Society for the Study of Social Problems Notes From the Chair Elizabeth Cavalier, PhD Georgia Gwinnett College Welcome, members of Sport, Leisure and the Body! Please enjoy our Summer, 2015 newsletter. In it you will find a listing of our section’s Sessions at the upcoming SSSP meeting in Chicago, a recent call for papers, information about the 2015 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport conference, and links to several recent news articles covering member research related to women’s sports. This is my last newsletter as Chair of the division – it has been a great two years. I am grateful for the shape Cheryl Cooky left the division in when I took over, and I hope I am leaving it on an upward trajectory for the next division chair in the future. I had hoped to be able to congratulate our new division chair in this newsletter, but we had such great candidates in Dr. Stephanie Medley and Jeff Sacha that the membership couldn’t decide, so we had a tie for the first time in division history! Please make sure you vote in the runoff election (by July 29) to determine the 2015-2017 division chair. I would like to congratulate the winner of our student paper award, Kyler Sherman-Williams from The Pennsylvania State University. Kyler’s paper, “The Effect of Work and Parental Role Occupancy and Role Performance on Exercise Participation among U.S. Adults” will be presented at the “Leisure, Recreation, and Sport Across the Life Course” session co-sponsored by Sport, Leisure, and the Body and Youth, Aging, and the Life Course on Sunday at 4:30 during the Annual Meeting. I encourage you to attend. Thank you also to the several anonymous reviewers who helped determine a winner in a difficult field. Graduate students, I encourage you to consider submitting to next year’s award. Please do what you can to ensure the growth of the Sport, Leisure, and the Body division in the future. You can do this in a number of ways, including volunteering to organize sessions, serving on a student paper committee, submitting papers to our sessions, attending the business meetings for our division, and most notably by renewing and maintaining your memberships in our division and encouraging others to do so. I think our division adds value to SSSP by focusing on recreation, sport, leisure, and the body, and I would like to continue to see these topics discussed at future SSSP meetings. Thanks for all you did over the last two years to continue our growth—let’s keep up that momentum. Finally, I would like to give thanks to our newsletter editor Dr. Rachel Allison. It has been a pleasure working with you throughout the last few years, and I hope you continue as the editor in the future. Help make Rachel’s job easier by contributing to the newsletter—announcements, editorials, book excerpts or any other related content should be sent directly to Rachel at rallison@soc.msstate.edu. Join Us at SSSP! Division Meeting: Friday, August 21, 4:30-6:30, Atlantic C Session: “Race, Class, and Gender in Sport.” Friday, August 21, 10:30-12:10, Adriatic. Session: “Genders, Sexualities, and Bodies,” Friday, August 21, 2:30-4:10, Atlantic D. Session: “The Body and Embodiment in Institutional Ethnography,” Saturday, August 22, 8:30-10:10, Pacific 3. Session: “Labor and the Body,” Saturday, August 22, 12:30-2:10, Pacific 2. Session: “Media and Body Image,” Saturday, August 22, 2:30-4:10, Pacific 2. Session: “The Body and Embodiment in Relations of Ruling and the Social Organization of Life and Health,” Sunday, August 23, 12:30-2:10, Baltic. Papers in the Round: “Gambling and Society,” Sunday, August 23, 2:30-4:10, Atlantic C. Session: “Leisure, Recreation, and Sport Across the Life Course,” Sunday, August 23, 4:30-6:10, Adriatic. Call For Papers CFP: Contextualising Positive Organisational Behaviour: The Case of Sport Organisations - Int. J. of Sport Management and Marketing Call for papers - Int. J. of Sport Management and Marketing Special Issue on: "Contextualising Positive Organisational Behaviour: The Case of Sport Organisations" Guest Editors:  Associate Prof. Christos Anagnostopoulos, Molde University College, Norway and University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus Assistant Prof. Dimitra Papadimitriou, University of Patras, Greece Nearly two decades ago, Doherty (1998) called for closer attention to be given to human resource management (HRM) issues within the context of sport organisations. More recently, Todd and Kent (2009) offered the theoretical insight that a critical area that distinguishes sporting contexts more than other organisational settings may be the psychology of employees. Although psychology has been criticised as being primarily dedicated to addressing mental illness rather than mental “wellness” (Bakker and Schaufeli, 2008), the seminal work by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) placed more emphasis on positive psychological traits, states and behaviours. This “positive psychology” (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) – to which Todd and Kent (2009) implicitly refer – has subsequently had a great effect on the field of organisational behaviour (OB). For example, both Luthans (2002) and Wright (2003) argued that framing research with a positive lens through so-called positive organisational behaviour (POB) should be the way forward for organisational and management scholars. According to Luthan (2002), POB is “the study and application of positively oriented human resource strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed and effectively managed for performance improvement in the work place” (p. 59). While such an organisation-centred view has its value, Wright (2003) argued that the mission of POB should also encompass the pursuit of employee happiness and health as viable goals in themselves. Bakker and Schaufeli (2008) went even further and drew on the work of Zwetsloot and Pot (2004) to integrate the above-mentioned organisation-centred (Luthan, 2002) and employee-centred (Wright, 2003) views into a “positive business value model of employee health and well-being” (p. 148). Although more than 3000 articles have been published relating to POB in various contexts (Rothmann and van Zyl, 2013), the sport management scholarly