Small and large sport clubs, in big cities or in the countryside, need to respond to external pressures created by social, financial and environmental factors. These pressures may come from the commercial environment, communities, national governing bodies, or political stakeholders. This chapter introduces the reader to the current pressures faced by Nordic sport clubs and the entrepreneurs’ role in the clubs’ development through the lens of entrepreneurship, and especially social entrepreneurship. This chapter addresses the role of the entrepreneur in relation to the triple bottom line of corporate social responsibility (CSR)—economy, environment, and society—in the context of Finnish and Swedish team sport clubs by using two football clubs as examples.

This chapter discusses the mutual interests of social enterprises (SEs)/social entrepreneurs and neo-liberal policy-makers/stakeholders. It offers a brief historical discussion of the evolution of SEs in Western Europe from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. The chapter focuses on how these institutions changed from 1980 to the present. It also focuses on the role political institutions at all levels played in reshaping the sector. The chapter discusses the connections between SEs and market forces, and how these connections produced dramatic changes. It addresses how our cross-temporal analysis can help understand contemporary SEs and welfare regimes. The chapter describes the historical evolution of solidarity in the context of the sweeping changes that have been made to various welfare regimes. It provides a fair assessment of the evolution and growth of the welfare sector across Europe, as well as how these predecessors have affected current SEs.

The development of Swedish sports management as well as the field of education and research has been significant in recent decades and is still ongoing to a great extent. In this chapter we describe this development. However, what is included in the field of sports management is a matter of debate. We have chosen to define it based on the four verbs plan, organize, lead and evaluate, which are taken from a trilogy on Swedish sports management (Bäckström et al. 2018, 2019, 2020). To illustrate the development of Swedish sports management, we describe how sports management education expresses itself, as this says something about how we view the subject area in Sweden. Next, we report on the growth of the research field with particular focus on a selection of dissertations and other research production. In conclusion, we highlight how Swedish sports management relates to international ditto. Situating the review in an international perspective is a way of highlighting the particularly Swedish.

 Utvecklingen av svensk sport management som såväl utbild- nings- som forskningsfält har varit markant de senaste decen- nierna och pågår i allra högsta grad fortfarande. I detta kapitel beskriver vi denna utveckling. Vad som ingår i fältet sport ma- nagement är dock en diskussionsfråga. Vi har valt att avgränsa det utifrån de fyra verben planera, organisera, leda och utvär- dera, vilka hämtats från en trilogi om svensk sport management (Bäckström m fl 2018, 2019, 2020). För att illustrera svensk sport managements utveckling redogör vi för hur sport mana- gementutbildning tar sig uttryck, då detta säger en del om hur vi ser på ämnesområdet i Sverige. Därefter redogör vi för forsk- ningsfältets framväxt med särskilt fokus på ett urval av avhand- lingar, och annan forskningsproduktion. Avslutningsvis belyser vi hur svensk sport management förhåller sig till internationell dito. Att sätta genomgången i ett internationellt perspektiv blir ett sätt belysa det särskilt svenska.

Voluntarily organized sport is the cornerstone of Swedish sports and has an important societal role. In this chapter, the Regional Sports Confederation and Sports Education Skåne, which is the gathering body of the non-profit sport clubs in the region, represents the voluntary, non-profit sector. The Leisure Department, City of Malmö, represents the public sector. The football club Malmö FF represents the for-profit sector, despite not being a completely commercial club. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and analysis of documents.

The three sectors have overlapping interests and a lot to gain from extended cooperation and knowledge transfer to bring about change. All our informants state a clear awareness of the importance of sustainability and highlight sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) at the leading level of their organizations. However, their capacity and incentives to act differ, partly due to each sectors’ specific logics. Malmö FF, strongly affected by commercial logics, stands out as the organization most active in realizing the SDGs. The Leisure Department, limited by political requirements, works hard to handle basic political requirements with an ambition to do good and even be a role model among municipalities. For the sports movement, the possibility of collective actions is challenged by voluntarism and the strong autonomy of sports clubs. Perhaps it would be logical to argue for a stricter control of the sports clubs’ operations to ensure proper handling of sustainability issues, but according to the Swedish sport ideology, the incentives should rather be created from the bottom-up.

