The big assist: Exploring professional sport and nonprofit relationships through CSR and Ethics of Care
Open Access
- Author:
- Formentin, Melanie Jane
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 12, 2014
- Committee Members:
- Denise Sevick Bortree, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Denise Sevick Bortree, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Colleen Connolly Ahern, Committee Member
Francis Erin Dardis, Committee Member
Patrick Robert Parsons, Special Member - Keywords:
- public relations
corporate social responsibility
sport communication
ethics of care - Abstract:
- Corporate social responsibility (CSR) research in public relations often emphasizes organizational goals, examining how CSR is practiced and communicated, how stakeholders perceive CSR efforts, and how reputational and organizational benefits emerge. Notably, scholars have largely failed to examine CSR impacts from the perspective of those who benefit from corporate giving. This research fills numerous gaps in public relations CSR literature: In addition to exploring the nonprofit perspective of CSR relationships, this study presents the first known effort to explore sport CSR in public relations. To date, sport CSR has been studied almost exclusively in business and marketing literature, where the sport industry is presented as bearing unique characteristics for practicing CSR and creating social impacts (Babiak & Wolfe, 2006, 2009, 2013). These relationships were explored and situated within ethics of care, which is presented as a useful normative framework for engaging in and evaluating CSR based on caring practices and values that privilege the perspectives and needs of relationship partners (Held, 2006). To address scholarly gaps, 29 depth interviews were conducted with nonprofit representatives who worked for organizations that received support from sport organizations located in a major metropolitan area. Inductive coding strategies revealed numerous themes related to CSR impacts and relationships, particularly in the context of sport CSR and care ethics. Findings suggest that nonprofits primarily reach out to sport organizations to establish relationships, and the sport industry is perceived as yielding unique benefits and challenges for partnering organizations. Specifically, nonprofits can yield direct benefits from teams including awareness, reach, and credibility, while team visibility and celebrity serve as indirect benefits that enhance the ability for teams to provide direct benefits. In the context of care ethics, nonprofit practitioners prefer caring relationships that are built upon trust and mutual concern, encourage human flourishing, and exist because of a genuine concern to assist others. Specifically, the strongest nonprofit and sport organization relationships are marked by mutually shared caring practices and values. To advance theoretical development of caring CSR practices and to situate CSR in the public relations domain, a public relations-based definition of caring CSR is presented alongside a proposed model for testing the predictive value of emergent themes.