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Sponsorships targeting an internal audience, e.g. employees, are still under-researched. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how employees perceive and evaluate a sponsorship that is designed with the purpose of improving customer services and explore how the company may benefit from the sponsorship.

The study is anchored in critical realism and based on a single case study using multiple methods. The authors survey the impact of the sponsorship on employees’ (n=653) perceptions of their ability to communicate with customers, to perform their personal best, to engage in teamwork, as well as employee retention. The authors use individual and group interviews to qualify the analysis and the access to company data on customer satisfaction rates to provide an indication of the effect of the sponsorship.

Results indicate that close to half the employees respond that the campaign positively impacted their ability to communicate, improve personal performance and to engage in teamwork. The analysis also reveals that the commitment of the direct leader has an impact on employees’ interest and commitment to the campaign. Data on customer satisfaction show that reducing the number of dissatisfied customers and increasing the number of customers willing to recommend the company to others has been accomplished, thus indicating that the sponsorship has had a positive impact on company performance.

By combining sponsorship research with insights from the HRM literature, the study provides empirically based knowledge to the hitherto limited research on the internal audience of sponsorships. The study provides a plausible indication of a positive relation between a sponsorship design and company performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate firms’ reasons and motives for becoming sponsors and how they benefit from this networking engagement by exploring sponsorship networks associated with two Danish team sport clubs – a Premier League football club and a second-division handball club.

Two online surveys were conducted with firms associated with the networks during the Autumn and Winter of 2013/2014 (n=116). The questionnaire was theoretically anchored in the existing sponsorship literature, business network research, and social capital theory.

The results show that business logics were the dominating reasons for joining the network. A large proportion of the respondents reported having increased their number of business (32 percent) and social (26 percent) relations with other network members after joining the network. Furthermore, 37 percent of the respondents reported having made business agreements with companies external to the network via network contacts, which supports ideas of bridging social capital. More than half the respondents (59 percent) preferred doing business with network members rather than with non-members.

By investigating a local and regional sport club context, the paper adds to our knowledge about sponsorship networks. It emphasizes the potential importance of team sport clubs for the business landscape, thus maintaining that sport clubs fulfill an important role for local communities beyond being mere entertainment industries.

Play and exercise at the workplace have been promoted as ways to counter the development of lacking physical activity and improve workplace health. Through a reappraisal of the critical literature on workplace exercise, the analysis seeks to answer two questions: How do managers perceive employee health in the intersection between individual responsibility and collective community? How can the performative potentials of workplace exercise be critically understood?

We use an institutional approach along with critical theories on management in which we argue that specific logics guide certain practices, values and beliefs within organizations. This qualitative study relies on insights from three diverse Danish workplaces that have implemented exercise during workhours.

Adopting exercise and play as elements inspired by community sports becomes a powerful managerial technique. Managers combine practices such as play and voluntarism with the logics of profession and corporation. This gives rise to practices known from community sport that can lead to micro-emancipations during work as well as to subtle forms of managerial power by hiding explicit references to employee health.

By combining an institutional logics perspective with critical views, the study contributes to the growing body of research on workplace exercise by pointing to the potentials and constraints of adopting a community logic into practices. The study adds nuances to the view on workplace exercise in the critical management literature as well as illustrating the conditions necessary to make exercise and health promotion reconcilable with existing managerial practices.

The prevalence of individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) being associated with terroristic threats, lone wolf terrorism or affiliating with terroristic groups is rare. This paper aims to discuss this issue.

However, several cases are presented, where individuals with autism are involved in making a naïve, empty terroristic threat or uttering serious serial terroristic threats. Other cases are also presented of individuals being at risk for an abduction or being used by a terrorist group, and finally committing an act of domestic lone wolf terrorism.

Essential to the analysis was establishing a functional connection between autism-based deficits and the terroristic threats, terrorism, and when to not criminalize naïve, empty terroristic threats or acts.

Currently, tools available to law enforcement and prosecutors exploit the vulnerabilities and liabilities which arise as a result of group interactions, a “preventive” approach to terrorism that is not applicable to the solitary, “lone wolf” terrorist. There has been relatively little research (including case studies) examining individuals with ASD who engage in terrorism. For instance, when dealing with an individual with ASD who is charged with terrorism, it is crucial to consider how the diagnosis of autism may have presented as a contextual vulnerability, and to make sure that justice, rehabilitation and management, are informed by an understanding of the person’s diagnosis of ASD.