Boundary Objects at Play in the World's Greenest Football Club

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the face of increasing environmental and societal pressures, organizations are gradually moving away from merely reducing their detrimental effects toward making positive impacts. One sizeable sector of economic activity, that is frequently overlooked, is that of sport, of which football is the largest in terms of economic value, fan base and global cultural influence. It is only relatively recently that outliers in the football industry have transitioned from being purely profit‐motivated to being both socially and environmentally aware. This transition is challenging since it is being undertaken within the often aggressively masculine environment, as well as the deep‐seated socio‐historical origins and contexts of the individual clubs and the sport as a whole. One such outlying football club is Forest Green Rovers which appears to have navigated this journey successfully. However, research has yet to understand “how” this has been achieved. This study addresses this gap through a 4‐year examination of the social and environmental initiatives of Forest Green Rovers. This lower‐league “club on the hill” is globally recognized for its novel approaches and solutions. Through examining the various Boundary Objects that aid in uniting disparate social groups in order to effect considerable changes to the “match day experience” and to stakeholders' consumption behaviors, it explains how their pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic functions combine to create an accepted suite of socially and environmentally beneficial initiatives.