Purpose The paper aims to investigate the standpoints and practices of university members from European developing countries regarding the harnessing of the intellectual capital (IC) within online academic social networks. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire-based survey with 210 university members was conducted, with the indicators adopting prior measurement scales which were further adapted to a network framework. Findings The organizational policies and practices relate positively and highly significantly with the valuation of the network-based IC components. Moreover, 63 per cent of the professional and organizational competitiveness of higher education institutions is determined by the exploitation of the IC embedded in online academic networks. Research limitations/implications All survey respondents were from the European developing countries, which may limit the general applicability of the findings. Also, the emphasis is laid solely on online academic networks. Practical implications This paper brings to the fore both the potential and the state-of-the-art in leveraging the IC of online specialized networks which are indicative of the academic field. When acknowledged as such, the network-based IC is liable to generate substantial competitive advantages at the professional and organizational levels at the same time. Originality/value This research adds to the extant literature in two main ways. First, it advances a new construct – network-based IC – in the context of the online academic social networks. Second, it proposes a research model for addressing the network-based IC from a competitive advantage perspective.

Within the broader media-sport nexus framework, sport is known for providing not only engaging performances for the entertainment market, but also important symbolic capital in terms of national identity and public diplomacy. The present paper looks at how these dimensions overlap, focusing on the centrality of the media logic within the dynamics of the social field of sport and its corollary celebrization imagery. The aim of the paper is, thus, to identify the contextual aspects and the legitimation strategies mobilized through media discourses in the overlap of the star status and the national hero image of a sport actor. When and how does media crown an athlete with the national hero aura? What does this national hero status involve in terms of identity and identification mechanisms? Focusing on a corpus of 310 online articles and 12 Facebook highlights published by two main Romanian sport newspapers during the 2014 Roland Garros Tournament, the study discusses the media construction of the raising sport star, Simona Halep (i.e. first Romanian tennis player to enter Top 3 WTA), as national hero. The analysis examines not only the symbolic power of the sport performances as national identity resources and celebrity input, but also the engaging deliberative spaces that emerge along with the national hero frame and the hybrid form of civic celebrity practices involved in legitimizing it.

Media are no longer just a witness to sports events, facilitating our access to them, but have become the most powerful judging platform for sports competitions, serving as a guide for their interpretation and evaluation. The present study focuses on media framing of sports actors' responsibility when it comes to major sports competitions. Who is responsible for the team's performance and results?In analysing media discourse, framing effects of sports events coverage will be examined from two inter-correlated dimensions, textually and visually. Based on an event-related corpus of on-line press articles from four national newspapers, this case study covers two major sports events: 2010 European Women's Handball Championship and 2011 World Women's Handball Championship.The discursive analysis of the press articles shows that, if winning competitive settings favour the emergence of a personification effect, building up sports heroes on both textual and visual dimensions, the responsibility of failure is rather diffused towards a collective referent. However, the visual component of press articles, along with the indirect strategy of addressing the responsibility issue throughout reported speech techniques, works as an alternative to the personification effect.Keywords: responsibility; visual framing; competitive situation; personification effect; media discourse. IntroductionToday our sports experiences and social imaginary attached to this field are grounded in the general approach of sports as media product. Most of our sports experiences are, in fact, mediated ones, as the public visibility and accessibility towards sports actors and events is mainly provided by media. While gaining their centrality inside the world of sports, media ended up transforming that world (Whannel, 1992, p. 3) and speeding up its commodification process. Sharing the public dependency constrains, as well as the entertaining component, sports and media are "inextricably linked together in a symbiotic relationship" (Valgeirsson & Snyder, 1986, p. 131), which is best described by its commercial nature. Both sports and media build on attracting and retaining large audiences and, in so doing, they join their forces in providing us with a hybrid experience of sports events as both competition and entertaining shows. The sports-media dyad is defined by the reciprocity of the structuring effect (Bourdieu, 1998) that both social fields exert upon each other. In order to gain public visibility, sports events need to be "mediazable", meeting the general condition of a media show and reflecting the "spectacularization effect" of media upon the sports ethos. This implies correlating the competitive content with a spectacular form in order to provide an attractive media product for the audience. The need to build up on the "fun factor" (Kellner, 2003, p. 3) of sports events converts them into one of the most popular genres of entraining shows and, thus, a valuable asset for media's continuous chase for rating points. The boomerang effect of...

The media-sport relation of interdependency has influenced both the commodity value of sport actors and events, as well as the mere sport experience. The present study focuses on the reconfiguration process of the spectatorship experience through media, addressing two of its central dimensions: the emotional and physical one. Along with the wide accessibility to sport events and a progressive grow of audiences, media provided a mediated live experience that ended up competing with the genuine live experience. Strongly related and dependent on the technological changes and the dynamics of the globalization process, media went beyond simply transmitting the sport event, engaging in a process of redefining it. In doing so, they generated a deterritorialized laboratory sport experience, “hotting-up” the spectatorship experience and minimizing the perceptual constrains. This, in turn, ended up by making this media-sport hyperreality more appealing than the genuine live experience of sport acts. In addressing the spatial reconfiguration of the spectatorship experience, I have built up a new model in order to better respond to the primacy of connectivity over the space-dependent experience of sport acts: the scattering model of sport spectatorship. Moreover, I discuss the mixture of the private and public zones as a strategic way of maximizing the accessibility and customization of sport media-products, inside the wider process of sport commodification.

Within the general framework of the internationalization of higher education, this paper brings forward the role of host-universities in facilitating the intercultural adaptation of Erasmus students. In line with Kim's (2001Kim's ( , 2005 theoretical approach, the general premise that we build our research on is that the more universities involve in organizing activities which encourage communication and social relationships for the visiting students, the easier the adaptive process to the new socio-cultural medium would be for them. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with Romanian students aged between 19 and 23, who went on an Erasmus programme of 4 to 8 months in different European countries, we discuss which were the main facilitators and barriers that they had to cope with during their mobility sojourn. Although the results show a low level of host-universities engagement in facilitating the adaptive process of visiting students, we lay stress on how universities can approach this process as a win-win relation and which are the short-term and long-term implications on both individual and organizational level.