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Sports marketing and sponsorship research is located at the intersection of behavioral and design research, which means that it analyzes the current world and shapes a future world. This dual focus poses challenges for formulating and testing theories of sports marketing.

This article develops criteria for categorizing theoretical concepts as either behavioral or formed as different ways of expressing ideas of sports marketing research. It emphasizes the need for clear concept categorization for proper operationalization and applies these criteria to selected theoretical concepts of sports marketing and sponsorship research.

The study defines three criteria to categorize theoretical concepts, namely (1) the guiding idea of research, (2) the role of observed variables, and (3) the relationship among observed variables. Applying these criteria to concepts of sports marketing research manifests the relevance of categorizing theoretical concepts as either behavioral or formed to operationalize concepts correctly.

This study is the first in sports marketing to clearly categorize theoretical concepts as either behavioral or formed, and to formulate guidelines on how to differentiate behavioral concepts from formed concepts.

This study focused on Ivorian track and field athletes who were current or former members of the Ivorian national team to understand athletes’ experiences with migration, diaspora and sport.

Participatory action research (PAR) methodology was used in this research study (Lenette and Nesvaderani, 2021). According to Schinke and Blodgett (2016), PAR is a type of qualitative research used to engage the researcher and researched. The researcher and researched work together to understand the issues of a situation and communicate a plan to work toward resolving those issues (Kemmis et al., 2014). Using PAR helped to engage multiple people in the study, and as more research studies explore forced migration and sport, more scholars are starting to lean on the methodology to create a more diverse perspective and to include marginalized populations in the world of scholarly research (Stone, 2018; Robinson et al., 2019).

Key findings illustrate Ivorian athletes’ ability to forge a bond that transcended tribal and political differences through geographical proximity and sport opportunity, allowing them to (re)connect with their Ivorian diaspora by representing the national team.

This research paper expands on past studies in sport and migration by showcasing the fluid nature of how diaspora constructs an athlete’s national identity once they are forced to leave their homeland.

This chapter examines how and why Asian bookmakers have surpassed the rest of the sports gambling market in betting volume. It critically unpacks the size, structure and operations of this market, before examining the globalisation of match-fixing that accompanies this, largely, unregulated market. While there has been some excellent research on the structure of the Black/Red Mafia controlled gambling in Communist China or match-fixing in national markets like South Korea and Taiwan, this chapter is one of the first comprehensive examinations of the globalised Asian gambling market and its contribution to sports corruption.

In response to increasing competition for consumer attention, sport governing bodies have innovated short-format, action-oriented versions of traditional sports to attract new fans. This article explores how sport governing bodies (SGBs) manage the need for innovations to both conform to existing stakeholder expectations whilst offering novel benefits in comparison to competition (i.e. legitimate distinctiveness).

Created by the English Cricket Board (ECB), The Hundred competition was used as a case study to explore the conformity-differentiation tension through a legitimacy lens using document and media analysis.

Seven themes were created to explain how the ECB managed legitimacy tensions: rule modification, team creation, scheduling, game-day experience, broadcasting, gender equity and sponsorship. In each theme, differentiation and conformity were traded-off by the ECB to prioritise pragmatic legitimacy with broadcasters and sponsors.

For sport management professionals, the Hundred demonstrates the commercial value of differentiating new sporting events from competitors via hybrid broadcasting partnerships, embedded gender equity and designing game-day experiences that attract hard-to-reach consumer demographics.

SGBs must trade-off legitimacy between sources when innovating to survive, and when faced with conflicting expectations, commercial imperatives determined whether to conform or differentiate.

Increasing industrial agriculture and economic crisis has generated creative responses in pursuit of responsible solutions to the human and environmental cost of globalization by applying these models to promote social responsibility, help sustain livelihoods and foster biodiversity. A key issue concerns how responsible and circular businesses might provide appropriate responses to large-scale “wicked” problems. This paper aims to ask what such creativity looks like in the context of a circular economy that attempts to build closed value loops, by examining a case from the organic cotton textile industry: Appachi Eco-Logic.

This study uses an ethnographic extended-case approach to identify two phases of creative growth at Appachi Eco-Logic, examining how closing the value loop and creating circularity involved broadening the circle to include more and more actors.

This study identifies two major challenges to achieving and maintaining full circularity before concluding with a broad provocation for the study of circular economies.

The case offers insight into fundamental features of circularity, regeneration and redistribution, which can be used by managers to build responsible and sustainable closed value loops.

Firms are accountable for upholding worker rights and well-being in their supply base. The authors unpack the evolution in lead firm thinking and practice about how to assure labor conditions at suppliers.

The authors conducted interviews with the social sustainability leaders at 22 global corporations (“lead firms”) and their sustainability consultants to understand how they think about, and enact efforts, to support labor in their supply base. The authors complement this with an analysis of stated practice in proprietary supplier codes of conduct for the manufacturing and extractive-related firms in the S&P 500 and FTSE 350.

The authors’ interviews suggest firms follow two distinct and cumulative approaches: a transactional-based approach leveraging collective buyer power to enforce supplier compliance and a relational-based approach focused on mutual capacity building between lead (buyer) firms and their suppliers. The authors also see the emergence, in a small subset of firms, of a bottom-up approach that recognizes supplier workers as rights-holders and empowers them to understand and claim their rights.

