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Traditional sports have seen declining participation at many levels, with football being no different. This is occurring at a time when emergent technologies present new challenges, particularly to the crucial yet ignored cohort of millennials. Without meeting the needs of millennials, football cannot be successful in the future. This research seeks to understand how millennial football fandom (sport, not team) in Australia impacts football participation, whilst empirically examining the impact of football video games (FVGs).

Survey data are collected from online groups, forums and social media pages of Australian football (soccer) fans. Quantitative analysis of millennial fandom and its influence on football participation (for the first time demarcated into play and engagement) is undertaken, including the moderating influence of time spent playing FVGs, amidst covariate influences of age and number of children.

Results highlight the multi-dimensionality of millennial football fandom in Australia, reveal the typical hours spent playing football across a range of participation types (including play and engagement), support fan involvement’s influence on engagement with football, establish that a desire to interact with other football fans manifests in playing more football, specify how playing FVGs moderates these relationships, supports the covariate influences of age and evidences that playing FVGs does not hamper football play.

This is the first study to examine millennial fans of football (the sport, not tied to a club) and the influence of fandom on football participation. By separating football participation into two forms, play and engagement, we highlight discrete influences, whilst evaluating for the first time the moderating influence of the time millennials spend playing FVGs. For sport managers and administrators, these are important findings to facilitate better segmentation, recruitment, retention and participation, each with broader societal health benefits. This is undertaken in Australia where football is not a dominant code, relegating fandom to a niche, thus revealing important findings for sports and business management.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an applicable solution to help organizations to solve the problem of participation vs privacy in office buildings.

A theoretical model is proposed based on research claims that employees' participation motivated by three issues simultaneously is likely to shape the ideal overall participation map in office layouts. These are organizational, physical planning, and personal characteristics issues. The model was applied to a case study and results were compared with employees' reaction.

Once the model was applied, results revealed misallocation of 63 per cent of staff in their workspaces. Results support employees' reaction towards their dissatisfaction with the level of participation vs privacy they possess in their workspaces.

Each organization could have a different participation map due to variations in organizational and personal characteristics issues. Further research is needed to understand relationships among the three incorporated issues.

The proposed model could be easily applied and would provide organizations with ideal office layouts that would support productivity.

SERVICE USER PARTICIPATION IN housing and support is an important issue in national services. Nonetheless, research has found wide variations in the levels of service user participation in housing and support schemes. This paper reports on a case study evaluation of approaches to service user participation in housing and support, drawing out key requirements: for flexible approaches to service user participation, to embed service user participation within organisations, for independent facilitation, and the importance of the participation process.

Employee participation is conceived as a four‐stage process (interaction, communication to and from management, influence by and on management, employee effect on decisions). Eighty‐two lower supervisory managers perceived the four stages as highly related except for influence by management. Further, the four processes of participation were found in approximately equal amounts (except for managerial influence). An examination by decision type showed that employee and managerial influence were inversely related on corporate and departmental decisions, but were unrelated on departmental employee and operational decisions. Employees engaged most in participation on departmental employee decisions and least on departmental staffing decisions. This difference in participation was greater for organisations of small size.

In Israel, the decision which educational framework is most suitable for pupils with special needs is made by a placement committee. In January 2005, the eighth amendment of the Israeli Special Education Law determined that all pupils have the legal right to participate in their placement committee’s deliberations. This paper aims to examine the implementation of this liberal reform that let young people’s voices be heard. Specifically, the focus is on the attitudes of involved professionals (committee chairs, educational supervisors, teachers, etc.) regarding the law, and whether and in what ways their views influence the extent to which this law is implemented.

The research used an eight-step linear scale to investigate both the desired and actual levels of children’s participation in the committee’s discussions, as evaluated by professionals. In addition, the pupils’ satisfaction with the discussion process was evaluated, based on the professionals’ perceptions. Furthermore, the research analyzed which socioeconomic, cultural and occupational variables correlated with the degree of students’ participation in and satisfaction with the process.

The major finding was that many of the adults responsible for the implementation of the reform do not believe in its principles and are even opposed to child participation. In their discussions, child participation was poor.

The conclusion drawn from the study is that legislation alone is not enough when implementing a controversial reform. Spreading of this new social norm must be accompanied by efforts to promote the concept of child participation among the professionals who implement it.

This paper examines the relationship between participation and job performance. It also seeks to identify the impact of individual variables on the level of participation among managerial employees in the Public Service Department in Malaysia. Finally, it attempts to determine whether Porter and Lawler's (1968)‐expectancy model could represent an appropriate framework for studying employee participation. The results indicate that the level of perceived participation among managerial employees is high and that employee participation has acmoderate and positive relationship with job performance. The findings appear to match other studies conducted in the West, suggesting that these studies were not very much different across cultures. Managerial employees place equal importance on intrinsic and extrinsic outcomes. Employee participation could be better managed if employees possess certain critical factors. These include high job abilities, greater need for achievement, and a substantial amount of motivation. This study also suggests that Porter and Lawler's (1968) expectancy model is a suitable framework for studying employee participation.

