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The purpose of this paper is to isolate factors predictive of event attendees, and assist tourism professionals such as members of host committees, in maximizing the number of out-of-town visitors to their region and optimizing tourism-related revenue when hosting college football bowl games.

A total of 16 demand variables were entered into a hierarchical regression model, including the stature of the event and market-related variables, as well as team-related variables reflecting team or program stature and current season performance.

A final model containing seven variables (bowl age, market population, conference affiliation, bowl game stature, season wins, home attendance, and distance traveled) predicted 77.5 percent of the variance in bowl game attendance.

This paper illustrates the use of predictive modeling for major sport event attendance with a unique sample and variables explored. Future research may build off the model to explore attendance for other populations or events.

The applied nature of this study allows practitioners working in the tourism and event management field to incorporate a predictive model to best select participants in sporting events to maximize event attendees.

Understanding the variables which predict event attendees in the context of college football bowl games provide useful data to practitioners. This study advances this area of research by treating event participants as unique observations (something which has not been done in prior studies), and looking at a new data set which incorporates the College Football Playoff era.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the tests the author faced in her sociolegal fieldwork on Hawaiian cockfighting, and to draw broader lessons from these tests for other ethnographers of illegal organizations.

The author draws on six weeks of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing.

Relational work in ethnographic fieldwork requires skills academia does not always impart – including humility, a sense of humor and patience with yourself and other people. Each test we face is a part of the ongoing process of building these relationships.

As ethnographers, it is sometimes considered “taboo” to tell our stories – to explain our internal and external struggles in the field. This taboo makes a certain amount of sense. After all, we are trying to understand society, not reflect on our own development as people. Yet the taboo is also a pity. For one, it is unrealistic to think that we are “mere observers” whose presence in the field does not affect it. “Scrubbing” ourselves from the field necessarily scrubs out some of our data. It also omits parts of the story that other researchers might find interesting or instructive.

Public health programs facilitate access to resources that not only provide individuals’ options but also often foreclose individual preference through prescriptive requirements. This chapter takes two disparate cases from public health – vaccines and family planning –that reveal patterns of inequality in who has access to individual choice and who requires state support to exercise choice. Looking specifically at dynamics of funding and compulsion, this chapter elucidates how reliance on the rhetoric of individual choice as an expression of freedom rewards those with the greatest access to resources and fails to make sure that all members of the community have the resources to shape their own outcomes or to make sure collective health is protected.

The role of implicit provider bias in mental health care is an important issue that continues to be of concern in the twenty-first century for the Black/African American community. Access to mental health and quality care remains elusive as members of this social group lack access to mental health screening, diagnosis, and attention due to institutional and cultural barriers. Supporting the position that implicit and explicit provider bias exists in the mental health profession, this chapter will explore how implicit provider bias is an intractable institutional barrier that prevents Black/African Americans from accessing mental health and quality care. A review of the implications related to mental health outcomes with Black/African American clients will also be explored.

A brief overview of the Black/African American cultural responses to implicit provider bias will be discussed later in this chapter. There will be an exploration of the ways to help identify, address, and eliminate implicit provider bias using evidence-based personal and community engagement strategies that promote mental health wellness within the Black/African American community. Implications for best practices in Black/African American mental health will also be addressed to eradicate the risk of unethical or medical malpractice with Black/African American clients, reduce the mental health disparity experienced by Blacks/African Americans, and create mental health equity for this population.

Internal organisational aspects of service delivery from the employee's perspective have received some attention in the literature. However, there is a need for more detailed empirical research to explore the possible impacts of specific internal service factors (ISFs) on service quality. This paper seeks to consider the overall influence of customer‐employee interactions, and to discuss and test empirically the relative influence of five ISFs that interface with internal marketing strategies.

Empirical data were collected from a sample (n=202) of supermarket employees across a large metropolitan city. The data analysis used bivariate correlations, stepwise regression, and structural equation modelling.

The main research findings, from the employee perceptions of service quality, suggest that there are three main predictor variables, namely, service orientation, service role flexibility, and non‐standardised scripted behaviour. The most important internal service quality predictor variable is employees' service orientation attitude, followed by non‐standardised scripted service behaviour and third by the organisational policy to adopt and change (flexible) service roles.

The research needs to be expanded by investigating simultaneously the viewpoints about service quality by managers and actual consumers.

Retail marketing managers need to be mindful that ISFs have the potential to indirectly influence consumer perceptions through employee behaviours and perceptions of customers' needs. The five ISFs identified in this research can serve as a basis for differentiating a service brand.

The paper highlights the importance of five internal service success factors that influence service quality.

Purpose – We introduce the concept of a brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a dynamic, historical account of the events that have shaped the brand over time. Using a particular type of brand biography, “the underdog,” we empirically show how managers can strategically use brand biographies in brand positioning, in this case to mitigate the curse of success. As brands grow and become successful, they are often marked by the negative stigma associated with size and power, which elicits anticorporate sentiment from consumers. An underdog brand biography can be strategically wielded to prevent or offset anticorporate backlash stemming from consumers’ negative perceptions of firms’ size and/or market power.

Methodology/approach – Lab experiments.

Findings – We find an underdog effect: consumers like and prefer brands with underdog brand biographies because they identify with them. We show that an underdog brand biography can mitigate the curse of success by making large firms more attractive to consumers.

Practical implications – Firms can use brand biographies to weave compelling narratives about their brands that help protect them from negative consumer attitudes and actions.

Originality/value of the chapter – Extant branding theory has a dearth of theoretical constructs and frameworks that allow for the dynamism and evolution of brands over time. Through our observation and study of emerging marketplace branding practices, we have identified a new construct, the brand biography, to complement existing theoretical frameworks for understanding brand meaning.