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The purpose of this study is to capture the journey of the first female leader in sports management in her country in the south-east Asian region for their National Sport and the values and behaviors enabling her to achieve it.

The study uses a mixed-methods case study design, quantitative and qualitative outcome measures, to assess the career progression of the first female executive director of a national sporting organization in her country, namely, BWN and her involvement in a two-week intensive sports management, leadership and development program.

A professional and courageous approach to identify and implement honest and evidence-based solutions were key for BWN’s success. BWN complemented professionalism with soft skills, clear communication and an outcome-based approach to challenging situations, successfully influencing change within her national sporting organization. This female leader is an inspiring role model for other women and her professionalism her most influential value driving innovation in sports management and organizational change. The positive impact she had in her community highlights the significant contributions female leaders can have within the sports leadership context, given the opportunity and scope to do so.

For the first time in her country, the unsolicited and unprecedented evidence-based approach, professionalism and proactivity assisted BWN with her colleagues accepting her as the first woman on the executive board of her national sporting body of one of the most celebrated national sports. Breaking the mold with unexpected (positive) behavior might be the secret to further breakthroughs for women in sports management.

Narrative inquirers come to understand experience through story. In this way, the narrative is the primary unit of analysis rather than breaking down stories into its constituent parts, parsing particular words, ideas, or codes in the process of analysing and interpreting experience. This chapter adds complexity to understandings of the ways that narrative inquirers make meaning of experience with participants. My work with Olivia, a research participant, serves as a guide for this chapter as I further explore my process of meaning-making as a narrative inquirer. Beginning with recorded research conversations and transcriptions, the process moves to the use of word images as interim research texts. Word images are collections of participant responses, words and phrases, brought together to form storylines. The composition of word images allows for complex understandings of experience, with multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives emerging from the participants’ words. As Maxine Greene suggested, meaning-making includes a going beyond the text that allows readers to connect with the words in new and interesting ways. Similarly, meaning-making in narrative inquiry moves beyond traditional qualitative data analysis that allows researchers and readers to think with the stories of participants, engaging with the participants’ experience(s) in new ways as the researcher and reader brings their own stories of experience to bear in the text; making meaning and imagining experience from new perspectives.

This study aims to explore school health promotion (HP) as a set of institutionally embedded professional practices.

This is a qualitative study using data from nineteen interviews with school professionals in Sweden. Data analysis was informed by practice theory and an institutional logic perspective.

School professionals constructed practical understandings of HP at the intersection between institutional directives and professional values. Professionals were challenged by multiple and occasionally ambiguous policy directives as well as by multiple tiers of governance. Professional understandings of institutional directives were mediated by a bureaucratic logic and three instantiations of a professional logic (competence, pragmatic and entrepreneurial). School leadership was perceived as a crucial link between institutional directives and professional practices.

The findings draw attention to the need for policy revision and disambiguation as well as the need for establishing dynamic institutional dialogues across levels of governance. These measures can foster sage leadership and fruitful interprofessional collaboration within school HP.

The findings provide a multi-perspective view of school HP and link professional values to institutional ones. The study sheds light on the explanatory relevance of human cognition in practice contexts.

Surprise family vacations have become increasingly prevalent in today’s digitally mediated consumer culture. Drawing on a performance-based view of tourism, this paper aims to explore the performance practices and embodied experiences by which young consumers are the recipients of last-minute surprise vacations.

YouTube offers a space for examining surprise family vacations, as captured in real time by consumers. The visual elements and verbal discourses of 139 surprise family vacation reveal videos were analyzed using a hermeneutical approach.

Findings suggest that surprise family vacations are characterized by three performance practices in which embodied tensions arise between normative expectations and unanticipated experiences: executing the reveal (scripted act versus improvised act), announcing the destination (absolute ideal versus relative ideal) and reacting to the surprise (initial acceptance versus initial rejection).

By exploring a phenomenon in which children’s anticipation for a vacation is largely absent or limited, surprise family vacations reveal culturally idealized norms and performative practices in family tourism. Positioning a family vacation as an offering or surprise for the children is distinct from previous research, which suggests family vacations are co-created. Children of all ages experience tourism-related stresses and anxieties.

The primary practical contribution for marketers lies in revealing how the material and performative practices of a family vacation begins even before a family enters its tourist destination. Service providers and retailers may provide offerings for families to support surprise family vacations, particularly in an increasingly digital culture. This study also reveals opportunities for parents to strategically discuss surprise vacations with their kids.

This study captures the liminal moment in which a child’s tourism journey begins. By using YouTube as a resource for digital ethnography, researchers can better understand how families discuss, negotiate and mediate tourism-oriented concepts, through their lived experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of scaffolded lesson study on the content knowledge, conceptions of curriculum, and classroom practice of 22 elementary and secondary history teachers in four school districts.

Teachers, teacher educators, and historians collaborated to design and test research lessons grounded in a theory-based framework for problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI) practice. The authors sought to support consonance between the reform ideas of the formal, professional development, curriculum, and the curriculum as enacted in participants’ classrooms.

