Corporate social responsibility in sport : a critical review of CSR development and sensemaking

Zeimers, Géraldine [UCL] Zintz, Thierry [UCL] Willem, Annick [Ghent University]

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has received significant attention among sport scholars and practitioners. This ever-increasing interest gave rise to a theoretical and empirical influx of studies across numerous CSR approaches, level of analysis, theoretical perspectives, research designs and methods, CSR pillars, cultural contexts, sport disciplines, sport organizations. Scholars are currently shifting their focus from a content-oriented to a process and strategic-oriented research perspective (Breitbarth, Walzel, Anagnostopoulos, & van Eekeren, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to participate to that endeavor by focusing on process-related issues. Specifically, we explore the CSR implementation process, also labelled CSR development process.