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This article deploys the notion of 'self-Orientalization' to empirically investigate the signifying practices across the East–West divide for the construction of global advertising campaigns by Japanese sport brand Asics. In this context, Asics engaged in the practice of self-Orientalization as it formed a creative alliance with Western advertising agencies that represented Japanese culture and identity on behalf of the Japanese-based global headquarters. With insights from interviews with key advertising personnel, the article illuminates practices of negotiation and accommodation between Japanese and European creative workers in shaping 'authentic' and 'cool' signs of Japan. Overall, it suggests that self-Orientalization: (a) entails negotiations over the cultural-economic politics of representation between the Orient and the Occident and (b) simultaneously functions to blur such distinctions at the micro level of social relations and personal identification of creative workers when embodying and performing the Other on behalf of the Self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors outline the set of political-economic developments that have eroded the traditional role of public broadcasters in providing free-to-air telecasts of sporting events of national significance for all citizens. They argue against the belief that new digital sports broadcasting landscape is workably competitive. The authors propose that the said landscape should fall within the mandate of the nation's public broadcaster to provide live telecasts of these events.

Legitimacy building is an increasingly recognized feature of bureaucratic practice under networked governance. Mark Moore's (1995) model of ‘public value creation’ captures the strategic imperative to build credibility, legitimacy and support for policies and programmes in this context. As an emerging ‘narrative’ in public organizations, it combines perspectives on managerial and political leadership and is therefore useful to explain bureaucratic experiences with legitimacy building and their implications for policy. This article investigates the efforts of Canada's federal sport agency to secure legitimacy and explores the implications of public value creation on future policy-making. Drawing from interview data as well as public and internal documents, the study outlines Sport Canada's initiatives to establish sport's ‘benefits’, collaborate widely and add value in terms of equity and ethics. Two related implications (or storylines) are considered and discussed: (a) the tendency for public value creation to reduce the policy sector to anecdotal understandings in the eyes of political authorizers, and (b) the propensity for building public value to result in over-commitment due to the accumulation and embedding of new collaborations, mandates and target populations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]