dc.description.abstract | Over the last decades the importance of sustainability increased due to environmental concerns. The critical role of organisations was recognised in the transition to more sustainable circumstances, which led to different approaches to include all dimensions of sustainability equally. One of the most used and recognised approaches is corporate sustainability, which helps organisations to adopt sustainability throughout the whole organisation. Since then, sustainability became important for the overall evaluation and thus the organisational reputation. To investigate the relation between sustainability and reputation the sport industry and in particular sport events are chosen as case(s). This is because of its association mainly to positive aspects, even though negative aspects and controversies towards sustainability occur occasionally. The following research question is answered during this study:
How does the importance of sustainability topics in building a reputation differ across sport events and how do these topics relate to other essential topics?
During this study corporate sustainability is used alongside with the concept of organisational reputation, which can be determined as the most important sustainability driver. To answer the research question, topic modelling is used, which is a quantitative method to analyse the qualitative data that is considered in this study. Out of the internal data that originates from sport organisations and external data from news and media organisations, different topics are determined. These topics are interpreted and categorised through which conclusions could be drawn. First of all, out of the external data no sustainability topics are determined which states that news and media organisations does not, or in very small numbers, publish about and evaluate sport events on sustainability aspects. Secondly, in the internal data fourteen different sustainability topics are determined. These topics are mostly focused to the social, and in much lesser extent, to the environmental and economic dimension of sustainability. Additional, the importance of sustainability topics differ between events but on average the most important topics for the reputation of sport events are, in order of importance, sport, organisation, and sustainability topics. When it comes to the relatedness between events it can be concluded that the sport, organisation, and sustainability topics are strongly related to each other. This study contributes to the understanding of the relation between sustainability and organisational reputation. Ultimately, this study contributes to a more sustainable world for this and future generations. | |