Grace Yan

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at University of South Carolina

Although social media has been increasingly noted as an outlet for athletes to openly address social issues, there has been very little systematic examination on the organizational capacity of social media. To address this, our study seeks to focus on the strike organized by the football players through Twitter at the University of Missouri in 2015...

Prior studies have investigated consumer-based economic discrimination from a number of contexts in the sport industry. This study seeks to further such lineage of inquiry by examining consumer interest in Major League Baseball players on the Twitter platform, especially considering the emergence of social media at the forefront of consumer behavio...

From the perspective of economic demand theory, this study examines the factors that determine daily changes in Twitter following of Major League Baseball teams as a form of derived demand for a sport product. Specifically, a linear regression model is constructed by taking consideration of factors relevant to fan interest: team performance, market...

After the South Korean men’s soccer team beat its Japanese counterpart in the bronze-medal match at the 2012 London Olympics, South Korean player Park Jung-Woo celebrated with a banner that displayed Dokdo is our land. Dokdo is called the Liancourt Rocks in English, the sovereignty over which has been an ongoing point of contention between South Ko...

Literature on tourism representations has focused on Western-produced representations of Others. Missing is a critical investigation regarding how the Other represents itself in contemporary tourism discourse. Seeking to understand how non-Western tourism discourse has evolved, we analyze a tourism promotional video: “China, Forever”. Employing cri...

Esports—a professionalized, commercialized, and spectatorial form of video game competition—is a burgeoning industrial sector that has relied on entrepreneurial community support and multi-platform media distribution modalities to catalyze its growth. In particular, the esports industry is increasingly turning towards grassroots crowdfunding to gai...

Research Question There is a growing body of research focused on athlete activism and social movements in the sport literature. One lineage of research examined consumer perceptions and reactions to these movements. Such discussions, however, generally concentrate on detecting changes in consumer behaviors rather than understanding the nuance in th...

Since the concept of redeveloping Wrigley Field became prevalent, the Chicago Tribune has notably constructed a variety of narrative strands on related urban dynamics. Through a framework that connected post-Gramsci insights of hegemony, discourse, and critics of spatial and economic neoliberalism, this study examined how the newspaper strategicall...

With the expansion of the esports industry, there is a growing body of literature examining the motivations and behaviors of consumers and participants. The current study advances this line of research by considering esports consumption through an economic framework, which has been underutilized in this context. Specifically, the “attention economy...

In this article, we use narrative economics to analyze the social conditions promoting the growth in private investment in esports—specifically in North American esports teams and franchises. Investment in the esport industry has outpaced revenue growth and esport teams do not have a proven cash flow model. To understand this disjuncture, we draw u...

In the wake of the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympic Games, basketball experienced a surge in popularity as an international sport. Recently, to field more competitive teams, professional leagues around the world have begun to recruit international players, particularly those from the United States (U.S.). Though most leagues still maintain strict caps...

Recently, private and State actors within the Chinese economy have increasingly taken ownership of (or established other financial relationships with) major football clubs across Asia and Europe. In this study, we provide an abductive interpretation of a) the extent to which capital investitures in the sport are linked to State mandates to grow inf...

In this article, the authors provide a Deleuzoguattarian tracing of a specific set of relationships between traditional Chinese medicine, life, death, and football (soccer). More specifically, the authors examine political, economic, and cultural associations formed in and around the Quanjian Group, a major traditional Chinese medicine company once...

Purpose Previous research on rivalry games in sport has predominantly focused on understanding the nature of these games and their effects on consumer behavior. As such, the purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical examination to provide better theoretical and empirical understanding of how rivalries may impact the posting of content online...

With the understanding that the mass-participated mechanism of social media has led to an evolved lens of gatekeeping, this study incorporates the framework of digital gatekeeping to examine activities of Internet Research Agency (IRA) bots in the Twitter sphere of the National Football League anthem protest. To do so, the investigation employed da...

Research question: This study investigated the Twitter networks of the Champions League hashtag (#UCL) across the 2017 UEFA Champions League Final. Through an examination of network parameters and shifting structures, the analyses disclosed patterns of attention and power distributed among various sport stakeholders and fans. It advanced the inquir...

This study examines the market disruption of college football protests, under the belief the ability of market disruption can play a significant role for activism movements to challenge authority as well as expand opportunity for social change. Specifically considering game attendance as an important form of market demand, it employs regression mod...

Dark tourism and its implications have been gaining significant prominence in both the literature and in practice in recent years. Moving conceptualizations of dark tourism forward, we utilize the interpretative phenomenological frame to investigate the interrelationships between tourism and current conditions of society. We do this by qualitativel...

The present research investigates the dynamic relationships between television viewership and activities on social networking microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) utilizing Big Data. The premise of this study is situated in the understanding that in a digital era with explosive growth of information, various media platforms are constantly competing...

The question of how and why users engage in sport digital communication endures. In this study, structuration theory is employed to examine how socialmedia users exercise preferences in the creation of content as they respond to a variety of macrolevel factors pertaining to college football-the type of game, team strength, conference membership, ma...

Dark tourism and its implications have been gaining significant prominence in both the literature and in practice in the recent past. Understanding the process and outcomes of dark tourism related to tourists and local hosts can play a key role in relations between the two groups of people. This paper, utilizing long-form interview data and content...

The awarding of the hosting of the Football World Cup to Russia and Qatar initiated discussions about temperature and travel distances related to the game. This study examines the effect of weather conditions, travel distances, and rest days—three factors potentially causing fatigue—on running performance using player-level and team-level data from...

Drinking behaviors and alcohol use consequences can have a major effect on well-being in college student populations. Little research has addressed how the unique acculturative stress experiences of international students may affect their alcohol use and consequences. This study examined acculturative stress as a moderator of the relationship betwe...

Understanding how consumers interact with sport brands on digital platforms is of increasing importance to the sport industry. In this study, through a nexus of consumer behavior and economic literatures, the examination focuses on consumer interest in major league baseball teams on social media platforms from July 2013 to June 2014. Specifically,...

After the South Korean men’s soccer team beat its Japanese counterpart in the bronze-medal match at the 2012 London Olympics, South Korean player Park Jung-Woo celebrated with a banner that displayed Dokdo is our land. Dokdo is called the Liancourt Rocks in English, the sovereignty over which has been an ongoing point of contention between South Ko...

The Olympic Games are one of the most popular global televised sporting events. In the greater body of sport communication literature, a great deal of focus has been placed on examining sport media from the West. This article considers the unique and specific case of Chinese Olympic broadcast commentary televised by state media. In this, an evoluti...

This study seeks to engage in a contextualized analysis to propose the adaptation of media communication literature into examining the sociocultural constructs in China's tourism media discourse from a critical perspective. In doing so, the study is designed to deliver a deconstructionist reading of the current investigation on the sociocultural co...

Seeking to contribute to ongoing investigations of diverse contexts of tourism consumption, the current investigation explores the meanings genealogical tourists attribute to their lived experiences and contextualizes those findings within larger social approaches to the human dynamics that drive contemporary tourism. Taking an interpretive turn, i...

This study engages with interlocking socio-cultural intra-ethnic relationships from the on-the-job perspectives of ethnic social agents involved in selling ethnic goods and services to tourists. It focuses on the narratives provided by Chicago’s Chinatown Chinese to justify their involvement in the tourism-related project of manipulating ethnic ide...

The heritage tourism market has developed from being regarded as a small niche segment to a mainstream market of considerable size. In Taiwan, diversified heritage resources hold considerable appeal to the international tourism market. Little research has been completed on international heritage tourists to Taiwan, so this study utilized Taiwan as...