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Framed by nostalgia marketing, this research draws upon lessons from ParticipACTION, a Canadian non-profit health promotion organization, to examine one of their most well-known campaigns, Body Break with ParticipACTION, in order to assess the potential role for nostalgia-based marketing campaigns in sport participation across generational cohorts.

Exploratory sequential mixed methods involving two studies were completed on behalf of ParticipACTION, with the authors developing the research instruments and the collection of the data undertaken by research agencies. Study 1 was the secondary analysis of qualitative data from five focus groups with different demographic compositions that followed a common question guide. Study 2 was a secondary data analysis of a pan-Canadian online survey with a sample (n = 1,475) representative of the overall adult population that assessed awareness of, and attitudes toward, ParticipACTION, Body Break, physical activity and sport participation. Path analysis tested a proposed model that was based on previous research on attitudes, brand and loyalty. Further, multi-group path analyses were conducted to compare younger generations with older ones.

The results provide direction and understanding of the importance of nostalgia in marketing sport participation programs across generational cohorts. For instance, in the four parent-adult focus groups, unaided references as well as frequent and detailed comments regarding Body Break were observed. Similarly, Millennials reported that Body Break was memorable, Canadian and nostalgic, with a mix of positive and negative comments. The importance of nostalgia was supported sequentially via results from the national survey. For example, while 54.1% of the 40–54 age-group associated ParticipACTION positively with Body Break, so did 49.8% of the 25–39-year age group, most of whom were not born when the promotion ran. Further, brand resonance was found to explain 4% more variance in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), the proxy for sport participation, for younger people compared to older people.

Results provide direction to brands, properties and agencies around the use of nostalgia in sport marketing campaigns and sponsorship efforts. For brands seeking to sponsor sport properties to alter their image with potential consumers in a new market, associating with a sport property that many view as nostalgic could improve the impact of the campaign. On the sport property side, event managers and marketers should both identify existing assets that members or fans are nostalgic about, as well as consider building nostalgia into current and new properties they develop.

This research is valuable to the sport marketing and sponsorship literature through several contributions. First, the use of nostalgia marketing, and nostalgia in general, is novel in the sport marketing and sponsorship literature, with future research in nostalgia and sponsorship recommended. Second, the potential to adopt or adapt Body Break to other sport participation and physical activity properties is empirically supported. Finally, the finding that very effective promotions can have a long-lasting effect, both on those who experienced the campaigns as well as younger populations who only heard about it, is notable.

Prior studies on the impact of incentives on physicians’ online participation mainly focused on different incentives while ignoring the difficulty of setting monetary incentives efficiently. Based on goal-setting theory, the current research examines the relationship between incentives with goals of varying difficulty and professional health knowledge sharing (PHKS) in online health knowledge-sharing platforms (OHKSPs).

Four field experiments with different monetary incentives were conducted by one of China’s largest OHKSPs, with whom the researchers cooperated in data collection. Monthly panel data on 10,584 physicians were collected from September 2018 to December 2019. There were 9,376 physicians in the treatment group and 1,208 in the control group. The authors used a difference-in-difference (DID) model to explore the research question based on the same control group and the Chow test with seemingly unrelated estimation (sureg) to compare regression coefficients between four groups. Several robustness checks were performed to validate the main results, including a relative time model, multiple falsification tests and a DID estimation using the propensity score matching method.

The results show that the monetary incentive significantly positively affected the volume of physicians’ PHKS directly with negative spillover to the duration of physicians’ PHKS. Moreover, the positive effect of incentives with higher difficulty on the volume of physicians’ PHKS was significantly smaller than that of incentives with low difficulty. Finally, professional title had a positive moderating effect on the volume of goal difficulty setting and did not significantly moderate the effect on the duration of physicians’ PHKS.

Some limitations of this study are: firstly, because the field experiments were enterprise benefit oriented, the treatment and control groups were not balanced. Secondly, the experiments for different incentive measures were relatively similar, making it challenging to validate a causal effect. Finally, more consideration should be given to the strategy for setting hierarchical incentives in future research.

