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The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and interested research a sense of how the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is affecting worker productivity in the workplace. There are several positive and negative issues concerning how some employees are willing to spend work time following the NCAA tournament and related office gambling activities.

A review of the applied literature on sports‐related gambling and bracketing that is quite widespread in the USA and other countries was provided. The sample consisted of relatively well‐paid professionals, who may routinely engage in office pools and most universally are involved in bracketing March Madness plays. This resulted in 145 useable questionnaires recording responses to 28 variables from an initial sampling frame of slightly over 200 potential respondents associated with a major Pittsburgh‐based financial service provider. Factor analysis and multivariate statistical analysis were used to test several hypotheses.

Management appears to be successfully delivering the message that office gambling activities harm productivity if management activity discourages office gambling, but there appears to be a trade‐off as labor productivity may be slightly reduced on the short term, and employee cohesiveness may increase on the long term. It was also found that the degree of personal involvement is important; the more an employee is involved, the more negative the impact that March Madness activities will have on his/her productivity.

March Madness is a time‐honored tradition that many employees take for granted and will engage in regardless of the extrinsic controls that management may care to implement, making the extrinsic controls too expensive for a questionable return in enhanced labor productivity during March Madness.

It is an interesting academic research question concerning the balance of productivity losses and gains in employee cohesiveness that warrants additional research in the intrinsic motivations of both management and their employees.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and test certain assumptions concerning the employee productivity and employee morale associated with the annual participation in March Madness activities.

The sample consisted of relatively well‐paid professionals many of whom routinely engage in office pools and most universally are involved in bracketing March Madness plays, from a major Pittsburgh‐based financial service provider. Multivariate statistical analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Although management may advertise that their companies lose operational productivity, respondents generally agree that there is little drop off in workplace productivity. Apparently, there is a trade off between labor productivity, which may be slightly reduced on the short term, and employee cohesiveness, which may increase on the long term.

March Madness activities are such time‐honored traditions that it may be questionable whether any efforts on the part of management to curb office pooling would be effective, due to the expense, uncertain consequences, and doubtful impacts on productivity arising from such initiatives.

Continued research to determine the balance of productivity losses and gains in employee cohesiveness and morale is needed to develop appropriate strategies to effectively deal with the complexities posed by March Madness activities in the workplace environment.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic response is not only devastating nations and economies across the globe but it is also severely disrupting the event industry, with government and health authorities forcing many events to be postponed or cancelled. The purpose of this study is to investigate the prospective attendees’ emotional responses to cancelled events. This study draws upon grief cycle theory to articulate different layers of the grief process in the event domain of inquiry.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament was selected as the research context. Taking user-generated messages from Twitter, this study first performed content analysis to organize lexical patterns into categories and higher-order themes based on the grief cycle. It also performed social network analyses using UCINET to illustrate how different grief phases are inter-related.

Results not only point to attendees’ self-expression manifested through a continuum of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance but they also reveal a three-layer hierarchy of grief, namely, event-related, socio-politics-related and crisis-related. The network analysis further illustrates how grief phases are tied into a complex network of grief messages.

This study advances the event literature by improving knowledge about attendees’ emotional responses to cancelled events. It increases our understanding of the grieving process in the aftermath of COVID-19. The proposed triple grief cycle helps advance the literature by showcasing how voices from prospective attendees represent three pillars of grief hierarchy. The findings also underscore the emotional crisis of the COVID-19 aftermath.

The purpose of the chapter is to overview the sociological literature related to social media and digital technologies in sport, with particular attention to media representations, content production, and audience responses. The chapter examines how social media and digital technologies reproduce and challenge hegemonic representation strategies, while maintaining existing cultural norms in the industry. Further, the chapter evaluates how athletes and fans create digital communities to bring visibility to marginalized groups. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of digital media for social justice and advocacy.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature in sociology of sport, sport communication, and media studies to provide an assessment of the implications of social media and digital technologies for sport.

Scholarship on social media and digital technologies in sport has primarily focused on descriptive analyses. Sociological approaches provide a theoretical grounding for examining issues of power, inequality, and social justice in relation to media ideologies, production, and consumption.

The chapter identifies future areas of study, including a more robust engagement with theory and an expansion of methodological approaches.

The chapter provides an overview of the literature on social media and digital technologies in sport of nearly 80 scholarly publications. The chapter moves beyond focusing on patterns in content to consider how structures, journalistic practices, cultural norms, and audience interactions collectively shape ideologies about gender, race, sexuality, religion, and disability in the sport media industry.

