FACULTY RESEARCH REPORT 2022
2022 FACULTY RESEARCH REPORT
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2022 Faculty Research Report
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Message from the Associate Dean of Research............................................3 Accounting: Elaine Wang ...........................................................................4 Finance: Mila Getmansky Sherman ............................................................6 Hospitality & Tourism Management: Irem Onder Neuhofer................8 Management: Giuseppe Labianca............................................................10 Marketing: Matthew Godfrey ..................................................................12 Operations & Information Management: Monideepa Tarafdar........14 Sport Management: Nicole Melton.........................................................16
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Message from the Associate Dean of Research Isenberg faculty members are engaged in cutting-edge research that makes an impact on the business world and society, as well as the knowledge base in academia. We have gained a global reputation for thought leadership by addressing important issues with rigorous research methods across a range of topic areas, including business leadership, alternative investments, behavioral accounting, the economic impact of tourism, marketing and public policy, large-scale networks, human-computer interactions, sport diversity issues, entrepreneurship, knowledge creation, and information flows. In fact, Isenberg faculty members have published articles in more than 20 premier journals over the past three years; some faculty members have published multiple articles in premier journals. Isenberg’s research mission is supported by: • Internationally recognized scholars. On our faculty, we have 14 members with endowed professorships. Many of our faculty members hold editorial positions and sit on prestigious editorial review boards. They continue to innovate and push the boundaries of their disciplines. • A wealth of research support. This includes access to important research databases, the support of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and its extensive digital catalog, and research support found at a top 25 public university.
• A strong established doctoral program. Over the past 50 years, Isenberg has offered PhD concentrations in accounting, finance, hospitality and tourism, marketing, management science, information systems, organizational studies, sport management, and strategic management. • A vibrant academic environment. The UMass Amherst campus houses many nationally ranked programs in a variety of fields, which offer interdisciplinary support and opportunities. The fivecollege environment—including Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mt. Holyoke College, and Smith College—provides extended access to resources and collaboration opportunities. • A culture that values innovation and thought leadership. We are driven to make an impact with our research. I’m pleased to be able to share a few examples of the game-changing projects Isenberg faculty members are pursuing. You can read more about their work at isenberg.umass.edu.
George Milne ASSOCIATE DEAN OF RESEARCH AND CARNEY FAMILY ENDOWED PROFESSOR, MARKETING ISENBERG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
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ACCOUNTING
Elaine Wang PROFESSOR AND DEAN’S RESEARCH FELLOW
Pinning Down the Human Factor in Accounting
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hough most of accounting research focuses on capital markets, Isenberg Accounting Professor and Dean’s Research Fellow Elaine Wang doesn’t follow the crowd. She specializes in an increasingly influential subfield of accounting research: judgment and decision-making in accounting and auditing. “Most people don’t realize how much professional judgment plays a role in accounting,” says Wang, who grew up in the bustling coastal city of Dalian, China. She pursued accounting as an undergraduate, but was more interested in the thought processes prevalent in the field than numbers. “I’ve always been interested in why decisions get made and what the potential downsides are.” When she spent a year abroad at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and got the chance to do some accounting research, she began considering the possibility of pursuing an accounting PhD and becoming a professor. She completed her doctorate at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where she ran decision-making experiments with human subjects and realized that accounting could encompass psychology. For the first time, the accounting piece and the judgment piece clicked. Her recent research, “The Effect of Increased Audit Disclosure on Managers’ Real Operating Decisions: Evidence from Disclosing Critical Audit Matters,” published in The Accounting Review, explores the potential business impacts of new accounting regulations. In 2019, in a shift characterized as one of the most significant changes in accounting practice in more than 50 years, auditors became required to disclose “critical audit
We may see organizations playing it safe in terms of not triggering auditor disclosures, but in the end potentially facing greater economic loss.” ELAINE WANG
matters” (CAMs) in their final audit reports. CAMs are issues in a company’s financials that require the auditor to make “challenging, subjective, or complex” judgments. In general, investors view zero CAM disclosures as a green light to invest. CAM disclosures can be seen as potential red flags, requiring management to spend additional time reassuring investors and justifying their decisions. Some disclosures can even trigger enough market anxiety that a company’s stock price drops. In their research, Wang and colleagues Jeremiah Bentley of Isenberg and Tamara Lambert of Lehigh University theorized that managers’ operational decisions would be influenced by a desire to reduce CAM disclosures. In multiple experiments, the research team found that managers would voluntarily close down riskier projects or choose more traditional operating approaches simply to avoid the possibility of triggering a CAM disclosure. While in some cases it is beneficial for the public to know if an auditor has discovered irregular or highly risky financial reporting practices, the overreaction to the CAM disclosure could prevent managers from making optimal economic decisions. In the long term, Wang notes, managers may quash innovation by avoiding more complex, creative, or uncertain prospects.