The Enabling the Flourishing and Evolution of Social Entrepreneurship for Innovative and Inclusive Societies (EFESEIIS) project addressed several Innovation Union priorities on smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, which shows that it is serious about drawing up a wide range of policies relating to social entrepreneurship. European policy has focused on the related concept of social innovation. Since social entrepreneurship is a relatively new phenomenon, building both a partnership and a methodology required a great deal of attention. The cooperative methodology employed by the partnership inspired controversy, consensus, and ambivalence. European welfare systems play an important role in improving the living conditions of its citizens, most notably in the areas of childcare, health prevention services, employment services, and benefits for the elderly. The chapter discusses some ambivalences, divergences, convergences, and unifying concepts. From a methodological point of view, the EFESEIIS project is full of interesting tensions and ambivalences.

The aim of this policy brief is to provide sport policymakers and the sport community as a whole with an overview of and comments on some of the most urgent questions in Danish sport with a specific focus on social aspects of sport governance. It is based on research which has explored the overall organisational structure and relationships be-tween sport governing bodies and their membership at local, regional and national lev-els. This research has furthermore considered the involvement of women in these net-works particularly in decision-making capacities, as well as best practices for managing dispute resolution and maintaining public confidence.

CSR eller idrottens sociala ansvar är en beskrivning av hur en idrottsorganisation förväntas ta höjd för sin påverkan på samhälle och miljö genom att integrera sociala, miljömässiga och finansiella åtagande, utöver juridiska skyldigheter, framtagna i dialog med sina intressenter, i sin dagliga verksamhet på frivillig basis. Även om det är frivilligt för idrottsorganisationer att arbeta utifrån ett (C)SR-perspektiv framstår det dock alltmer som intressenterna förväntar sig just detta. Detta kapitel diskuterar och presenterar praktiska förhållningssätt och lösningar såsom arbete med TBL, VMOSA-CSR och CSR-snurran.

INTRODUCTION ‘Sport for all’ is the official slogan of Danish sport policy. This responsibility has traditionally been shared between the two major national umbrella sport governing bodies: the NOC and Sports Confederation of Denmark and the Danish Gymnastics and Sports Associations. The former governs both ‘Sport for all’ and elite sport, whilst the latter has an exclusive focus on ‘Sport for all’. The main differences are ideological and whilst education and self-realisation are two keywords of the DGI, for the DIF the practising of sport and good friendships in club environments are goals in themselves and not the means to solve social, health and other societal problems. Sport for all is also in many ways the focus of this research. By considering the social ties between SGBs and their membership from the perspective of social capital through an exploration of the organisational structure and reported relationships, thoughts on inclusion vs. exclusion or associational life as a school for democracy take centre stage. It is commonly acknowledged that sport is an arena where the development of national norms, social skills and social networks occur naturally; sport regularly fulfils an important role in strategic national public policy such as social integration policy. Nevertheless, the structure of sport and its competitive elements render such policy goals as ‘Sport for all’ more difficult to achieve. This is further underlined by the number of additional integration projects carried out by sport associations, under the lead of SGBs, often in collaboration with and, most of the time, funded by different local and national governments around Europe. Despite the growing doubt about sport’s inherent capacity or perhaps because of this doubt, together with a greater need in a time of constant reduction of the welfare state, the topic of social responsibility has become increasingly important for the discourse in Scandinavian sport governance. As a result the research turned its interest towards social responsibility of and through sport. The effects on sport governance are in this chapter framed as tradition in transition. Despite what may at first come across as a major shift of focus, the lens remains the same: to investigate the social ties between SGBs and their membership through the governance of sport. Social capital still is and needs to be at the centre in order to better understand the relationships within governing bodies and in connection to why and how the governing bodies of sport may pay attention to the topic of social responsibility. Subsequently, this chapter will pay attention to the changing nature of Danish sport governance in the light of Sport for all and through the lens of social capital. Two types of social capital will be presented as central to sport governance and typical for the Danish case: the leisure ties and the professional ties. In order to address these themes the chapter is structured as follows. The next section introduces the reader to Danish sport. Then, methods and cases are outlined. The subsequent section outlines the theoretical framework used throughout the research to understand and explain the social relations central to the governance of Danish sport. Thereafter, the chapter focuses on two themes that stand out as the most important questions for the future of Danish sport governance. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the more important findings and their potential implications for the future of Danish sport governance.