The research indicates that monetary incentives have a bilateral effect on PHKS, i.e. a positive direct effect on the volume of physicians’ contributions and a negative spillover effect on the duration of physicians’ PHKS. The professional titles of physicians also moderate such bilateral switches of PHKS. Furthermore, when a physician’s energy is limited, the goal difficulty setting of the incentive mechanism tends to be low. The more difficult the incentives are, the more inefficient the effects on physicians’ PHKS will be.

This research serves to determine causal configurations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) conditions that best influences grassroots football club stakeholders to meet a sponsor's goals through promotional activity.

The research uses a case study of the Essex Alliance League, a local amateur football league in England. Firstly, semi-structured interviews were held with multiple stakeholders to understand the ecosystem of grassroots football. From here, further semi-structured interviews were held with club sponsors to identify the conditions of CSR. This allowed the research to then issue a survey from which results were analysed and discussed using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA).

The ecosystem of grassroots football is formed by a myriad of stakeholders operating at a national level, all the way to more local governance structures within which the business-club relationship exists. Sponsors identified three main conditions of CSR: shared values, self-congruity, and happiness. However, following fsQCA, two pathways were found: (1) presence of shared values, and (2) presence of happiness with the absence of self-congruity.

For practitioners, adaptations can be made for clubs to attract and maintain sponsorship as businesses seek to use grassroots sport as a channel for their own CSR objectives. To attract long term sponsorship, club managers are recommended to maintain long-term relationships with business owners especially in relation to personal values, fit, and happiness. As such, the responsibility of the club to ensure its stakeholders engage in promotional activity on behalf of their sponsor will help in maximising the financial value over multiple seasons.

Where fertile ground for academic analysis in grassroots football is present, this research investigates CSR activity at this level of football, where most research is more concerned with professional levels of the game. Furthermore, this research reaches into the sport ecosystem through an understanding of co-created values between organisations in this exchange of shared values to meet common objectives.

The purpose of this research is to explore how one unsanctioned community sport organization (CSO), AM Hockey, sought to acquire legitimacy in a highly institutionalized minor hockey marketplace at various points in its organizational life cycle.

This study was guided by instrumental case study methodology. Twenty (20) AM Hockey stakeholders from a variety of roles (e.g. executives, program directors and coaches) were interviewed. Document analysis was also utilized to supplement the interviewees. Internal and public documents reflective of the CSO's creation and growth were obtained.

Findings revealed that the CSO had to navigate distinct phases of evolution including the Building, Growth, Competition and Stabilization phases. Although the four life cycle phases identified in this study share similarities with the phases identified by Lester et al. (2003), findings indicated that institutional work mechanisms must be understood in their context as they can vary over the life cycle of an organization. Therefore, start-up sports organizations must approach the pursuit of legitimacy as a continual process rather than something acquired and defended through maintenance work.

Developing legitimacy remains a central challenge for CSOs that seek to deliver alternative sport programming, yet it continues to be understudied. Ultimately, the long-term viability of an unsanctioned CSO in a federated sports system relies, in part, on its ability to continually determine the actions needed to achieve legitimacy within its environment.

This study aims to examine the drivers of membership at the micro-level to influence club retention rates and promote positive health-related behaviours through encouraging active member participation.

The data for this study (n = 197) was obtained from four martial arts groups in Melbourne, Australia. Self-administered questionnaires assessed the importance of personal benefits, risk taking, personal values and enjoyment of specific benefits.

Hierarchical analysis identified shared values, excitement (ß = −0.066, p < 0.05), sense of belonging (ß = 0.644, p < 0.05), enjoyment of activities (ß = 0.179, p < 0.05), fitness level (ß = 0.564, p < 0.05), belt status (ß = 0.466 p < 0.05) and the expectations of instructor (ß = 0.144 p < 0.05) and others (ß = 0.483 p < 0.05) as predictors in attracting and retaining club membership. Adult Australians share socio-demographic characteristics and common desires to attain specific benefits which appear to evolve, as membership is not perceived as an interim engagement but rather as a lifelong lifestyle choice.

By advocating positive associations between lifetime membership and active participation, social marketing campaigns can inform and contribute towards a knowledge base for sports clubs to develop targeted strategies and practices towards membership retention.

This study contributes to evidence-based social marketing approaches in an era of ageing demographics, where there remains a need to learn more about how to manage active memberships to promote healthy lifestyles and well-being at a national, community and individual level. The approach of exploring club membership at micro-level to inform tailored macro-level strategic health-related messages is also novel.

