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| How Chris Lazarides Brought Banking Closer to New Yorks Greek-American Community |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (11 reads) | |
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The cyprus-born executive rose through atlantic bank, helped launch olympian bank, and used his financial experience to support businesses, younger bankers, and cypriot-american institutions.
as greek and cypriot immigrants built businesses and community institutions across new york, chris george lazarides helped bring banking closer to the communities they were creating.
during three decades at atlantic bank of new york, he helped expand the institution’s presence in greek-american neighborhoods, including the branch on ditmars boulevard in astoria. The pancyprian association of america credited him with helping establish local branches at a time when many business owners were seeking financing, commercial accounts, and guidance as their companies developed.
philip christopher, president of the pancyprian association, remembered lazarides as a mentor to younger greek americans pursuing careers in banking.
lazarides was born on june 15, 1935, in lefkoniko, cyprus, the only child of george and theano lazarides. He grew up among cousins and later recalled village life through stories of his grandfather, who owned a tavern and, lazarides insisted, made the finest yogurt in cyprus.
during a school trip to greece, lazarides had what he later considered his first business experience. At a stop in beirut, he used his pocket money to negotiate the purchase of a watch.
the same trip also introduced him briefly to a young woman named kiki, who lived in another part of cyprus. He assumed they would not meet again.
after graduating from the lyceum of larnaca, lazarides left cyprus at 18 and arrived in new york in august 1953. He traveled alone to the bronx, where he met his father at a coffee shop and began building a life in the united states.
he earned a bachelor of arts from columbia college in 1957 and a master of science from columbia university’s graduate school of business in 1958. He later graduated from the stonier graduate school of banking at rutgers university in 1970.
new york also brought him back into contact with kiki. Their relationship developed after the unexpected reunion, and they married on december 28, 1958, at saint demetrios church in astoria.
that same year, lazarides began at atlantic bank as a trainee in its international department. He rose through the institution to become senior executive vice president.
lazarides helped small businesses secure financing and grow, including some that later entered the public markets. Through that work, he became a trusted adviser to greek-american business owners navigating expansion and investment.
in 1988, after three decades at atlantic bank, lazarides became president and chief executive of olympian bank while the new institution was being organized. The bay ridge bank formally opened in may 1989.
the position placed him at the head of a new community bank and allowed him to apply the experience he had gained working with immigrant entrepreneurs and established businesses.
in 1992, lazarides joined audiovox corporation as vice president and director of international operations.
audiovox was among the companies he had helped finance during his banking career. His new role took him throughout the far east, fulfilling an ambition he had carried since his youth. He remained with the company until retiring in 2005.
alongside his business career, lazarides used his financial experience in organizations supporting cyprus and the greek-american community.
he was a founding board member and first treasurer of both the cyprus relief fund and the cyprus children’s fund. He also served as a founding board member of the cyprus-u.S. Chamber of commerce and as a founding member and treasurer of the american cyprus congress, originally known as the cyprus cultural society.
his other roles included trustee of the pancyprian association of america and former treasurer of its freedom award committee.
those appointments placed lazarides in positions of financial responsibility across relief, advocacy, and community organizations.
the pancyprian association said lazarides worked with eugene rossides in connection with the establishment of the american hellenic institute and later the american cyprus congress.
in 2009, the cyprus-u.S. Chamber of commerce recognized lazarides with its distinguished merit award.
his daughter, theana iordanou, introduced him at the award dinner. After listening to her describe his career and community service, lazarides joked that he had spent the introduction wondering whom she was talking about.
relatives also remembered him as intellectually curious, observant, and interested in the people around him. He read fiction and nonfiction, followed financial markets and world affairs, and remained comfortable with new technology.
in retirement, he would ask waiters, waitresses, and strangers their names and try to learn something about their lives.
lazarides and kiki spent much of their retirement in florida, where they renewed old friendships and made new ones. Mattituck, on long island’s north fork, remained the family’s summer gathering place, as it had since 1966. Near the long island sound, lazarides planted and tended fig trees.
their marriage lasted 67 years, and their family eventually included two children, seven grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.
lazarides passed away on july 8, 2026, at 91.
his influence extended beyond the positions he held. It could be seen in the branch expansion he helped lead, the businesses he advised, the community organizations he helped guide, and the younger bankers he encouraged into the profession.
his career showed how banking could serve not only as a business, but also as part of the infrastructure of an immigrant community finding its place in new york. |
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| At Wells College |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (9 reads) | |
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At wells college
by anne whitehouse
posted on
i
my husband and i spotted the deer
lying in the woods
outside the college library.
through a tunnel of green leaves,
she held our gaze.
eighty years before our visit,
his mother came here to college,
a tall, shy girl burdened
by her mother’s expectations.
she found a young woman’s paradise.
stately buildings on sloping lawns
housed lecture halls and classrooms,
dormitories and common rooms,
a dining hall with chandeliers
and murals on the walls.
there was a boathouse on the lake
and trails through the woods.
when she wasn’t studying,
she loved playing the piano
and sailing a sunfish
on the silvery lake.
ii
when wells college was founded in 1868,
the founder’s son gave the school
a marble statue of minerva.
it was a contemporary copy
of a roman statue in the vatican,
itself a replica of a greek bronze.
generations of students venerated
their goddess of wisdom.
they kissed her feet for luck
when they passed by.
in the spring they decorated her
with garlands of flowers.
they painted her toenails
in glittery colors.
iii
in 1888, the wells campus was destroyed by fire.
placed in the alcove to the main building
and surrounded by thick walls,
the statue of minerva was the only object
to survive the conflagration.
in the aftermath of the fire,
the college was rebuilt, and it thrived.
in 1975, students at hobart,
the neighboring college for men,
kidnapped minerva from her pedestal
and put her in the trunk of a car.
she was too big, and it wouldn’t close.
stopped by a state trooper,
the students were charged with grand larceny,
and minerva was restored to her niche.
iv
in the following years, my mother-in-law
served on the board of trustees.
she cherished her connection
to the college that had nurtured her.
she had no sisters of her own,
and it gave her a sisterhood.
it distressed her to vote to admit men
to the incoming class of 2005,
but she believed it was the only way
to secure the future of the college,
even if its character was changed.
v
that july day we visited in 2023,
ten years after my mother-in-law’s death,
members of the new freshman class
were expected for orientation.
in the main building, staff arranged
welcome bags on long tables.
a middle-aged woman
who worked in the kitchen
confided that she loved the college
and hoped to work long enough
to enroll her young daughter.
in the grand salon of the main building,
there were prints and drawings on the walls
by nineteenth and twentieth-century masters.
the doors were unlocked. People walked
in and out. I felt in a time out of mind.
we walked across green lawns
down to the beach on the lake,
where the college had a boathouse.
little waves lapped against the shore.
sequins of sunlight sparkled on the water.
i listened to the rocking of small boats
at their moorings—sailboats, kayaks, canoes.
vi
in april 2024, the board of trustees
voted to close the college,
citing inadequate finances,
the global pandemic, inflation,
and a shrinking pool of students.
the class we saw being welcomed
was the last incoming class,
and they were marooned.
that june, after the students departed,
maintenance workers were sent
to move minerva to what was called
“a secure location indoors.”
they lifted her from her pedestal,
strapped her to a dolly,
and laid her across a backhoe’s bucket.
while attempting to raise her
from the bucket into the back of a truck,
they dropped her to the ground.
with a loud thud, her head broke off
and rolled on the dirt.
seeing the damage, the backhoe driver
covered his face and cursed.
news of the decapitation
spread through the wells community,
provoking general outrage.
the administration was criticized
for attempting to move minerva
without protection or professional oversight.
“on top of everything else, a final unraveling,”
commented the local historian,
who was a wells graduate.
vii
idealism inspired the founding of wells.
at a time when higher education
was denied to women, here they would thrive.
today women have more opportunities,
but those making policy have less idealism.
the board closed the college without consulting
alumnae, students, or faculty. To some,
the decision seemed as precipitous
as the destruction of minerva.
my mother-in-law was a reserved woman.
she kept to herself and was shy in company.
her connection to wells sustained her.
when her husband of sixty years died,
the college president wept on the phone
with her. The personal endures
after the people are gone.
viii
after my mother-in-law died,
we found a heavy glass vase
on the bottom shelf in the back
of the glass-fronted maple cabinet downstairs.
its fluted sides curved gently in two parabolas.
on the front was inscribed,
“in grateful appreciation, wells college.”
my sister-in-law gave it to me.
in spring and summer,
i fill it with bouquets of flowers.
author’s note: i first learned of wells college from my mother-in-law, martha l. Whitehouse, who cherished her time there as a student and in later years devoted her efforts to strengthening the college, eventually serving on the board of trustees. She was sad when wells college went co-ed because she supported all-women’s education, but she believed it was the only way to save the college.
in the summer of 2023, ten years after my mother-in-law’s death, my husband and i were traveling to ithaca, new york, and we made a detour to aurora to visit wells college. The college was bustling with preparations for an orientation for the incoming freshman class, but we were still shown around the campus, saw the beautiful buildings, including the library with no right angles. We learned about the college, its history, and its lore, including the veneration of the minerva statue. It was a beautiful afternoon, full of promise. Little did we know that the following year the college would close unceremoniously, without informing staff or alumnae, and stranding its students.
all the details in the poem are true, including the story of minerva’s abduction by hobart students and her decapitation during an ill-planned transfer when the college was closed. It is also true that when my father-in-law died in 2010, the president of wells college, lisa marsh ryerson, wept on the phone with my mother-in-law. “I don’t think they’re shedding any tears at harvard (my father-in-law’s alma mater),” i commented when my mother-in-law told me the story. And i treasure her wells college vase. |
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| Building positive workplace behaviors: how trust in the manager enhances sportsm |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (11 reads) | |
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Abstract
sportsmanship, a key dimension of organizational citizenship behavior (ocb), refers to employees’ willingness to maintain a positive attitude at work by tolerating inconveniences and avoiding unnecessary complaints. Although sportsmanship behavior plays an important role in sustaining cooperative and supportive workplace environments, relatively little research has examined the trust-related mechanisms that encourage it. Drawing on social exchange theory (set) and leader-member exchange (lmx), this study examines how trust-based relationships within organizations influence employees’ sportsmanship behavior. Specifically, the study proposes that trust in the manager contributes to sportsmanship behavior both directly and indirectly through organizational trust. When employees perceive their managers as competent, fair, and supportive, they are more likely to interpret their interactions with managers as positive exchanges. According to set, employees tend to reciprocate these positive experiences through constructive discretionary behaviors that benefit the organization. Over time, trust in the manager may extend beyond the interpersonal level and develop into a broader sense of trust in the organization. Data from 287 employees in saudi arabia were analyzed using pls-sem to examine how trust influences workplace behavior. The results indicate that when employees trust their manager, they are more likely to demonstrate sportsmanship behavior. Trust in the manager also strongly strengthens trust in the organization. In turn, organizational trust encourages sportsmanship behavior and partially explains how managerial trust translates into more positive behavior at work. Drawing on set and lmx, the findings emphasize that building trustful manager–employee relationships can strengthen organizational trust and support a more cooperative, supportive work environment.