Det svenska Riksidrottsförbundet (RF) beräknar att den svenska idrottsrörelsen bärs upp av minst 600.000 idrottsledare, de flesta ideellt engagerade, som årligen lägger 140.000.000 timmar på idrotten. Framför allt är det naturligtvis barn- och ungdomsidrotten som är beroende av de ideella krafterna. Dessa fakta ligger bakom uppdraget från RF till två forskare vid Ersta & Sköndal Högskola att studera och analysera det sociala ledarskapet. Johan von Essens och Martin Börjessons rapport, Det sociala ledarskapet (Riksidrottsförbundet, FoU-rapport 2007:3), recenseras av H. Thomas R. Persson, som konstaterar att författarna på ett intressant sätt närmat sig diskussionen om spänningen mellan idrottsliga och sociala målsättningar inom barn- och ungdomsidrotten. Han beklagar den bristfälliga empirin som innebär att resultaten inte är generaliserbara, men finner flera intressanta spår, främst diskussionen om idrottsledare som både är föräldrar och tränare.

The Danish Football Association (FA) is about to become the first Danish sport govern- ing body to adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR). This article identifies a number of governance events in Danish sport and football over the last 4 years in order to provide a picture of the current governance climate. Professionalization, value- and norm-based leadership, transparency, ability and democracy, together with law and order as well as a concept of social responsibility, are all central to the overhaul of Danish sport govern- ance. It is argued that they are all part of building trust and that governance practices are therefore to be viewed through a lens integrating ‘good governance’, CSR and social capital in the context of multi-level governance. ‘Good governance’ is consequently seen as embedded in the context of its economic actions and social relations in and with society at large.

During the last decade FIFA and UEFA have increasingly stressed the importance of CSR and to work according to Good Governance-principles. Although with great opportunities for improvement, the Danish FA has come out on top in Scandinavian comparisons of the different FAs’ CSR engagement according to Good Governance praxis. However, there is little known about the CSR-activities amongst the Danish PL-clubs. With a point of departure in the FA’s CSR agenda and work, this study examines to what extent the DPL-clubs work with CSR and to what extent this is communicated according to principles of Good Governance with transparency as a motto. The findings show low CSR-activities and, or alternatively low transparency. Based on the result, the study proposes a CSR model and tool to simplify a transparent and effective CSR-accounting with moderate efforts.

There are different ways of tackling ethnic discrimination on the labour market. This chapter focuses on positive initiatives for combating discrimination in employment and promoting equal opportunities and gives examples of different government, civil society, private sector organisational and trade union initiatives. It is structured according to initiatives aimed at removing barriers (i.e. work permit, residence permits, language skills, etc.) and those projects aimed at changing attitudes and behaviours through for example diversity awareness training, primarily for employers, but also employees.

It has long been argued that that there is a common Scandinavian way of organising sport, which is closely related to the development of the Scandinavian social democratic welfare model and civic sector. In time of reorganisation or reduction of the welfare state and growing doubt about sport‘s inherent capacity to deliver towards the public social policy agenda – solving social integration and public health problems, such as growing problems with obesity related illnesses – the topic of social responsibility has become increasingly important to sport (Persson, 2008, 2011a). While introducing the reader to Scandinavian sport governance and the central issues facing sport governance in Scandinavia, football governance in the three countries will be used to discuss the development of good governance and social responsibility or corporate social responsibility.

