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The sporting body in Indian sports studies has been studied in the context of changing power relations in society, and this essay continues in a similar vein. The significance of sport in India evolved from being used as a means of control by the coloniser to becoming a point of resistance and then a tool for nation-building for the colonised peoples. Post-liberalisation wrought significant changes to the social and cultural landscape and brought with it a singular focus upon the individual, as the idea of the nation receded to the background and the link between sport and self-making became prominent. In the context of the changing cultures of sport and the body from colonial to post-liberalisation India and the growing prominence of sport in popular culture, this chapter turns a critical eye towards the representation of sport in three Nike advertisements between 2007 and 2016 with the understanding that these representations are shaped by the workings of power and ideology in society and therefore provide a window to access the evolution of sports discourse over time. Through this examination, it explores the complex dynamic between the liberation of the postcolonial sporting body from discursive shackles and its evolution – and possible entrapment – into becoming a placard of the neoliberal vision and what this means in terms of the decoloniality discourse.

This case study will help business management students learn the dynamics of distribution management in the rural context. After working through the case and assignment questions, the students will be able to:▪ Understand the transformation of rural retail from traditional models to organized modern retail;▪ Understand the opportunities and challenges of rural markets with specific reference to automobile products;▪ Identify and evaluate the various distribution channels available for rural markets; and▪ Devise a suitable rural-centric distribution model for automobile products following an appropriate logistics system.

Manan Motors, a dealership of Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India (HMSI) Private Limited in Hathras City of Uttar Pradesh province in India, has been operating successfully for the past two decades. Mr Manoj Bansal, the director at Manan Motors, was primarily targeting the urban markets with 60% dependency on the scooter portfolio of HMSI. But multiple pressures like stringent vehicle emission norms, price rise of two-wheelers and the impact of the pandemic took a toll upon the urban business of Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India Limited and subsequently upon Manan Motors. The sales for HMSI dipped from 15,121 million units in 2020–2021 to 13,466 million units in 2021–2022. Consequently, Bansal decided to alter the business strategy of Manan Motors and shift its focus from the urban to the rural territory of Hathras, where it could foresee demand for entry-level two-wheelers (engine capacity between 75 and 110 cc). Rural markets were developing, so Bansal realized that supplying a low-cost, low-end model to the rural Indian market was an opportunity for his dealership. Bansal’s decision to focus on the rural vertical of its two-wheeler business stirred several questions that floated in his mind. Should they manage distribution on their own, or through some channel members, or should they follow a rural-specific modern retail model?

The case study is designed for use by a postgraduate or executive-level audience for subjects such as sales and distribution management, distribution management and rural marketing. Students will understand the concept of distribution management and associated keywords specific to rural markets. The case study provides an opportunity to discuss and decide how a company can penetrate the rural market and also discusses the opportunities and challenges of rural distribution.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and logistics.

The television (TV) content ecosystem has shifted from traditional broadcasting systems to dedicated content producers and over-the-top (OTT) services. However, less empirical effort has been paid to the actual behaviors of the mobile users who watch TV content when explaining the impact of OTT service and mobile network profiles in watching TV content. This study aims to investigate the impact of gratifications and attitude formed by mobile TV users on actual mobile TV watching behaviors, as well as the moderating impacts of paid OTT service subscriptions and mobile network profiles, based on gratification theory, cognition–affect–behavioral (CAB) framework, sunk cost effect and walled-garden effect.

This study employs the generalized linear model (GLM) with generalized estimating equations (GEE) to test hypothesized relationships. A total of 338 mobile phone users who have been watching TV content using a mobile phone participated in the survey. The moderating variables, 4 types of paid streaming platform subscriptions, were classified based on the walled gardens formed by mobile telecom services.

The study’s results revealed that obtained gratifications and opportunity constructs substantially influenced a mobile phone user’s attitude and behaviors. Additionally, mobile network profiles and the degree of access to paid platform services played significant moderating roles in the relationship between users’ attitudes and behavior.

This research enriches the existing OTT service literature and is one of the pioneering studies investigating the walled-garden effect’s role in mobile phone users’ actual watching behaviors, offering valuable practical implications for the OTT platform providers.

