ABSTRACT

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has confirmed itself as an important issue in sports organizations, sparking the interest of sport management scholars. Sensegiving derives from the parent notion of sensemaking, which refers to the process by which people give meaning to experience in organizational contexts. More specifically, as organizational sensemaking often results from a negotiated social construction, sensegiving is concerned with the process of attempting to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred definition of organizational reality. Besides the National Forests Office, public authorities have long been absent from the CSR program, and the subsidies they allocated to the event were rather small given the overall budget. The analysis of the sensegiving process seems to reflect two distinct forms of CSR: that of the event itself, and that of the company as a surfwear brand. This chapter adopts a sensegiving approach in order to describe how the CSR program of the Quiksilver Pro France was formed.