Strong focus on the promotion of health and social integration aspects in society means the state has increased pressure on sport associations to deliver its social policy agenda. The building of (corporate) social responsibility and the proposed merger between the NOC and Sport Confederation of Denmark and the Danish Gymnastics and Sport Associations are offered as possible progressive responses to changes in Danish state sport policy and as a way to increase its social capital. A correlation between (corporate) social responsibility and social capital is established and visualized in the official stand on social responsibility of individual and umbrella sport governing bodies, and Danish state policy. Ness’s definition of corporate social responsibility – as the necessity and the duty of companies to behave responsibly, ethically and sustainably, and to be transparently accountable to their stakeholders – is transferred to sport associations. Social capital is defined as the relational resources that we as individuals or as part of a collective, such as a sport association, inherit or intentionally construct to achieve our own goals. Depending on the structural and normative characteristics of the social system in which it operates, it can facilitate but also limit individual and collective action. Development of a contemporary grounded social responsibility by the sport governing bodies suggests a gain in social capital, new memberships and future assurance of financial and social support.

Strong focus on the promotion of health and social integration aspects in society means the state has increased pressure on sport associations to deliver its social policy agenda. The building of (corporate) social responsibility is offered as a possible progressive response to changes in Danish state sport policy and as a way to increase its social capital. A correlation between (corporate) social responsibility and social capital is established and visualized in the official stand on social responsibility of individual and umbrella sport governing bodies, and Danish state policy. Ness’s definition of corporate social esponsibility as the necessity and the duty of companies to behave responsibly, ethically and sustainably, and to be transparently accountable to their stakeholders, is transferred to sport associations. Social capital could be defined as the relational resources that we as individuals or as part of a collective, such as a sport association, inherit or intentionally construct to achieve our own goals. Depending on the structural and normative characteristics of the social system in which it operates, it can facilitate but also limit individual and collective action. Development of a contemporary grounded social responsibility by the sport governing bodies suggests a gain in social capital, new memberships and future assurance of financial and social support.

Genom att titta på CSR som en poteniell reaktion till en pågående förändring av dansk idrottspolicy, och därmed öppna upp till en ny debatt inom europeisk sport och idrottsforskning bidrar denna artikel till att fylla ett vakuum inom europeisk idrottslitteratur. Genom att dessutom visa korrelationen mellan CSR och socialt kapital ämnar den att medverka till ökad kunskap bland dem som utformar idrottspolicy, inom både idrottsförbund och på den politiska arenan.

This paper takes its starting point in DIF’s “Sport for all” policy and reacts to two statements that were frequently stressed by people in the Danish Football Association during a yearlong fieldwork carried out in 2007. One of the statements was based on strong prejudice towards people with an immigrant background, the other against women. All of our views, prejudiced, or not, are related to knowledge. That knowledge and the lack thereof play an important role in each of our lives should therefore remain unchallenged. Consequently, accessibility to the different arenas where knowledge is created and communicated is of greatest importance. This applies to all of us, both laypersons and researchers. We are all in need of acquiring knowledge, but as researcher we have a greater responsibility in producing and diffusing this knowledge. This paper will illustrate and problemize the actual knowledge gap that exist between the Danish FA and the reality it organises and how this affects the potential social capital at both ends, at the same time as it challenge our role as researchers. Were does it start and where does it end?

The topic of social integration is high on the agenda in most EU member states and politicians increasingly turn to sport for assistance. As a result, the ‘Sport for All’ discourse, originally moulded on a population dif-ferentiated by social classes, has gradually been replaced by a discourse targeting certain excluded or seg-regated groups in our societies. This paper analyses visual displays of the multicultural Denmark in the con-text of sport. It takes its starting point in the Danish Sport Confederation’s “Sport for all – regardless of level, age and gender”-policy. The paper originates from a multi-sited ethnographic study of the production of so-cial capital in and through the governance of sport. The study made use of a combination of techniques, such as: observations, semi-structured interviews and secondary analysis of official documents. The con-struction of a ‘new’ inclusive Danishness in and through sport is problemized by reading the visual documen-tations of ongoing social integration projects, sport magazines and instruction manuals published by Danish sport governing bodies. The picture of the multicultural sport arena is read through the lens of Barthes’ con-tribution on the myth, Stuart Hall’s contribution on representation, ideology, and encoding and Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, and against a political Danish climate that has attracted much attention in connection to the Mohammad cartoons and the Danish People’s party.

