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This paper advances our understanding of sponsorship linked internal marketing (SLIM). Based on a comprehensive qualitative investigation of major sponsors, this research examines the use of sponsorship linked internal marketing to conceptualize, communicate and implement corporate identity development and employee performance. Sport (by way of an investment in sponsorship) provides a rich opportunity to build employee identification with corporate identity; to establish a fit between how the identity of the firm is positioned internally and externally; and to inspire employee engagement to drive business performance. Moreover, it helps to foster a collaborative culture. The research furthers our understanding of the value of sport sponsorship, sponsorship fit, and sponsorship leveraging.

Ethnodrama combined with Goffman’s ‘presentation of self’ is used to explore three elite swimmers’ ‘presentation of self’ in relation to the dominant ideology of ‘slim to win’. The ‘presentation of self’ of three swimmers is presented and analyzed according to their front stage (e.g., posting of specific images; direct media quotes) and backstage (e.g., an autoethnographic representation) performances. Goffman’s concepts of expressions ‘given’ and ‘given off’ are used to highlight how the ideology comes to be presented to others and whether the swimmer negotiates and/or contests it. As an analysis and representation, ethnodrama affords the opportunity to reveal the extent an athlete may go to to avoid a failing ‘presentation of self’ in relation to ‘slim to win,’ highlighting potential health effects (e.g., physical, emotional).

This study examined the relative ways in which muscularity and thinness concerns longitudinally influence adolescents’ intentions to use doping substances. It was hypothesized that muscularity and thinness exert their effects on doping intentions by promoting endorsement of positive attitudes toward doping use in male and female adolescents and across different levels of sport involvement. To test this hypothesis, nearly 900 high school adolescents provided questionnaire data on two separate occasions during an academic year. On average, boys, as well as boys and girls who practice some sport, had relatively strong concerns about muscularity, whereas girls showed relatively strong thinness concerns. Boys also expressed more positive attitudes about doping than did girls. Structural equation modeling showed that muscularity and thinness have direct effects on adolescents’ intentions to engage in doping and that muscularity, but not thinness, partly exerts its effects through the endorsement of positive attitudes toward doping.

Previous research with female athletes has yielded equivocal findings when comparing disordered eating rates to nonathlete populations, but the rates differ for athletes in leanness and nonleanness sports (Sherman & Thompson, 2009). The purpose of the current study was to develop a measure to assess sport-specific weight pressures for female athletes. Secondly, this study identified frequencies of weight, size, and appearance pressures across sports. Participants (N =204) were female Division I athletes from three universities who represented 17 sports. Exploratory factor analysis yielded a 4-factor solution for the 16-item Weight Pressures in Sport for Females (WPS-F) scale with strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.90). The most frequently reported pressures among female college athletes were teammates (36.8%), uniform (34.3%), and coach (33.8%). These findings are discussed in comparison with previous research along with clinical and research implications for using the WPS-F in sport psychology settings.

During the 1970s, a new corporal and aesthetic standard emerged in women’s artistic gymnastics. No longer was grace and elegance the main feature, but acrobatic and somewhat robotic performances. These exercises were increasingly performed by highly trained and sexually immature girls. The Western audience was fascinated by the athletic and innocent-looking gymnasts. The emerging corporality and performance trend combined youthfulness und slimness with physical fitness and muscular tone, a combination that reflected the idealized woman of the 1970s. Sports photographs played a key role in distributing the “new” ideal of femininity. In this article, we consider how gymnasts’ performances of the 1970s were visualized by examining a sample of professional sports photographs. We demonstrate how sports photographs construct and establish gender and body standards through their visual construction of gendered and de-gendered gymnastics performances.

Guided by critical discourse analysis, commercially available exercise DVDs are described in terms of the instructor and model characteristics, and the motivational content being verbally conveyed by the instructors on the DVDs. Ten commercially available, contemporary, single instructor lead exercise DVDs were obtained from multiple sources. Instructor and model characteristics, emergent relationship patterns, and the motivational content of the primary instructor were analyzed. Most instructors and models were female, Caucasian, slim, and dressed in revealing attire. Motivational statements comprised 26.9% (SD = 11.31) of the transcripts. One in seven motivational statements were negative. With body capital clearly on display and some of the motivational language being suspect in terms of building potential participants’ psychological capital, the value of commercial exercise DVDs is brought into question.

Adolescent girls are becoming less physically active and are experiencing more body image issues compared to adolescent boys. Furthermore, adolescent girls maintain physical activity levels well below recommended guidelines, especially girls in urban environments. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of an 8-week after-school educational curriculum, GoGirlGo!, and physical activity program on urban adolescent middle school girls’ attitudes toward physical activity and body image. Twenty-five girls ranging in age from 12 to 14 years of age (M = 12.34 years, SD = 2.1) were randomly placed into two groups: (a) GoGirlGo! intervention and physical activity, and (b) physical activity only. The GoGirlGo! group increased their attraction to physical activity and lowered scores in weight dissatisfaction and desire to be slim compared to the physical activity only group. Based on the data, the GoGirlGo! curriculum is effective in improving attitudes about physical activity and body image among urban adolescent girls.

This article explores men’s talk about physical activity, weight, health and slimming. Drawing from qualitative data from men whom medicine might label overweight or obese, it outlines various ideal typical ways of orienting to the idea that physical activity promotes “healthy” weight loss before exploring the most critical display of perspective: justifiable resistance and defiance. This gendered mode of accountability comprises numerous themes. These range from the inefficiency of physical activity in promoting weight loss to resisting imposed discipline. Theoretically and politically, these data are read as a situationally fitting and meaningful response to “symbolic violence” in a field of “masculine domination” (Bourdieu 2001)—that is, a society in which fatness is routinely discredited as feminine and feminizing filth by institutions that are publicly reinforcing and amplifying fatphobic norms or sizism.