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Drawing upon social judgment theory, the research examines whether changes in psychological involvement with a sport human brand owing to their sporting success can generate spillover effects on people's national pride, a proxy for the collective level of well-being and whether the individual's behavioral engagement in sport spectating will moderate this relationship.

Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment grounded in the 2021 Indian Premier League championship, the authors solicit responses from 296 representative individuals residing in India twice using a two-wave panel design. The authors conducted confirmatory factor analysis, repeated measures T-test, latent change score analysis, and structural regression analysis to examine the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride.

The results demonstrate a positive association between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride. Further, the findings indicate that an increase in psychological involvement with sport human brand was associated with an increase in national pride due to the successful athletic endeavor involving the sport human brand. However, the relationship between psychological involvement with sport human brand and national pride was invariant irrespective of patrons' spectatorship behavior.

This research demonstrates that sport human brands possess transformative soft power that extends their prerogative cultural identity personified by their athletic ability and success, allowing them to shape public sentiments of national pride via their profound influence through and beyond the complex network of brand ecosystems.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of cultivating belongingness within an organization. This paper will also indicate ways human resources (HR) practitioners can enhance inclusivity and foster a more diverse workplace.

This paper is written for practitioners who want to create a more inclusive organization. Exploring lessons learned from an environment seemingly disparate from a typical workplace revealed common generalizable themes. HR practitioners can use these themes to better understand the need for an intentionally designed workplace that prioritizes belonging as a means of improving overall organizational efficiency.

Organizations compete globally for market share and consumers, who are nonhomogeneous. Attracting, retaining and growing a diverse talent pool that is representative of their heterogeneous customers will help organizations better understand and adjust to dynamic market demands. Research shows that promoting diversity, inclusion and belongingness in the workplace oftentimes enhances employee performance, improves organizational culture and increases profitability.

Learnings from outdoor adventure sports are explored to garner insight for HR professionals seeking to enhance diversity and inclusion. This paper proposes three ways HR professionals could foster a more diverse environment where employees will be more engaged, empowered and fulfilled: create safe spaces, open access to opportunities and cultivate belongingness.

The rites and practices of folk religion in Nigeria cut across virtually all conventional and emerging social institutions in the country. The inability of the State to perform many of its functions has encouraged this trend, with many turning to folk religion and associated practices in attempts to control uncertain situations. Unemployed/underemployed young gamblers have begun to incorporate and normalise the combination of spiritual elements with sports betting activities in a bid to translate games of uncertainty into games of certainty. This study attempts to conceptualise how and why young people adopt, practice and make sense of folk religion in relation to sports betting.

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were used to interrogate and analyse the lived experiences of key actors living in the capital city of Ilorin, Kwara State, a place renowned for the widespread practice of folk religious rites: 20 unemployed/underemployed young sports bettors and 10 folk doctors. Collected data were transcribed manually and subjected to inductive content analysis, using grounded theory. The combination of folk religion with sports betting is fast becoming normalised as young Nigerians seek to survive harsh economic conditions. Adoption is also linked with belief in traditions, in-group conflicts, gambling adverts, lack of luck and greed. Folk religious practices combine elements from the natural and spiritual worlds. This study formulates concepts for understanding the complexity of such practices concerning gambling among young sports bettors in Nigeria.

In the face of widespread opposition and hostility, trans and nonbinary athletes, from recreational to professional levels, continue to resist exclusion and oppression by daring to compete, participate and play. The long-standing binary thinking that characterizes sport poses particular challenges for trans women, who are positioned by advocates of trans exclusion as an alleged threat to women's sport.

As context for this discussion, Lenskyj examines how social psychologists have contributed to understandings of belonging and community and the implications for trans and nonbinary athletes' rights to share the benefits that sport offers. The concept of ‘deliberative freedoms’ – including freedom to live one's life without having others view certain traits as ‘costs’ – provides a framework for investigating resistance.

Greey then draws on a sociological understanding of gender to argue that inclusion is not synonymous with belonging. Belonging for trans athletes, Greey argues, requires more than the ‘letter of the law.’ Belonging requires recognition from teammates, coaches and other sport community members. An overview of terminology is presented, followed by an overview of chapters, summarizing the key themes and findings.

Research in critical disaster studies stresses the urgency to explore alternative ontological framings (Gaillard and Raju, 2022) that encourages researchers and practitioners, especially Indigenous communities, to nurture spaces where Indigenous voices are well represented. It is imperative that research in the Pacific should be guided by Pacific research methodologies to maximize positive outcomes (Ponton, 2018) and break free from limited Eurocentric ideologies that are often ill-suited in Pacific contexts. Hazards in the South Pacific region have become more frequent and volatile. This has created a growing interest in the study of disasters in the region. However, current disaster studies in the Pacific are often problematic as they often fail to challenge the implicit coloniality of the discipline.

This paper will expand on these arguments, suggesting ways to overcome the limits of common Eurocentric research frameworks in disaster studies and to illustrate the significance and relevance of Pacific methodologies.

It is pertinent that critical disaster studies encapsulate Pacific worldviews and knowledge as valued and valid to reconstruct Pacific research. Decolonizing disaster research will ultimately liberate the discipline from limitations of its colonial past and allow for truly engaging and critical research practices.

This paper will illustrate and articulate how Talanoa, a pan-Pacific concept, could offer a more culturally appropriate research methodology to disasters, seen through a Samoan lens. Talanoa is an informal conversation that is widely shared among Pacific communities based on pure, authentic and real conversations which are crucial elements in building relationships with Pacific communities (Vaioleti, 2006).

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.

This chapter investigates resistance initiated by trans athletes and their allies and evaluates developments in policies and practices at the international, national and local levels of sport. The limitations of liberal approaches to trans inclusion are identified, and examples of radical, transformative approaches grounded in intersectional feminism are presented, together with an analysis of the crucial roles of solidarity work provided by allies and accomplices. The potential offered by boxing as a route to empowerment for trans and nonbinary participants is examined. An overview of recent media coverage of trans athletes suggests that global resistance is having an important impact on mainstream journalism. Finally, this chapter outlines how a successful campaign challenging a trans-exclusive Sport Canada's 2022 opinion survey and a recent report by Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport provide further evidence of effective resistance to trans exclusion in sport.