The authors identify systematic convergence in supplier codes of conduct. While the transactional and relational approaches are well documented in the supply chain social sustainability literature, the rights-holder approach is not. Its emergence presents an important complement to the other approaches and enables a broader recognition of human rights, and the duty of Western firms to assure those rights.

Platform ecosystem governance is a decisive issue for orchestrators, as the motivation and behaviors of the complementors in an ecosystem can be distinctly different, shaped by the specific arrangements they have within the ecosystem. However, knowledge about adaptation in the governance of platform ecosystems is quite limited. First, the authors hardly know which obstacles are arising for orchestrators due to typical governance settings and their consequences. Second, the authors know less about governance strategies by orchestrators that help deal with these obstacles.

The authors follow an inductive, multistep case-study-based approach with multiple cases using guidelines proposed by Yin (2018). Based on predefined criteria, the authors selected 41 platform ecosystems with a “hub and spoke” system within and across several industries and collected a wide range of data. The authors conducted 14 interviews with executives of these platform ecosystems to gain further insights, transcribed and/or summarized all interviews, and analyzed the data.

Based on the dataset, the authors identify four significant obstacles and ten strategies of orchestrators in platform ecosystems. This approach allows us to gain insight into innovative approaches orchestrators conduct to cope with these challenges.

The authors already have a broad range of studies on ecosystem governance in the literature. However, research dealing with the dynamics of governance regimes is quite rare. The study examines how orchestrators of platform ecosystems react to emerging obstacles they are confronted with during the evolution of their platform ecosystems. Partly, these strategies might be expected, but mostly they show innovative approaches for handling these obstacles that have not been reported in research so far.

Cultivating customer loyalty is extremely crucial for fast-food players to remain competitive in the industry. This research is discovering the path to cultivate customer loyalty through experience that is built based on auditory, gustatory, haptic, olfactory and visual cues.

Quantitative research has been conducted by distributing survey questionnaires to customers at selected fast-food restaurants in urban areas. The collected data has been analyzed by descriptive and structural equation modeling analysis.

The customers' loyalty to fast food can be cultivated through gustatory, haptic and olfactory cues. However, auditory and visual are not functioning as marketing cues to cultivate customer loyalty.

The fast-food players may emphasize gustatory, haptic and olfactory marketing cues to cultivate customer loyalty. These cues can be shared through experience.

This study has discovered the potential ways to cultivate customer loyalty in dining at fast-food restaurants within the Malaysian market.

The aim of this study was to conduct a comprehensive investigation into declining and emerging occupations and job titles and to develop a national career progression pathway for the tourism and hospitality (T&H) sector.

Anchored on the Social Cognitive Career Theory, this study used face to face in-depth interviews of 33 industry stakeholders: policymakers, trade association, training providers and beneficiaries (T&H).

The finding reveals that only the “watchman” occupation was identified as the declining job while majority of the emerging jobs were more related to information technology and environmental occupations (website designers, digital marketers, data analysts, hygienists, and safety and hazard experts).

The findings provide a valuable signal for the growing number of jobs in security services, hygiene and information technology-oriented occupations, which the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture including practitioners including HR directors and general managers should respond timely to and to these growing needs in order to remain competitive in the sector.

This is the first study in context that responded to a call by industry players to fill in a practical knowledge gap in examining declining and emerging jobs and job titles in the T&H sector. The study provides vocational insights into mapping the entry level requirements for the jobs allied with occupations in the national technical and vocational educational training qualifications framework of Ghana at the national level.

This pan-Canadian study examines the information practices of STEM-trained immigrant women to Canada as they navigate workfinding and workplace integration. Our study focuses on a population of highly skilled immigrant women from across Canada and uses an information practice lens to examine their lived experiences of migration and labour market integration. As highly trained STEM professionals in pursuit of employment, our participants have specific needs and challenges, and as we explore these, we consider the intersection of their information practices with government policies, settlement services and the hiring practices of STEM employers.

We conducted a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 74 immigrant women across 13 Canadian provinces and territories to understand the nature of their engagement with employment-seeking in STEM sectors. This article reports the findings related to the settlement and information experiences of the immigrant women as they navigate new information landscapes.

As immigrants, as women and as STEM professionals, the experiences of the 74 participants reflect both marginality and privilege. The reality of their intersectional identities is that these women may not be well-served by broader settlement resources targeting newcomers, but neither are the specific conventions of networking and job-seeking in the STEM sectors in Canada fully apparent or accessible to them. The findings also point to the broader systemic and contextual factors that participants have to navigate and that shape in a major way their workfinding journeys.

The findings of this pan-Canadian study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. Through interviews with these STEM professionals, we highlight the barriers and challenges of an under-studied category of migrants (the highly skilled and “desirable” type of immigrants). We provide a critical discussion of their settlement experiences and expose the idiosyncrasies of a system that claims to value skilled talent while structurally making it very difficult to deliver on its promises to recruit and retain highly qualified personnel. Our findings point to specific aspects of these skilled professionals’ experiences, as well as the broader systemic and contextual factors that shape their workfinding journey.