“We may see organizations playing it safe in terms of not triggering auditor disclosures, but in the end potentially facing greater economic loss,” she says. How Jargon Impacts Decisions She’s also deeply interested in how the language used in financial disclosures influences investors and has published widely on the topic, including in The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, and Journal of Accounting and Economics. “What are the consequences of making something easier or more difficult to understand?” she asks. “How do investors react?” She has explored factors such as readability, tone, and the use of industry-specific jargon. Among her findings: Novice investors are more positively influenced by upbeat tone and industry jargon (even if they don’t understand it), but more sophisticated investors—those who have direct industry knowledge—find companies less credible when managers use unnecessary jargon or language that is more positive than the results warrant. “People think of accounting as always clear-cut but there are a lot of areas where judgment biases decisions,” she says. “The gray areas are the most interesting parts.”
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FINANCE
Mila Getmansky Sherman JUDITH WILKINSON O’CONNELL FACULTY FELLOW AND PROFESSOR
The Changing Hierarchies of Influence in Global Finance
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here does the United States sit in the global financial system today? Toss out any old assumptions you hold.
pandemic as two factors that have decreased the relative power of the United States and “increased the centrality of China.”
“The system is changing right in front of us,” says Mila Getmansky Sherman, Isenberg’s Judith Wilkinson O’Connell Faculty Fellow and a professor of finance. “In the past, the U.S. was the undisputed center, the driver of financial returns and news, but now that’s not true.”
“The centrality of the United States in the global financial system is taken for granted, but its response to recent political and epidemiological events has suggested that other industrialized countries now hold a comparable position,” Sherman writes with colleagues Monica Billio (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Andrew W. Lo (MIT), Loriana Pelizzon (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), and Abalfazl Zareei (Stockholm University).
In “Global Realignment in Financial Markets,” a working paper that made a splash at the American Finance Association annual meeting, Sherman and colleagues documented the waning of United States dominance and China’s increasing influence and centrality by tracking daily global market returns across 11 industrialized countries. In the study, she sees the “first signals that the global financial system is moving from a unipolar to a bipolar (or multipolar) world.” Sherman and colleagues cite the U.S.China trade war and the Covid-19 6
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The dynamic goes beyond just ChinaU.S., they argue. By mapping the data, “we can see countries coming together in a tighter web of influence,” Sherman says. In the past, when the U.S. experienced a boom or a crisis, the rest of the world was directly affected, either prospering or slumping in turn. Now, the work of Sherman and her colleagues shows that other countries are much more
relevant to the global financial network. A crisis in one country can propagate to other countries, and the effects often get magnified. For instance, the data show a substantial amount of “negative contagion” when Covid-19 variant waves swept the globe, and countries “caught” market slumps from each other. Sherman sees global finance research itself changing too, broadening to weigh up the impact of political turmoil, climate change, and other factors that affect markets. “In the past, if you uttered the words epidemiology and finance in the same sentence, people would say, ‘what are you talking about?’ Now we are really looking at interconnectedness and realizing we are less buffered,” she says. Pursuing Interdisciplinary Expertise and Varied Interests Sherman is one who can think global and act local. She earned her undergraduate degree at MIT in chemical engineering with an economics minor, and studied system dynamics and
finance while completing her PhD there, so she is used to looking at interconnectedness of disciplines and methodologies from seemingly unrelated fields. She credits her success to the steady mentorship that she received both as a student and as a junior faculty member, and she works to be an effective mentor to students and faculty in turn. Despite a schedule packed with teaching and research, Sherman is bringing along the next generation of finance experts at UMass Amherst, mentoring both undergraduates and PhD candidates and serving as faculty advisor to the UMass chapter of Smart Woman Securities, a national organization focused on educating undergraduate women in finance. To raise awareness of gender inequality, she and colleague Heather Tookes (Yale) recently published research in the Journal of Finance quantifying how underrepresented women academics are in finance, making up a mere 16 percent of finance professors in the top 100 U.S. business schools. She has given a TEDx talk on how women can develop financial skills and social networks to support each other. Her efforts span beyond adults. During Covid lockdowns, she took on a deeply personal project and advised the student members of Smart Woman Securities in creating a five-week, free financial literacy Zoom course for public school children in middle and high school. “I spend so much time analyzing global financial markets for my academic research, but I think it’s really important to be aware of how the big picture affects individuals,” Sherman says. “Helping young people—particularly girls—function within the financial systems is vitally important to my work.”
