Studying Corporate Social Responsibility in Professional Sports

Sports fans don’t need to dig far into their favorite team or league website to see pictures and stories of athletes and teams supporting charitable causes. In the National Hockey League (NHL), “hockey fights cancer” by supporting cancer-related research and those fighting cancer. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), the “NBA Cares” by supporting causes related to youth education and health. In 2011, National Football League (NFL) Commissioner Roger Goodell revealed his league provided $10 million in grants through its nonprofit foundation while establishing a $150 million NFL Youth Football Fund. This support and funding is only the visible tip of the philanthropic iceberg in sport.

Although giving in professional sport is routine, the study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in sport has only started taking root. Work related to sport CSR has emerged in business and marketing literature, focusing almost exclusively on understanding the organizational benefits of and reasons for implementing CSR initiatives. This mimics how CSR is studied in public relations; most research focuses on understanding and describing the reputational benefits yielded by organizations, the impacts on stakeholder behavioral intentions, and how organizations communicate about CSR. And while CSR is widely studied and practiced in public relations, scholars have yet to explore how it is practiced and communicated in sport. Additionally, the beneficiary perspective is essentially missing from CSR scholarship, whether in public relations, business, or marketing literature.

Although scholars have attempted to understand how CSR practices impact stakeholder behaviors and attitudes, research has failed to explore how recipients such as nonprofit organizations benefit from and perceive CSR efforts. For example, public relations scholars have yet to explore whether sports-based CSR may provide unique communication opportunities for benefiting organizations. With the help of funding from the Arthur W. Page Center, I am closing this and other gaps in CSR scholarship through my ongoing dissertation research.

For my dissertation, I will explore how sports organizations in a major metropolitan area impact their communities through socially responsible initiatives. After identifying nonprofits that have received support from local teams, I conducted interviews with employees familiar with the relationships between their organization and those teams. In addition to learning how these relationships are formed, I aim to understand how these relationships are perceived, how team-based support helps these nonprofits, and whether professional sport provides nonprofits unique communication opportunities.

Because current research has overlooked the beneficiary perspective in CSR, this exploratory research will primarily describe the existing relationships. Additionally, however, I argue that relationships between sports organizations and nonprofits can highlight how ethics of care may be a useful normative framework for approaching CSR from a public relations perspective. Because public relations is “a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics,” care offers a more appropriate framework for conceptualizing CSR practices compared to other normative ethics such as deontology and communitarianism. Not only does care emphasize the importance of respecting and building mutually beneficial relationships, but also it privileges the voices of those with less power—arguably, in this case, benefiting nonprofits. By understanding how care can play a role in CSR, and by using sport to explore the perspective of beneficiaries in giving relationships, I hope to enhance scholarly understanding of CSR and its potential impacts.