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In contrast to other Chinese sports, which attract enormous commercial interests and relates to a kind of political kudos and ideological significance, Chinese baseball represents a singular case for the author to investigate the way in which China responds to sport globalisation due to its peripheral position in, and limited resource from, the domestic sport system and powerful stakeholders from the global society. The study examines the development of Chinese baseball and its interplay with the global sport giants and international events (i.e. the Olympic Games and the Major League Baseball [MLB]). Given the influence of sport globalisation, the author also identifies the consistent dominance of Chinese sport authorities and the spectrum of local stakeholders' reaction towards globalisation. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relationship between marginal position of Chinese baseball in the local sport system and the rationale of its response to sport globalisation.

This chapter explores the implications of acknowledging one's own excessive entitlement and living contradictions in contributing to Living-Educational-Theory Research. The analysis emphasises the importance of accepting one's educational responsibility for one's own continuing professional development in inquiries of the kind that address this query: ‘How do I improve my professional educational practices in education with values of human flourishing?’ This responsibility includes making public evidence and values-based explanations of educational influences in learning, in contributing to the global knowledge base of education.

The notion of excessive teacher entitlement was coined by Ratnam to characterise the putative deficit view of teachers that is projected onto them. Craig (2013) developed Schwab's concept, the teachers' ‘best-loved self’, to embrace teachers' input in promoting the learning and well-being of all in the institutions they serve (Ratnam & Craig, 2021). My experiences of being a living contradiction are grounded in a tension between my best-loved self and my experience of excessive entitlements. Living educational theories research in which individual practitioner-researchers generate their validated, evidence- and values-based explanations of educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations that influence their practice with values of human flourishing, have helped me leverage the potential for growth afforded by this tension. The perspective draws insights from the disciplines of education including Habermas's Critical Theory. It also includes insights from other methodologies such as autoethnography, action research, phenomenology, self-study and narrative inquiry.

This study aims to use a theoretical-based case study of two distinct ownership groups of the Jack Daniel’s brand to explore how rhetorical history (i.e. malleability of the past for strategic goals) may evoke and capitalize on different forms of nostalgia. Within, the authors configure four forms of nostalgia (i.e. personal, historical, collective and cultural) from the individual or collective interaction and level of direct experience one has with the past as lived or happened.

This study uses an historical research approach which involved the identification of primary and secondary sources, facility tour, source criticism and triangulation to create themes of rhetorical history infused with nostalgic narratives using compelling evidence through rich description of this fusion.

The findings reveal how nostalgia-driven narratives reflecting different collective longing for the re-creation of an American Paradise Lost used by Jack Daniel (i.e. the man) and later but differently by Brown-Forman. This study uncovers how the company’s inherited past was used rhetorically throughout its history, beginning with the nostalgic story of Jack Daniel and the distillery’s nostalgically choreographed location in Lynchburg, Tennessee. This study delves into this setting to highlight the importance of symbols, details, emotional appeals and communications for collective memory and identity development and to showcase the ways in which they are influenced by different types and forms of nostalgia.

This study adds to a limited number of studies focused on understanding the impact of founders on an organization’s brand and how that is malleable. This study responds to scholarly calls to study the influence of sequenced historical rhetoric on an organization and highlight the relevance of social emotions such as nostalgia for rhetorical history. Finally, the theoretical contribution involves the advancing and construction of a theory typology of nostalgia previously proposed by Havlena and Holak in 1996.

Consumers send billions of messages with high ephemerality each day, yet the effects of this type of communication are relatively unknown. Online ephemeral communication refers to sending and receiving information with a predetermined, finite lifespan in computer-mediated environments. The purpose of this paper is to conceptually understand online marketing communications with high ephemerality relative to messages with low ephemerality within a consumer’s goal system.

This paper is an attempt to conceptually understand how high ephemerality differs from low ephemerality, particularly as online ephemeral communication has emerged and is widely used by consumers and firms. Goal systems theory is applied to understand how ephemerality is a means for consumers to reach their communication goals.