Tabletop ‘pen and paper’ role-play games (TTRPGs) can function as spaces of creative experimentation with gender identity through shared storytelling. The last decade has seen an explosion of Actual Play (AP) shows that broadcast recorded gameplay of TTRPGs to online audiences. Neverafter is the 15th season of well-known AP show Dimension 20 and is a horror-themed re-imagining of classic fairy tales through the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. Four of the six player characters are male, based individually on the fairy tales of Pinocchio, Puss in Boots, the Frog Prince, and a (gender-swapped) Mother Goose, adventuring together in a story-world called ‘The Neverafter’. Not only are these versions of the fairy tale characters shaped by the players' own explorations of identity, but as an AP show, this is also layered with the expectations produced by the show's wide fan base. Their diverse gender explorations and their subversion of fairy tale conventions are enabled by the fluency of the players and audience in freely flowing between the framing perspectives of player and character. This chapter will focus on non-binary player Ally Beardsley's creation and performance of Mother Timothy Goose as a gay, elderly, human man as a particularly meaningful case study. This analysis considers how heroic masculinity is reconceptualised in Neverafter through the horror-themed embodiment of fairy tale men in the context of contemporary gender issues.

The purpose of this study was to examine consumer data acquired by branded prescription drug websites and the ethics of privacy related to the interconnected web of personal information accessed, packaged and resold by tracker technologies.

The research used the DMI Tracker Tool to collect data on the top 17 branded prescription drug websites, with a specific interest in the tracker technologies embedded in those websites. That data was analyzed using Gephi, an open-source data visualization tool, to map the network of trackers embedded in those branded prescription drug websites.

Findings visualize the interconnections between tracker technologies and prescription drug websites that undergird a system of personal data acquisition and programmatic advertising vehicles that serve the interests of prescription drug marketers and Big Tech. Based on the theory of platform ethics, the study demonstrated the presence of a technostructural ecosystem dominated by Big Tech, a system that goes unseen by consumers and serves the interests of advertisers and resellers of consumer data.

The 17 websites used in this study were limited to the top-selling prescription drugs or those with the highest ad expenditures. As such this study is not based on a random sampling of branded prescription drug websites. The popularity of these prescription drugs or the expanse of advertising associated with the drugs makes them appropriate to study the presence of tracking devices that collect data from consumers and serve advertising to them. It is also noted that websites are dynamic spaces, and some trackers within their infrastructures are apt to change over time.

Branded prescription drug information has over the past three decades become part of consumers’ routine search for information regarding what ails them. As drug promotion moved from print to TV and the Web, searching for drug information has become a part of everyday life. The implications of embedded trackers on branded prescription drug websites are the subject of this research.

This study has significant social implications as consumers who are searching for information regarding prescription medications may not want drug companies tracking them in a way that many perceive to be an invasion of privacy. Yet, as the Web is dominated by Big Tech, web developers have little choice but to remain a part of this technostructural ecosystem.

This study sheds light on branded prescription drug websites, exploring the imbalance between the websites under study, Big Tech and consumers who lack awareness of the system that operates backstage.

The study underlying this chapter investigates how diverse actors in the Cauvery Delta, India, and the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, understand and live with water salinity. In focusing empirically on river deltas, this chapter addresses some of the SDG14 targets, as SDG14.2 (‘Protect and restore ecosystems’) and 14.5 (‘Conserve coastal and marine areas’) refer to the sustainable management of coastal areas as crucial targets for SDG14. Based on interviews with land users in the two deltas, in tandem with analyses of salinity maps and other policy-level knowledge artefacts, this chapter shows how, in some cases, only particular forms of knowledge are represented at the policy level, while many of the diverse viewpoints of land users are rendered invisible. In this way, delta management only meets the concerns of a select few, often professional elites, and limits land users from taking ownership of their own realities. This chapter concludes with the recommendation for water professionals, scholars, and practitioners alike, to be more open-minded, modest, and attentive to difference, by engaging more seriously with interdisciplinarity and cultivating sensibilities for listening to ‘smaller’ water stories.

This study aims to examine the role of hospitableness towards refugees, as embraced by local hosts, in engendering positive social outcomes, including fostering favourable attitudes and empathy towards refugees, satisfaction from hosting refugees in private dwellings and advocacy for hosting them.

Rooted in the contact theory and drawing on a hospitality social lens framework, the study uses a mixed-methods approach using a sequential quantitative-qualitative design to understand the interface between hospitableness, attitudes and empathy towards refugees, satisfaction from hosting refugees in private dwellings and advocacy for hosting them. A conceptual model is proposed and tested using 160 valid surveys collected from individuals hosting Ukrainian refugees in Slovakia. SEM-PLS is used to test the proposed model. A total of 25 in-depth interviews with Slovakian individuals hosting refugees in private dwellings were also conducted to explain and further explore the initial quantitative results.

