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This study aims to expand understanding of servant leadership beyond organisational boundaries by making an examination of its role in the establishment and growth of a social movement.

This paper’s findings are developed from four sequential, semi-structured interviews and a narrated tour of Garstang with the founder of the Fairtrade Towns (FTT) movement. It follows a theoretical framework of servant leadership (SLship) from Spears (1996; 2009). Evidence is gathered through in-depth investigation of the activities of Bruce Crowther, the architect and driving force behind the FTT initiative.

The findings discovered how SLship operates in a social, place-based setting to influence Fairtrade consumption. The paper argues the success of the FTT movement is linked to Bruce Crowther’s leadership. The findings presented draw and expand upon Spears’ ten characteristics of SLship. Utilisation of this framework sees Crowther emerge as a servant leader operating at a community level to influence FT consumption via the FTT movement.

The paper makes a contribution to theory by identifying the novel characteristic of servant leaders that is exploring affinity and proffers it as an extension of Spears’ framework. It also provides valuable information about the impact and importance of SLship in the efficacious advance of ethical consumerism.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate children’s perceptions and attitudes towards sponsorship transition, specifically the change from Nike to PUMA as kit sponsors for Manchester City Football Club (MCFC) in July 2019.

A sample of 368 children, between 7 and 16 years of age were recruited for the study. Using electronic diaries, 1,577 diary entries were captured between February 2019 and March 2020.

Data reveals that children conceptualise sponsorship as a social exchange, with sponsoring brands seen as human entities and interaction with them reflecting the dynamism of social and familial relationships. Consequently, children in this study demanded prosocial and interpersonal behaviours from sponsors and sponsee during the transition period.

The research has an immediate and direct application for brand managers and the sponsee when considering terminating long-term sponsorship. Both the departing and incoming sponsors can maximise their relationships with these younger fans through an orchestrated departure, arrival and dedicated handover.

The findings enable marketing brand managers to effectively evaluate sponsor transition to maximise opportunities to maintain, and indeed start, brand relationships with younger fans.

This is the first study that has examined sponsorship children’s responses to sponsorship transition.

The purpose of this research is to understand what motivates 7–11-year-old children to participate in online brand communities (OBCs). Prior research has concentrated on prescriptive product categories (games and gaming), predominantly adolescent groups and the social aspects of community engagement and actual behaviour within communities, rather than the motivations to participate with the OBC. This has ultimately limited what has been gleaned, both theoretically and managerially, from this important segment.

An interpretive, longitudinal position is adopted, using a sample of 261 children (113 male and 148 female) from across the UK, using event-based diaries over a 12-month period, generating 2,224 entries.

Data indicate that children are motivated to participate in a brand community for four reasons: to support and ameliorate pre-purchase anxieties, resolve interpersonal conflicts, exact social dominance in terms of product ownership and perceptions of product knowledge and to actively engage in digitalised pester power. The study also reveals that certain motivational aspects such as conflict resolution and exacting dominance, are gender-specific.

Knowledge of children’s motivation to engage with OBCs is important for marketers and brand managers alike as the data reveal markedly different stimuli when compared to known adult behaviours in the field. Given the nature of the study, scope exists for significant future research.

The study reveals behaviours that will assist brand managers in further understanding the complex and untraditional relationships that children have with brands and OBCs.

This study makes a novel examination of a hitherto little-explored segment of consumers. In doing so, it uncovers the theoretical and practical characteristics of child consumers that contemporary, adult-focussed literature does not recognise. The paper makes an additional contribution to theory by positing four new behavioural categories relating to community engagement – dependers, defusers, demanders and dominators – and four new motivational factors which are fundamentally different from adult taxonomies – social hegemony, parental persuasion, dilemma solving and conflict resolution.

The paper aims to critically review the increasingly taken-for-granted view of social enterprise (SE) as inherently paradoxical and tackles the research question as follows: are the tensions experienced by SE and social entrepreneurs (SEnt) actually paradoxical and if not, what are the implications for theory and practice?

A paradox theory (PT) approach has been utilized to explore the implications, validity and helpfulness of the paradox perspective in understanding and managing the tensions that are inherent in SE.

Conceptualizing the primary tension of doing social good through commercial activity as a paradox is argued to be a limiting misnomer that conspires to reify and perpetuate the tensions that SE and SEnt have to manage. Drawing upon PT, the findings of the paper reconceptualize these tensions as myths, dilemmas and dialectics, which are subsequently used to develop a more complete ontological framework of the challenges that arise in SE and for SEnt.

Reconceptualizing the “inherent paradoxes” of SE as either dilemmas or dialectics affords a means of pursuing their successful resolution. Consequently, this view alleviates much of the pressure that SE managers and SEnt may feel in needing to pursue commercial goals alongside social goals.

The work presents new theoretical insights to challenge the dominant view of SE as inherently paradoxical.

Places have deep-seated meaning and serve to shape our social grouping and practices. Sporting stadia are a highly influential aspect of many people’s lives that drive the inexorable journey towards team affiliation, immersive experiences, intense loyalty and the creation of an enduring, local identity. This paper aims to explore how the nature of a sporting place has been shaped to change the practice of football as a sport, as a business and as entertainment. This paper uncovers how Forest Green Rovers (FGR) differentiates itself from the historical and socio-economic roots of football and uses numerous novel sustainability initiatives to re-imagine a new type of football place, club and fandom.

Over a two-year period, the authors used multiple data collection methods, engaging in participant observation, interviews and focus groups, at FGR and related events. A thematic data analysis was conducted to pinpoint and extract key areas surrounding the unique structures, practices and reinforced behaviours that have developed in FGR.

