From social activism to active socialization: The evolution of football ideology in community‐owned football clubs

Abstract

Community‐owned clubs are profound socializing agents that offer children a prosocial environment that disarticulates some of football's most pernicious ideologies in favor of an environment that is developmental, empowering, and self‐affirming while facilitating self‐determination. The work highlights the evolution of community‐owned clubs from activist enclaves to virtuous, imperative environments that influence and transfer community‐bound knowledge. Children in the study articulated that the ethos found at these clubs has enhanced their self‐esteem and self‐efficacy and has positively changed their perceptions, behavior, and interactions with the vulnerable individuals within their community. In addition, the data reveals a new idealism in terms of football with self‐restraint and nominal consumption of club apparel preferred to traditional materialism.

The Ecosystem of UK Social Entrepreneurship: A Meta-Analysis of Contemporary Studies

“…Finally, notwithstanding the more and greater challenges that are associated with becoming more mainstream, what we have observed is the increasing impact that such legitimised organizations are able to exert considerable social influence (Thomas, 2020;Samuel, 2018;. Football, with its historical context of hyper-masculinity, is perhaps one area where the development of responsible behaviours is least-likely to be enacted.…”

“…These studies, being uniformly interpretivist in nature, utilised Grounded Theory approaches (Saldana, 2010), and semi-structured interviews (Fox, 2009;Denscombe, 2010), coupled with analytical techniques that broadly conform to methods of thematic analysis (Guest, MacQueen & Namey, 2012). The five studies comprise examinations of the UK's Social Enterprises Places (SEP) initiative (Samuel, 2018;, the expert resources that are utilised by SEnts (Allen, 2020), the internalisation of strategic intent of a community mutual housing association (CMHA) (Taylor, 2020), the cyber-security preparations of SEs (White, Allen, Samuel, Abdullah and Thomas, 2020), and the influence of football clubs' social programmes upon children (Thomas, 2020): see Table 1. (Samuel, 2018; In 2014, Social Enterprise UK rolled out a Social Enterprise Places Programme (SEP), describe as geographical areas (quarters, towns, cities and zones, areas around the UK) where social enterprise activity and investment in the sector is thriving.…”

“…FOOTBALL CLUB SOCIAL PROGRAMMES (Thomas, 2020) SEs are a significant movement (Tausl & Noskov, 2020) socially culturally (Doherty, Haugh, & Lyon, 2014;Bengo, Arena, Azzone, & Calderini, 2015;Popkova, & Sergi, 2020), as they represent a means of addressing challenges that cannot be explored or ameliorated by state or private business ventures (Tykkyläinen, 2019;Velayutham, & Rahman, 2018). SEs capture a business approach that amalgamates and blurs (Dart, 2004) the boundaries between traditional and social thinking and ultimately allows both individuals and communities to transition toward better futures (Teasdale, 2010;Fotheringham and Saunders (2014).…”

Exploring the motivations to participate in an online brand community: a study of 7–11-year-old children

“…This enables the child's ability to recognise, interact, recall, and engage with brand and is considered a normative occurrence (Achenreiner and Roedder John, 2003;Ji, 2002;Lopez and Rodriguez, 2018;Thomas et al, 2020). Children develop clear brand knowledge (Thomas, 2020), know what they like and dislike (Daems et al, 2019) and are said to have the same levels of awareness of brands as adults (Jones and Glynn, 2019;Martensen, 2007).…”

“…This enables the child's ability to recognise, interact, recall and engage with the brand and is considered a normative occurrence (Achenreiner and Roedder John, 2003;Ji, 2002Ji, , 2008Lopez and Rodriguez, 2018;Thomas et al, 2020). Children develop clear brand knowledge (Thomas, 2020), know what they like and dislike (Daems et al, 2019) and are said to have the same levels of awareness of brands as adults (Jones and Glynn, 2019;Martensen, 2007). Even from a formative age (7-11 years), children start to develop a network of association with brands (Rodhain and Aurier, 2016;John and Sujan, 1990) and this is augmented by newer technologies (Folkvord et al, 2019) and a desire to belong (Cody, 2012).…”