of the nature and scope of MNEs' CSR programmes that have sport at their core. More specifically, the present study addresses the following questions: (1) How do FTSE-100 firms utilise sport as part of their CSR agendas? (2) How do different industries have different approaches to CSR through sport? and (3) Can the types of CSR through sport be classified?Design/methodology/approach -Centred on legitimacy theory and exploratory in nature, the study employed a content analysis method, and examined three types of document from each of the FTSE100 firms, namely, annual reports, annual reviews and CSR reports over the ten-year period from 2003 to 2012. In total, 1,473 documents were content analysed, thereby offering a sound representation of CSR disclosure of the FTSE100. 2 of reliable conclusions problematic. Particularly, the lack of an explicit focus on longitudinality is a typical limitation, meaning that no conclusions can be made regarding the trend. The study outlined in this paper offers the most comprehensive longitudinal study of CSR through sport to date, and thus contributes to the increasing volume of literature that examines the application of CSR in relation to the sport sector.

The win/profit maximization debate: strategic adaptation as the answer?

“…Moreover, there remains a need for additional research around the trade-off between the multiple objectives of professional sport teams but which is not limited to the debate between profit and win maximization, for example, including objectives related to social, community and corporate social responsibility activities (Anagnostopoulos and Kolyperas, 2015;Bason and Anagnostopoulos, 2015;Breitbarth et al, 2015) and of how to accurately estimate the weighting of these multi-faceted objectives.…”

“…Kern, Schwarzmann and Wiedenegger, 2012). However, social performance cannot be captured by a single indicator such as stadium utilization given its multi-faceted nature, and hence consideration is required of other aspects of clubs' performance, such as the effectiveness of its corporate social responsibility programmes (see, for example, Anagnostopoulos & Kolyperas, 2015;Bason & Anagnostopoulos, 2015;Breitbarth et al, 2015).…”

Applying a Communicating Vessels Framework to CSR Value Co-creation: Empirical Evidence From Professional Team Sport Organizations

“…(CF12) Indeed, our empirical findings align with previous studies on the charitable foundations of PTSOs in the UK and US (see Bingham & Walters (2013) and Sparvero & Kent (2014), respectively), which also point out that financial efficiency and overall organizational capacity requires both inward thinking (closer collaboration with the founding sport company) and outward tactics (greater collaboration with the commercial world). The latter is crucial not only because public funds are much more competitive (Walters & Panton, 2014) and large resource commitments from the parent organization during tough economic times become much harder to obtain (Bansal et al, 2015), but also because firms outside the sport industry demonstrate increased interest in co-creating their CSR agendas through collaboration with nonprofit organizations of this type (Bason & Anagnostopoulos, 2015;Morrow & Robinson, 2013). The excerpt below manifests just that:…”

“…PTSOs have dual opportunities for CSR in and through sport (Anagnostopoulos & Kolyperas, 2015;Breitbarth et al, 2015), either by drawing on their own unique resources to facilitate social image and orient their stakeholder members' experiences (McNamara, Peck, & Sasson, 2013;Yang & Sonmez, 2005) or by integrating external resources to serve as vehicles of CSR co-creation for other businesses (Bason & Anagnostopoulos, 2015;Dowling, Robinson, & Washington, 2013). Given the unique sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological characteristics of PTSOs -such as communication power and youth appeal, among others (see Smith & Westerbeek, 2007), and considering CSR as culture meaning management (Brei & Böhm, 2011) -consumer culture theory (CCT) has explanatory power to meaningfully define the contextual, idealistic, and symbolic context (and resources) in which CSR value co-creation unfolds (Anagnostopoulos et al, 2014;Castro-Martinez & Jackson, 2015;Walters & Chadwick, 2009).…”

Understanding strategic decision-making through a multi-paradigm perspective

“…One reason for this expansion is that corporations -in search for 'commercial idealism' as per Cortsen (2014) -with CSR ambitions have become more interested in sports as a vehicle for deploying social initiatives and amplifying their branding impact (Smith and Westerbeek, 2007). For example, in 2008, 255 projects used sports as a mechanism to facilitate development (Levermore, 2010), and multinational enterprises (MNEs) are now increasingly using sports for their CSR agendas (Bason and Anagnostopoulos, 2015). This state-of-affairs among these charitable organisations requires some harmonising with these (new) environmental forces.…”