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This study focuses on analysing Japanese pop culture events to determine whether they may be useful marketing tools for a location with a distinctive culture from where they are organized. It also examines how the popular culture events differ from other events and what impacts they have on these destinations.

A mixed-method approach is used to analyse data from a questionnaire provided to 364 participants from these events and seven semi-structured interviews with event organizers or their representatives from events on this topic in Portugal, France, Spain, Denmark and North America.

According to the research, these events are regarded as unique and unusual from the perspective of the customer due to the variety of activities they offer, the use of imagination they inspire and the engaged fan participation. These occasions have been found to strengthen and propagate Japanese popular culture outside of its place of origin and arouse interest in it.

Several studies have examined the appeal of Japanese pop culture, but few have investigated the impact of events to enhance the destination's image where they are held, as well as their potential outside of Japan. With already over a hundred official events of this theme held annually, with a sizable number of participants, a study of this paradigm exposes its potential for promoting a culture that is growing in popularity outside of its place of origin and understanding the effects it has on these various regions.

Football exists and evolves in a dynamic ecosystem, displaying a massive and multidimensional influence on most contemporary societies, and football has grown into a significant industry with a plethora of stakeholders. This research is the first to comprehensively identify the key industry stakeholders and their distinct value, from the individual club perspective, and to conceptualise and test their interrelationship toward the development of a corresponding framework of club benefits.

The study applied a multilevel approach to collect and verify qualitative data. It initially developed a preliminary conceptual framework, which was first validated by an expert panel and was subsequently extensively tested in the Cyprus-specific context, which offered fertile ground for such a study. The empirical stage rested on 41 semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with very high-ranking individuals from the top nine football clubs, as well as with key industry stakeholders.

Though the examined industry is partly in line with international norms, it is also highly affected by unique characteristics that alter the various stakeholders' role, producing (even negative) value of varied typologies that is directly linked with the industry's financial, sporting, cultural and social conditions.

The research ultimately presents scholars, practitioners and policymakers with a systemic and comprehensive understanding of the individual club stakeholder value offerings, delivers a tested framework as a tool for social and business management and prescribes future avenues for research, governance and practice.

Extant studies on the subject are either partial or focus on individual stakeholders and evidently lack requisite scientific comprehensiveness. The current research bridges this significant gap in knowledge by exhaustively identifying the key industry stakeholders, explicating their relative social, economic or other value in the individual club perspective and developing a value-based stakeholder framework.

This paper aims to analyse the effects of events image from host communities’ perspective on the city’s overall image and the intention to recommend the events and the city as a tourism destination.

The research used a bivariate data analysis based on Spearman’s correlation and regression analysis to determine useful variables to predict the intention to recommend the city as a tourism destination. Data collection was face-to-face and online with a non-probabilistic sample of Viseu city residents, the second largest city in the central region of Portugal.

The findings had implications for researchers, governments and stakeholders. From the resident’s point of view, there is a high correlation between the overall city image and the intention to recommend it as a tourism destination. Event image and the intention to recommend the event participation affect the overall city image. Results point out the resident as natural promoters of events and their city if the local events have an appeal that generates their participation. Conclusions indicated that cities need to re-thinking tourism from the citizen’s perspective as staycation is a grown option.

Event image by host-city residents’ perceptions is an underdevelopment theme in the literature, although residents’ participation is essential to the success of most events. Local events can promote tourist citizenship and reinforce the positioning of tourism destinations, associating them with an image of desirable places to visit and live.

This paper aims to consider the relationship between urban events and urban public space, asking whether cities have enough space for events and whether events have enough space in cities.

Policy analysis surrounding events and festivals in the Netherlands is used to understand the dynamics of urban events, supported by content analysis of policy documents. A vignette of event space struggles in Amsterdam illustrates the contradictions of the event/space relationship.

The research identifies a policy shift in the Netherlands towards urban events from expansive, festivalisation strategies to defensive, NIMBYist policies. It exposes contradictions between protecting space as a living resource and the exploitation of space for regenerative purposes. Three future scenarios for urban events are outlined: conflict and competition, growth and harmony and digitalisation and virtualisation.

Develops scenarios for the future relationship between events and urban space.

Provides an analysis of the recursive spatial implications of the growth of the events sector for cities and the growth of cities for events.

Stakeholder theory understands business in terms of relationships among stakeholders whose interests are mainly joint but may be occasionally conflicting. In the latter case, managers may need to make trade-offs between these interests. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of managerial decision-making about these trade-offs.

This paper draws on the ordonomic approach which sees business life to be rife with social dilemmas and locates the role of stakeholders in harnessing or resolving these dilemmas through engagement in rule-finding and rule-setting processes.

The ordonomic approach suggests that stakeholder interests trade-offs ought to be neither ignored nor avoided, but rather embraced and welcomed as an opportunity for bringing to fruition the joint interest of stakeholders in playing a better game of business. Stakeholders are shown to bear responsibility for overcoming the perceived trade-offs through the institutional management of social dilemmas.

For many stakeholder theorists, the nature of managerial decision-making about trade-offs between conflicting stakeholder interests and the nature of trade-offs themselves have been a long-standing point of contention. The paper shows that trade-offs may be useful for the value creation process and explicitly discusses managerial strategies for dealing with them.