Sweden as the great welfare state where everybody is equally welcomed and cared for has for long been the prevailing view. Although Swedish integration policy seems to confirm this view, this is far removed from many people’s experienced reality. I argue that part of this disharmony lies in how West European languages contain and relate to an ‘identity’ construction, which perpetuates and is perpetuated through dichotomies that strengthen the social and political cogency of concepts such as ‘race’, ethnicity and culture. Based on this, I carry out a discourse analysis of Sweden’s major integration policy documents from the mid 1970s up to today.

After an eclectic reading of discourses on migration and integration terminology, ‘identity’ and language, I assert the centrality of ‘identity’ construction to everything we do. With this in mind, taking the dialogism promoted by the Bakhtinian Circle as the dichotomy to monologism, I carry out a close dialogic reading in the tradition of Lynn Pearce (1994) and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986).

Contextualising the policy documents, I present the history of migration and integration from a Swedish perspective. Focusing on the last five decades, I divide the different historic tendencies into themes ranging from: emigration to labour migration, refugee migration and the European Union, and from immigrant policy to integration policy.

Believing that the conceptualisation and the handling of categorisation, segregation, culture, discrimination and racism are all central to a successful integration policy, I analyse the policy documents thematically accordingly. I show how the interdependence of the common ‘identity’ constructions and language sometimes obscures and frequently counteracts the intention of the author. As a result, I argue that the Bakhtinian Circle holds the key to a better understanding of the invincibility of stereotyping within racialised discourses, through applying absolute ‘identity’ constructions in monologic speech, and how this may be counteracted in order to strive for a dialogic approach to the world.

In this chapter, the new social economy is addressed from the point of view of the Swedish social economy. The Swedish social economy is appropriately described as the sole or the backbone of the Swedish society. It is a vast sphere containing several sectors and a melting pot of numerous organisations emphasising social values and has an effect on most Swedish citizens and denizens at some point, if not throughout their entire lives. Hence, it would be close to megalomania to set out to cover all aspects of the social economy sphere in this chapter. Instead, the main focus is on those aspects relating to the Swedish welfare state.

This chapter summarizes the development of social enterprises (SE) and their ecosystems in Europe. It provides the nature of social entrepreneurship and SEs. The chapter focuses on some of the policy implications and offers suggestions on how to improve the study of social entrepreneurship, SEs, and social innovation. The neoliberal turn initiated during the 1980s still shapes the manner in which many European welfare regimes try to reinvent themselves. The chapter shows that Albania, Austria, France, Poland, and Serbia have statist-macro ecosystems, due to the predominance of state institutions in delivering support to the SE ecosystem. SEs operate in different sectors, they take on different legal forms, their capacity to remain and stay compatible in the market differ, and they are often dependent on external funding. Social innovation, another context-dependent phenomenon, often involves actions, frameworks, models, systems, processes, services, rules, organizational forms, and sometimes products.

CSR är ett relativt nytt fenomen i Sverige och ännu nyare i kontexten av svensk idrott. CSR-arbete med idrotten som förgrundsfigur är nödvändigtvis inte idrotts- eller idrottsliga initiativ, därför har det också vanligtvis varit tal om ett CSR genererat genom idrotten. Artikeln argumenterar för att man bör vidga denna förståelse till att också inbegripa CSR genererat av och/eller med idrotten.

