ABSTRACT
Being housed in a business school, you could be forgiven for thinking that some of the central tenets of business ontology (assuming that there is such a unified singularity) might appear at odds with the fluid trajectories of physical cultural studies (PCS) scholarship. However, given my interest in work that is multi-disciplinary (ranging from international relations and development studies to corporate governance and organizational studies) and the critical bent of much of my published work, there are clear convergences between PCS and work in corporate social responsibility (CSR) relational to power and emancipation. Moreover, it is my contention that there can, could and should be even more convergence in future examinations of CSR. This chapter therefore explores these convergences with respect to the ways in which CSR has engaged (and should engage further) with physical culture. Further, I explore how a PCS sensibility can be located in past, present and future research in this field; a debate I have previously addressed and in which I lamented the absence of what I see as key elements of a PCS sensibility in ‘sport CSR’ (see for example Levermore, 2013; Levermore and Moore, 2015). As such, the chapter offers an opportunity to deepen previous analyses and challenge previous assumptions that sport specifically (and physical culture in general) has engaged with CSR in a shallow/dominant perspective.