1 introduction
organizations depend not only on employees’ formal job performance but also on voluntary behaviors that extend beyond officially assigned duties. These discretionary actions, commonly referred to as organizational citizenship behavior (ocb), play an important role in improving organizational effectiveness and supporting the overall functioning of the workplace (organ, 1988). Ocb reflects employees’ willingness to assist colleagues, sustain cooperation, and contribute positively to the organization in ways that may not be formally rewarded but remain vital to organizational success.
among the dimensions of ocb, sportsmanship refers to employees’ willingness to tolerate less-than-ideal working conditions without excessive complaining or fault-finding (podsakoff et al., 1990). Employees who demonstrate sportsmanship maintain a positive, constructive outlook even when facing difficult situations, helping organizations preserve a supportive, cooperative work environment. Sportsmanship behavior has become particularly relevant in modern organizational contexts characterized by uncertainty, rapid organizational change, and increasing performance expectations. Sportsmanship is the ability to maintain a positive attitude and refrain from excessive complaints when faced with workplace challenges, thereby contributing to organizational effectiveness (). It also involves tolerating workplace inconveniences and unfavorable situations without complaining, thereby contributing to a positive work environment ().
thus, employees who exhibit sportsmanship help maintain stability, encourage cooperation, and foster constructive engagement within organizations. In this regard, sportsmanship reflects employees’ positive workplace behavior, in which individuals focus on the constructive aspects of their organization and willingly accept unavoidable work-related inconveniences without complaining ().
organizational trust has long been regarded as a fundamental factor shaping positive workplace attitudes and behaviors (). Prior research consistently shows that trust in leadership plays a significant role in encouraging employees’ ocb and improving job performance (). Trust promotes cooperation, strengthens relationships between employees and their leaders, and motivates individuals to contribute beyond their formal job duties.
drawing on social exchange theory (set) (; ) and leader–member exchange (lmx) (; ), this study suggests that employees who trust their managers are more likely to develop a broader sense of trust in the organization as a whole, which, in turn, encourages them to display sportsmanship behaviors. Set posits that when employees perceive trust, fairness, and support from their leaders, they tend to reciprocate with positive attitudes and discretionary behaviors that benefit the organization. Accordingly, this study proposes that organizational trust mediates the relationship between trust in the manager and sportsmanship.
although previous studies acknowledge the importance of organizational trust in encouraging ocb (; ; raziq et al., 2025; singh and srivastava, 2016), there remains limited agreement on the mechanisms through which this relationship operates. The mediating processes that link organizational trust to employees’ ocb remain insufficiently understood, highlighting an important gap that requires further theoretical and empirical investigation (). Additionally, relatively little attention has been given to the underlying mechanisms through which trust in managers leads to specific forms of ocb, such as sportsmanship behavior. In particular, the role of organizational trust as a mediator in this relationship remains insufficiently examined.
this study examines how trust in managers influences organizational trust and positive sportsmanship behavior among employees in saudi arabia. Drawing on set and trust literature, particularly mayer et al.’S (1995) conceptualization of trust relationships, this study investigates the mediating role of organizational trust in explaining how managerial trust relationships may encourage positive discretionary workplace behaviors (sportsmanship behavior). Sportsmanship behavior, as a dimension of ocb, was specifically chosen because it reflects employees’ willingness to tolerate workplace inconvenience, avoid unnecessary complaints, and maintain positive attitudes within the organization.
these discretionary behaviors are closely linked to trust-based social exchange relationships and the positive relational mechanisms emphasized in mayer et al. (1995) and set. Compared with other ocb dimensions, sportsmanship is especially relevant to organizational trust contexts because it captures employees’ behavioral responses to supportive, trustworthy workplace relationships. Additionally, contemporary organizations increasingly face financial and operational challenges that require employees to remain adaptable, positive, and supportive in the workplace. Sportsmanship is considered particularly relevant because it reflects employees’ ability to tolerate workplace inconvenience, avoid exaggerating negative situations, and maintain constructive attitudes during challenging circumstances ().
moreover, saudi arabia offers a distinctive setting for examining trust relationships and ocbs, given the ongoing economic transformation under vision 2030, which prioritizes organizational effectiveness, employee engagement, and human capital development (). The saudi workforce reflects a blend of traditional collectivist values and hierarchical structures alongside increasing modernization. This blend creates a context in which trust in managers and organizations may influence employee behavior differently than in western settings (). Furthermore, research on sportsmanship as a component of ocb in saudi arabia remains limited (). By investigating the mediating role of organizational trust between trust in managers and sportsmanship, our study contributes context-specific evidence and extends the trust literature beyond predominantly western contexts.
therefore, the present study addresses the following research question (rq):
rq: how does trust in a manager promote organizational trust and positive sportsmanship behavior among employees in saudi arabia?
this study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it integrates set to develop a conceptual model linking trust in manager, organizational trust, and sportsmanship. Second, it empirically examines the mediating role of organizational trust in explaining how managerial trust influences employees’ discretionary behaviors. Third, the findings provide practical insights for organizations seeking to foster constructive workplace attitudes by strengthening trust relationships between leaders and employees.
the remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews the relevant literature and develops the theoretical framework and hypotheses. This is followed by the methodology and data analysis sections. The study then presents and discusses the findings, followed by the implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research.
the next section presents the theoretical background and develops the study hypotheses.
2 literature review and theoretical background
2.1 social exchange theory (set) and leader-member exchange (lmx)
given the dynamic and multifaceted nature of this environment, the assumptions of set and the lmx perspective provide a useful lens for examining these relationships ().
social exchange theory (set) explains social relationships as reciprocal exchanges of valued resources (). When individuals receive favorable treatment, they feel obligated to reciprocate (). Set also posits that reciprocal exchanges between employees and organizations generate mutual benefits that foster trust and commitment in the workplace (). In organizational settings, employees interpret fairness, support, and integrity as social currency that shapes their attitudes and behaviors.
set has been widely used to explain citizenship behaviors, employee engagement, and trust-based workplace outcomes (; ). A social exchange relationship is built on mutual trust and develops through ongoing interactions between individuals. It involves long-term commitments and shared expectations, with the exchange often centering on socio-emotional elements such as trust, obligation, and commitment (; ).
lmx theory explains leadership through the quality of one-to-one relationships between leaders and followers (). Hence, lmx theory posits that the quality of leader–member interactions represents a core organizational mechanism through which collective performance, coordination, and effectiveness are influenced (). Lmx theory suggests that leaders establish relationships of varying quality with different employees, leading to differences in workplace attitudes and outcomes. High-quality lmx relationships are typically marked by trust, mutual respect, and reciprocal resource exchange (willie, 2025).
mayer et al. (1995) proposed one of the most influential frameworks for organizational trust, defining trust as a party’s willingness to be vulnerable to another party’s actions based on positive expectations about that party’s behavior. The model emphasizes that trust develops through perceptions of ability, benevolence, and integrity, which in turn influence relational outcomes and risk-taking behaviors within organizations. In organizational settings, trusted relationships between employees and managers may encourage employees to engage in discretionary behaviors that go beyond formal job requirements. Accordingly, building on set, the present study extends this perspective by examining how trust in managers contributes to organizational trust and subsequently enhances sportsmanship behavior as a dimension of ocb.
2.2 trust in manager
trust is the willingness to be vulnerable based on positive expectations about another party’s intentions or behavior (mayer et al., 1995). Trust in the manager refers specifically to employees’ confidence in their immediate supervisor’s competence, integrity, and benevolence (mcallister, 1995). Meta-analytic evidence shows that trust in leadership significantly predicts citizenship behaviors and performance outcomes (). When employees trust their managers, they reduce defensive behaviors and increase cooperative engagement. Managers serve as agents of the organization. Therefore, employees often interpret managerial actions as reflections of organizational values (rousseau et al., 1998).
recent research underscores the critical importance of managerial trust in both sports and organizational contexts. For example, a study of college sports environments found that athletes’ trust in their coaches increased significantly when they perceived the procedures as fair. This, in turn, increased their commitment to their teams and their likelihood of feeling supported by their organizations (pos). These results confirm the importance of leader fairness and open decision-making in building trust ().
leaders who show charisma, care about each person, and challenge their minds build more trust among their employees, which in turn encourages positive behaviors such as sportsmanship. Trust functions as a psychological mechanism through which leadership style affects employees’ discretionary behavior ().
2.3 organizational trust
organizational trust is employees’ confidence in the organization’s fairness, reliability, and integrity (). It reflects trust in the organization as a system rather than in an individual. Research shows that organizational trust predicts positive workplace outcomes, including commitment, engagement, and ocb (; ). Trust transfer theory holds that trust in a specific actor (e.G., A manager) can generalize to a broader entity (e.G., The organization) (rousseau et al., 1998).
recent studies across sectors confirm the mediating role of organizational trust: an empirical study of referees found that organizational trust partially mediated the link between perceived organizational support and job satisfaction and fully mediated the link between support and career commitment (). These findings collectively support set; when employees perceive support and equitable treatment, they cultivate trust in their organizations, which subsequently improves job satisfaction, commitment, and performance (). Additionally, an empirical study of chinese companies showed that trust, when combined with strong support from supervisors and clan-oriented cultures, was a strong predictor of employees’ emotional commitment. This indicates that the influence of trust is contingent on context and is enhanced by supportive cultural characteristics (zhang and gao, 2025).
2.4 sportsmanship behavior
sportsmanship behavior is defined as employees’ willingness to tolerate inconvenience without excessive complaining and the maintenance of a positive attitude (nyarieko, 2018; podsakoff et al., 1990). Sportsmanship behavior extends beyond the workplace and contributes significantly to the development of responsible and constructive citizenship (). Furthermore, sportsmanship is characterized by maintaining optimism and patience in the face of workplace challenges, difficulties, or unfavorable conditions (Özdemir and büyüky?Lmaz, 2025).
in saudi workplaces, sportsmanship is a crucial component of ocb because it aligns with the nation’s social norms, cultural customs, and religious beliefs (). Islamic teachings encourage patience, tolerance, forgiveness, cooperation, and good relationships, so employees are expected to handle workplace challenges calmly and put the group’s needs ahead of their own. Saudi culture values collaboration, respect for authority, and strong relationships, so sportsmanship helps maintain a peaceful workplace, reduce conflict, and support teamwork (). Employees who demonstrate sportsmanship help create a constructive work environment by facing challenges, adapting to change, and staying positive during difficult times (yang et al., 2023). Socially, saudi workplaces value respect, unity, and relationship-building, and positive behavior fosters trust and teamwork (). Because of this, sportsmanship not only improves how people work together but also strengthens and unites organizations, which is especially important in saudi arabia ().
in leadership contexts, recent research shows that sportsmanship is strongly influenced by trust in leaders. A study found that trust in leadership significantly predicted employees’ sportsmanship, while trait emotional intelligence partially mediated this relationship. This suggests that trust not only promotes conformity but also advances positive, flexible behavior (). Organ (1988) conceptualized sportsmanship as a key dimension of ocb, alongside altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, and civic virtue. Employees who demonstrate sportsmanship maintain positive attitudes even when facing organizational constraints. This behavior reduces workplace negativity and enhances collective functioning.
sportsmanship behavior has been found to increase employee commitment in service-oriented industries. In a study conducted in nigeria’s hospitality industry during the 2023–2024 period, a positive correlation was found between the manager’s sportsmanship behavior and the employee’s affective and normative commitment. This shows that when the manager acts ethically and treats the employee respectfully and positively, it will have a significant impact on the employee’s commitment ().
3 hypotheses development
3.1 trust in manager and organizational trust
trust in managers is widely recognized as a fundamental aspect of organizational life because it influences employees’ attitudes, behaviors, and workplace relationships (trivedi et al., 2010). Thus, trust in managers can be understood as employees’ positive expectations regarding the intentions and future actions of their supervisors, particularly the belief that such actions will be beneficial rather than detrimental to their wellbeing (robinson, 1996). Organizational trust is defined as “a psychological state comprising willingness to accept vulnerability based on positive expectations of an organization” (, p. 1174). Organizational trust plays a central role in social exchange relationships, as employees often rely on their interactions with managers to form broader perceptions of the organization (). When managers demonstrate trustworthiness, support, and fairness, employees are more likely to develop confidence not only in their supervisors but also in the organization they represent.
evidence from the sports industry shows that trust in the manager (coaches, referees’ supervisors) directly affects employees’ organizational trust, which, in turn, directly affects attitudinal outcomes such as job satisfaction and commitment. This pattern is consistent with set and lmx theory (). When managers demonstrate fairness, competence, and integrity, employees infer that the organization supports such behavior (rousseau et al., 1998).
although perceived organizational support and motivation to volunteer have been identified as important antecedents of ocb (), prior research suggests that trust-related factors may also play a critical role in encouraging discretionary workplace behaviors. Organizational trust is grounded in employees’ rational assessments of others’ trustworthiness, which develop through accumulated experience, interactions, and knowledge of organizational members’ capabilities and reliability (pucetaite and novelskaite, 2014).
when employees trust their managers and the organization and perceive a supportive, effective work environment, they are more likely to reciprocate with discretionary positive behaviors that go beyond formal job requirements. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that higher levels of trust in managers will contribute to the development of organizational trust among employees. Because managers act as key organizational representatives, employees who perceive their immediate supervisors as trustworthy are more likely to extend that trust to the organization itself, resulting in higher levels of organizational trust (). Based on the previous argument, we formulate the first hypothesis:
h1: trust in manager positively influences organizational trust.
