Professional Sport Corporate Social Responsibility And Opinion Leaders: An Exploration Into The Csr Communication Between Professional Sport Teams And The Media, Regulatory Bodies, And Monitoring Groups

Abstract

Critiques of professional sport corporate social responsibility (CSR) often derive from opinion leader stakeholders, which consists of the media, regulatory bodies, and monitoring groups. Yet, little research has gone towards exploring the communicative practices used by professional sport teams to communicate with their opinion leader stakeholders about the CSR activities of their organization. The purpose of this study was to understand the CSR communication strategies that professional sport teams use to demonstrate their legitimacy to their opinion leader stakeholders and to identify the determinants of such communication strategies. The CSR communication strategies identified by Morsing & Schultz (2006) was used as a theoretical framework for this research. A narrative inquiry research design was used to examine the communication between professional sport teams and their opinion leaders. Using semi- structured interviews, data was collected from three professional sport CSR practitioners that were employed by three separate professional sport teams operating in three different North American professional sport leagues. Drawing from narrative thematic analysis, findings showed that professional sport teams used five CSR communication strategies to communicate with their opinion leaders and that seven determinants of CSR communication with opinion leader stakeholders exist. The findings a) extend the theory of CSR communication by providing empirical evidence for novel CSR communication strategies, b) establish a foundation by which to understand professional sport CSR communication with opinion leader stakeholders, and c) provide a framework for practitioners to evaluate and adjust their CSR communication with their stakeholders.