ABSTRACT
This chapter is about sports clubs managed by volunteers. These are termed community sports organisations (CSO) in Europe, Australia, and Canada; and community sports associations in the USA. They are small organisations in which volunteers take almost all the roles of governance and delivery. The chapter draws mainly on English and European sources, with some references to Australia and Canada. It considers why there is little information about CSOs in the USA. The focus on England and Europe is due to the emergence of CSOs in England, along with their national governing bodies of sport, which have had a strong influence on other countries. The discussion of CSOs is related to considerations in understanding the voluntary sector in leisure in general. These include: the difficulties of defining an ‘organisation’, how to measure volunteering, how to evaluate the contribution of volunteering to society, the implications of a trend away from collective activity, the balance between altruism and self-interest in volunteers’ motives, and the position of the voluntary sector in a leisure market in which the competition for time, enthusiasm and expenditure is intense. Thus, the chapter uses a discussion of CSOs to highlight themes which run through the study of volunteering and other chapters in this book.