3.2 organizational trust and sportsmanship behavior
organizational trust also plays a key role in shaping positive workplace behaviors. When employees trust their organization, they are more likely to cooperate with colleagues, support organizational goals, and contribute beyond their formal job responsibilities. This trust strengthens constructive, collaborative behaviors essential to effective teamwork and a healthy organizational climate (). Saks and gruman (2024) argued that organizational trust reflects employees’ confidence in the organization’s ability, benevolence, and integrity, and develops when employees believe the organization genuinely cares about their wellbeing and acts in their best interests.
previous trust research has emphasized that trust relationships within organizations develop through positive social exchange and may subsequently influence broader organizational outcomes (schaubroeck et al., 2013). Building on mayer et al. (1995) and schaubroeck et al. (2013) argued that leaders often represent the organization and its values, so positive trust relationships with leaders may extend to broader organizational trust perceptions. Consequently, employees who trust their managers may develop stronger organizational trust, which can encourage positive workplace behaviors such as sportsmanship.
when employees trust their organization, they are more likely to interpret workplace challenges in a balanced, constructive way. Rather than viewing difficulties as signs of unfair treatment or exploitation, employees tend to see them as normal or temporary situations that can occur in any work environment. This perception helps reduce negative reactions such as cynicism, frustration, and excessive complaining (). Trust in the organization creates a psychological foundation in which employees believe that management decisions are made fairly and with good intentions, encouraging them to remain patient and cooperative even during demanding periods.
organizational trust is fostered by shared organizational values, beliefs, and behavioral practices, creating an environment that facilitates open communication and positive interactions among employees (). Thus, sportsmanship is considered a voluntary, discretionary workplace behavior that goes beyond employees’ formal job responsibilities (silva et al., 2023). It reflects employees’ willingness to maintain positive attitudes, tolerate workplace inconveniences, and avoid unnecessary complaints, even in challenging situations. Set suggests that employees who experience fair and supportive treatment from their organizations reciprocate by engaging in discretionary behaviors such as sportsmanship (). Based on the previous arguments, we formulate the following hypothesis:
h2: organizational trust positively influences sportsmanship behavior.
3.3 trust in manager and sportsmanship behavior
fairness, managerial support, and principled leadership create a positive organizational climate where trust can flourish. This trust fosters higher levels of commitment, encourages constructive behaviors, and reduces disengagement and negative attitudes among employees (). When employees believe that their manager is willing to consider and accommodate their personal needs, such as allowing extra break time during urgent family situations, they often interpret this behavior as a sign of support, understanding, and fairness within the workplace ().
such actions signal that the manager values employees not only as workers but also as individuals with personal responsibilities. According to set, when managers provide this type of discretionary support, employees tend to respond with positive attitudes and behaviors (). One form of such positive workplace behavior is sportsmanship. Supportive treatment strengthens trust between employees and their supervisors and fosters a sense of reciprocal obligation. As a result, employees become more motivated to contribute beyond their formal job requirements, demonstrating greater engagement and participating in ocbs that benefit the workplace.
when employees consistently observe supportive managerial behaviors and fair interpersonal treatment, they begin to extend this trust beyond individual supervisors to the organization as a whole. Over time, this process strengthens employees’ emotional attachment to their workplace and increases their willingness to maintain positive attitudes even in challenging situations. Consequently, employees who feel trusted and respected are more likely to engage in constructive behaviors, cooperate with colleagues, and contribute to a stable, supportive organizational environment. Thus, when workers perceive high service quality and trust their manager, they are more likely to display discretionary positive behavior, such as sportsmanship (). Specifically, when employees perceive their managers as fair, supportive, and trustworthy, they are more likely to develop positive attitudes toward the workplace and feel secure in expressing their views and concerns (). Furthermore, when employees trust their leaders, they are more likely to maintain positive attitudes, tolerate minor inconveniences, and avoid unnecessary complaints. Thus, we formulate the third hypothesis:
h3: trust in manager positively influences sportsmanship behavior.
3.4 the mediating role of organizational trust
organizations that strengthen organizational trust through supportive, trustworthy managerial relationships are more likely to cultivate committed, cooperative employees (). When employees trust their managers, they may perceive the organization as fair, reliable, and supportive, leading them to generalize this trust to the broader organization. Consequently, employees with higher organizational trust are more likely to demonstrate sportsmanship by tolerating workplace inconveniences, avoiding unnecessary complaints, and maintaining positive, cooperative attitudes in their daily work (Özdemir and büyüky?Lmaz, 2025).
according to set and lmx theory, employees who experience supportive, trusting relationships with their supervisors are more likely to maintain positive, reciprocal relationships within the organization (). High-quality manager–employee relationships, characterized by trust, mutual respect, and effective communication, may strengthen employees’ positive perceptions of the organization and encourage constructive workplace behaviors. Consequently, employees who develop stronger organizational trust are more likely to demonstrate sportsmanship through cooperation, tolerance, and fewer workplace complaints (podsakoff et al., 2000).
mayer et al. (1995) argued that trust encourages individuals to engage in relationship-based risk-taking within organizations. Such behaviors may include discretionary and extra-role actions that support organizational functioning. In this context, sportsmanship reflects employees’ willingness to tolerate inconvenience, avoid unnecessary complaints, and maintain positive attitudes that support organizational effectiveness. Therefore, employees with higher organizational trust may be more likely to demonstrate sportsmanship.
set further explains this process by suggesting that positive exchanges between individuals create expectations of reciprocity (). When employees perceive their relationship with their manager as supportive and trustworthy, they view it as a high-quality exchange relationship. Over time, this trust can extend from the manager to the organization, encouraging employees to maintain positive attitudes and behaviors at work. Trust in managers has been shown to directly influence sportsmanship behavior by encouraging employees to go beyond formal job responsibilities and maintain constructive attitudes. When employees believe that their managers act with good intentions and make fair decisions, they are more likely to reduce complaint behavior and demonstrate tolerance toward workplace challenges (; Özdemir and büyüky?Lmaz, 2025). Furthermore, when employees perceive that their organization provides support through constructive feedback and a supportive work environment, they are more likely to develop trust in the organization. This trust, in turn, encourages employees to engage in voluntary behaviors that contribute to organizational sustainability and support the satisfaction of external stakeholders (park and kim, 2024). According to lmx theory, effective leader–member relationships are built on trust, mutual respect, and open communication (; ). Thus, we formulate the last hypothesis:
h4: organizational trust mediates the relationship between trust in the manager and sportsmanship behavior.
the proposed research model is presented in figure 1.
figure 1
4 methodology
4.1 sample
the questionnaire was constructed using previously validated scales widely used in organizational behavior research. Items assessing trust in the manager, organizational trust, and sportsmanship were adapted from established instruments to ensure content validity. Prior to the main data collection, we conducted a pilot study with 30 mba students employed in organizations similar to those in the final sample. Participants evaluated item clarity, wording, relevance, and comprehensibility. Based on their feedback, we made minor adjustments to improve readability and cultural appropriateness. The pilot study demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency, with cronbach’s alpha values above the recommended threshold of 0.70 for all constructs (). These steps enhanced the instrument’s reliability and confirmed the questionnaire’s suitability for the saudi organizational context before large-scale administration.
to examine sportsmanship as a dimension of ocb, along with employees’ perceptions of organizational trust and trust in their direct supervisors, a structured self-report survey was designed to collect the required data. A self-administered questionnaire was chosen because the key variables in this study relate to employees’ perceptions and attitudes. Conducting organizational research in the middle east often involves methodological challenges, including limited organizational access, cultural sensitivities, and a general hesitation to participate in survey-based studies (). Given these constraints, convenience sampling was adopted (). Although this method may limit statistical generalizability, it is commonly used and considered practical when probability sampling is difficult to implement (polas, 2024).
formal invitations were sent to human resources departments at organizations across industries in riyadh, the capital of the kingdom of saudi arabia, and in the western province. Nine organizations agreed to participate and granted access to their employees. Organizational approval was obtained, and strict assurances of confidentiality and anonymity were provided to both the organizations and the respondents. Participation was voluntary, and all respondents were informed of the study’s purpose and provided written informed consent before completing the survey. These procedures were implemented to ensure ethical research practices and to encourage participant trust.
to facilitate participation and accommodate organizational preferences, the questionnaire was distributed online. Participating organizations shared the survey link electronically with their employees, enabling respondents to complete and submit the questionnaire conveniently while maintaining confidentiality.
in total, 600 questionnaires were distributed, and 302 responses were received, yielding a response rate of 47.8%, which is considered acceptable for organizational research in this regional context. After screening for completeness, consistency, and response quality, 15 questionnaires were excluded due to missing or inconsistent responses. For surveys with minimal missing data, mean substitution was applied where appropriate. Consequently, 287 valid questionnaires were retained for the final analysis, ensuring a reliable dataset for subsequent statistical procedures.
table 1 presents the demographic characteristics of the sample (n = 287). Regarding nationality, 154 respondents (53.7%) were saudi, and 133 (46.3%) were non-saudi, indicating a balanced representation of local and expatriate employees. The sample was predominantly male (95.1%), with female respondents comprising 4.9%, which may reflect the workforce composition in certain industries within the region.
table 1
| variables | frequency | percentage (%) |
|---|---|---|
| nationality | ||
| saudi | 154 | 53.7 |
| non-saudi | 133 | 46.3 |
| gender | ||
| male | 273 | 95.1 |
| female | 14 | 4.9 |
| age | ||
| 35 years or less | 166 | 57.8 |
| 36–46 years | 88 | 30.7 |
| 47 years or above | 33 | 11.5 |
| educational level | ||
| high school or below | 85 | 29.6 |
| diploma | 87 | 30.3 |
| bachelor or above | 115 | 40.1 |
| employment sector | ||
| private | 234 | 81.5 |
| public | 53 | 18.5 |
| job tenure | ||
| 5 years or less | 133 | 46.3 |
| 6–10 years | 91 | 31.7 |
| 11 years or more | 63 | 22 |
| organizational tenure | ||
| 5 years or less | 98 | 34.1 |
| 6–10 years | 65 | 22.6 |
| 11 years or more | 124 | 43.2 |
demographics of the sample.
by age, most respondents were 35 or younger (57.8%), followed by those aged 36–46 (30.7%) and those 47 or older (11.5%), suggesting the sample largely consisted of early- to mid-career professionals. In terms of education, 40.1% held a bachelor’s degree or higher, 30.3% had a diploma, and 29.6% had a high school certificate or lower, indicating a moderately educated workforce.
the majority of respondents were employed in the private sector (81.5%), while 18.5% worked in the public sector. Participants represented several industries, including manufacturing (33.8%), food and beverage (21.9%), engineering and construction (19.9%), education (8.5%), and telecommunications and technology (5.9%). This sectoral diversity strengthens the study’s external validity by capturing perspectives from multiple organizational contexts.
regarding work experience, 46.3% of respondents had five years or less of professional experience, 31.7% had between 6 and 10 years, and 22.0% had 11 years or more. In terms of organizational tenure, 43.2% had more than 11 years in their organizations, 34.1% had 5 years or less, and 22.6% had between 6 and 10 years.
overall, the sample reflects a predominantly male, private-sector workforce composed mainly of early- to mid-career employees from diverse industries and educational backgrounds. This diversity strengthens the empirical analysis and supports the broader applicability of the study’s findings across organizational settings.
overall, the sample reflects a predominantly male, private-sector workforce composed mainly of early- to mid-career employees from diverse industries and educational backgrounds. Specifically, 95.1% of respondents were male, while only 4.9% were female. Although the sample demonstrates diversity in industry, experience, and education, the gender distribution was highly skewed toward male respondents. However, a one-way anova revealed no significant differences between male and female respondents in organizational trust (f = 0.759, p = 0.384) or sportsmanship (f = 0.615, p = 0.434), suggesting that gender did not significantly influence the study variables. Nevertheless, caution should be exercised when generalizing the findings to populations with a more balanced gender composition.
