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With the available technological tools, fans are able to access sport products regardless of geographic proximity. Through technology, fans can follow sports teams from other countries. In contrast to previous research focused on the local fan, in this paper we report on a study of a group of distant fans – Chinese National Basketball Association (NBA) fans – as the focal object. The study was guided by three questions: RQ1: what motives drive a distant fan’s involvement with their favorite NBA team? RQ2: are there differences in the motives associated with the different stages of psychological connection among distant fans? RQ3: are there differences in the amount of media consumption at the different stages of psychological connection? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An online survey was distributed to consumers of a Chinese sports message board to assess the motives of distant fans (n=281) following teams in the NBA, and strength of psychological connection to the NBA based on the psychological continuum model (PCM).

There were significant differences in the motives for following a distant NBA team among the respondents at different stages of psychological connection. Significant differences were also found among Chinese NBA fans at the respective stages regarding media consumption.

This study contributes to the advancement of knowledge regarding sport fandom. It is one of the first studies to include an assessment of the sport consumption motives of distant fans, more specifically, motives influencing Chinese fans’ consumption of the NBA. Utilizing the PCM allows for the segmentation of a specific fan population and to ascertain whether there are differences in the motives and behaviors associated with different stages of an individual’s psychological connection with a team.

The purpose of the current research was to examine the different relationships between individuals' sense of community in sport (SCS) cultivated by participating in local sport leagues, social support and health-related psychological outcomes (i.e. depressive symptoms and happiness) based on the participants' involvement level in the tennis league.

Using participants (n = 150) from local tennis leagues in the Southeastern region of the USA, the authors first conducted an instrument validation procedure to assess the psychometric properties of the included measures, and second, the authors analyzed the proposed multigroup moderated-mediation structural model using component-based partial least squares structural equation modeling with SmartPLS 3 (Ringle et al., 2015).

The results provide adequate evidence of reliability and validity for both the included reflective and formative constructs. Further, the findings of the proposed moderated-mediation structural model indicated that SCS was positively and significantly associated with social support and happiness while negatively related with depressive symptoms. Social support only mediated the relationship between SCS and happiness. The multigroup analysis results showed significant differences in the relationship between social support and happiness between the least involved group and more involved groups.

The findings of this study indicated that SCS experienced through participation in local sport leagues can develop both the extent and quality of supportive social relationships with other engaging members. One conclusion from the findings is recognizing a need to develop interventions to enhance SCS, social support and health-related psychological outcomes through local sport league participation.

Drawing upon social judgment theory, the research examines whether changes in psychological involvement with a sport human brand owing to their sporting success can generate spillover effects on people's national pride, a proxy for the collective level of well-being and whether the individual's behavioral engagement in sport spectating will moderate this relationship.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment grounded in the 2021 Indian Premier League championship, the authors solicit responses from 296 representative individuals residing in India twice using a two-wave panel design. The authors conducted confirmatory factor analysis, repeated measures T-test, latent change score analysis, and structural regression analysis to examine the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride.

The results demonstrate a positive association between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride. Further, the findings indicate that an increase in psychological involvement with sport human brand was associated with an increase in national pride due to the successful athletic endeavor involving the sport human brand. However, the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride was invariant irrespective of patrons' spectatorship behavior.

This research demonstrates that sport human brands possess transformative soft power that extends their prerogative cultural identity personified by their athletic ability and success, allowing them to shape public sentiments of national pride via their profound influence through and beyond the complex network of brand ecosystems.

This chapter focuses on how corporate entrepreneurs seize opportunities and deal with threats through resource acquisition, control, and use. When corporate entrepreneurs fail to gain control of preferred resources they must rely on their ability to optimize their use of resources on hand in order to avoid the typical limitations inherent in a constrained set of resources. However, control of resources, whether existing or supplementary, by itself is an insufficient basis for influencing performance. Performance also depends on an organization’s capacity to deploy resources in combination with strategically important organizational processes to affect a desired end. The way in which corporate entrepreneurs utilize their resources is likely to have a more significant effect on performance than is merely having control of them. The current research aims to elaborate on how corporate entrepreneurs can become more resourceful by using a vacillation approach to resource acquisition and utilization. In this context, vacillation is movement between exploration and exploitation, or knowledge acquisition and knowledge integration from a knowledge management perspective. Vacillation is distinguished from the “balance” hypothesis prevalent in the organizational ambidexterity literature. A balance hypothesis states that both exploration and exploitation may be pursued simultaneously either by creating structural or contextual organizational ambidexterity. Here, we explain how vacillation enables an organization’s corporate entrepreneurship posture to lead to improved performance. In this chapter, we first describe the extant literature and construct relationships between corporate entrepreneurship posture, organizational resource level, vacillation, and organizational performance. We then analyze the learning processes associated with vacillation and discuss the research and managerial implications associated with the proposed relationships.

The prevalent approach to providing the Internet in rural areas of developing countries takes the form of ‘telecentres’, where, it is assumed that ‘access to’ this technology will confer benefits on the target groups. The purpose of this paper is to show that this approach diverts attention from the many variables that determine whether and to what extent, access is translated into well‐being. During this part of the paper we draw on Sen's analysis of the complex relationships between consumption and welfare. The second part of our critique is concerned to show that excessive concern with access, has led to the neglect of an alternative type of model in which knowledge rather than technology is the main concern.

This paper proposes a framework that focuses on instilling feelings of gratitude within consumers. Participant sports events are often funded largely by sponsorship revenues, and their consumer base is considered to represent an identifiably unique market. These conditions are argued to be favourable for integrating a gratitude framework. A model is presented that depicts gratitude as a mediating mechanism within a reciprocal relationship between the sponsor and the consumers. It includes purchase intentions as the behavioural outcome of gratitude. The findings suggest that incorporating feelings of gratitude may prove to be advantageous for potential sponsors within the participant sports industry.

If information technology (IT) is to have a mass impact on those living in rural areas of developing countries, it cannot occur on the basis of ownership (as it does in rich countries). Instead, it is to institutional innovations in and for developing countries, that one needs to look at. Two basic forms of innovation are identified: one which allows use of IT without ownership and the other which permits the benefits of IT to reach those who make no individual use of it. Either way, however, successful institutional innovations require a thicket of interactions between local actors, rather than interventions from foreign agencies (at least in the initial phase). Three case studies were used to illustrate these components of what I feel is an emerging paradigm of IT and rural development.

Throughout this study, the authors sought to identify the antecedents and consequences of a multi-dimensional consumption-value construct. Data were collected from sports spectators in Japan (n=372) and the United States (n=396). The results indicate that three quality dimensions (functional, technical and aesthetic quality) have a significant impact on their respective value dimensions in the context of sporting events. Moreover, the constructs of entertainment and community prestige have positive effects on customers' behavioural intentions.