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In recent decades, significant advances have been made at both the grassroots and professional levels of women's ice hockey in North America. Yet, despite recent achievements, such as the establishment of ‘professional’ leagues, and compelling narratives of progress, athletes and league organisers still face significant challenges. The barriers women face, such as reduced access to resources and opportunity, lack of legitimacy, and league instability, and a continued reliance on relationships with men's sporting leagues, such as the National Hockey League, suggest that women's ice hockey is accommodated into the game in ways that reinforce and perpetuate systems of gender, reproducing a neoliberal notion of failure. Using Halberstam's (2011) notion of failure as the place from which reform and transformation can take place, we offer a critical reading of the (re)formation of the National Women's Hockey League and the developments in women's (semi)professional ice hockey in North America.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine community relations as corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagements by sport organizations through the lens of social anchor theory. Specifically, this work explores whether and how sport organizations serve as social anchors in community, and what community relations approaches have the potential to facilitate professional sport organizations as social anchors. Findings are based on textual analysis of CSR reports and community relating websites of nine professional sport organizations in the United States. Findings suggest that sport organizations act as social anchors by identifying with social issues, celebrating diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI), and incorporating the margins into sports. Overall, partnerships, community events, and players' community engagements are the community relations approaches with potential to establish sport organizations as social anchors. The proposed best practices illustrate the intersection of sport CSR initiatives, community relations, and DEI social programs.

Coaches from both the professional and college ranks are often put forth as archetypal examples of effective leaders – individuals’ whose behaviors, styles, and wisdom provide the ever elusive playbook for how to successfully lead others. While numerous books and articles in the popular press put forth advice from leaders in the sports world, numerous empirical studies of the drivers of successful sports leadership and the factors that contribute to leader success in the context of sports have also been conducted. In this chapter, we first provide a broad review of empirical leadership research conducted within the sports world and examine how research within the sports context provides a suitable and advantageous setting for leadership research in general. Second, we offer a road map of opportunities for future leadership studies within the context of sports. The goal of this chapter is to stimulate and rally more thought-provoking research related to leadership in sports that generates insights for organizational leadership across contexts.

To examine the ways in which sports-related brain injury (concussion and subconcussion) is both similar to and different from other injuries and to set out a sociological understanding of the injury, its manifestation and management.

There is a broad contextualization of the ‘issue’ of concussion and the processes that have brought this to the fore, an examination of the ways in which concussion has been figuratively clouded from plain view, and an outline of the main contributions of the social sciences to understanding this injury – the culture of risk and the mediating effect of social relationships. The chapter concludes by questioning whether the emergence of concerns over chronic traumatic encephalopathy has stimulated a fundamental change in attitudes towards sport injuries, and if this has had a significant impact on the social visibility of concussion.

The two available sociological studies of the lived experiences of concussion are situated within a broader analysis of the politicization of sports medicine and the emergence of a particular social discourse around sports-related brain injury.

The difficulties emanating from the dominance of a biomedical approach to concussion are discussed along with the need for further research, incorporating a more holistic view of concussion, as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.