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Televised sport offers a rich context for investigating the processes that influence particular uses of language. Here, the authors consider how pressure on sport commentators to connect with audiences results in reliance on preestablished narratives that draw heavily on stereotypes. They investigate how television sport commentators negotiate tensions between stereotypes of a particular country’s playing style and on-field action that challenges those stereotypes. Their interdisciplinary approach—drawing from social psychology, communication, media studies, sport studies, and cultural studies—provides a textual analysis of New Zealand commentary in a pivotal Rugby World Cup game between France and New Zealand. The authors identify three different ways in which national stereotypes lead commentators to produce interpretations that do not always accurately represent the action on the field. They conclude that sport commentary in an international context operates to create and reinscribe symbolic differences between nations, even in the face of visual evidence that is ambiguous or actively contradicts the words used to describe it. The analysis demonstrates how powerfully national stereotypes influence commentators’ representational choices.

This article explores how local pressures intersect to produce differing broadcasts in 2 cultural contexts. This is achieved via a cross-cultural analysis of a decade of televised rugby union matches between France and New Zealand and interviews with leading commentators in both countries. The authors argue that although the overarching commercial imperative to capture audiences might be the same in both countries, and despite global tendencies toward homogenized presentation of sports events, there are local differences in expectations about which kinds of audiences should be captured, and these lead to different practices and emphases in the live broadcasts. The authors suggest that in each country, broadcasts are the result of a complex set of pressures that interact to produce broadcasts with “local” flavor and characteristics.

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Several studies have explored why employees leave their organization in the face of abusive supervision. However, there is a lack of research on what makes employees continue with employment despite being affected by abusive supervision. This study responds to the calls made to analyze multiple mechanisms that employees use to cope with abusive supervision. It addresses this gap by examining employees’ psychological and social resources that can mitigate the effects of abusive supervision. We specifically consider employee psychological and structural empowerment, as well as resilience and workplace friendship. This is a time-lagged study using a sample of 146 postgraduate students who have a minimum of 2 years of work experience. Utilizing the tenets of conservation of resources theory, we find that damage to psychological empowerment plays a significant role in diminishing the work engagement and creativity of employees, as compared to structural empowerment. We also find that workplace friendship plays a significant role in weakening the damaging effects of abusive supervision on structural empowerment. Future studies should consider other psychological and social mechanisms that can mitigate the effects of abusive supervision. Moreover, organizations should work toward developing a culture of sharing and support between coworkers.