Measuring and Leveraging the Contribution of Sport to Business and Society.

Abstract

Recently, sports have been recognized as a powerful means to promote education, societal equity, health, culture, sustainability and peace. This unique potential is based on the universal popularity of sport in global communication platforms and on its capacity of a positive force for social change (Beutler, 2008). There has been, however, little research to quantitatively examine the actual societal impact of sport in society. To effectively communicate the intangible values of sports to society with various stakeholders, a quantified and standardized measurement is useful. Therefore, this dissertation 1) conceptualizes a new framework to measure the contribution of sport to society and to justify the roles, resources and benefits of each actor such as corporations, non-profit organizations (NPOs), and sport organizations in the form of collaboration via sport, 2) develops a measurement to evaluate the intangible social values of sport in society, and 3) empirically examines how the measured societal value of sport could be leveraged to benefit multiple actors including corporations and NPOs in sponsorship, partnership or CSR practices. First, I offer a conceptual framework that includes an examination of 1) various types of collaboration mechanisms, 2) motivation, objectives and expected outcomes for each partner to collaborate via sport, 3) measurement of the social outcomes via sport and 4) why the measurement is important. Second, I develop a measurement to evaluate the intangible social values of sport in terms of social capital, collective identities, health literacy, well-being and human capital. I found that simple global measures are efficient to measure the multidimensional values of sport to society with the theoretical integrity. I also found that community-oriented sport activities can contribute to social capital, collective identity and health literacy in general and that team-based sport activities can contribute to children with special needs in terms of social capital, collective identities, well-being and human capital. Third, through a qui-experimental design, I found the measured societal value of sport activities or programs can be leveraged to increase willingness to donate to the NPOs and to enhance a corporation’s functional fit with a partnering NPO, and to enhance CSP of the corporation.