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Drawing on interviews with football wives from the Canadian Football League (CFL), this article examines how these women define their personal identity through their talk about being married to a pro football player. Using the concept of courtesy identity and Anderson and Snow’s (1987) conceptualization of identity talk, this chapter explains the processes in which these women claim a courtesy identity of a football wife. I identify two strategies these women use to construct their identity: distancing from stereotypes and envisioning self as his teammate. I argue that women performed this verbal identity work in pursuit of legitimizing their courtesy identity of a football wife. They accomplish this by distancing self from a stereotypical, anticipated social identity of the football wife as a “gold digger” or naïve woman and then working up another socially positive and normative one that they are supportive women who have worked alongside their husband and are part of their career. I conclude by summarizing the findings and argue that by constructing themselves as devoted football wives, they uphold these idealized images of traditional masculinity and femininity in professional sports.

Extensive ethnographic research with wives of professional athletes revealed that in certain sport families, the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship is among the numerous unique marital and occupational stressors these wives confront in their everyday life. Many wives believe they must compete with their mothers-in-law for their husbands’ attention, love, and support. This chapter makes a case for their use of the intersecting and complementary processes of “control management” and emotion management, which involve a variety of interactional strategies, in maintaining these relationships. Although these self-management processes tend to further entrench the wives in the subordinate status to which they are relegated in this male-dominated occupational world, they learn to skillfully use these processes as they struggle to preserve their marriages, support their husbands’ careers, and maintain a well-defined sense of self.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors informing spousal global mobility decisions within the context of sporting expatriation. Findings contribute to the non-corporate global mobility literature as well as providing an empirical enhancement to the family relatedness of work decisions framework.

In this qualitative study, in-depth interviews gave voice to 21 spouses of professional sailors who have experienced both trailing their spouse and staying behind.

Access to empathetic social support, the potential impact on children, and the spouse’s career were all found to influence the spouse’s dynamic global mobility decision making.

The study is limited by the cross-sectional nature of the research. Future longitudinal research into the impact of spousal preferences would identify the on-going effect of their decision(s) to relocate or to stay behind.

Providing organisations with an understanding of the familial issues their global talent may factor into their work mobility decisions will allow them to implement appropriate family-focussed support, irrespective of the choice to engage, or not engage, in global mobility.

By grounding the study in the under-researched sporting arena, the author contributes to the emerging non-corporate expatriate conversation. Furthermore, the family relatedness of work-related decisions framework was found to provide a useful conceptual foundation for understanding decision making in an international context.

Trend watchers who proclaim a tide of increasing diversity in consumer life styles usually conclude that “the marketplace is becoming more fragmented,” “the era of mass marketing is over,” and “the key to successful marketing is a segmented marketing strategy.” For example, in The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler conjures up the concept of “demassified” markets. And recent statistics confirm this trend. The question facing business now is: What does this mean for consumer goods companies?

To explore the sociology of sport-related pain through an autoethnographic focus on the contiguous, 20-year participation of one professional athlete at the Ironman Triathlon World Championships in Kona, Hawaii; to address the “well heeded, long-standing and vociferous calls ‘to bring the body back in to social theory’” (Hockey & Collinson, 2007, p. 2) by allowing authorial reflection on the negotiations of pain during those decades of elite competition.

Negotiated sports pain is explored as the subject/author allows visceral memory over a two-decade arc of professional-level participation at the Ironman. The ethnographic study is a combination of self-reflection, phenomenology, supportive and correlative theory, and detailed peripheral aspects of one elite athlete as he discusses the roles, levels, types, applications, and meanings of pain during the training and racing of the Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Allowances are made for reflective and subjective narratives in service of introducing sensorial elements to this area of the sociology of pain.

This chapter addresses several calls for a focus on the “practical experiences of the body” (Wainwright & Turner, 2006, p. 238) or what Hockey and Collinson (2007) call the “lacking (of) a more ‘fleshy’ perspective, a ‘carnal sociology’ (Crossley, 1995) of sport.” The details provided by the author/athlete offer a more personal and intimate view of how sports pain is negotiated over the arc of two decades of high-level competition. A sometimes brutally honest and objective self-reflection reveals the inner workings of a professional athlete turned college professor as he reflects on the multiplicity of roles that pain served and played during his 20 years at the Ironman World Triathlon Championships.

With a dearth of “embodied” studies on the sociology of sports-related pain, particularly by elite athletes who lived much of their youth in a physical culture that requires the near-constant negotiation of pain, this chapter provides a deep inside-out look at one case with its sensorial, phenomenological, and temporal insight to pain management.

Most professional athletes are broke financially within a short few years after they stop playing. It is easy for outsiders to place the blame squarely on the athlete himself. This rush to judgment, however, is not entirely accurate. Black student-athletes who have the talent and ability to play professional sports are hyper-focused on getting to the next level, and the system around them is built to accommodate that focus. A lack of educational, financial, and legal structures creates a dynamic that sets the athlete up for failure. This chapter will focus on the legal and financial realities that Black males face when transitioning into and out of professional sports. In order to shift the current paradigm, this chapter will also provide solutions for both the athlete and the coaches, friends, family members, and agents who surround the athlete, in order to empower the athlete to positively impact himself, his family, and his community.

The term “medical” will be interpreted broadly to include both basic and clinical sciences, related health fields, and some “medical” elements of biology and chemistry. A reference book is here defined as any book that is likely to be consulted for factual information more frequently than it will be picked up and read through in sequential order. Medical reference books have a place in public, school, college, and other non‐medical libraries as well as in the wide variety of medical libraries. All of these libraries will be considered in this column. A basic starting collection of medical material for a public library is outlined and described in an article by William and Virginia Beatty that appeared in the May, 1974, issue of American Libraries.