4.2 measures
the conceptualization of trust in this study was informed by mayer et al. (1995), who viewed trust as a relational mechanism associated with vulnerability, positive expectations, and workplace behavioral outcomes. Based on this perspective, trust in the manager and organizational trust were treated as distinct but related constructs within the organizational context. This conceptual distinction supports examining how managerial trust relationships may influence broader organizational trust perceptions and, in turn, shape employees’ discretionary workplace behaviors, particularly sportsmanship. Given the exploratory nature of this study, all constructs were measured using well-established, previously validated scales to ensure conceptual clarity, consistency with prior research, and methodological rigor.
trust was examined at two related levels: trust in the immediate supervisor (trust in the manager) and trust in the organization. Trust in the manager was measured using the six-item scale developed by podsakoff et al. (1990), which assesses the extent to which employees perceive their supervisors as fair, reliable, and supportive.
organizational trust was measured with robinson’s (1996) seven-item scale, which assesses employees’ overall confidence in the organization’s integrity, fairness, and fulfillment of its obligations. Using these established instruments strengthens construct validity and aligns with prior empirical studies in organizational behavior and management research. The full scales for trust in the manager and organizational trust are provided in appendix 1.
sportsmanship, conceptualized as a dimension of ocb, was measured using the scale originally developed by niehoff and moorman (1993) and later adapted by to assess managers’ citizenship behaviors. The original instrument covers five classical ocb dimensions, including five items that specifically capture sportsmanship. This dimension reflects employees’ willingness to tolerate minor inconveniences and workplace frustrations without excessive complaining, thereby helping maintain a positive organizational climate. The full sportsmanship scale is presented in appendix 1.
following , all measures were adapted to a self-report format, which is appropriate for capturing perceptual and attitudinal constructs. These constructs are best assessed through individuals’ own evaluations of their experiences and relationships in the workplace. All items were measured using a five-point likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“never”) to 5 (“always”), allowing respondents to indicate the frequency of the described behaviors or perceptions.
4.3 procedures
data were collected using a structured survey questionnaire designed to ensure clarity, cultural appropriateness, and methodological rigor. The questionnaire consisted of four main sections. The first section gathered demographic and organizational information, including nationality, gender, age, educational level, employment sector, job tenure, and organizational tenure. These variables described the sample’s characteristics and provided useful context for subsequent comparative and control analyses. The remaining sections measured the study’s key constructs: trust in the immediate supervisor, trust in the organization (employer), and sportsmanship as a dimension of ocb. All scales were presented in a consistent, standardized format to facilitate completion and reduce respondent fatigue.
the online survey method was particularly appropriate for the saudi organizational context for several reasons. First, organizations are geographically dispersed across major regions, including riyadh and the western province, making electronic distribution practical and cost-effective. Second, online surveys offer greater anonymity and confidentiality, which are crucial in high power-distance cultures where employees may hesitate to share perceptions of supervisors and organizations in person (mertens and schollaert, 2024). Third, the increasing digitalization of organizational processes and the widespread use of electronic communication platforms in saudi arabia have increased employees’ familiarity with online surveys, facilitating participation and improving response accuracy (). Finally, online administration allowed respondents to complete the questionnaire at their convenience, reducing social desirability bias and encouraging more candid responses regarding trust and organizational behaviors. Thus, the online survey method was both culturally and methodologically appropriate for data collection in the saudi context.
because arabic is the official language of the kingdom of saudi arabia (ksa), distributing the survey only in english could have limited participants’ understanding and potentially affected response quality and participation rates. To ensure linguistic accuracy and cultural appropriateness, a back-translation procedure was used. Following established methodological guidelines (e.G., ), Two independent bilingual translators first translated the original english questionnaire into arabic using a conceptually accurate approach. Two other translators, who had not seen the original questionnaire, then translated the arabic version back into english.
the research team, together with language professors fluent in arabic and english, compared the original english questionnaire with the back-translated version. Minor differences were discussed and corrected to ensure conceptual equivalence and grammatical clarity without altering the meaning of the items. Most adjustments were linguistic and did not affect the original validated scales. To further ensure clarity and face validity, the final arabic questionnaire was pilot tested with a small group of students who provided feedback on wording and overall clarity. The pilot test indicated that the questionnaire was clear and easy to understand, so no further changes were required.
these procedures helped ensure linguistic accuracy, cultural sensitivity, and measurement equivalence, thereby strengthening the reliability and validity of the data collection process. Data collection was conducted after obtaining ethical approval from the research ethics committee under approval number uof/rec/2025-02-15.
4.4 results
before assessing the measurement model, the data’s suitability for factor analysis was evaluated. The kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) measure of sampling adequacy was 0.807, exceeding the recommended threshold of 0.60 (shrestha, 2021). Bartlett’s test of sphericity was statistically significant (?2 = 2450.316, df = 153, p < 0.001), indicating that the correlation matrix was appropriate for factor analysis. The reproduced correlation matrix was also examined to assess the adequacy of the factor structure and the extent to which the extracted factors reproduced the observed correlations. These results confirmed the data’s suitability for subsequent measurement model evaluation.
4.4.1 measurement model assessment
to assess whether the measurement model was acceptable, we conducted the standard reliability and validity tests recommended for pls-sem (). Table 2 presents the indicator loadings. All items we retained had loadings above the 0.50 cutoff, indicating acceptable indicator reliability. Items with loadings below 0.50 were removed to improve the model: three organizational trust items (ot1, ot2, ot4) and two trust in manager items (tm4, tm5) were dropped for low loadings.
table 2
| main variables | organizational trust (ot) | sportsmanship behavior (sb) | trust in manager (tm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ot3 | 0.824 | ||
| ot5 | 0.827 | ||
| ot6 | 0.523 | ||
| ot7 | 0.772 | ||
| sb1 | 0.838 | ||
| sb2 | 0.842 | ||
| sb3 | 0.885 | ||
| sb4 | 0.879 | ||
| sb5 | 0.776 | ||
| tm1 | 0.762 | ||
| tm2 | 0.563 | ||
| tm3 | 0.745 | ||
| tm6 | 0.770 |
factor loadings.
the study’s reliability and convergent validity results are shown in table 3. Cronbach’s alpha (ca) and composite reliability (cr) were used to assess reliability. The results demonstrate that the measurement items have acceptable internal consistency, with cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.736 to 0.899, all of which are higher than the suggested cutoff of 0.70 (). Similarly, the composite reliability (cr) values are significantly higher than the suggested minimum level of 0.70, ranging from 0.899 to 0.926. This provides additional evidence for the validity of the study’s constructs.
table 3
| main variables | cronbach’s alpha | composite reliability (rho_c) | average variance extracted (ave) |
|---|---|---|---|
| organizational trust (ot) | 0.736 | 0.831 | 0.558 |
| sportsmanship behavior (sb) | 0.899 | 0.926 | 0.714 |
| trust in manager (tm) | 0.736 | 0.899 | 0.511 |
cronbach’s alpha, composite reliability, ave.
the average variance extracted (ave) was used to assess convergent validity. All ave values, ranging from 0.511 to 0.714, exceed the recommended threshold of 0.50. This indicates that more than half of the variance in each indicator is explained by the constructs. Overall, these findings show that the measurement scales exhibit adequate convergent validity and satisfactory reliability, indicating that the constructs are appropriate for further structural model analysis.
4.4.2 multicollinearity assessment
the variance inflation factor (vif) was used to assess multicollinearity among the predictor constructs before testing the structural relationships. According to , vif values below 5 indicate that multicollinearity is not a significant problem in the model (table 4).
table 4
| main items | vif |
|---|---|
| ot3 | 1.497 |
| ot5 | 1.773 |
| ot6 | 1.196 |
| ot7 | 1.459 |
| sb1 | 2.358 |
| sb2 | 2.610 |
| sb3 | 2.949 |
| sb4 | 2.887 |
| sb5 | 2.080 |
| tm1 | 2.117 |
| tm2 | 1.714 |
| tm3 | 2.049 |
| tm6 | 1.109 |
vif statistics.
4.4.3 discriminant validity
discriminant validity was evaluated using two commonly recommended approaches: the fornell-larcker criterion (table 5) and the heterotrait-monotrait ratio (htmt) (table 6).
table 5
| main variables | organizational trust (ot) | sportsmanship behavior (sb) | trust in manager (tm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| organizational trust (ot) | 0.747 | 0.845 | 0.715 |
| sportsmanship behavior (sb) | 0.534 | ||
| trust in manager (tm) | 0.425 | 0.429 |
fornell–larcker criterion.
table 6
| main relationships | htmt |
|---|---|
| trust in manager (tm) < - > organizational trust (ot) | 0.509 |
| trust in manager (tm) < - > sportsmanship behavior (sb) | 0.404 |
| sportsmanship behavior (sb) < - > organizational trust (ot) | 0.598 |
heterotrait–monotrait ratio (htmt)
according to the fornell and larcker criterion (), the square root of the ave for each construct should exceed its correlations with the other constructs in the model. As reported in table 5, the square root of the ave values on the diagonal are higher than the correlations between constructs. Therefore, the results provide evidence of satisfactory discriminant validity among the constructs in the measurement model ().
in addition, discriminant validity was further examined using the heterotrait–monotrait ratio (htmt). As recommended by , htmt values should be below 0.85 to establish adequate discriminant validity (see table 6).
4.4.4 structural model assessment (hypothesis testing)
the next step was to examine the structural model to evaluate the proposed hypotheses. Pls-sem analyzes relationships among constructs using an iterative regression procedure that simultaneously estimates both the measurement and structural models (ringle et al., 2023). The evaluation of the structural model included examining the path coefficients (?), Standard deviations, t-values, and p-values. These statistics were obtained using a bootstrapping procedure with 5,000 resamples, a commonly recommended approach in pls-sem analysis ().
the results of the direct relationships are presented in table 7. Trust in the manager had a moderate positive effect on organizational trust (? = 0.425), indicating that higher levels of trust in managers are associated with stronger perceptions of organizational trust among employees. Organizational trust also had a positive effect on sportsmanship behavior (? = 0.429), suggesting that employees who trust their organization are more likely to exhibit sportsmanship. Furthermore, trust in the manager directly influenced sportsmanship behavior (? = 0.246), indicating that managerial trust contributes to employees’ willingness to demonstrate positive discretionary workplace behaviors. The significance of these relationships was confirmed through bootstrapping (5,000 resamples), with all paths statistically significant (p < 0.001). These findings support the proposed hypotheses.
table 7
| direct relationships | b | standard deviation (stdev) | t-values | p-values |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| trust in manager - > organizational trust | 0.425 | 0.047 | 9.084 | 0.000 |
| organizational trust - > sportsmanship behavior | 0.429 | 0.060 | 7.131 | 0.000 |
| trust in manager - > sportsmanship behavior | 0.246 | 0.055 | 4.459 | 0.000 |
structural model results- direct relationships.
?, Path coefficients.
as shown in table 8, the indirect relationship between trust in manager and sportsmanship behavior through organizational trust is statistically significant (? = 0.183). This finding indicates that organizational trust partially mediates the relationship between trust in manager and sportsmanship. The results of the structural model analysis are presented in figure 2.
table 8
| indirect relationships | b | standard deviation (stdev) | t-values | p-values | 2.5% | 97.5% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| trust in manager - > organizational trust - > sportsmanship behavior | 0.183 | 0.035 | 5.217 | 0.000 | 0.123 | 0.261 |
structural model results—mediation effect.
?, Path coefficients.
figure 2
4.4.5 coefficient of determination (r2)
the coefficient of determination (r2) was used to assess the model’s explanatory power. As shown in table 9, trust in the manager explains 18.1% of the variance in organizational trust (r2 = 0.181). Furthermore, organizational trust and trust in the manager jointly explain 33.5% of the variance in sportsmanship (r2 = 0.335). According to , these values indicate moderate explanatory power for the structural model.
table 9
| endogenous construct | r-square adjusted |
|---|---|
| organizational trust (ot) | 0.178 |
| sportsmanship behavior (sb) | 0.331 |
coefficient of determination (r2).
