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The purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which students from an American-style Business School in Lebanon expect the managerial behaviors that they are taught in the classroom to actually be applied by managers in the Lebanese workplace. Broadly categorized as accountability, gender equity, religious tolerance, consultation and transparency, the authors found little indication that such expectations existed. Even when they could be identified such as with racial equality, their relative strength was so weak that they were barely above neutral on a 10-point scale. What was perhaps most troubling was that expectation for the elimination of bribery and corruption actually declined as students matriculated through the curriculum. At least for the time being, it appears that Lebanese business students do not anticipate encountering American-style management practices, which have formed the core of the Business courses, when they enter the workforce.

In this paper, we outline the parameters of a discursive approach to attributions in sport psychology. Attribution theory has had a strong presence within sport and exercise psychology. Attributions are the perceived causes or reasons that people give for an occurrence related to themselves or others. An attributional model, developed in educational psychology, has been most influential and often requires the researcher(s) or participants to determine the dimensional categorisation of attributions (e.g., internal-external, stable-unstable, controllable-uncontrollable). Assessing attributions in sport and exercise psychology has been almost exclusively through self-report questionnaires and entrenched within a limited theoretical perspective. In contrast, a discursive approach focuses on discourse and what is accomplished through people's talk. Such an approach would advocate a move from a view of talk (discourse) as a route to internal or dimensional categories to an emphasis on talk as the event of interest. Using principles of conversation analysis (CA), a critical examination of the traditional conceptualisation of attributions will be offered in this paper. Drawing on a corpus of data where athletes discuss their sporting performance, we consider the management of attributions as talk-in-action, rather than a series of discrete cognitive elements and dimensions. To illustrate the way that attributions are managed in conversation, we consider three areas—asking questions about loss, the interactional modesty inherent in discussing wins and the "slipperiness" of attributions in conversation. Finally, the implications of a discursive approach to the study of attributions in sport and exercise psychology are discussed. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs030133