Project participation was associated with significant gains in content knowledge and the conceptualization and implementation of more challenging instruction consistent with the PBHI model and the standards of authentic intellectual work (AIW). Mean AIW instruction scores for research lessons were more than double the scores for participants’ non-lesson study lessons and indicated noteworthy progress in integrating the formal and enacted curricula. Evidence suggested that many teachers developed more nuanced understandings of historical phenomena, gained greater appreciation for the importance of authentic purpose in motivating student engagement in challenging learning, and began to reconsider what is required to facilitate complex learning and to refine their repertoire of learning strategies.

Evidence from the first year of this project offers hope for the potential of collaborative communities of practice to facilitate a shared professional knowledge base of wise practice that brings the formal, intended, and enacted curriculum into greater alignment. These results also emphasize the evolutionary process of conceptual change.

Research on creative workers speaks to the relative lack of job opportunities available, the role that changing production logics play in shaping such opportunities, and gender disparities in success. Tracking 22,561 hits found on Billboard's mainstream charts, we examine various factors that may spur or hamper the success of female recording acts. We find that the expanding logic of decentralized production eliminates the negative effect of concentration on the success of female acts and that the presence of successful female acts in one period bodes well for subsequent female acts, until a glass ceiling of sorts is reached.

While educators impart FMEA instruction, its practical implementation within the educational sector remains limited. This study investigates the application of FMEA within higher education institutions. Implementing FMEA in these institutions is difficult due to statutory requirements, schedule restrictions, and stakeholder participation challenges. Moreover, higher education institutions struggle with preserving education quality, faculty training, and resource management, complicating organised methods such as FMEA.

This research conducted a global survey to identify the critical success factors, benefits, and common challenges in using FMEA in the higher education sector.

The outcomes highlighted that lack of awareness regarding the tools’ benefits is the primary barrier to FMEA implementation. However, respondents perceive that FMEA can improve process reliability and quality in higher education institutions. Further, the analyses found that knowledge about the FMEA tools is the prime critical success factor, and the lack of time due to other priorities in the organisation is a significant challenge in tapping the potential of FMEA.

A limitation of the study is the relatively low number of HEIs surveyed globally. Further, the study provides a broad perspective rather than a focused study on one HEI.

This study addresses this gap by exploring the potential benefits, challenges, and factors associated with the successful adoption of FMEA in academic settings. Using this information, HEIs can become more successful in applying FMEA.

This study is unique in its exploration of the application of FMEA with higher education institutions for service quality improvement.

This paper aims to analyze how strategizing practices can legitimate construction of public sector policy. The Porto Alegre Film Commission was set up as part of a strategy to increase the city’s competitiveness as a tourism destination. The municipal government engaged with private and public stakeholders and embarked on a collective process of policy construction.

The authors based their research on two theoretical lenses from business administration theory: strategy as practice (SaP) and neo-institutional theory (NIT), whereby SaP attempts to explain formation and implementation of strategy on the basis of a process that seeks a collective result, whereas NIT reveals the limits of this formation and implementation, attributing the process to influences of power and legitimacy. Thus, the authors get a more accurate view of the actors and the system of governance, considering the in-built reflexivity of these relationships and their capacity to change institutional arrangements. The authors conducted an in-depth case study with a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews, participatory observation and documentary analysis.

The results revealed the role played by the government and how practices used in the strategizing process ensured the legitimacy of public sector policy formulation and engaged private and public stakeholders.

The authors recognize limitations such as the investigation being set in a single country and responses based on the interviewees’ perceptions of momentum. It would be interesting to undertake cross-national comparisons using empirical data that allow comparison of film commissions with different relationships between strategizing, power and politics.

This case study analyzed the relationship between formal institutional agents and the strategies adopted to create and run the Porto Alegre Film Commission (PAFC), positioning Porto Alegre as a destination for film and video production and, reflexively, making it more attractive to tourists interested in getting to know the locations where publicity campaigns, films and soap operas were filmed. This formal institution agent was converted into a strategic catalyzer to influence the institutional issues in a creative industry in which trade associations and firms had encountered difficulties when they attempted to set up a film commission alone.

The evidence compiled showed that the practices, besides being strategic, were enacted in a specific context and directed toward results and survival of the PAFC. The practices shaped the results, because they were constructed together with other actors, achieving legitimacy through collaborative development of practices and targeting survival by establishing governance structures capable of riding out periods of political transition. In short, the collective construction of the PAFC policy, led by the public sector, legitimized it in the eyes of society.

This study furthers the discussion about strategizing in an organizational field marked by power relationships and how their consequences can affect society in general. There is a need to take a closer look at the implications of strategizing for power relationships and how the consequences can influence the organizational field.

There is a tacit understanding among social studies teachers and educators that incorporating primary source documents in planning and teaching is desirable for many reasons, most prominent among them the ways in which it challenges students to think at higher levels. This study is a descriptive study of public school teachers’ uses of primary source documents in social studies planning, in which we review lesson activities of various grade level teachers to evaluate their use of primary documents for higher order cognitive purposes. Given the salient theme of critical thinking in the literature, we established a baseline continuum of uses that served as our framework for evaluating these activities. We asked the following questions: When history teachers incorporate the use of primary source documents in their planning, to what degree do they promote development of higher level critical thinking? What might a planned activity look like when they do? We found that the majority of the activities examined here employ primary source documents for lower order purposes but held the promise of easy transition to higher order uses.

The classics will circulate wrote a public librarian several years ago. She found that new, attractive, prominently displayed editions of literary classics would indeed find a substantial audience among public library patrons.