4.4.6 effect size (f2)
the effect size (f2) was calculated to assess the contribution of each exogenous construct to the r2 of the endogenous constructs. As shown in table 10, organizational trust has a medium effect on sportsmanship (f2 = 0.227). Similarly, trust in manager shows a medium effect on organizational trust (f2 = 0.221). In contrast, trust in manager shows a small effect on sportsmanship (f2 = 0.075).
table 10
| relationships | f-square |
|---|---|
| organizational trust (ot) - > sportsmanship behavior (sb) | 0.227 |
| trust in manager (tm) - > organizational trust (ot) | 0.221 |
| trust in manager (tm) - > sportsmanship behavior (sb) | 0.075 |
effect size (f2).
4.4.7 predictive relevance (q2 predict)
the model’s predictive ability was evaluated using the pls-predict procedure in smart-pls. The results in table 11 show that the q2 predict values for the endogenous constructs are above zero, indicating that the model has predictive capability. Specifically, the q2 predict value for organizational trust is 0.167, and for sportsmanship it is 0.174. According to , q2 values greater than zero indicate sufficient predictive relevance. Accordingly, these findings suggest that the model demonstrates moderate predictive power for both constructs, indicating that the exogenous variables can reasonably explain and predict variations in the endogenous variables.
table 11
| construct | q2 predict | rmse |
|---|---|---|
| organizational trust (ot) | 0.167 | 0.918 |
| sportsmanship behavior (sb) | 0.174 | 0.913 |
q2 (predictive relevance) and the root mean square error (rmse).
as reported in table 11, the root mean square error (rmse) values were 0.918 for organizational trust and 0.913 for sportsmanship behavior, while the srmr value was 0.116. These indices provide supplementary information regarding the model’s predictive performance and overall fit. Consistent with the prediction-oriented nature of pls-sem, model evaluation primarily focused on reliability, validity, path coefficients, explanatory power (r2), and predictive relevance (q2), while rmse and srmr were reported as additional assessment indicators (; yusefi et al., 2025).
5 discussion
this study suggests that trust in one’s manager promotes sportsmanship by first building trust in the organization. Consistent with set and lmx, when employees have positive, supportive interactions with their managers, they tend to reciprocate with constructive behaviors, including greater tolerance, cooperation, and fewer complaints.
h1 shows that trust in the manager significantly strengthens organizational trust. Employees interpret managers’ behavior—fairness, competence, and integrity—as cues about the organization’s values and intentions. Recent work finds that trust in leadership is central to developing organizational trust and positive employee attitudes (). Trust in leadership has been shown to predict broader organizational trust in a meta-analytic study (). Trust in a manager (micro level) may serve as a relational gateway that shapes employees’ perceptions of the organization as a trustworthy actor (macro level) (schilke and lumineau, 2025). Because managers serve as visible representatives of the organization, their actions shape how employees view organizational policies and systems. Positive manager–employee relationships therefore foster confidence in the organization.
h2 is confirmed: organizational trust itself boosts sportsmanship. Prior empirical evidence further supports this relationship. For example, findings from 305 validated questionnaires collected from chinese enterprises show that organizational trust has a significant positive influence on ocb, including cooperation and sportsmanship, indicating that employees who trust their organization are more likely to engage in voluntary behaviors that benefit the workplace (). Employees who believe their organization treats them fairly and values their contributions feel secure and respected, making them more willing to act in ways that preserve workplace harmony.
h3 is also supported: trust in the manager positively affects sportsmanship behavior, a key form of organizational citizenship behavior (ocb). When employees trust their managers, they are more likely to respond constructively in difficult situations—showing patience, tolerating minor hassles, and avoiding unnecessary complaints. Trust reduces negative interpretations of managerial decisions and encourages cooperative responses, consistent with findings that supportive supervision directly promotes ocb. The findings align with schaubroeck et al. (2013), who suggested that trust relationships with leaders contribute to broader organizational attachment and positive workplace outcomes through social exchange processes. Furthermore, the present findings corroborate prior evidence that relational authenticity is positively associated with altruistic and sportsmanship behaviors (ostermeier et al., 2022). Similarly, research in leadership highlights the importance of trust in shaping specific forms of ocb, such as sportsmanship. Takos et al. (2025) found that trust in leaders directly influences employees’ sportsmanship behavior. These findings suggest that trust functions not only as a relational and emotional factor but also as a mechanism that guides employees’ behavioral responses within organizations.
finally, the results support h4, showing that organizational trust mediates the relationship between trust in the manager and sportsmanship behavior. The findings are consistent with mayer et al. (1995), who suggested that trust within organizational relationships facilitates positive relational outcomes and encourages employees to engage in discretionary behaviors. The significant mediating role of organizational trust indicates that trusted managerial relationships may strengthen broader trust perceptions toward the organization, which subsequently enhance sportsmanship behavior among employees. Additionally, this mediation explains how managerial behavior influences broader organizational outcomes. Specifically, trust developed through interactions with managers gradually extends to the organization as a whole. As organizational trust increases, employees become more likely to maintain positive attitudes and engage in constructive behaviors such as sportsmanship. This finding highlights trust as a dynamic relational process within organizations. Prior research also emphasizes that leadership behaviors often influence employee outcomes indirectly by shaping broader organizational perceptions that guide employee attitudes and behaviors (; ). Additionally, the present findings are consistent with prior research showing that organizational trust functions as a key mediating variable in social exchange relationships (). Therefore, cultivating trust at both the managerial and organizational levels is essential for encouraging positive discretionary behaviors among employees.
6 practical and theoretical implications
this study offers several meaningful implications for both theory and organizational practice. From a practical perspective, the results underscore the crucial role of managerial behavior in fostering a positive work environment. When managers are perceived as fair, capable, and supportive, employees are more likely to trust them. Over time, these positive experiences with supervisors shape employees’ perceptions of the organization as a whole. As organizational trust increases, employees become more willing to tolerate workplace difficulties, reduce unnecessary complaints, and maintain constructive attitudes even in challenging circumstances. Therefore, organizations seeking to strengthen cooperation and sportsmanship among employees should focus on developing trust-based leadership practices.
managers foster trust by making decisions openly, treating staff with respect, and acting with consistent integrity. Organizations can reinforce this by providing leadership training that emphasizes ethical behavior, clear communication, and fair management practices. By deepening trust in managers, employees are more likely to engage in voluntary, positive behaviors that enhance a cooperative and supportive workplace.
beyond its influence on sportsmanship and other citizenship behaviors, organizational trust may have broader implications for workplace effectiveness and employee wellbeing. Prior research has shown that trust in management fosters employee cooperation, proactive citizenship behaviors, and stronger organizational relationships. Furthermore, trust is a critical factor in occupational safety, as it encourages employees to engage in safety-related citizenship behaviors, comply with organizational procedures, and contribute to a stronger safety culture. These outcomes may ultimately reduce unsafe workplace behaviors and improve organizational safety performance (ordysi?Ski, 2024).
from a theoretical perspective, the findings contribute to the ocb literature by identifying a relational trust mechanism that explains the emergence of sportsmanship behaviors. While prior studies have generally associated sportsmanship with broad organizational conditions or workplace environments, the present study demonstrates that trust in managers is an important antecedent that shapes employees’ broader trust in the organization. Drawing on both set and lmx theory, the findings suggest that high-quality relationships between managers and employees foster trust, mutual respect, and positive exchanges, which extend beyond the immediate supervisor–subordinate relationship to influence employees’ perceptions of the organization. As employees develop organizational trust, they are more likely to reciprocate through sportsmanship behaviors characterized by tolerance, cooperation, and a willingness to overlook minor workplace inconveniences. Accordingly, the study extends the lmx and ocb literature by highlighting organizational trust as a key explanatory mechanism through which managerial trust is translated into positive discretionary employee behaviors.
7 limitations and future research
although this study offers useful insights into how trust influences sportsmanship behavior, several limitations should be recognized. Acknowledging these limitations clarifies the scope of the findings and offers directions for future research.
first, the proposed framework focuses primarily on trust in the manager and organizational trust as the key factors influencing sportsmanship. While these variables are strongly supported by set and lmx, sportsmanship is likely affected by a broader set of factors. Elements such as leadership style, organizational justice, job satisfaction, psychological safety, and organizational culture may also shape employees’ willingness to tolerate difficulties and avoid unnecessary complaints. Because these variables were not included in the current model, the study captures only part of the broader explanation. Future research could incorporate additional organizational and psychological factors to develop a more comprehensive model of sportsmanship behavior.
second, the study uses a cross-sectional research design, which limits the ability to draw strong causal conclusions. The model assumes that trust in managers gradually develops into organizational trust and then leads to sportsmanship behaviors. However, cross-sectional data capture perceptions at only one point in time and may not fully reflect how trust develops over time. Future studies could adopt longitudinal designs to better understand how trust evolves and how it influences employees’ discretionary behaviors. Additionally, this study employed a convenience sampling approach, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. Although the sample provided valuable insights into the relationships among the study variables, caution should be exercised when extending the results to all organizations in saudi arabia. Future research may benefit from using probability sampling techniques and examining different sectors and regions to enhance the external validity of the findings.
third, the research relies on self-reported survey data, which may introduce biases such as common method variance or social desirability bias. Employees might unintentionally report more positive behaviors or provide responses they believe are socially acceptable. Although pls sem techniques can help mitigate these concerns, using a single data source remains a limitation. Future studies could improve the robustness of the findings by including multiple data sources, such as supervisor assessments or peer evaluations.
fourth, the generalizability of the results is a limitation. Employee trust and behavior can vary across cultural, institutional, and organizational contexts. In some environments, employees may naturally display greater tolerance and cooperation, while in others they may be more likely to express dissatisfaction when facing challenges. Because this study was conducted within a specific organizational context, the findings may not fully apply to all industries or cultures. Future research should therefore test the proposed model across different countries, sectors, and organizational settings.
fifth, the study focuses solely on sportsmanship as an aspect of ocb. Sportsmanship is crucial for maintaining a positive work environment, but ocb also includes other dimensions such as civic virtue, conscientiousness, altruism, and civility. A more comprehensive understanding of how trust influences employees’ discretionary actions may be gained by examining these additional behaviors.
sixth, another limitation of this study concerns the sample’s gender composition, as male respondents accounted for 95.1% of participants. Although additional analyses found no significant gender differences in the key study variables, caution should be exercised when generalizing the findings to more gender-balanced workforces.
seventh, another limitation concerns the use of self-reported data collected from a single source at a single point in time. Although harman’s single-factor test suggested that common method bias was not a serious concern, as the first factor accounted for only 29.10% of the total variance, the possibility of common method bias cannot be entirely ruled out. Future research may benefit from collecting data from multiple sources, using longitudinal designs, or incorporating additional procedural and statistical controls to further reduce the potential effects of common method bias.
lastly, although the measurement scales used in this study were adopted from established trust literature, more recent research has suggested broader, multidimensional operationalizations of organizational trust (mayer and davis, 1999; schoorman et al., 2016). Future research may benefit from employing more contemporary trust measurement approaches that capture additional dimensions of trust relationships and further enhance construct validity.
8 conclusion
trust relationships play a foundational role in shaping positive workplace behaviors. This study integrates set to explain how trust in the manager enhances sportsmanship through organizational trust. By strengthening trust at both the managerial and organizational levels, organizations can foster constructive, cooperative workplace climates. The findings further support the relevance of mayer et al.’S (1995) integrative model of organizational trust in explaining how trust relationships and perceptions of trustworthiness may shape positive workplace behaviors within organizational settings.
empirically, this study makes four contributions. First, it provides evidence that trust in managers positively influences organizational trust. Second, the findings demonstrate that trust in managers directly promotes employees’ sportsmanship. Third, the results show that organizational trust is a significant predictor of sportsmanship. Fourth, the study confirms the mediating role of organizational trust in explaining how trust in managers translates into positive discretionary employee behaviors. Collectively, these findings underscore the importance of trust-based relationships in fostering constructive workplace attitudes and behaviors.
statements
data availability statement
the raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
ethics statement
the studies involving humans were approved by the university of fujairah (uof)/rec/2025-02-15. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.
author contributions
ha: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, software, visualization, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing. Ae: data curation, methodology, validation, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing. Aa: supervision, validation, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing. Lg: validation, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing.