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H O S P I TA L I T Y & T O U R I S M M A N A G E M E N T
Irem Onder Neuhofer ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
How Tech Can Guide Tourism Recoveries I rem Onder Neuhofer’s trusty orange suitcase may have sat idle during the pandemic, but her mind has been busy. If you’re someone who studies travel, as Neuhofer does, the last few years have been turbulent. The Covid-19 pandemic upended the industry and, with new variants sweeping the globe, kept even a “new normal” in flux. Neuhofer, an associate professor of hospitality and tourism management at Isenberg, examines the intersections between technology and tourism. She’s investigated how social media drives travel demand, how the sharing economy has changed supply, and how emerging trends, such as blockchain technology—now mostly associated with cryptocurrency—may become the standard operating platform for the industry and may change how online transactions are handled. Fittingly, for someone who studies travel, Neuhofer has seen much of the world. She grew up in Istanbul, where she studied economics; came to the U.S. for a master’s degree in information technology; and completed her PhD in travel and tourism management at Clemson University. She has visited
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every European country, seen much of Asia, had her passport stamped in New Zealand and Costa Rica, and been all over the U.S. She spent more than a decade in Vienna, teaching at Modul University. Post pandemic, she’d like to visit Japan.
“Normally, I’m always going somewhere. It was very difficult to stay put for these last two years,” she says. But in the meantime, she’s training to be a volunteer firefighter in Amherst and taking mental journeys, imagining how the travel industry might change. The industry needs to reckon not only with contagious diseases, but also with crowds. Pre-pandemic, the world’s top destinations were in crisis. Cheap flights and social-media popularity meant iconic destinations such as Florence, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and—most famously—Venice, were often swamped with visitors. (In Venice, a city of 55,000 residents, as many as 120,000 tourists would arrive each day in peak season. In March of 2021, after trying measures such as entry turnstiles and taxes on day trippers, Venice banned larger cruise ships from docking in the lagoon.)
Tech Solutions Neuhofer believes that high-demand global destinations will increasingly use booking and forecasting technology to manage crowds. Similar to a Waze app for visitors, Neuhofer imagines cities developing “a multi-pass electronic ticket that shows how crowded a place is at a given time, so that people can be prompted to go on to the next museum, a nearby café, or another option.” With fewer peaks and valleys in visitors, venues would be better able to manage security, cleaning, and staffing. In contrast, lesser-known destinations that want to reap the benefits of tourism can use social media to raise their profile. Tourism creates jobs, and can prompt infrastructure investment and conservation from central governments, she says. For instance, if a village can track how many visitors travel to its mosque or historic ruin, it may be possible for planners to make a case for funding public transportation, public toilets, bike paths, or other amenities. Neuhofer’s 2021 paper, “An exploratory analysis of geotagged photos from Instagram for residents of and visitors to Vienna,” published in the Journal
of Hospitality & Tourism Research, offers takeaways for how destinations that want to raise their profiles might go about it. Neuhofer and colleague Ulrich Gunter from Modul University examined 627,632 geotagged photos for the most visited sites in Vienna and determined the best way to predict tourism interest in a site (versus local usage) was to look at the number of likes and comments, not the sheer number of photos. Simply posting a site many times “does not automatically generate engagement,” they concluded. In other words, places
wanting to increase tourism need to find ways to build dialogue with prospective visitors. Neuhofer is researching what kinds of experiences travel might serve up next, including NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which have become hot in digital art and may have a role to play in virtual travel experiences. “They may belong to the hospitality experience eventually,” she says. “So many possibilities. A lot of change is coming.”