Research on knowledge creation within eSports learning is scarce. This study extends the understanding of competition-oriented collaborative learning in eSports by examining the relationship between the dynamics of knowledge creation modes and the continuum of the motivational profile, along with the moderating effects of mutualistic co-presence therein.

Participants were recruited from the community of massively multiplayer online gamers (MMOGs). Through a quantitative survey, their motivations (i.e. self-extrinsic, self-intrinsic, peer-extrinsic and peer-intrinsic motivations), knowledge creation involvements (i.e. internalization, externalization, combination and socialization) and perception of mutualistic benefit of self and peers were captured for hypothesis testing.

Significant and positive direct relationships were observed between four motivations and four knowledge creation modes. The mutualistic co-presence positively moderated the positive relationship between the self-extrinsic, peer-extrinsic and peer-intrinsic motivations and socialization. When mutualistic self-benefit were outweighed, peer-extrinsic motivated gamers became less likely to perform internalization, whereas self-extrinsic and peer-extrinsic motivated gamers were less likely to perform combination.

This study is among the first to rationalize the relationship between motivational profile and the dynamics of knowledge creation in eSports learning. The conceptualization of the new construct – mutualistic co-presence – using the ecological concept of symbiosis is uncommon in prior literature. The findings also demonstrate that the four modes of knowledge creation in eSports learning are continuous and interwoven; they can be initiated at any point and do not necessarily occur in a specific sequence.

This paper aims to address the development and implementation of “AltPrint,” a slicing algorithm based on a new filling process planning from a variation in the deposited material geometry. AltPrint enables changes in the extruded material flow toward local variations in stiffness. The technical feasibility evaluation was conducted experimentally by fused filament fabrication (FFF) process of snap-fit subjected to a mechanical cyclical test.

The methodology is based on the estimation of the parameter E from the mathematical relationships among the variation of the material in the material flow, nozzle geometry and extrusion parameters. Calibration, validation and analysis of the printed specimens were divided into two moments, of which the first refers to the material responses (flexural and dynamic mechanical analysis) and the second involves the analysis of the printed components with localized flow properties (for estimating the response to cyclic loading). Finite element analysis assisted in the comparison of two snap-fit geometries, one traditional and one generated by AltPrint. Finally, three examples of compliant mechanisms were developed to demonstrate the potential of the algorithm in the generation of functional prototypes.

The contribution of AltPrint is the variable fill width integrated with the slicing software that varies the print parameters in different regions of the object. The alternative extrusion method based on material rate variation was conceived as an “open software” available in GitHub platform, hence, open manufacturing with initial focus on desktop 3D printer based on FFF. The slicing method provides deposited variable-width segments in an organized and replicable filling strategy, resulting in mechanical properties variations in specific regions of a part. It was implemented and evaluated experimentally and indicated potential applications in parts manufactured by the additive process based on extrusion, which requires local flexibilities.

This paper presents a new alternative method for application in an open additive manufacturing context, specifically for additive extrusion techniques that enable local variations in the material flow. Its potential for manufacturing functional parts, which require flexibility due to cyclic loading, was demonstrated by fabrication and experimental evaluations of parts made in acrylonitrile butadiene styrene filament. The changes proposed by AltPrint enable geometric modifications in the response of the printed parts. The proposed slicing and filling control of parameters is inserted in a context of design for additive manufacturing and shows great potential in the area of product design.

This study aims to underline the importance of addressing gender issues in family firms. It reinvigorates research in this field by revealing its current state, identifying research gaps and suggesting future agendas.

A bibliometric approach using a co-word analysis of 376 papers from the Web of Science database and their 885 keywords was performed to reveal the thematic structure of gender and family firm research, research topics, associations among them and their evolution over the last 30 years (1991–2021).

This review provides an extensive literature base and suggests research topics that facilitate the adoption of a gendered lens in family firm literature and business practice.

This review demonstrates how gender issues are intertwined with management, leadership and family firm approaches. Our observations inform scholars, policymakers and practitioners on the need to integrate gender issues into organizational culture and to connect empowerment strategies with the sociocultural environment.

This study shows the need to address women’s empowerment in business, considering different sociocultural contexts in addition to a Western focus. It also calls for embracing gender and feminist perspectives in research.