The purpose of this study is to explore the plurality of logics composing an organizational field and how that plurality affects a sport governing body's (SGB) sense of self. The authors sought to determine what logics exist in a specific field and how they interact according to Kraatz and Block's (2017) types of organizational responses. Finally, the authors explore how an organization's responses affect organizational outcomes.

The authors analyzed 476 unique organizational web pages and documents and 293 news media articles from four news outlets. The authors conduct a content analysis informed by Gioia et al.’s (2013) method to explore the website data to understand the logics of the field. The authors analyze the media articles for media accounts of events and determine how logics inform an SGB's actions (Cocchairella and Edwards, 2020).

The authors find institutional plurality leads to a fractured organizational sense of self, resulting in poor outcomes. The authors' findings suggest Kraatz and Block's (2017) as well as other previously theorized strategies do not lead to an organization reconciling competing logics. Rather, the strategies employed led to outcomes harming the organization's legitimacy and financial well-being.

There are several calls within the broader management field and the sport management field to address institutional plurality (Kraatz and Block, 2017; Robertson et al., 2022). Unlike previous research studies, this study finds detrimental effects of plurality on an organization. The authors discuss the strength of the strategies employed and why the strategies failed.

The purpose of this paper is to take the results of two studies to hypothesize about practice and recommend research/debate on business leaders’ use and perceptions of social media. Data were considered under the umbrella of current senior management practice, with the purpose to make suggestions for better practice, but primarily to theorize about the probable evolution of social media value and credibility for executives.

The first study presents results from a qualitative content analysis of Fortune and Inc. 500 CEOs’ use of Twitter in terms of: activity and engagement; tweet subject matter; frequency of opinions expressed; and level of formality. The second considers the credibility of social media against traditional media and personal information sources within one quantitative survey.

Senior executives using social media (Twitter) tend to engage in one-sided conversations in a two-way medium. Further, most CEOs appear to be using more formal language than general Twitter users. These factors, combined with the low credibility and value of social media by senior managers, may indicate the best future hope for social media credibility with executives will be neutral.

In examining a combination of current literature and the data from these separate studies, the authors posit a number of underlying challenges in realizing the potential of the evolving social media environment that may deserve specific research.

Discussion touches on implications for future adoption of social media tools by business leaders, as well as one-way vs two-way communication tendencies. This paper proposes a starting-point for theory development regarding this significant emerging area of communication.

The purpose of this editorial is to set the context for the second issue of this new sport business management journal, by identifying the distinctive features of sport and sport management. The editorial also profiles the papers appearing in the journal.

The editorial is based upon the editor's previous academic experience and his work with practitioners in the field of sport business management. The way in which the paper is presented is intended to assist researchers in identifying opportunities for work in the field of sport business management.

Based upon extensive experience working with leading business scholars, as well as senior managers from across sport, it is the editor's view that sport is a unique industry, characterized by a highly distinctive set of characteristics. As such, this necessitates specialist research to be undertaken in the field, and for the appropriate differentiation of sport business management research to be established.

The editorial identifies a number of characteristics which sport displays, which should assist current and prospective sport business management researchers to identify where there are opportunities for carrying out work.

The essence of the editorial introduction is that, while academically rigorous research is central to the development of sport business management, the practical application of this research is essential.

Implicit within the editorial is the notion that sport is different to other industrial sectors, but that the practice of good management is nonetheless still important. As such, management in a social context is an important aspect of the editorial's intent.

The editorial invites prospective authors and readers to think about and identify how and why sport is different to other industries, and how this could impact upon the research they carry out.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the influences of theory of planned behavior (TPB) constructs (i.e. attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control (PBC)) on individuals’ volunteer intention for future sporting events, and second, to investigate the moderating effects of brand reputation and moral obligation in the relationships between TPB constructs and volunteer intention.

The sample consisted of 107 volunteers at the 2009 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Moderated hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypothesized relationships of the model.

Subjective norm and PBC were significantly associated with volunteer intention. Brand reputation was found to be a moderator in the relationships between attitude and volunteer intention and between subjective norm and volunteer intention, and moral obligation moderated the relationship between PBC and volunteer intention.

Sporting events/volunteer managers must understand individuals’ decision-making process with respect to volunteering at sporting events and important insights into new strategies to increase volunteer recruitment, retention, and reliability.

Because sporting event managers face considerable obstacles in recruiting and retaining a volunteer workforce, an enhanced understanding of volunteering may highlight new ways to remove obstacles to being a volunteer to the benefit of individuals and society.

This paper emphasizes the importance of brand reputation and moral obligation as moderators of the effects of the TPB constructs on volunteer intention in the context of sporting events.