The findings show that FGR’s place operates as a central location through which stakeholders, ideas, resources and practices have been disrupted and re-imagined around the principles of sustainability. This fundamental shift in FGR’s place, changing its composition, character and reach, means that FGR can be conceptualised as a novel place synonymous with new global social movements.

This study presents unique insights into the world’s first socially and environmentally conscious football club. This study examines the construction and operation of the place that facilitates its actions which go beyond what has been seen and maybe expected from commercial sporting institutions.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is distinguishable from suicide attempts (SAs) on a number of psychological and motivational factors. However, in corrective services settings, NSSI and SA are not clearly distinguished in assessment impacting on intervention. The purpose of this paper is to examine if any attributes differentiate lifetime history of SA+NSSI, NSSI and SA presentations in inmates who had recently been assessed in custody by a risk intervention team.

A comprehensive clinical assessment and file review was conducted with 87 male inmates (including a no self-injury control group) in two large correctional centres in New South Wales, Australia, to determine if three self-injury groups differ from the control group and if the three self-injury groups differ from each other across a range of static, trait, environmental and clinical characteristics.

The SA+NSSI group was most different from the control group (27/59 variables), and from the SA group (10/59 variables), predominantly across trait and clinical correlates. The SA group was least different from the control group (2/59 variables: suicide ideation, childhood physical abuse).

It was found that the presence of SA+NSSI history is an indicator of increased psychopathology. A history of SA only appears not readily associated with psychopathology. The self-injury subgroups reflected different clinical profiles with implications for risk assessment and treatment planning.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social and personal drivers of co-creation in children.

A sample of 463 children aged between 7 and 13 years were recruited. Using electronic event-based diaries, 2,631 entries were captured during an 18-month period.

Data from 861 entries identified a series of anomalous external social and personal factors that drove children to engage in co-creation. These were for maintaining external relationships, dealing with addiction to the co-creation process and dealing with personal loneliness.

The study reveals new, unconventional and gender-specific behaviours that might assist marketers in understanding children’s complex relationships with co-creation and brands.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to examine children’s social and personal drives to engage in co-creation.

This paper aims to further the authors’ understanding of brand communities, and their role in brand co-creation, through empirical and theoretical contributions derived from researching the marketing dynamics operating within a successful but atypical form of brand community, Fairtrade Towns (FTT).

The paper reflects a pragmatic application of Grounded Theory, which captured qualitative data from key “insiders”, with a particular emphasis on FTT steering group members and their role as “prosumers”. Data were gathered via ethnographic involvement within one town and semi-structured interviews with participants in others.

FTTs, as brand communities, demonstrate elements of co-creation that go beyond the dominant theories and models within the marketing literature. They operate in, and relate to, real places rather than the online environments that dominate the literature on this subject. Unusually, the interactions between brand marketers and consumers are not the primary source of co-creation in FTTs. Instead, factors usually identified as merely secondary providers of additional brand knowledge become key initiators and sources of co-creation and active “citizen marketer” engagement.

This study demonstrates how brand co-creation can operate in physical geographical communities in ways that are formal without being managed by conventional brand managers. It conceptualises FTTs as a nested and “glocalised” brand and demonstrates how steering group members facilitate the process of co-creation as prosumers. It empirically demonstrates how FTTs have evolved to become unusually complex brand communities in terms of the variety of stakeholders and the multiplicity of brands involved, and the governance of the localised brand co-creation process.

Covid-19 has caused many businesses to rethink their short- and potentially long-term workforce operations. The use of lateral flow serology can provide a clinically convenient approach for the assessment of prior infection with Covid-19. However, its widespread adoption in organisations seeking to use it to test for workforce immunity is controversial and confusing. This paper aims to explore the paradoxical dilemmas and dialectics immunity workforce testing creates.

This study involved capturing the ethnographical participation of a chief executive officer (CEO) dealing with the experience of managing the outcomes of Covid-19 workforce immunity testing. The aim was to take a snapshot in time of the CEO's empirical world, capturing their lived experiences to explore how management actions resulting from Covid-19 immunity testing can played out.

Providing staff with immunity tests at first glance appears sensible, decent and a caring action to take. Nevertheless, once such knowledge is personalised by employees, they can, through dialectic dialogue, feel disadvantaged and harbour feelings of unfairness. Subsequently, this paper suggests that immunity testing may only serve to raise awareness and deepen the original management dilemma of whether testing is a worthwhile activity.

This paper aims to be amongst the first works to empirically explore the workforce management challenges that arise within small businesses within the service sector following the completion of Covid-19 immunity testing of their staff. It seeks to achieve this via utilising the robust theoretical framework of the paradox theory to examine Covid-19's impact upon small business workforce management thinking and practice.

This paper aims to examine the factors that influence and collectively conspire to inhibit social enterprises’ abilities to flourish in geographies of economic and social deprivation. Drawing upon the extant literature, it deploys a Delphi study to rank the relative importance of these factors.

A two-round Delphi study has been used to assess the relative importance of the issues that beset social enterprises. The research panel consisted of owner-managers of nine social enterprises from South Wales (UK).

The findings indicate that the prime challenge faced by social enterprise owner-managers is balancing their dual mission. The difficulties faced in delivering social value while remaining financially viable is one that appears to impinge upon the other strategic and operational challenges they face.

The generalizability of this study that utilizes expert insight is dependent upon the nature of the panel. In this instance, social enterprise owner-managers studied operated within a socially deprived region of the UK. The relative influence of the tensions that affect social enterprises in less impoverished areas of the UK or other geographies may well differ.

Drawing upon the extant literature that examines the tensions that surround social enterprises, the prevailing factors are considered and ranked of significance. The resulting ranking provides a crystallised vantage point for policy and support. This could be used to better inform the allocation of resources to facilitate a favourable eco system capable of supporting social enterprises who operate in areas troubled by economic and social deprivation.