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appendix 1
measurement scales used in the study
this appendix presents the measurement scales used in the study. The constructs were measured using previously validated instruments widely used in organizational behavior research. Specifically, trust in supervisor, organizational trust, and organizational citizenship behavior (ocb) were measured using established scales. In the case of ocb, only one dimension (sportsmanship) was used in the present study, as it directly reflects employees’ willingness to tolerate inconveniences and avoid unnecessary complaints at work. All items were measured using a likert scale.
1. Trust in manager (tm)
trust in manager was measured using the scale developed by podsakoff et al. (1990), which assesses employees’ level of confidence, loyalty, and faith in their immediate supervisor.
items:
i feel quite confident that my supervisor will always try to treat me fairly.
my supervisor would never try to gain an advantage by deceiving workers.
i have complete faith in the integrity of my supervisor.
i feel strong loyalty to my supervisor.
i will support my supervisor in almost any emergency.
i have a divided sense of loyalty toward my supervisor. (Reverse coded)
2. Organizational trust (ot)
organizational trust was measured using the scale developed by robinson (1996), which captures employees’ perceptions of the organization’s honesty, fairness, and integrity.
items:
i believe my organization has high integrity.
i can expect my organization to treat me in a consistent and predictable fashion.
my organization is not always honest and truthful. (R)
in general, i believe my organization’s motives and intentions are good.
i do not think my organization treats me fairly. (R)
my organization is open and upfront with me.
i am not sure i fully trust my organization. (R)
3. Organizational citizenship behavior (ocb) – sportsmanship behavior
organizational citizenship behavior was measured using the scale developed by niehoff and moorman (1993). The original scale includes five dimensions of ocb based on the conceptualization of organ (1988): altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy, and civic virtue. For the purposes of this study, only the sportsmanship dimension was used, as it reflects employees’ ability to maintain a positive attitude and refrain from complaining about minor workplace inconveniences.
sportsmanship behavior items
i tend to make problems bigger than they really are. (R)
i always focus on what is wrong rather than the positive side. (R)
i complain about trivial matters at work. (R)
i tend to find fault with what the organization is doing. (R)
i spend a lot of time complaining about trivial matters. (R)
summary
keywords
leader-member exchange (lmx), organizational citizenship behavior (ocb), organizational trust, social exchange theory (set), sportsmanship behavior, trust in manager
citation
aldabbas h, elamin am, ahmed aze and gernal l (2026) building positive workplace behaviors: how trust in the manager enhances sportsmanship behaviors through organizational trust. Front. Psychol. 17:1828581. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1828581
received
11 march 2026
revised
07 june 2026
accepted
23 june 2026
published
13 july 2026
volume
17 - 2026
edited by
friday ogbu edeh, alex ekwueme federal university, ndufu-alike, nigeria
reviewed by
pramila thapa, purbanchal university, nepal
szymon ordysi?Ski, central institute for labour protection - national research institute, poland
updates
copyright
© 2026 aldabbas, elamin, ahmed and gernal.
this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (cc by). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*correspondence: hazem aldabbas, hazem.Aldabbas@outlook.Com; h.Aldabbas@fu.Ac.Ae
orcid: hazem aldabbas, orcid.Org/0000-0002-0632-1732; abdallah m. Elamin, orcid.Org/0000-0003-4984-9307; ahmed z. E. Ahmed, orcid.Org/0000-0002-1158-4350; liza gernal, orcid.Org/0000-0002-2219-7866
disclaimer
all claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. |
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| Nuclear fallout gave her cancer. Now shes a dogged voice for Americas downwinder |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (11 reads) | |
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- mary dickson got thyroid cancer at 29 and only years later discovered it was caused by radioactive fallout from u.S. Nuclear weapons tests.
- the government acknowledges downwinders throughout utah, idaho and new mexico, as well as parts of arizona, nevada and missouri.
- but advocates for downwinders cite gaps — cancers and locations — and many people do not know they could be compensated.
when she was 29, mary dickson got thyroid cancer and chalked it up to bad luck or bad genes.
her life had been pretty idyllic, despite being raised against the frightening backdrop of the cold war.
she spent hours of her childhood running around in the gullies by her home near the mouth of parleys canyon in salt lake city. The neighborhood was packed with kids who pretended those rising and falling hills were rollercoasters, racing up and down, laughing and screaming. With seven kids in her house, she always had playmates.
dickson and her friends also pretended at school. Children were taught to huddle under their wooden desks and cover their heads with their hands, pretending russians were dropping bombs. Each child brought a bleach bottle filled with water, name scrawled in indelible marker so they’d have something to drink should bombs actually fall. Sometimes, they cowered in a “fallout shelter” — a crawlspace under the grade school— waiting for an audible all-clear.
but as most children get to do, dickson grew up. She went to college, launched a career in journalism, married. Then came the cancer, with its then-brutal treatment: removal of her thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes, followed by radioactive iodine-infused medicinal drinks that made her ovaries light up during monitoring. Hospital staff put a “caution, radioactive material!” Sign on her hospital room door. Even those delivering meals would reach in just far enough to put food on a nearby tray.
a radiologist stood in the doorway each day and pointed a geiger counter her way. She couldn’t go home until it stopped beeping.
dickson was the radioactive material the sign warned others about.
when she finally left the hospital, her clothes were burned and she was warned not to be around pregnant women or small children for a while. “Don’t get pregnant for a year,” she was told. That was enough to make those closest to her nervous just to be nearby.
she later learned her cancer was related to the backdrop of her childhood romps. The u.S. Government admitted that all of utah, idaho and new mexico, as well as parts of arizona and nevada were downwind of nuclear tests above and below ground on the nevada test site, 65 miles northwest of las vegas. Some blasts were reportedly stronger than nuclear bombs dropped in world war ii.
americans in the path of radioactive fallout — downwinders — experienced what in other circumstances could be called friendly fire.
dickson cannot pretend that what she gave up, like the chance to have children or the deaths of so many she loved, including relatives, can be chalked up to bad luck or bad genes.
so she’s been doing something about it.
rethinking what happened
dickson is a petite blonde whose siren-red lipstick is something of a signature. She’s a familiar name in utah, where for more than 35 years she has been a prominent journalist who also amassed podcast and playwright credits.
now retired, she spends most of her time helping downwinders recognize their status and file claims under the radiation exposure compensation act, that formal government acknowledgement that cold war fallout hit devastatingly close to home. She’s among a group of outspoken advocates for those affected and has been instrumental in getting an expanded version of reca, as it’s called, passed by congress. But she told deseret news there’s more to be done. More people were impacted than have been acknowledged.
when she’s not doing reca-related work, dickson is often found wandering in the hills with her 3-½-year-old husky, khione, whose name means “goddess of snow” in ancient greek. The dog is as restless and energetic as dickson and they journey miles along trails in the salt lake city foothills.
khione and dickson are both friendly, so the two often befriend others. And in a nod to how far the radioactive fallout spread, it turns out many are also downwinders or survivors of those who were.
it was such a chance encounter that launched dickson into what’s an almost-evangelical passion for finding and helping those affected by nuclear weapons tests.
for a freelance magazine article in the early 1990s, she interviewed a new york writer and photographer, carole gallagher, who was in utah to capture stories of people who’d been in the path of fallout for what would later be the book, “american ground zero: the secret nuclear war.”
gallagher was listing cancers linked to fallout and when she said thyroid cancer, dickson mentioned she’d had that. Gallagher asked where she grew up, then if she drank milk as a child. Milk from cows that ate radiated grass was believed to be one exposure source.
“you got cancer from testing,” gallagher told her.
“no, i didn’t,” dickson replied. “I never lived in southern utah.”
that was when dickson first saw the u.S. Map showing where three or more nuclear debris clouds passed overhead. It was created by richard miller, an industrial safety expert and author of multiple books on u.S. Nuclear testing. He based it on once-classified maps from the u.S. Weather service and the atomic energy commission. Later, a national cancer institute study found every county in the continental u.S. Got some level of fallout.
when gallagher’s book was published, dickson said she was almost afraid to open it, to see her picture and for the first time be labeled a downwinder. The label would stick.
dickson, by profession a dogged researcher, started digging.
at some point, she and her older sister, ann, started listing everyone near their childhood home who had cancer or autoimmune dysfunction: the girl her age with thyroid cancer, kids with bone cancer, leukemia, brain tumors. “There were so many. Growing up, when it happens, you just think ‘i guess everyone gets cancer.’”
their people-we-know list grew to 54 names in a five-block area. In 2001, dickson added her sister’s name: ann debirk. She died at age 46, leaving three young kids. Today, one of dickson’s younger sisters battles a rare cancer and another has autoimmune disorders.
while reca acknowledges some responsibility for fallout causing cancer, various scientists told dickson there’s compelling evidence some autoimmune disorders are rooted in nuclear testing of old, too.
the sheer number of people she’s met who had cancer or possibly fallout-linked immune disorders stuns her.
“one of the effects of my cancer is the sorrow i carry — not just for myself but for everyone i’ve lost or for those whose stories i’ve listened to,” dickson said. “I feel an enormous responsibility to all of those we’ve lost and those too sick to speak out to keep their stories alive and to help make sure they are compensated.”
finding her voice
her first speaking invitation came unexpectedly from the unitarian church in salt lake city. So dickson shared her story and information she’d gathered about the testing. Soon, invitations poured in. She testified before congress and the u.S. Nuclear regulatory commission. She spoke at a hearing in st. George at then-dixie college. By then, she was both mourning and mad and cut out yellow construction-paper headstones with names and dates for people she knew whose deaths she believed could be blamed on nuclear weapons testing. One of her mentors, downwinder j. Preston truman, who later died of cancer, had been compiling files and helped her tape the headstones to the big windows so the safety commissioners arriving for the hearing would see them.
that day, in the restroom, dickson said one of the panelists told her, “i’m so sorry for what happened to you. I had no idea this happened.”
that admission was stunning, dickson said. She decided to keep telling her story and gathering others. She’s now done that many times at the united nations, before the national academy of sciences and more. At one point, she and others carried pocket-sized copies of miller’s debris-cloud map and other data, passing them out to each congressional office.
dickson was then still working full time for utah public television, while also working nearly full time as a downwinder activist.
gathering the research
perhaps her journalism training — asking questions, reaching out to sources — made it easier for her to find the right people for her tough questions.
dickson cold-called joseph j. Mangano, an epidemiologist and executive director of the radiation and public health project, who had been given a collection of roughly 300,000 baby teeth from areas where fallout landed. The study dates back to the 1950s, led by a st. Louis doctor named louise reiss, who thought strontium — an element the body can absorb, known to carry serious health effects in its radioactive form — had to be making its way into kids’ teeth because they drank milk from cows eating radiated grass. Researchers hoped to quantify strontium in the teeth and pair the amount with what happened to the owners of the teeth, but the follow-up linkage to health outcomes was never completed.
those tiny teeth are still in little manila envelopes, their color darkened with time, each bearing the name of the child, the parents, where they were from, and the child’s age, dickson said.
dickson’s efforts encouraged her friends to question, too. One whose mother died recently sent bone tissue to a researcher at purdue university who said he’d never seen such high levels of cesium in a bone fragment. The radioactive form of cesium known as cs-137 was released into the environment as a byproduct of nuclear weapons testing. Her mother would have been 12 or so growing up in southern utah during the testing.
scientific evidence matters. But many research grants have shriveled or died entirely. When pondering the magnitude of loss, dickson wonders how much of the evidence was buried in the literal sense, taken to the grave.
banding together
pockets of concerned people were finding each other. Dickson was working with a group of downwinders in the west and from various native american reservations, who met weekly on zoom. She connected separately with the union of concerned scientists, who sponsored biweekly meetings. She said it’s hard for ordinary citizens to know who to talk to in congress and how to set meetings up, but once the union took it on, “everything started opening up.” Visiting congressional offices “helped a lot.”
their staunchest ally in congress was sen. Josh hawley, r-mo., Who kept hearing from mothers living near where manhattan project waste was dumped. Their children were getting cancer.
hawley started one loud, strident press conference with dickson’s story and soon she was doing interviews on c-span, writing a piece for usa today, co-writing for politico with the head of the arms control association. She’d decided she would talk to anybody any time about fallout’s devastation.
original reca
the first version of reca passed october 15, 1990, but it was much more limited in scope than the damage wrought on downwinders, many of whom would not be recognized for another 34 years.