So many possibilities. A lot of change is coming. IREM ONDER NEUHOFER
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MANAGEMENT
Giuseppe Labianca BERTHIAUME CHAIR IN BUSINESS LEADERSHIP
The Effects of Mergers on Workplace Networks M anaging change? Integrating people during a transition? Networking across functions?
Timely issues for today’s organizations and all areas of expertise for one of Isenberg’s newest faculty members, Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca, the Berthiaume Chair in Business Leadership and coordinator of the management department’s PhD program. After spending 16 years in Kentucky, interspersed with research stints in Australia, Labianca is happy to be back in Massachusetts, near family. He has an undergraduate degree in psychology from Harvard University and a doctorate in business administration from Penn State. Labianca brings to Isenberg a rare and valuable data set—15 million emails exchanged during a merger between two consumer goods companies over a twoyear period. “We’d been working with the client studying their new product development and they let us know they were about to purchase a company and wanted to know if we wanted to study it as well,” Labianca recalls. “We said, ‘Would you give us access to all of your email data?’ and they were up for it. I don’t know of any other
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organizational data set that’s as large and comprehensive.”
By using software to anonymize the messages and find communication patterns, Labianca and his team got a fascinating look at the merger in real time. Their findings to date have been published in a pair of articles in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Although the number of mergers and acquisitions have increased dramatically over the past decade, the vast majority fall short of expectations. An estimated 7-in-10 mergers fail to achieve their intended cost savings and business growth, according to Labianca. Many times, firms also lose talented people just when their expertise is most needed to integrate organizations and make the merger a success. In order to get better merger and acquisition (M&A) outcomes, the post-merger period needs more study, Labianca notes. “In any given year, a huge amount of M&A activity takes place—in the trillions of dollars—and companies always go into it thinking it’s going to go well. It very rarely does,” he says.
The team analyzed messages exchanged over a two-year period, spanning preand post-merger so they could compare “before” and “after” snapshots. In “Turnover During a Corporate Merger: How Workplace Network Change Influences Staying” (Journal of Applied Psychology), the research group discovered that people with clout—either because they had formal power or informal status—tended to quickly decide whether to leave or stay. If they decided to stay, they broadened their networks and forged relationships with colleagues in the other organization. “We saw that the more power someone has, the more likely they are to widen their network to be a broker sharing knowledge across the organization,” he says. This brokering behavior was valuable and relatively unusual. “Most of the time, people don’t want to change who they are talking to. They stick to their usual contacts,” he notes. But with high-power brokers, “their language and topic-use changed. They started incorporating language from further away from them in the organization.” In essence, they were “the ones doing the real work of integration by gathering
information from disparate parts of the organization.” “We know from decades of research that brokers are extremely valuable because they help to integrate across different areas of the organization,” he says. “That’s why they get ahead faster in their careers, and their salary change over time is greater.” Managing Teams for Successful Integration In a second paper, “Employees’ Responses to an Organizational Merger: Intraindividual Change in Organizational Identification, Attachment, and Turnover,” also published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Labianca and the same group of colleagues looked at interventions that would help people stay through a merger. Labianca recommends organizations “actively manage networking opportunities through transitions,” he says, including assigning people to cross-functional teams and providing many opportunities to collaborate. “You want managers to help their direct reports work with people from the other side, so they begin to see the possibilities of staying, and they see a future in the new organization.” Labianca knows such a rich data set could fuel years of study. He’s already got the next work teed up: investigating gender differences in language use during a merger in order to understand the implications for networking and, ultimately, for women’s careers. “There hasn’t been a lot of research in this area previously,” Labianca says. “What little has been done shows potential negative outcomes for female managers. But I think that more research is needed to make any definitive statement.”