community has failed to explicitly address the matter in its respective context(s). The increase in publications outside the sport industry, however, indicates the need for and impact of positive psychological behaviours within organisations. This special issue seeks to cast a fresh and state-of-the-art eye on how POB shapes and influences the workplace within the sport organisational context. There is still much to learn about how and why POB and a variety of outcomes at work are interlinked, let alone when “there is extensive variability in the scope and size of sport organisations” (Taylor, Doherty and McGraw, 2008, p. 2). Conceptual, theoretical and empirical works drawing on and engaging with POB are welcome for this issue. We hope that this issue will inspire and encourage scholars to expand their research horizons to investigate employees in flourishing sport organisations. Exploring and/or explaining the applicability/presence of POB in sport organisations is needed to discern (possible) differences highlighted by the sport context, and thus to address the need for theory development whilst acknowledging the various characteristics associated with sport (Chalip, 2006). Indeed, we strongly believe that POB offers a great platform to do what Slack (1998) called for nearly two decades ago: to use sport as a means of extending existing theory. Subject Coverage Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following: * Passion at work: harmonious versus obsessive passion in sport organisations * Thriving and flourishing at work: what's the score? * Resilience: sport executives and team sport organisations * Happiness at work: beyond the team's results? * Virtuousness in sport organisations * Hope and optimism that sport (organisations) can lead to positive social change * Employees' emotional competence and customer satisfaction linkages * Satisfaction and work performance * Organisational commitment in sport charitable organisations * Feel-good factor of "mega events": beyond the organisation? Notes for Prospective Authors    Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained from any copyright holders of the original paper). All papers are refereed through a peer review process. All papers must be submitted online. To submit a paper, please read our Submitting articles page.  Important Dates Submission of manuscripts: 31 January, 2016 Notification to authors: 31 March, 2016 Final versions due: 31 May, 2016 Conference News NASSS 2015 - Sports at/on the Borderlands: Translations, Transitions, and Transgressions La Sociedad Norteamericana para la Sociologia del Deporte Societe Nord-Americaine de Sociologie du Sport North American Society of the Sociology of Sport 2015 Conference Santa Fe, New Mexico El Dorado Hotel and Spa Sports at/on the Borderlands: Translations, Transitions, and Transgressions Inspired by this year’s conference location, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the conference theme engages in questions and considerations of borders, borderlands, and border work to explore the ways in which sports both materially and discursively constitute and are constituted by, in, and through myriad borders (whether geographic, economic, gender, racial, embodied, mediated, cultural, and so on). Sessions may engage how sports, sporting cultures, physical cultures, and/or body cultures, construct, navigate, and/ or dismantle such borders. Sessions might also engage the work sports do in the liminal spaces that exist in and around borders. Sessions may also consider how sports studies scholarship can most effectively be translated to communities for advocacy and social change, the potential and/or struggle in constructing translations between academic and public audiences, and what might be lost and/or gained in translational practices. Sessions may examine sports as “contested activities” wherein participants construct, navigate, and resist sports inherent transitional contents, forms, meanings, and relations. Sessions may also engage with the following questions: What ways do sports serve as a site for transgressions? What are sports potential as a transgressive space? Sessions may also consider how the discipline of “Sociology of Sports,” and specifically NASSS, serves as the site for the production of borders, whether those are disciplinary, theoretical or methodological, and address the question of what we can do/ are we doing as scholars to translate or transgress the very borders we construct, and whether this translation/ transgression desirable, and if so, for whom? Santa Fe +1 Initiative: In partnership with the Diversity and Conference Climate Committee Interim Chair, Dr. Algerian Hart, the 2015 Conference Committee is pleased to announce the “Santa Fe +1” initiative. The goal of this initiative is to expand the audience for the NASSS conference to include those who have never attended the NASSS conference or who have not attended for some time. NASSS members are encouraged to invite a +1; this can be a colleague, student, peer, or friend who has never been to NASSS and to invite them to register and participate in the conference. As you are considering organizing a session and/ or submitting an abstract, we encourage you to distribute the announcements and Calls to your networks, and bring to your +1 to Santa Fe! Member Media: Women’s World Cup Edition Even in the Wake of a Record-Setting Women’s World Cup, Myths Still Surround Women’s Sports (http://espn.go.com/espnw/news-commentary/article/13215042/even-wake-record-setting-women-world-cup-myths-surround-women-sports) The Sexist $33 Million World Cup Prize Gap (http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/07/sexist-33-million-world-cup-prize-gap.html?mid=fb-share-thecut) Will Team USA’s Win Help Level the Playing Field for Women? (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/will-team-usas-win-help-level-playing-field-women/) Former World Cup Champion Brandi Chastain on Women’s Role & Representation in Sport (http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2015/06/10/43207/with-women-s-world-cup-in-full-swing-looking-at-wo/) Women’s Soccer is a Feminist Issue (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/womens-soccer-is-a-feminist-issue/394865/) 8