Social hackathons are events designed to craft social change using technology that enables citizen empowerment or addresses societal issues by deploying data. Hackathons provide a framework for organizing to help create prototypes and business models through interaction with technology. The relevance of the sociomateriality of the emergent technology (prototype) and organizational structure raises the question if viable and impactful solutions can be developed within such frames.

This study applies an inductive research methodology based on ethnographic participant observation, interviews with participants and event organizers, and qualitative insights from surveys.

Events such as social hackathons are centered around technology and share a vision of creating opportunities for change. The materiality of prototypes may define their interaction patterns. The differentiation of the embodiment and emergent structuration of technology may be a breaking point for in-group dynamics and a barrier to social innovation. The emergent structuration of technology with a longer initial phase of problem definition and ideation within a group was found to have more potential for impactful embodiment with the technological artifact. Some cases reveal that “expert” participants who shared visions of change enabled by technology were constrained by other members.

The paper suggests an extended view on the connection of sociomateriality, organizing and social impact.

The purpose of this paper is to identify if fraud theory models suggested over the years are applicable to match-fixing and if so, whether the Krambia-Kapardis’ (2016) holistic fraud and corruption prevention model can be used to reduce significantly match-fixing in football.

An online survey was developed by the authors and was administered to football stakeholders in Cyprus, namely, players, referees, coaches and team management.

The research questions, who are the initiators of match-fixing, why is match-fixing taking place and what is the best way to prevent or reduce match-fixing, have been answered, and these findings have enabled the authors to make policy recommendations.

The survey considered match-fixing in only one sport (football) while the number of respondent categories and the 335 usable questionnaires returned did not allow advanced statistical analysis of the data obtained.

The findings point to the need both for ethics and moral values to be installed in all the stakeholders through training and continuing education. It is also suggested that teams/clubs and related associations acting as regulators ought to implement governance principles and ethical programs, including whistleblowing lines and appoint integrity officers to minimize the match-fixing phenomenon. Furthermore, society, as well as government, sport regulators and sponsors, ought to encourage and demand fair play and integrity in sport through improved measures of governance and accountability and the implementation of ethical audits and public disclosure of audited financial statements of teams. Finally, sports integrity ought to be embedded in school curriculum from a very young age.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is an original contribution to knowledge that has impact on the future of sporting fairness and social legitimacy.

This study aims at developing an understanding of action pathways when adverse events force micro-enterprises to change their operations.

This qualitative study draws upon empirical data collected from entrepreneurs facing the same adverse event—the COVID-19 pandemic—to build theory on different types of actions that micro-enterprises take and what leads up to these actions.

The findings suggest three types of action pathways. The first pathway is set off by losses stretched out over time and generates open-ended actions. The second pathway is set off by immediate losses and generates survival-oriented actions. The third pathway is set off by potential long-term losses and generates developmental-oriented actions.

This study offers novel insights into action pathways in response to adverse events, heterogeneity of such actions and processes that precede the choice of actions. It also expands the existing literature by showcasing actual actions instead of desired actions, which have already been extensively studied.

This study answers the call for research and theorising exploring ethical communication and brand risk from the African continent. The study's purpose was to identify the challenges that strategic communication practitioners face in enacting ethical crisis communication in South Africa.

The researchers conducted ten in-depth interviews with South African strategic communication professionals.

The dominant theme emerging from the study is the marginalisation and exclusion of the communication function in decision-making during crisis situations. Communicators were viewed as implementers, technicians and not strategic counsel. The protection of organisational reputation was done at the expense of the ethics and moral conscience of practitioners. Practitioners were viewed and deployed as spin doctors and tools to face unwanted media interactions.

The article sheds light on the concepts of ethical communication and decision-making in a multicultural African context using the moral theory of Ubuntu and strategic communication. It demonstrates the tension professionals experience as they toggle between unethical capitalist approaches and African values. The practitioner's role as organisational moral conscience is hindered, suppressed and undermined by organisational leadership's directives to use opaque, complex communication, selective transparency and misrepresentation of facts.

This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives positively impact customers’ selection of retail banks in Hong Kong (HK) and identifies which CSR domains affect customers’ selection of banks.

This study adopted a quantitative approach. Primary data were collected from 416 customers of 22 retail banks in HK. The theoretical framework of this study was developed from a literature review, prior studies by Oberseder et al. (2013 and 2014), and CSR initiatives implemented by leading retail banks in HK. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests were used to analyze the data.

The study found that CSR initiatives positively affect customers’ bank selection. CSR initiatives related to the customer and environment domains are likely to have a greater impact on customers than those related to the society domain and are not likely to significantly impact customers’ bank selection.

This study contributes to the CSR literature by offering enhanced insight into the dynamics of CSR and its effects on customer bank selection. Furthermore, this study tests consumers’ perceptions of CSR initiatives in each CSR domain in the banking sector in Hong Kong – a novel approach that has not been previously explored in existing studies. These findings can help banks review the effectiveness of their CSR initiatives and make informed decisions on which initiatives should pursue improved CSR performance and efficient resource allocation.