Kicking goals: Community stakeholders as value creators, strategists, and identity shapers

Abstract

The concept of ‘community’ is pervasive in organisational and management theory. Yet literature on communities within the field is fragmented and the definition of the term remains ambiguous (Dunham et al., 2006; Georgiou & Arenas, 2023; O’Mahony & Lakhani, 2011), whilst the role that communities play in organisational processes has been largely under recognised (O’Mahony and Lakhani, 2011). My qualitative research focuses on the complex relationships between communities and organisations in multi-stakeholder networks. Taking multiple perspectives on the roles that communities perform within these networks, I explore how they create value beyond the economic, how different forms of community help shape organisational strategizing, and how organisational groups and their leaders respond to threats to their identity constructed by the wider community and the media. The case study of this qualitative research is the complex multi-organisational network of football in Australia. A wealth of literature suggests that sport serves as a rich setting within which to conduct organizational research and is well suited to addressing research questions concerning a wide range of organizational phenomena (Brown and Coupland, 2015; Day, et al., 2012; Katz, 2001; Quigley, Gardner and Drone, 2022). As a microcosm of wider society, a sport context provides opportunities for the study of interactions between organisations and stakeholders (such as community) (Wolfe et al., 2005).