Hoping to increase the productivity of their employees, firms provide and expect their employees to use approved mobile apps. However, despite an intuitive appeal, the relationship between information technology usage and productivity is still seen as paradoxical. This study examines the relationship between employees' experience and engagement with business mobile apps provided by employers and its effects on employee work productivity.

Data from respondents who use employer-provided business apps were used to test the hypotheses. Measurement-corrected latent scores extracted from the PLS measurement evaluation were used in regression-centric assessment using PROCESS.

Results indicate that employee-users’ experience-based attributions of the business app, i.e. customization, performance quality and compatibility, have positive effects on productivity mediated by participation intensity. Further, work type (retail vs non-retail) and the depth of the employee user’s experience moderate experience-based attributions' indirect effects on productivity.

Unlike previous studies delving into this topic, this study focuses solely on the mediation and moderation effects for hypothesis testing. Specifically, this study investigates effects conditional on work type (retail vs non-retail), which the authors believe has significant implications for retailing. These findings have interesting implications for both future research and managers.

The concept of “participation” has become a buzzword in contemporary public governance models. However, despite the broad and significant interest, defining participation remains a debated topic. The aim of the current study was to explore how participants perceived and interpreted the meaning and scope of participation.

This study is part of a four-year (2019–2022) longitudinal research project investigating stakeholder participation in the context of developing and establishing a strategic regional plan in Region Skåne in southern Sweden. The research project has a qualitative approach and uses interviews with different stakeholder groups such as municipal politicians and public officials and a survey as empirical material.

The authors developed a participation spectrum including eight types of participation: to be open, to be informed, to be listened to, to discuss, to be consulted, to give and take, to collaborate and to co-create. The authors also identified four different purposes of participation: creating a joint network, creating a joint understanding, creating a joint effort and creating a joint vision. The spectrum and the purposes were related through four characteristics of participation, i.e. involvement, interaction, influence and empowerment.

The study rests on a single case, and so the results have limited transferatibility.

Researching participation in terms of the participants' perceptions contributes a new perspective to the existing literature, which has commonly focussed on the organizers' perceptions of participation. Moreover, in order to clarify what participation meant to the participants, the study puts emphasis on untangling this from the why question of participation.

Although the prior literature has identified the relevance of dealer participation for multinational enterprises (MNEs), it is unclear whether such participation could also be an important means for local dealers to learn from MNEs. By adopting local firms’ viewpoint, our study draws on organizational learning theory to examine how local dealers benefit from their participation with foreign suppliers in Africa.

The empirical setting is a combinative dataset of secondary data and primary survey of 164 small- and medium-sized local dealers with nine subsidiaries of a Chinese motorcycle company in six countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.

This research shows that dealer participation is positively associated with dealer performance, and this positive effect is stronger when local dealers operate in regions with low government corruption and high government support. However, the positive relationship is weaker when local dealers use the local tongue extensively but becomes stronger when their foreign suppliers have a high dealer coverage.

By taking a local-participant perspective, our study extends the participation literature to show how firms from a resource-constrained region may benefit from their proactive participation with foreign counterparts. Additionally, we identify the boundary conditions of institutional factors and strategic choices of local dealers and foreign suppliers, providing a nuanced understanding of firm behaviors in complex and uncertain markets.

Promoted for its inclusivity, agricultural value chain (AVC) financing leverages social capital and mechanisms such as off-take agreements and forward contracts to reduce borrowing and lending costs and risks for both farmers and lending institutions. AVC financing has been defined as the flow of financial products and services to and among the various actors within the AVC to address constraints of production and distribution and fulfill the needs of those involved in the chain by reducing risk and improving efficiency. This paper investigates how farmers' involvement in AVC affects their access to credit.

The authors collected primary data from 400 crop farmers in northern Ghana through a semi-structured questionnaire and analyzed the data, using the multinomial endogenous switching regression model.

Joint participation in AVC increased the amount of formal and informal credit received by 64 and 78%, respectively, compared to nonparticipation. Similarly, participation in AVC horizontal linkage and AVC vertical linkage increased the amount of formal and informal credit received by 40 and 47% and 46 and 74%, respectively, compared to nonparticipation. Irrigation farming, extension visits, knowledge of AVC in the community, access to a storage facility and trust in contract farming significantly influenced farmers' participation in AVC.

The authors’ work offers valuable insights into how different dimensions of value chain participation can impact smallholder farmers' access to credit. This work also underscores the importance of considering both formal and informal credit sources when analyzing the outcomes of value chain participation. The findings could enable formal financial providers to identify, liaise and/or resource informal financial players such as value chain actors to supply both formal and informal credit to farmers in AVCs.