In any given year, a huge amount of M&A activity takes place—in the trillions of dollars—and companies always go into it thinking it’s going to go well. It very rarely does.” GIUSEPPE LABIANCA
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MARKETING
Matthew Godfrey ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
How to Sell Re-Use and Repair
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atthew Godfrey, an assistant professor of marketing at Isenberg, is that rare consumer scientist: one who thinks about how people might be persuaded to buy less stuff, not more. “Sustainability has been an interest of mine since I was a kid,” Godfrey says. Growing up in British Columbia, he was constantly outdoors—hiking, biking, camping, and fishing. At home, the Godfrey family repaired things. Godfrey kept his gear in order and could sew on a button or patch his jeans. But as Godfrey grew up and entered the working world, he saw a dilemma: People lived in homes crammed with things, often felt stressed about it, and yet still bought more. It wasn’t producing happy consumers, and it certainly wasn’t good for the planet. “I was interested in marketing, but it was a psychological weight on me. Instead of my job being to make people buy stuff they didn’t need, could I use the skills of marketing in another way?” he asked himself. And found he could answer yes. His research—”Repair, Consumption, and Sustainability: Fixing Fragile Objects and Maintaining Consumer Practices”—will be published this year in the Journal of Consumer Research. It’s the culmination of work he started as a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona when he began thinking about how to make consumption kinder. The idea of upcycling consumer discards—turning plastic bottles into shoes, for example—had become relatively mainstream, but Godfrey became interested in a lesser-discussed scenario: repairing items so they didn’t become waste in the first place. He began doing field research at Tucson-area cobbler and bike shops, interviewing tradespeople to
investigate the links between repair and consumption. Godfrey concluded that repair represents a significant, underserved opportunity in the United States. Very few U.S. consumer companies promote or offer repair for their goods. (There are notable exceptions: Patagonia offers free in-house repairs on some gear; during the 2021 holiday season, it urged customers to fix what they had rather than buying new and put DIY tutorials on its homepage. Red Wing Shoes, which makes work boots, operates a repair service center at its Minnesota headquarters.) Getting Brands and Consumers on Board Godfrey believes most brands underestimate the value of repair, both financially to the business and emotionally to customers. People want to stick with what they already own, and they feel guilty discarding things that have some useful life left, he notes. “When it’s something they’ve adapted into their life—a bike, or a shoe that’s broken-in the right way—people want to keep it going. They find it disruptive to buy a new version,” he says. “Every [repair] shop we visited was swamped with work.” Steep barriers stand in the way of making repair mainstream. Many people don’t know that items can be repaired or if they do, they can’t find someone skilled to fix it. Cobblers, for example, have been in decline for decades. (One estimate pegs fewer than 4,000 shoe repair shops left in the United States.) As well, many affordable, mass-produced products are designed to be disposable, not repairable. Most athletic shoes have
soles that are heat-fused with special, costly machines and custom components that can’t be replaced with the generic pieces that cobblers stock. When a product is designed to be disposable, repair is typically not possible or economically feasible. But things may change, Godfrey says. As climate change and inflation make raw materials more expensive, the economics of consumption may favor repair. Some organizations (auto dealerships come to mind), have made service and repair profitable parts of the business, even exceeding the value of new-goods sales. Further, while the U.S. has lost most of its skilled repair labor, the knowledge exists globally, Godfrey points out. Many countries (such as Cuba, Mexico, and Bangladesh) have repair shops in most neighborhoods. “I’m hoping we can learn from cultures and economies that haven’t discarded these skills,” Godfrey says. He believes schools can play a role in bringing back repair skills, by offering shop or home ec classes. Such classes have generally been in decline in U.S. high schools. Long term, Godfrey hopes more brands will consider repair as a natural part of the product life cycle and, accordingly, design for and market repair. In his paper, Godfrey cites Birkenstock as a model because of “the simplicity of replacing easily separable outsoles and midsoles,” making sandal repair “a cost-effective process for both consumers and shoe repair shops.” “It may take a few generations to make change,” he observes, “but I think a market shift is coming towards using things longer.”
