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As sport league brands have increasingly extended their marketing activities into foreign countries, international brand positioning has become a relevant research topic. In this research, we introduce and examine the concept of bicultural brand positioning, an approach that combines a sport league’s connection to its home country with target-country associations. We integrate bicultural identity theory with the literature on brand benefits to propose two types of bicultural brand positioning: functional versus symbolic. Three experiments, using the National Football League and German satellite fans as the empirical context, provide evidence that bicultural brand positioning incorporating functional (vs. symbolic) benefits for the satellite fans increases bicultural brand image integration, defined as the perceived compatibility of combining the two country cultures, and has positive indirect effects on intentions to use the brand and positive word of mouth. These effects are driven by increased perceptions of cultural authenticity of the brand and brand convenience.

An extensive literature base has investigated women’s underrepresentation in decision-making positions with sport organizations, yet women’s access to these positions remains limited. Diversification strategies, based on distributive justice, have failed to create further opportunities. A new approach is needed to address this latent issue. The concept of gender allyship is presented to address the limitations of distributive justice paradigms that involves men and women to work as members of a coalition to improve gender equity in sport organizations. Utilizing grounded theory, this paper presents the core category of awareness and related subcategories self-awareness, organizational awareness, and industry awareness, as a means of informing the performance of gender allyship. The findings provide interesting theoretical and empirical implications for understanding the development of awareness, its subcategories, and how it contributes to change.

There is a plethora of recent examples from the sport industry that situate sport organizations as contributing to sexual violence against women (e.g., Phoenix Suns, Nike). Though research has shown that these issues exist in sport, little work has focused on the impacts of gender-based violence and sexual harassment. Therefore, utilizing gender regimes as our conceptual framework, we explored how experiences of gender-based violence and sexual harassment within sport organizations work to perpetuate the gender inequality in sport workplaces. Findings illustrate the influence of a multilevel relationship to the gender-based violence and sexual harassment experienced by women is impacted by the presence of gender regimes and use of containment strategies to conceal this abuse. Thus, we argue that institutional-level failures to protect women represent organizational success, which reinforces gender regimes and the purposeful containment of these incidents maintains the gender/power hierarchy.