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This study aimed to investigate the impact of a university’s abrupt closure on the lives of graduate students and examined the role of grit, social support and school identification as they transferred to a new institution.

An online survey was administered to a diverse sample of 130 psychology graduate students after their university unexpectedly closed and the students transferred to another institution to complete their degrees. The survey included both qualitative and quantitative measures of the impact on different areas of their lives, anxiety and depression, life satisfaction, social support, grit and school identification.

Students reported experiencing financial loss, family and marital strain, anger, fear, uncertainty and loss of progress toward professional goals. Nearly 40% of participants had scores indicating elevated anxiety and depression. Students with higher anxiety and depression and lower life satisfaction tended to identify less with their new institution. Both social support and grit were related to better adjustment and life satisfaction.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact on graduate students following the closure of an institution of higher education. The findings have implications for educational policy and graduate student support services.

When and how did modern rankings emerge? This paper aims to answer that question by taking a closer look at the history of American baseball. In the 1870s, baseball was the first team sport to introduce a competitive system, the league, that determined the champion based on teams’ overall number of wins and losses. The in-depth analysis of the baseball discourse from the 1850s to the 1870s shows that leagues were introduced as a solution to a specific problem: how to identify deserving champions that had proved their ability again and again over the course of a season. The rising awareness of this problem was due to a shift in the baseball discourse of the 1860s, which established a new, statistical understanding of athletic achievement that demanded consistency of performance together with an acceptance that even champions lose a game once in a while. Rankings and other statistics, based on constant scoring of individual plays and increasingly sophisticated methods, helped institutionalize this new understanding of achievement and, in so doing, made the introduction of the league system possible. Moreover, the league system proved to be dependent on rankings – in the form of league tables – that made it possible to observe and experience the championship race, making rankings an essential element of modern competitive sports. Given that today’s rankings apply similar ideas of achievement to other fields (e.g., the “excellence” of universities), the story draws attention to the history of a specific imaginary of achievement that transcends the field of sports and should be studied more widely to understand the institutionalization of rankings in other fields.

Boxing Not so Clever In this first issue of what will be a regular review of the world's marketing literature, it is a challenge to an editor to extricate a theme from such an abundance of riches.

This study aims to investigate consumer responses to cause-related marketing (CRM) implemented by socially stigmatized industries, especially in fast food restaurants.

This experimental study uses a 2 (degree of perceived fit) × 2 (complementary fit) × 2 (brand equity) between-subjects design.

Results show significant interaction effects between the degree of fit and brand equity and complementary fit and brand equity on consumers’ brand evaluation. When a company with high brand equity chooses a high fit (vs low fit) or complementary fit (vs non-complimentary fit) for CRM promotion, this leads to consumers’ more positive attitude and higher intent to participate in CRM promotion.

This study provides practical implications for designing effective CRM promotion in the stigmatized industry such as fast food restaurants and casino.

Given the increased demand on CRM in the hospitality industry, the paper contributes to extend the realm of CRM literatures by investigating antecedents affecting consumers’ responses toward the CRM in the stigmatized companies or brands.

Based on upper echelons theory, this paper aims to explore the mixed impacts of chief executive officer (CEO) Machiavellianism on new venture performance. At the same time, this paper tests the mediating and suppression effect of top management team (TMT) collective organizational engagement, and the moderating effect of entrepreneurial orientation.

The authors conducted a three-wave survey of a sample of 1,550 enterprises established within three years, finally retained the full sample of 216 companies (216 CEOs, 733 vice presidents) with complete responses in all surveys. By using SPSS 26.0 and Amos 26.0 software to conduct data analysis, the authors empirically tested the hypothesized relationships.

Regression results show that CEO Machiavellianism negatively affects new venture performance through TMT collective organizational engagement, whereas there is a direct positive relationship between CEO Machiavellianism and new venture performance when TMT collective organizational engagement is controlled for. In addition, entrepreneurial orientation plays a boundary role in this mechanism, which can weaken the negative effect of CEO Machiavellianism on TMT collective organizational engagement.

By expanding the application contexts of the upper echelons theory, this paper enriches the research on Machiavellianism in the organizational research and further clarified the simultaneous positive and negative effects of CEO Machiavellianism on new venture performance.