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O P E R AT I O N S & I N F O R M AT I O N M A N A G E M E N T
Monideepa Tarafdar CHARLES J. DOCKENDORFF ENDOWED PROFESSOR
Digital Innovation and Technostress H er career already spans three continents and includes a handful of degrees and dozens of publications on some of the most pressing issues in information systems (including how technology and social media affect behavior and society), but Monideepa Tarafdar, Isenberg’s Charles J. Dockendorff Endowed Professor, still has appetite for more. “Maybe my next degree will be in the philosophy of science and technology,” she says, before laughing. “I don’t know if I have time for that, but there are so many interesting things to explore.” Tarafdar joined the faculty of Isenberg’s operations and information management department in January 2021. In addition to teaching, she also is the department’s PhD coordinator. She grew up in Lucknow and Calcutta, India, and taught in the United States at the University of Toledo and at Lancaster University in the U.K. Her degrees include chemistry, physics, and math (undergraduate); engineering (master’s); and management information systems (PhD). Ever curious, in her spare time, she’s taken courses in poetry and literature. Since arriving in Amherst, she has sought out places associated with the area’s writers and poets, such as Amherst Writers Walk, various parts of the 14
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Robert Frost Trail, and the house of Emily Dickinson. Exploration comes naturally to Tarafdar; it fuels her work. “Research is taking yourself to the edge constantly,” she says, “overcoming your comfort zones and looking to do something new.” Tarafdar’s work explores how technology affects human behavior and psyche. She has published extensively on “technostress” and its paradox: technology causes strain and anxiety, yet we compulsively turn to it to try to alleviate stress. She and her co-authors developed an instrument to measure technostress using metrics such as overload, invasion, complexity, and uncertainty; the tool has been translated and sought by scholars worldwide. “We are so caught up in everything— our email, the pings we get from work, our social media feeds—that we don’t realize that the content coming at us is not under our control. Perhaps not even how we react to it is completely under our control,” she says. She notes that although every generation might prefer a different platform (Boomers on Facebook, Millennials on Instagram, Gen Z on TikTok), most technologies are designed to hook users as long as possible. In a 2019
paper in Information Systems Journal, “Explaining the link between technostress and technology addiction for social networking sites: A study of distraction as a coping behavior,” Tarafdar and her coauthors found that a substantial number of participants who found technology stressful actually sought “refuge” within it. In fact, the study showed people had a higher propensity to cope with technostress by spending more time on social media versus setting their devices aside and, say, going for a walk. This finding has implications for mental health and addiction. “Normally, people’s reactions to stressful situations are to get away from them,” she notes. “If you’re seeking distraction within the medium, that can lead to addiction. You watch two hours of YouTube to try to relax, but you end up brainfogged.” How Tech Can Drive Change But Tarafdar is also quick to note that it’s not realistic (or even desirable) for people to try to purge technology from their lives. There are many benefits too. In research published in May 2021 in Information Systems Research, Tarafdar explores one positive case. The work
We cannot neglect technology. But we have to use it in a responsible and resilient way for greater good, to make the world a better place.” MONIDEEPA TARAFDAR
dissects how, after a fatal gang rape in Delhi, a social media-led protest engulfed India and led to dramatic change. The incident occurred December 16, 2012; a government enquiry commission headed by a former chief justice convened within a few days; and by February 3, 2013, reforms of rape laws had passed the legislature. In the paper, “Role of Social Media in Social Protest Cycles: A Sociomaterial Examination,” Tarafdar and co-author Deepa Ray, a data scientist based in Hong Kong, tracked social media posts about the incident across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, online blogs, and newspaper websites. They identified consolidation (people coming together to protest the government response to the rape), expansion (people mobilizing resources for the protest), and intensification (efforts that escalated the protest and drove global awareness) as the endogenous activities through which the protest cycle evolved. Rather than seeing discrete “stages” of
these activities, Tarafdar and Ray found they occurred simultaneously and on an ongoing basis, in peaks and troughs, to drive change. Although this is thought to be one of India’s earliest examples of a social media protest creating change, Tarafdar says it is a prototype for how protest cycles occur today. “This is how social protest is driven—by citizens using social media ground-up, self-organizing and self-creating,” she says. Technology erodes well-being and creates positive benefits, a dual-truth view that Tarafdar espouses in keynote speeches (“The Dark and Bright Side of Technology for Wellbeing”) and in her ongoing work. “We cannot neglect technology,” she observes. “But we have to use it in a responsible and resilient way for greater good, to make the world a better place.”
