ABSTRACT
The community sport context is commonly understood as the site in which the majority of organised sport activities worldwide are carried out, with the sport club being the most common organisation responsible for their effectuation. As such, sport clubs have been the focus of many scholarly investigations aiming at an understanding of the governance and management of sport, and increasing attention has been paid to the nexus between sport clubs and the community sport context. Stakeholder theory is a theory particularly well equipped to shed light on the significance of interorganisational relationships for the internal operations of an organisation, and in this chapter, we apply it to understand decision-making in sport clubs. Drawing on data from video observations of sport club board meetings, we point to the value of investigating stakeholders and stakeholder relations inductively, processually and from the focal organisation’s viewpoint. Doing so shows how case-specific, temporal and issue-based relations are cautioning us against deductive and generalised illustrations.
