Community Sports Organization Development From a Social Network Evolution Perspective— Structures, Stages, and Stimulus

As people become more health-conscious, more community sports organizations (CSOs) are emerging in society. The development of CSOs is often subject to very limited resources, and understanding its underlining principles is critical to maximizing the utility of available resources. Existing studies of CSOs are often empirical and adopt top-down methods of organizational management. This is partly because the inputs needed for such studies, for example, the interactions between community members, are often difficult to record. In this article, we perform an objective social network analysis on a real CSO with 2073 active members, with data collected over a five-year span on a mobile platform. Our study shows that the CSO members’ network has a low density and weak densification and is assortative and obvious in community structure. With a classification algorithm called SC-CEE, we observe that the development of the CSO can be robustly divided into stages. We further observe that the relationship between specific stimulus and community evolution varies across development stages, implying that an organization’s response strategy to change should be aligned with its stage of development. We then give practical guidance on the developmental priorities and response strategy of CSOs at different stages.