Corporate Social Responsibility in Professional Team Sport Organisations: An Integrative Review

The purpose of this study is to systematically review the current literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in professional team sport organisations with a critical conceptual lens. At its core, the concept investigates the economic, legal, ethical and discretionary elements of an organisation (Carroll, 1979), through the analysis of its principles, processes and outcomes of its operations (Wood, 1991). The purposes of the review are to a) map the social responsibility territory in the professional team sport, b) critically appraise the field’s direction for the purpose of advancing scholarly inquiry in the area. A socially responsible professional sport team is required to meet multiple social, economic and environmental objectives. Therefore, the aims of this research are to: 1) review the research on social responsibility in professional sport team contexts from 2006-2016, 2) synthesize the current knowledge regarding how professional sport teams manage multiple objectives, and 3) identify implications and future directions for sport managers and academics.

CSR research in the field of sport can be generally divided into CSR in and through sport. While latter focuses on research on organisations outside the sport industry which use sport as a medium for their CSR activities (Smith & Westerbeek, 2007), this research only considers publications about professional team sport organisations and their social responsibility measures. Reviewing the literature on CSR in sport it becomes obvious a universally accepted definition of CSR does not exist within the academic literature as well as within the sport management domain. This results in a very broad and diverse understanding of CSR. Consequently, the scope of CSR management practice in the field of professional team sport seems to be endless (Paramio-Salcines, Babiak & Walters, 2013). Additionally, the CSR in sport literature increasingly merges with other and related fields of sport management research e.g. sport for development, sport volunteerism, community sport. In the last decade CSR in the context of sport was a topic of extensive research from different perspectives (fans, sport organisation, stakeholders), using various methods and theories as well as different research lenses. A systematic and extensive review of the CSR research in other management fields provided valuable knowledge and guidance for future research avenues but has not been done in the context of CSR in sport as well as particularly in professional team sport, yet.

We conducted a systematic literature search with the following two key search terms in combination: “social* respons*” and “sport*” using the databases of SCOPUS and EBSCO HOST. As the first step, we identified 271 initial articles that have been published in English since 2006 in peer reviewed academic journals and after removing duplicates. Then a purposive search was followed in the major Sport Management Journals (identified by Shilbury, 2011) and 15 more papers could be added for further in-depth review In total we identified 286 initial articles which were subsequently reviewed by the authors.

From preliminary analysis the review indicates a heavy focus on compartmentalised approaches to social responsibilities that particularly focus on highly commercial sport organisations. Preliminary findings also indicate an overrepresentation of studies that looked at discretionary and environmental activities of professional team sport organisations (i.e. community programs and environmental changes), and relatively few that investigated economic and legal concerns. In general, multi-dimensional empirical work was underrepresented. With a view to prompting discussion at the conference we feel that discussion on the following questions hold potential to shape the future of the field. What is a socially responsibility professional sport team? Is CSR simply organisational performance? If CSR is multidimensional, where is the research on compliance and harm avoidance? Future research can build on the discussions within this workshop to shift the direction of the concept from a public relations discourse toward a more critical approach to organisational behaviour and performance in professional team sport.