This paper focuses on the dispute resolution mechanisms in sport, with particular attention paid to non-professional sport and its governance. Providing a brief summary of the literature on the topic, we argue that mainly two aspects of dispute resolution mechanisms have been highlighted in academic discussion: their ethical and moral character and their legal nature. Yet, except for these two relevant approaches, a more sociological approach of understanding the nature of these processes in the context of informal networks, unwritten rules and struggles over power is largely missing. To grasp this missing piece, we identify the mechanisms used by sport associations and their members to anticipate the disputes and we distinguish between three different types of dispute resolution mechanisms: proto-disputes, formal disputes, and meta-disputes. The paper draws on rich empirical evidence gathered during a multi-sited ethnographic study focused on both sport practice and governance, carried out in the Czech Republic and Denmark.

Conflicts of interest, financial irregularities, misuse of power, lack of transparency, manipulation of trust, ideological struggles, social exclusion; these are different examples of the dark sides challenging contemporary sport governance. Although the emergence of various dark sides has been inherent to sports associations since their origins, recent literature on sport management has argued that their frequency has increased, hand in hand with the growing encroachment of sport with politics, mass media, sponsorship and business. Notwithstanding the relatively high importance of the dark sides in contemporary sport governance, academic attention on this phenomenon has rather limited. To reduce this gap in the literature, this chapter summarizes existing scholarship about the phenomenon and considers potential future developments within SGBs in relation to their dark sides. We define as the dark sides of sport governance those behaviours that are detrimental for sport, sport associations and their civil and democratic nature, or those behaviours violating legal or organizational norms, or those that are deliberately harmful for sporting people, specific social groups or even for the whole society. Frequently, the dark sides of sport governance are expressed through power games, allegiances or various forms of corruption. On the other hand, the dark sides of sport governance shall not be confused with any form of struggle and conflict, which can be an inherent part of sport governance and democratic discussion among members and governance boards. Throughout this chapter we emphasize also that an emergence of the dark sides in sport governance cannot be grasped solely in terms of mere personal and isolated scandals as it is frequently represented in the media portrayal of single scandals and affairs related to sport management. Additionally, the dark sides of sport governance must be viewed as a product of structural and systematic developments of contemporary sport, governance and overall society. In other words, the dark sides of sport governance must not be perceived exclusively as particular conflicts, struggles or plots organized by single persons or small groups, but rather as the results of more general social processes and developments, the increasing interconnection of sport business, media and sponsorship and encroachment with politics. This happens not only at a global level of sport governance and management related to professional and elite sport, but also at national levels of sport governance and management of amateur sport.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the main results of the Enabling the Flourishing and Evolution of Social Entrepreneurship for Innovative and Inclusive Societies (EFESEIIS) project. It also discusses the multidisciplinary approach that was adopted in the EFESEIIS project as well as the different methodologies and theoretical frameworks that were used to answer the project's main research questions. The book addresses the history and evolution of both social entrepreneurship and social enterprises (SE) in Europe. It focuses on the various features and behaviors of SEs and social entrepreneurs. The book explores the role of stakeholder and institutional networks in shaping the development of SE ecosystems in various European countries. It offers a dynamic analytical framework that will allow scholars and practitioners to better understand the ecosystem in which SEs are set while also identifying whether or not these ecosystems act as an enabling force.

AbstractPurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate firms’ reasons and motives for becoming sponsors and how they benefit from this networking engagement by exploring sponsorship networks associated with two Danish team sport clubs – a Premier League football club and a second-division handball club.Design/methodology/approachTwo online surveys were conducted with firms associated with the networks during the Autumn and Winter of 2013/2014 (n=116). The questionnaire was theoretically anchored in the existing sponsorship literature, business network research, and social capital theory.FindingsThe results show that business logics were the dominating reasons for joining the network. A large proportion of the respondents reported having increased their number of business (32 percent) and social (26 percent) relations with other network members after joining the network. Furthermore, 37 percent of the respondents reported having made business agreements with companies external to the network via network contacts, which supports ideas of bridging social capital. More than half the respondents (59 percent) preferred doing business with network members rather than with non-members.Originality/valueBy investigating a local and regional sport club context, the paper adds to our knowledge about sponsorship networks. It emphasizes the potential importance of team sport clubs for the business landscape, thus maintaining that sport clubs fulfill an important role for local communities beyond being mere entertainment industries.