The findings indicate that hospitableness has a positive effect on attitudes towards refugees, fosters a sense of empathy and results in satisfaction from hosting refugees. Interestingly, while hospitableness per se does not directly affect advocacy for hosting refugees, it does so indirectly via favourable attitudes towards refugees and satisfaction from the hosting experience. While qualitative findings largely support and further explain the quantitative results, interesting insights are also obtained.

The study advocates that hospitableness should be addressed through a social lens beyond its traditional commercial boundaries. Several implications for policymakers, NGOs and other stakeholders involved in hosting refugees are proposed. Overall, policies need to be oriented towards harnessing the power of refugee hosting schemes, thus increasing the role of hospitableness in addressing societal challenges such as the refugee crisis.

While not new, private hosting of refugees has recently gained momentum following the outbreak of the Ukrainian refugee crisis. In spite of some valuable research delving into hosting experiences from the refugees’ and hosts’ perspectives, this research stream is notably fragmented and largely exploratory. Specifically, there seems to be no comprehensive understanding of how hospitableness towards refugees, as embraced by hosts, can engender positive social outcomes, including fostering favourable attitudes and empathy towards refugees, satisfaction from hosting refugees and advocacy for hosting refugees in private dwellings. Overall, hospitality research is notably biased towards commercial settings, focusing on instrumental benefits rather than societal outcomes. This study focuses on the societal outcomes of hospitableness as a tool to address the refugee crisis.

Red Riding Hood is said to have been assembled from folktales that pre-date the collector Charles Perrault's 1697 re-telling and initial publishing (Dundes, 1989; Zipes, 1993). Since then, it is a story that has been re-told and re-imagined many times in various media contexts, with Beckett suggesting that it is one of the most familiar icons of Western culture, and a ‘highly effective intertextual referent’ (Beckett, 2002, p. XVI). Even though this story has been generally regarded as a children's tale, adult themes of sexuality and transgression have been explored in modern re-conceptions. In this chapter, we examine the representation of gender and masculinity in commercial media output: the 2011 American film Red Riding Hood (Hardwicke, 2011) and the pilot episode of the NBC series Grimm (2011). In Red Riding Hood, a romantic horror film, the male characters may be regarded as satellites that cluster around the female protagonist, whereas in Grimm, through its generic fusion of police procedural and horror genres, the text plays upon strong established examples of traditional male roles alongside more nuanced and contemporary representations of masculinity. Our analysis explores themes of transformation and heteronormativity and the extent to which the texts challenge or conform to traditional tellings.

By analyzing tourist choices in Side and Alanya, well-known destinations for tourists in Türkiye’s thriving urban tourism sector, this study aims to fill a crucial vacuum in the body of knowledge about urban tourism. The study examines the changing dynamics of consumer preferences for advertisements and closely examines the underlying factors that influence these preferences, both pre and post-influential COVID-19 period.

This study clarifies the complex interplay between tourism marketing and prospective tourists’ decision-making processes through a thorough examination. This research greatly improves our understanding of urban tourism marketing strategies by examining the varying effects of advertising channels and comparing the persuasive power of emotional versus numerical advertising messages.

This study’s findings significantly advance our understanding of urban tourism. Examining how visitors react to advertisements in the various urban environments of Side and Alanya offers insightful information on how marketing strategies and visitor preferences correlate. This research also reveals the subtleties of efficient communication techniques, providing a practical basis for improving urban tourism experiences.

Being the first study of its sort, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research’s originality is supported by its insights into how advertising, consumer preferences and the urban tourism environment interact. The significant contribution to knowledge highlights the implications for those involved in urban tourism and provides practical advice for improving advertising tactics in the post-COVID-19 age.

Taking the Mamá Fit memes and other social media eruptions as a starting point and delving deeper into popular print media, this chapter traces the racialized and gendered practices that constitute fitness in El Salvador in a diasporic context. Importantly, the word fit is now often expressed in English, captured in the names of commercial gyms and diet advertisements; the use of this word signals an important cultural change in conventional understandings of the body in a Spanish-speaking society. By charting the emergence of this new health/beauty norm in a transnational domain, this chapter explores the relationship between shifting patterns of gendered body discipline and changes in El Salvador’s location within the global political economy. This chapter argues that fitness discourse has become a subtle, but powerful, conduit for coloniality during a renegotiation of the meaning of gender to fit a neoliberal reality. The argument ends by pointing in the direction of future research to explore how this discourse is experienced in embodied practice with potentially contradictory impacts in Salvadoran society.