Consumers are more likely to use messages with high ephemerality to impress with narrowly relevant content, regulate emotions, build social relationships, persuade others through peripheral cues and protect privacy, but messages with high ephemerality are less likely to help consumers manage their impression, acquire or share useful information or present strong arguments. It is also proposed that messages with high ephemerality can help marketers increase interest through frequent peripheral cues, including fun and friendly content, drive sales by creating a sense of urgency and increase loyalty, but are less likely to increase awareness, build interest through flattering or informative content or drive sales through transactional messages.

This study primarily advances the goal systems literature by introducing ephemerality. The defining feature of ephemerality, lifespan, also has research implications for studies of word-of-mouth marketing. The propositions in this study are ready for empirical investigation as to when consumers and firms choose to send messages with low or high ephemerality.

Firms need to understand how consumers are using messages sent with low and high ephemerality in order for firms to best move consumers through the sales funnel.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper to differentiate messages with low and high ephemerality, identify the presence and effects of ephemerality in offline and online communication and explain how and why sending messages with low or high ephemerality can help consumers and firms reach their communication goals. There is only one other paper in marketing on ephemerality in online marketing communications and no other conceptual work.

Capitalism is under siege (Porter & Kramer, 2011), and business schools are under fire (Amann et al., 2013). So, management and leadership education in higher education institutions should be reinvented under the more challenging era of capitalism. How then can business schools cope with these challenges and contribute to global endeavor for making sustainable capitalism? In this context, there is thus reason for the following three core concerns that new understanding of management and leadership education is required. First, shortcomings of contemporary capitalism lead to failures of responsible management. Second, ethical failure of management leadership is a pressing issue. Third, academic responsibility under the new capitalism remains unexamined. Based on these three core concerns, we seek to generate inclusive insights into the educational embeddedness of management and leadership members and the consequences of such embeddedness on managerial processes, structures, and outcomes under contemporary capitalism.

This paper describes the development of a digital role play game (RPG) designed to help construction apprentices to better communicate with their supervisors about issues with the potential to impact on their physical and psychological health and safety.

A participatory approach was adopted to utilise the knowledge and insights of the target users to inform the digital RPG development. Apprentices and supervisors were interviewed to identify characteristics of effective supervisor-apprentice communication, which became the RPG’s learning objectives. The scenarios constructed in the RPG were drawn from lived experiences shared by the apprentices in the interviews. During the development process, consultations were conducted with an advisory committee comprising of apprentices and supervisors to improve the realism of the RPG scenarios.

Three scenarios were developed for the RPG. In each scenario, players are asked to make decisions at various interaction points about how the characters should respond to the unfolding and challenging situations. Scripts were developed for the game, which were acted out and motion captured to animate digital MetaHuman characters embedded in a virtual construction site. Two example situations are introduced in this paper to illustrate the development process.

To our knowledge, the RPG introduced is one of the first applications of digital game-based training in the construction industry. The adoption of a participatory design approach ensures that the game content relates to real-world experiences. The digital RPG is highly interactive and engaging in nature and presents a novel approach to developing “soft” skills in construction.

This study of job advertisements for internal communication practitioners aims to investigate the signals that organisations are sending the profession about what is required of these roles. The concept of corporate voice – the “voice” of the organisation – is problematised to explore tensions in vocality. The aim is to support communication practitioners to navigate multi-vocality in the evolving professional context of digital communication technologies and changes in the workplace.

This qualitative study considers the role of voice in corporate communication practices and offers insights into “digital disruption” and the discursive pressure of employers' priorities on the profession and its practices. Job advertisements for internal communication practitioners were examined during 6-month periods in 2018, 2020 and 2022, which was a significant time of change for the profession with the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Qualitative content analysis of 514 internal communication job advertisements identifies that control and consistency are valorised, and continue to dominate descriptions of internal communication skills and responsibilities. The digital affordances that communication practitioners rely on has not changed significantly and a preference for “broadcasting” is evident.

This study provides insights into how Australian organisations shape and sustain univocal corporate communication practices, and the incompatibility of narrow configurations of voice with emerging organisational challenges such as social connectedness.