the original reca divided utah in half. Those on the south side of a county line got a flat $50,000 compensation if they had certain cancers (the list has since expanded) while others with the same cancers “were out of luck” if they lived even an inch past the imaginary line where fallout reportedly stopped, “even though we know that northern utah often got as much and sometimes more than southern utah,” dickson said.
she and others kept fighting for compensation to reach more people devastated by nuclear fallout. Dickson even wrote a play, “exposed,” about her childhood, her family’s losses and the death of her sister. It’s been produced again and again.
counting the cost
in 2021, lilly adams, campaign manager for the union of concerned scientists, tried to explain the toll of all that testing. A decade before, the senate had designated jan. 27 as national day of remembrance for downwinders. In a blog she wrote that between 1945 and 1992, the u.S. Conducted over 1,000 nuclear weapons tests, 216 above ground or under water. They spread radioactive fallout across the country. Before testing started, she wrote, the government acknowledged people downwind would be exposed to more radiation “than was considered medically safe.” Decades later, a federal court ruled the government was negligent in monitoring and protecting those downwind.
adams cited a 1997 study from the national cancer institute estimating testing likely caused between 11,000 and 212,000 thyroid cancer cases, just from iodine-131. And a study in 2020 found that the 1945 new mexico trinity test, the first nuclear weapons test, “likely caused up to 1,000 cancer cases. A recent study also shows a sharp spike in infant mortality linked to the test.” A centers for disease control and prevention study had in 1980 shown veterans who were part of atmospheric testing had “drastically higher” rates of leukemia than others in the military.
in 2024, congress was considering a bill to add uranium miners to reca compensation. Dickson wrote in deseret news that utah’s congressional delegation “has been absent in our fight,” although 21 of utah’s counties were in the highest 50 of the 3,100 counties across the u.S. Where radioactive iodine-131 had made its way into the soil from nevada bomb tests.” The top 50 counties for i-131 in miller’s “the u.S. Atlas of nuclear fallout” included utah, morgan, davis, salt lake, weber, summit and wasatch, utah’s most populous. None were included in reca.
gathering personal stories
as dickson researched, she found others working on expanding downwinder compensation.
laura taylor turner is an attorney in prescott, arizona, though in college she wanted to be a concert pianist. She took the law school entrance exam on a dare and when that went well, she pivoted.
but her first couple years practicing law were not soul fulfilling — until a guy walked into her office needing help filling out a reca claim form. By the time she finished helping him, she was hooked on helping downwinders. Now part of her time is spent teaching groups of people for free what kind of paperwork is needed to prove a claim and how to get it. Her paying practice often involves more difficult claims. Along the way, she got involved with mohave county downwinders. Mohave was left out of the original reca, despite being closest in arizona to nuclear testing. She met adams and others investigating fallout.
the late arizona sen. John mccain predicted mohave would not be included nor reca expanded, unless other states and senators got involved. Las vegas wasn’t included either, though it was close to testing. There were lots of “forgotten guinea pigs,” turner said.
working with dickson would come later, after reca was expanded. The two are among advocates who agree it still falls short of being fair.
reca 2.0
reca was reauthorized and expanded in 2025, with a two-year period to file a claim, ending dec. 31, 2027. It passed coincidentally on dickson’s birthday. Compensation was doubled to a flat tax-exempt $100,000. Coverage was expanded to include all of utah, idaho and new mexico and parts of arizona and nevada. It also covers areas in missouri, where manhattan project waste was dumped. But during last-minute wrangling that advocates for expansion can’t explain, montana, colorado and parts of arizona and nevada disappeared from the bill. Guam, a hard-hit u.S. Protectorate, was not included, either.
covered cancers include leukemia after age 20, multiple myeloma, lymphomas except hodgkin’s disease, and primary cancers of thyroid, breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gall bladder, salivary gland, urinary bladder, brain, colon, ovary, liver, renal system or lung. It excludes liver cancer if there’s cirrhosis or hepatitis b.
“i was able to get chronic lymphocytic leukemia covered by just yelling loudly for the last six months at the doj,” turner said. “The website says they’re not covering it, but they are.”
covered noncancers include some specific nonmalignant respiratory disease and chronic kidney diseases that primarily impact uranium industry workers. They must have worked at uranium mines or mills in colorado, new mexico, arizona, south dakota, washington, utah, idaho, north dakota, oregon and texas for at least one year and have a covered respiratory or kidney diagnosis.
claims can be complicated or simple. A claimant must prove a covered illness and physical presence in the affected areas for one year in new mexico between sept. 24, 1944 and nov. 6, 1962; in any other affected area one year between jan. 21, 1951 and nov. 6, 1962 or in any affected area for the entire month of july 1962.
a downwinder can apply directly. If that person died, a spouse is first in line if they were married at least a year. Divorce stops eligibility. Next are living children, who share equally. If there are none, grandchildren can split a claim. There’s no provision for heirs of a downwinder’s child who died if there are any living children. Turner recently helped 24 grandchildren in one family, who will split $100,000. “They almost need an attorney to coordinate them,” she said.
if the person who died has no children, a parent or grandparent can claim compensation, but there really aren’t any of those around anymore, turner said.
proving one was downwind that long ago can be tricky, but polk’s directories, school records, church records and other items can do it. In most cases, original paperwork is needed, though dickson and turner recently told a library staff — libraries are frequently asked for help — that a letter from the librarian attesting the copies of the polk’s directory’s covers and relevant pages are real can work.
medical records might seem easier, but they’re not. If a person died in the 1970s, ‘80s or ‘90s, it’s possible records no longer exist. A death certificate only works if it listed a qualified diagnosis. States have cancer registries, but rules vary. And some states might only release them to the person they’re about.
dickson warns people to start their claims asap, because gathering material takes time and the deadline is the end of 2027. Processing takes up to eight months once a claim number has been assigned and another month or so to pay if the claim passes muster. Everything’s slower than you’d expect. For full details, visit the u.S. Department of justice reca guidelines.
those who were left out
lots of people were left out, said dickson, who’s among those pushing to change that. They were included and then disappeared in the final bill, stunning those who’d worked hard on coverage. Besides disappearing locations, some illnesses like lymphedema believed related to fallout were dropped.
a proposal to close some of those gaps is reportedly imminent. On july 16, the anniversary of both the 1945 trinity test and the 1979 church rock uranium mill spill, which also happens to be national atomic veterans day, bipartisan legislation will be introduced to address some of the reca gaps.
the bill would broaden eligibility to cover all of arizona, colorado, guam, montana and nevada. It would also add coverage for those exposed to radiation from specific manhattan project sites in missouri, washington, ohio and colorado.
young children were the most vulnerable and those in the womb might have had highest risk, per turner, but they are not included in reca, their personhood not recognized even by an administration that argues life begins at conception.
karen day is an example. She was born a month after some of the heaviest nuclear tests. At age 40, she was diagnosed with stage 4 non-hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is covered by reca. She later got breast cancer. But she doesn’t qualify now because she was in the womb during the testing. If turner has her way, day will be a test case.
day learned about reca from dickson, who she met at a dog park years ago. They chatted often while their dogs played together.
the cancer cost her a lot, including hearing loss from treatment and what she calls “chemo brain” that affects her short-term memory. Her oncologist said she may never get back to where it was pre-cancer.
the list of cancers is incomplete, too, dickson and other advocates said. For instance, reca covers ovarian cancer, but not uterine cancer. Testicular cancer isn’t covered for men, which befuddles dickson.
“there was a 4-year-old in my neighborhood when i was little who died of testicular cancer four weeks after his 10-year-old sister died of brain cancer. I stayed in touch with their mother for a long time and brought her to testify at hearings,” dickson said. “She’s gone now. But to lose two little kids in a month ... ”
using her voice
karyn crandall worked with dickson at pbs utah before dickson retired. Cancer has affected more than a dozen close family members, crandall said, some of whom have applied for reca. While she personally won’t see any money, “in my eyes, mary dickson is a saint.” She admires dickson’s intellect and how she carries and expresses herself.
while dickson was a great coworker and boss, she said, her battle for justice for downwinders is a greater legacy.
“that her hard work has brought justice to so many families is quite an accomplishment,” she said. “I am super proud of her and grateful to know her. She’s made a huge impact on lots of people’s families, including mine.”
crandall describes dickson as someone who’s usually smiling, even bubbly. “She doesn’t let people know her personal problems. She’s always so worried about and cares so much about everybody else. Just the fact that she took the time to listen to my story and how it’s affected my family so much over the years was huge to me.”
dickson is still, more than 25 years after she started, finding different ways to talk about being downwind and seeking others who lived it. She recently teamed with a local artist, trent alvey, collecting squares from clothing of downwinders who had cancer. They plan to hang these “radiant remnants” from poles for an exhibit to show both the emotion through words written on the remnants and the sheer number who suffered.
alvey’s both artist and downwinder, raised in mount pleasant in central utah. Most people, she said, have no idea how far around the globe the fallout went. She had breast cancer and her dad had esophageal cancer. She has a list of people she knew that cancer killed.
she applied for reca. She said getting it “would mean i could help my two kids,” but wouldn’t make up for her own suffering battling breast cancer for five years or the loss of loved ones. It would, however, mean “someone acknowledged what i suffered due to government procedures, without getting to the right or wrong of any of that. It simply happened.”
dickson agrees. “I want people to know how widespread the fallout was. It’s vital to know or there’s no incentive to stop it from happening again.”
she added, “my sense is you need your elected officials to be on your side and watch out for you. Josh hawley epitomized what elected officials should do, standing up, not letting it be forgotten. Utah was the hardest hit really and utah elected officials didn’t back it.”
utah’s all-republican congressional delegation opposed hawley’s reca reauthorization bill. It was somewhat modified and later folded into the one big beautiful bill act, which all six voted for.
at the department of justice
the doj is well behind on handling claims and is expected to hire a slew of claims processors soon.
the easy claims are processed first and approved. The others are reportedly being set aside temporarily.
as of june 30, 2026, under the expanded reca the department has approved 6,563 claims total from downwinders, onsite participants, manhattan project waste and uranium workers. Another 33,654 are pending and 5 have been denied.
under the original reca, 42,596 were approved, 14,482 denied and 3 are pending.
the meaning in the misery
when adams of the concerned scientist group called dickson to tell her she would be compensated, dickson cried, though she couldn’t explain why. Adams responded, “because so many people still didn’t get it and because your sister’s still dead.”
when asked what the losses and victories mean, dickson paused to gather her thoughts.
“it’s hard to get everything i’m feeling into something concise,” she said.