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SPORT MANAGEMENT
Nicole Melton ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND ASSOCIATE DEPARTMENT CHAIR, MCCORMACK DEPARTMENT OF SPORT MANAGEMENT
“Fans want sport to become a more welcoming and inclusive place for LGBTQ+ individuals and sport organizations should not hesitate in offering support.” NICOLE MELTON
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n 2006, Nicole Melton was a recent college graduate playing professional golf when she had an experience that would change her life. She and her fellow female tour mates were sitting in a seminar entitled “Five Points of Stardom” when the instruction turned to makeup tutorials, wardrobe tips, and other “personal brand” advice. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, my friends from the men’s team pursuing their PGA dreams aren’t having to go through seminars like this,’” Melton recalls. “I thought, ‘This is silly. We have to make this better. This doesn’t have to be the way forward.’” Flash forward and Melton, now an associate professor and associate department chair for the McCormack Department of Sport Management, studies how sports can be more equitable and inclusive for all. “Sports has huge potential to bring people together. It’s the only environment I’ve seen where you can have total strangers hug and high-five each other, where grown men will cry together,” she notes. “But there are still areas where sports can improve.” Her recent paper, “Examining Sport Marketing Through a Rainbow Lens,” published in Sport Management Review, looks at LGBTQ+ marketing and inclusion in sports. “Once a setting filled with homophobic practices and heteronormative ideals, sport organizations are now showing signs of inclusion,” Melton and her colleague Jeffrey MacCharles, of Michigan State University, write. Melton cites women’s professional sports franchises, the WNBA and U.S. Women’s
Soccer, for being leaders in promoting inclusion. It helps that some of the respective sports’ biggest stars— Megan Rapinoe and Kelly O’Hara (soccer), Brittney Griner and Sue Bird (basketball), and others—are publicly out. Media coverage has become more inclusive: Power couple Rapinoe and Bird have been shown supporting each other on respective sidelines and courtsides. “Exposure like this helps,” says Melton. “You change hearts and minds when people see what the world is like.” In many ways, professional sport organizations are catching up to what fans already want. In 2015, the year the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, national polls showed a majority of Americans knew someone who was LGBTQ+ and felt supportive, Melton says. In her paper, she cites findings that more than half of fans (56 percent) would like their team more if the team promoted LGBTQ+ inclusion while a mere 8 percent would feel turned off by such an action. “Fans want sport to become a more welcoming and inclusive place for LGBTQ+ individuals and sport organizations should not hesitate in offering support,” Melton writes. Business Benefits of Doing the Right Thing In addition to inclusion being morally right, it’s also good for business. The LGBTQ+ community in the United States has an estimated buying power of $1 trillion, and its members are politically active spenders. Melton and MacCharles say marginalized communities look for “safety” signals of inclusion from brands and when they find them, more than half of LGBTQ+
individuals encourage their friends and family to support such businesses. “Being inclusive can also lead to business gains from not only sexual minorities but also from their heterosexual allies,” Melton and MacCharles write. Melton says that LGBTQ+ marketing creates a broader halo too, signaling that the organization is committed to social justice. But there is still progress to be made, particularly in men’s professional sports, which seem to be hindered more by traditional “masculine” stereotypes. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, roughly 6 percent of the U.S. population identifies as LGBTQ. (In her paper, Melton says the figure may be higher, perhaps as much as 17 percent of the total population.) Despite this, the number of openly gay, active-roster male professional athletes can be counted on one hand. The first openly gay football player, Michael Sams, was drafted into the NFL in 2014. At present, there is one openly gay player on an NFL roster—defensive end Carl Nassib of the Las Vegas Raiders, who came out on Instagram in June 2021. He received widespread support and sales of his jersey skyrocketed. Melton encourages organizations to do more than host an annual Pride night or stitch a rainbow onto a jersey. Inclusion efforts should be consistent and ongoing, including public statements of support, partners and spouses of LGBTQ+ employees listed on website bios, and safety in the workplace for coaches and players. Sports have “incredible cultural capital,” she says. “Executives can say all they want, but when athletes come out and say something is okay, they really have the power to change hearts and minds.”
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2022 Faculty Research Report
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ISENBERG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
The Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has one of New England’s topranked public business school undergraduate programs, according to U.S. News & World Report. Founded in 1947, Isenberg is AACSB accredited and has 4,300 undergraduates majoring in seven business disciplines, ranging from accounting and marketing to sport and hospitality and tourism management. More than 2,200 students are enrolled in nationally and internationally recognized on-campus and online graduate programs. The school’s 48,000 alumni live and work in more than 80 countries, and many of them serve as mentors, guest lecturers, and network connectors for Isenberg.
2022 FACULTY RESEARCH REPORT
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Isenberg School of Management University of Massachusetts Amherst 121 Presidents Drive Amherst, MA 01003
NON PROFIT ORG U.S. POSTAGE PAID AMHERST MA PERMIT NO. 2
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NON PROFIT ORG U.S. POSTAGE PAID AMHERST MA PERMIT NO. 2
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ISENBERG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Isenberg School of Management | University of Massachussetts Amherst | isenberg.umass.edu
