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This study sought to explore the experiences of those involved in the Bethlem parkrun. A mobile ethnography employing participant observation and informal discussion was conducted on the grounds of the hospital in London, United Kingdom. The findings focused on “what it is like” to participate in this parkrun and were organized into two themes: (a) Bethlem as a Shared Leisure Space and (b) Shared Leisure Space, But for Whom? Findings illustrated the emplaced and relational experiences of some participants in this “therapeutic landscape,” while highlighting that the events were exclusionary for others, namely service-users. These findings contrast the therapeutic landscapes literature, which largely assumes their benefits are experienced equally. This work may provide further understanding of the individual and collective experiences of parkrun.

Despite having clear policies that address athlete misconduct, including gender-based violence, at the collegiate and professional levels, members of SportsWorld—athletes, coaches, and staff—are rarely, if ever, held accountable. And, even when they face a penalty, more than 80% are allowed to either remain on the team or transfer and continue playing. In this paper, we explore the impact of this lack of accountability, including the “positive” benefits to players that include the opportunity to play in national playoffs and secure lucrative contracts as well as the negative impacts on victims and communities, most disturbingly the impact of serial abusers like Larry Nassar whose unfettered access to athletes resulted in hundreds of victimized individuals.

Boosting board representation of women redresses structural unfairness and improves corporate governance and performance. The Change Our Game initiative, running over 3 years statewide in Victoria, Australia, mandated 40% representation of women on state sport boards. At the start, only 44% of state sport boards had 40% women representation; by the mandate deadline, this had increased to 93%. Using an institutional theory lens, the authors qualitatively analyzed four stakeholder groups: mandators, policy champions, operationalists, and mandate targets. Stakeholder sentiments were analyzed pre- and postmandate deadline over 3 years. Sentiments ranged from positive to equivocation to denigration. The mandate’s coercive pressure, supported by institutional legitimacy and work to accelerate changes, led to institutional change and achieved a significant increase in women board members. Change was grounded in strong ethical and cognitive support from mandate champions. Microsocial expressions of denigration and change resistance did not prevent successful change.

This paper examines which factors influence the change in the number of followers of professional cyclists on social media using a fixed-effects model on 33 days of panel data regarding the performance, activity, and content of Twitter messages of 795 cyclists. The analysis shows that a better race performance leads to more new followers. Posting social tweets has no effect, but posting social retweets does increase the number of new followers for riders with a low or medium number of followers. For parasocial tweets, the reverse is true: Parasocial retweets have no effect, while parasocial noninteractive tweets have a positive significant effect for riders with a low or high number of followers. Finally, for riders with a high number of followers, posting a general question to followers has a positive impact on the number of new followers. Cyclists and teams can use the results of this study to identify over- and underperformers in terms of social media success and to attract more followers with all the associated benefits.

A clear and consistent finding across three decades of sociological work focused on performance sports is that various sports can be considered social spaces in which risk, pain, and injury are accepted, normalized, and valorized. In recent years, the emergent scientific and popular concern around the short- and long-term consequences of sport-related concussion has seen a resurgence in the use of classic sociological ideas to help understand why athletes appear to downplay, continue competing, and sometimes ignore potential brain injuries. Using data from interviews, this paper explores these social processes in the sport of road cycling in Britain. We present the argument that the enduring utility of classic sociological concepts in explaining athlete behaviors toward risk, pain, and injury may be indicative of the obdurate nature of the cultural norms which circulate in performance sport settings. With regard to the ongoing problems with concussion in sport, we show the continued need to understand the social context in which much sport is imagined and practiced. This leads to our suggestion that sociocultural and interactional processes in many sporting subcultures that support the normative acceptance of behaviors which often prioritize performance over health need to be more readily challenged if we wish to achieve comprehensive change toward improved athlete welfare.