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The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of practices in organizations from a phenomenological point of view. It explores the relevance of Merleau-Ponty's advanced phenomenology and ontology for understanding the role of the lived body and the embodiment of practices and change in organizational lifeworlds.

Based on the literature review and phenomenology, the role of embodied and relational dimension, the concept of an emergent and responsive “inter-practice” in organizations is developed systematically.

Based on the phenomenological and relational approach, the concept of (inter-)practice allows an extended more integral and processual understanding of the role of bodily and embodied practices in organizational lifeworlds as emerging events. The concept of inter-practice(ing) contributes to conceiving of new ways of approaching how responsive and improvisational practicing, related to change, coevolves within a multidimensional nexus of organizations.

Specific theoretical and methodological implications for exploring and enacting relational practices as well as limitations are offered.

Some specific practical implications are provided that facilitate and enable embodied practices in organizational contexts.

The responsive inter-practice is seen as embedded in sociality and social interactions and links to sociocultural and political as well as ethical dimensions are discussed.

By extending the existing discourse and using an embodied approach, the paper proposes a novel orientation for reinterpreting practice that allows explorations of the emergence and realization of alternative, ingenious and more suitable forms of practicing and change in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the migration of foreign football players that participated in the elite football championship in Greece and the impact of this migratory channel on the athletic success of the football clubs.

The study analyzed a database of all migrant and local athletes that participated in the professional Greek football championship over the period 2001-2013 and performed descriptive and regression analyses.

The regression analyses revealed a positive and significant statistical relation between the investment in foreign talents and the position of the clubs in the championship; however, this impact was more intense for foreign athletes after the formation of the Greek Super League (SL) in 2007 but on the contrary native athletes seem to contribute less to the athletic success than their foreign counterparts.

The findings indicated that valuable resources where spent after SL formation for the acquisition of foreign well-trained athletes. Therefore, this study corroborated arguments in previous research that a basic reason for foreign player migration in football is the increased revenues accrued from the media and sponsors. The study also provided useful policy implications for football managers for improving their decisions on this matter.

The present study fills a gap in the empirical literature and contributes significantly on the ongoing debate about the international athletes’ migration and its impact on athletic success.

Intercollegiate athletics is a tremendous part of today’s society and encompasses numerous American lives. Its wide spectrum attracts various people from gender, race, ethnicity, cultures, religion, and sexuality. Black male student-athletes, a target of higher education institutions, are affected by sociological, institutional, and athletic factors. This population is highly sought after by college coaches due to their athletic abilities and ability skills in their specific sport in order to elevate their respective sports team, athletics’ department, and university into the national limelight. Current institutional and intercollegiate athletics’ trends that are incorporated to recruit Black male student-athletes are explored. Specific recruiting techniques utilized by college coaches to persuade this population are examined. The sociological issues in current intercollegiate athletics are analyzed with their direct effect on the college selection choice of Black male student-athletes.

This chapter takes a panoramic view to explore the lives of collegiate Black men. We begin with brief reflections from our own experiences to position ourselves to and alongside Black men's lives and college years. After setting the stage through our own reflections, we explore the literature on Black men's lives during their college years and pay particular attention to their social statuses, campus engagement, and health and well-being. Two critical components in many Black men's collegiate experiences are how they are projected in wider US society through deficit-based perspectives and repositioned away from educational success. We interrogate these realities and advance a discussion on ways to improve the conditions, environment, and understanding of their college journeys and possibilities. We conclude with recommendations for research, practice, and policy.

Guided by self-presentation theory and social role theory, this study examines the different strategies elite female athletes used in personal branding on social media before and after becoming mothers. Scholars have investigated the authenticity of female athletes’ frontstage versus backstage representation on social media for branding purposes, but this study further expands on existing literature to review how female athletes would present themselves in the same realm once entering motherhood.

Through a content analysis, researchers evaluated whether there was a shift in three elite female athletes’ (Serena Williams, Allyson Felix and Skylar Diggins Smith) Instagram posts and captions one year before their pregnancy and one year after motherhood. A total of 732 posts were examined and were organized into six main categories: athletic, professional, promotional, personal, motherhood and dual identity.

Results revealed there was a difference in the self-presentation strategies used by the three female athletes on their social media pages. Specifically, the researchers confirmed the presence of a combined role of athlete and mother.

The findings support existing literature on the importance and the challenges of “balancing” a third identity of blending being both a mother and elite athlete as one. Yet, the findings challenge the previous notion that women cannot continue to perform at an elite level and manage the expectations that society institutes of being a “good mother.”

The 1922 Supreme Court anti-trust exemption awarded to organized baseball was quick to grasp the prerogatives of the emerging U.S. popular culture industries, and displays the anomalies of performance in the law. The trade and commerce in cultural performances yield contradictory opinions about the distinctions between the functions of work and play, as well as the properties of work and the performing arts. The interconnecting functions of a sport like organized baseball, as an industry, an art, and a popular cultural entertainment makes baseball a rich object for analysis in the perplexing historical puzzle of decentralized U.S. cultural policy.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the social significance of digital technologies for researching and understanding active women's bodies, identities, practices, and politics. In critically surveying the rapidly expanding body of literature on women's social media use for sport and physical activity, the chapter highlights the multidisciplinary nature of much of this work and its feminist and social justice orientation toward understanding the uneven impacts of platformed engagement for women, particularly those who are socially marginalized.

The chapter synthesizes the current literature to identify feminist and sociological approaches to analyzing sporting women's social media use. It draws on the authors' own research as case study illustrations of key developments.

Findings identify opportunities and challenges for women navigating the complexities of social media encounters in their sporting and physical cultural lives, focusing on self-presentation, branding and digital labor, community-building, and activism. It proposes theoretical, methodological, and ethical directions for sociological interventions in this area of study.

Future research should investigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape, issues of social justice and marginalized voices, and the social conditions that sustain gender inequalities in sport and social media spaces.

The chapter contributes original insights on emerging directions in the study of women, sport, and social media. Furthermore, it addresses the challenges for social researchers responding to the uptake of new social media platforms by female athletes and physically active women.

To explore the digital landscape, narrowing to Instagram, as a cultural space to advance sociological understanding of elite athlete mother identity meanings and lives.

Relativist narrative inquiry is outlined as a theoretical and methodological approach to expand sociological research on motherhood and sport, by exploring big and small stories on social media sites. Elite athlete mother's mediated self-portrayals on Instagram are theorized as identity stories (re)created and made possible, by cultural narrative resources.

An example of big and small story research is outlined from a larger case study of elite athlete figure skating mothers' self-portrayals on Instagram as they negotiated motherhood, and a professional sport career. Thematic narrative analysis findings include a big story plot in the post-partum period: negotiating intensive mothering and career. Two small stories that fed into fluid meanings of this big story plot are also presented: holding the baby close and working mum/new mumtrepeneur. These findings show nuanced contradictions of contemporary motherhood meanings, within sportswomen's personal and public digital stories.

A big and small story approach grounded in narrative inquiry holds value to learn more about the contemporary digital landscape's shaping of the meanings of sportswomen's identities and lives. Future research is recommended using this approach on additional social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) to expand intertextual understanding of elite athlete mother identities in socio-cultural context, tapping into these underexplored naturalistic data resources.