“after 30 years of advocating for expansion, finally receiving compensation makes me feel heard. More than the money — which was never my motivation — this is about justice. At long last, more of us are being acknowledged as collateral damage of the cold war. It’s a bittersweet victory. No amount of money can restore our health or bring back the people we’ve lost, but it matters that the government is finally acknowledging the harm it did to its own citizens.”
the greatest honor of her life, she said, has been helping downwinders receive not only restitution for what they and their families have suffered, but also validation that their pain and losses were real. And they matter. |
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| Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination - Luke Ford |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (9 reads) | |
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Cambridge, november 1956. Students from india and ceylon marched through the streets to protest the anglo-french attack on egypt. A crowd of english undergraduates, big men from the boat clubs and rugby fields, fell on them and started swinging. Benedict anderson , twenty years old, a scholarship boy reading classics at king’s college , came upon the scene and tried to pull the attackers off. Someone knocked his glasses from his face. When it was over, the men who had done the beating stood in the street and sang “god save the queen.”
anderson wrote in his memoir that nothing before had made him so angry. The scene held everything he later spent a career trying to understand: empire in its dying years, the racial line running through a university town, and the power of a national song to sanctify violence in the minds of comfortable young men. He had watched an anthem turn a mob into a congregation.
benedict richard o’gorman anderson (1936-2015) became the most influential theorist of nationalism of the late twentieth century. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (1983) gave the social sciences a phrase that escaped its author and now circulates everywhere, applied to fan bases, diasporas, and online forums. The phrase traveled because the insight underneath it answered a question most political theory had dodged. Why do millions of strangers who will never meet feel themselves to be one people, and why will they kill and die for that feeling?
anderson’s answer came out of a life that never sat still inside one country. He was born on august 26, 1936, in kunming, china, where his irish father worked for the chinese maritime customs service, a hybrid institution staffed by europeans collecting duties for the chinese state. His mother was english. The japanese war drove the family out of china in 1941. They meant to reach ireland, but german submarines made the atlantic crossing too dangerous, so they waited out the war in california. After 1945 the family settled in ireland. Anderson kept irish citizenship all his life.
the itinerary produced a boy who belonged nowhere in particular and could see everywhere from a slight angle. He later described himself as an english boy in california, a protestant in catholic ireland, and a scholarship student among the sons of wealth at eton . Each move taught the same lesson. Customs that feel like nature from inside a society look like costume from outside it. His comparative method began as a childhood condition before it became a scholarly practice.
at eton he lived among boys being groomed to run what remained of the empire, and he beat them at their own curriculum. He had started latin at nine and greek at twelve. He added french, german, russian, and spanish, and later taught himself dutch, indonesian, javanese, thai, and tagalog. The classical training left permanent marks. It taught him that words carry histories, that translation loses and distorts, and that grammar can encode rank. Decades later, when he analyzed the speech levels of javanese, in which a speaker must place himself above or below his listener with nearly every sentence, he worked with habits of philological attention first drilled into him over greek particles.
he took a first in classics at king’s college, cambridge, in 1957, with no plan for what came next. A school friend headed into the foreign service had accepted a post as a teaching assistant in the government department at cornell university and could not take it. He offered anderson the slot. Anderson crossed the atlantic to fill a job arranged over a personal connection, knowing nothing about american political science and less about southeast asia.
at cornell he met george mcturnan kahin (1918-2000), who changed the direction of his life. Kahin had written nationalism and revolution in indonesia (1952), the founding american study of the indonesian independence struggle, and had paid for his sympathies during the mccarthy years, when the state department pulled his passport. He ran cornell’s southeast asia program on a demanding creed. A scholar earned the right to write about a country by learning its languages, reading its newspapers and novels, and listening to people who held no office. Kahin pointed anderson toward indonesia, a republic barely a decade out from under dutch rule, crowded with parties, sects, generals, and revolutionary expectations.
anderson went to jakarta at the end of 1961 and stayed through 1964, the high years of sukarno (1901-1970) and his politics of permanent mobilization. He learned indonesian well enough to pass, then went deeper into javanese. His dissertation, finished in 1967 and published as java in a time of revolution: occupation and resistance, 1944-1946 (1972), told the story of the indonesian revolution through the pemuda, the politicized young men whose formation under the japanese occupation shaped the fight against the returning dutch. The book moved between ministries and street fighters, between official speeches and shifts in slang. Anderson treated changes in vocabulary and forms of address as political events, evidence of a generation remaking authority in its own image.
he also went where political scientists did not go. He sat through night-long performances of wayang , the javanese shadow-puppet theater that stages local adaptations of the mahabharata and ramayana. His early monograph mythology and the tolerance of the javanese (1965) read the puppet stage as a political education. Wayang refuses the western sorting of heroes from villains. Refined princes commit crimes. Clowns speak truth. Power and virtue travel separately. Anderson argued that javanese audiences brought these expectations to living politicians, and that a figure like sukarno performed within a repertoire his audiences already knew, the way an american politician might work within the conventions of the sermon or the sales pitch.
the essay that grew from this immersion, “the idea of power in javanese culture,” later collected in language and power: exploring political cultures in indonesia (1990), reconstructed a conception of power foreign to western political science. In this tradition power is a substance rather than a relation, finite in quantity, concentrated in persons, and legible through signs: composure, fertility of the land, order in the realm, a ruler’s command of himself. Anderson did not claim every javanese peasant held this metaphysics. He claimed the grammar survived beneath the vocabulary of the modern republic, shaping what audiences expected power to look like.
then came the catastrophe that split his life in two. On the night of september 30, 1965, junior officers kidnapped and killed six senior indonesian generals. Major general suharto (1921-2008) crushed the movement within days, then used it to destroy the indonesian communist party and push sukarno aside. The army and its civilian allies killed on the order of half a million people, perhaps more. It stands among the great massacres of the century, and for decades it went nearly unexamined in the west because the victims were communists and the killers were allies.
through the winter that followed, anderson, ruth mcvey (b. 1930), and frederick bunnell worked in ithaca from radio monitoring transcripts, indonesian newspapers, and army publications, trying to reconstruct what had happened. The analysis they finished in january 1966 argued that the september 30 movement grew out of conflicts inside the army, and that the communist party had been made a scapegoat. They circulated the study in confidence, afraid publication might get indonesian friends killed. It leaked anyway, reaching the washington post within months, and entered history as the cornell paper . Anderson and mcvey published it in 1971 without substantial revision as a preliminary analysis of the october 1, 1965, coup in indonesia.
the paper attacked the founding myth of suharto’s new order, which rested on the army as savior of the nation from a communist plot. Anderson compounded the offense in person. He attended the show trial of sudisman, the general secretary of the destroyed communist party, and later translated the condemned man’s final address to the court. In 1972 the regime barred him from indonesia. The ban lasted twenty-seven years.
exile made the book that made his name. Shut out of indonesian fieldwork, anderson learned thai and turned to thailand after its dictatorship fell in 1973, and he began thinking comparatively about the force that had organized his whole field of study without ever being explained by it. The late 1970s sharpened the question. Vietnam invaded cambodia. China invaded vietnam. Three states claiming marxist internationalism went to war along national lines. The socialist tradition had treated nationalism as a mask for class interest or a residue awaiting dissolution, and the wars in indochina exposed the poverty of that account. Anderson liked to say he had suharto to thank for imagined communities.
the book defines the nation as an imagined political community, imagined as limited and sovereign. Imagined, because no member of even the smallest nation will ever know more than a fraction of his fellow members, yet each carries an image of their communion. Limited, because every nation ends at a border beyond which other nations live; no nation dreams of enrolling all mankind. Sovereign, because nations were born as dynastic and divine legitimacy decayed, and the sovereign state became the emblem of their freedom. A community, because whatever the inequalities within it, the nation presents itself as a horizontal comradeship, and it is this fraternity that makes it possible for millions to die for it.
readers seized on “imagined” and heard “fake.” Anderson meant the opposite. All communities larger than a village of face-to-face acquaintance are imagined, including churches, classes, and civilizations. Money is imagined. Law is imagined. The question is never whether a community is invented but how. Communities are to be distinguished, he wrote, “by the style in which they are imagined.”
the engine of the national style, in his account, was print capitalism. Printing alone changed little; printing married to the market changed everything. Publishers hunting larger audiences exhausted the thin latin-reading elite and turned to the vernaculars. Commerce, without any nationalist intention, began standardizing languages, elevating some dialects and burying others. Readers of the new print languages became aware of hundreds of thousands of others reading as they read, invisible and unknown, yet somehow together. The languages that later felt like the eternal voice of the nation were the residue of sales strategies, administrative convenience, and accident.
two print commodities taught readers a new experience of time. The newspaper juxtaposes an election, a murder, a shipping notice, and a distant war on one dated page, connected by nothing except the calendar, and so trains its reader to imagine a society of simultaneous events moving together through what walter benjamin called homogeneous, empty time. Anderson, borrowing an image from hegel, described the morning paper as modern man’s substitute for morning prayers, each reader performing the rite in private while certain that unknown thousands perform it with him. The novel does the same work by other means. It follows characters who never meet but who share one social world and one clock, and so rehearses the reader in imagining the life of a nation.
anderson also broke with the assumption that nationalism was born in europe and shipped outward. He gave priority to the americas. Creole elites in the spanish colonies and british north america, men of european descent born in the new world, found their careers blocked at the top by peninsular officials and their imaginations bounded by the administrative units they served. Colonial newspapers and the pilgrimages of colonial careers taught them to imagine peru, venezuela, mexico, and the thirteen colonies as communities. The republics they founded became models. The nation proved modular, available for piracy, adapted in turn by european linguistic movements, by dynasts practicing official nationalism from above, and by the anticolonial movements of asia and africa.
the revised 1991 edition added a chapter that has shaped colonial studies ever since, on the census, the map, and the museum. The census sorted fluid populations into hard boxes of race and religion, and the boxes outlived the counters. The map turned frontier zones and layered sovereignties into colored shapes with sharp edges, and the shape, reprinted on schoolroom walls and stamps, became a logo a child could recognize and love. The museum arranged ruins into a lineage, letting the colonial state pose as guardian of an ancient civilization and letting the nationalists who followed claim the same stones as ancestors. The state did not merely count, chart, and curate what existed. It manufactured the categories through which its subjects came to see themselves.
the chapter of imagined communities that anderson himself thought most misunderstood concerns love. Theorists comfortable explaining national hatred stumble over national love, yet the love is the harder fact. People experience nationality as fate rather than choice, like family, and fatality purifies attachment; there is no merit in loving what one could not have refused, and so no suspicion of interest. The tomb of the unknown soldier, void of any nameable person yet saturated with national meaning, marks the place where nationalism does the work religion once did, turning anonymous death into continuity. Liberalism and marxism speak of progress and interest and fall silent before mortality. The nation speaks of the dead and the unborn. That, anderson argued, is why men die for it.
the theory drew serious fire, and anderson engaged it. Partha chatterjee (b. 1947) asked the sharpest question: if europe and the americas had already scripted the nation as a modular form, what was left for the colonized to imagine except a derivative? Chatterjee argued that anticolonial nationalists in bengal and elsewhere built an inner spiritual domain, in family, religion, and language, before they ever captured the outer machinery of the state, and that this inner sovereignty was their own creation, not a european loan. Ethnosymbolists such as anthony smith argued that nations are built from older ethnic myths and memories that constrain the invention, and that anderson underweighted the inheritance. Others noted that print cannot conscript armies or explain why reading publics should demand sovereignty, and that schools, railways, and barracks deserve more of the story. Feminist scholars observed that the horizontal fraternity was a fraternity, with women cast as the nation’s mothers and emblems rather than its comrades. Anderson conceded ground on some fronts and held it on others. The criticisms narrowed the theory’s claims without displacing its vocabulary. Forty years on, the argument over nations is still conducted in his terms.
his brother sharpened him from the other side of the atlantic. Perry anderson (b. 1938), two years younger, became the commanding intellect of new left review and the historian of european absolutism and western marxism. The brothers shared politics and a contempt for national complacency, and diverged in everything else. Perry built systems from the european archive. Benedict collected jokes, stamps, cemetery inscriptions, cartoons, and grammar books from the tropics, and distrusted any theory that had never left its own language. The division of labor served them both. Perry read and argued over drafts of benedict’s work on nationalism, and readers of the two can watch one family conduct a forty-year seminar on power.
students at cornell knew a different anderson from the one in the footnotes. He taught by interrogation, pressed his students into hard languages, and turned his seminar into a place where a first-year graduate student was expected to attack imagined communities to its author’s face and defend the attack. He helped sustain the journal indonesia, which published the young and the heterodox alongside the established. In his memoir he passed on an indonesian proverb as a warning to the profession: the frog under the coconut shell, who sits in the dark and takes the shell for the sky. Area studies, he thought, saved him from the shell, and monolingual theory built shells by the thousand.
the ban had one more effect. It pushed him toward the philippines, and the philippines pushed his theory outward. He learned tagalog and spanish well enough to live inside the world of josé rizal (1861-1896), the novelist the spanish shot and the filipinos made a national saint. From rizal’s novel noli me tangere he took the phrase that named his 1998 collection, the spectre of comparisons. Rizal’s hero, looking at the botanical gardens of manila, cannot stop seeing the gardens of europe behind them, and the doubled vision poisons the innocence of home. Anderson knew the demon personally. China, california, ireland, england, java, bangkok, and manila had left him unable to see any country as simply itself, and he turned the affliction into a method.
under three flags: anarchism and the anti-colonial imagination (2005) completed the turn. The book follows rizal, the folklorist isabelo de los reyes, and the propagandist mariano ponce through a late nineteenth century wired together by telegraph cables, steamships, and the international press, where filipino exiles in madrid and paris read anarchist papers, corresponded with cuban rebels, and coordinated sedition by post. The nation, the book showed, was born global. The men who invented filipino nationalism did it abroad, in other people’s languages, inside international networks of radicals and readers. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism, supposed opposites, arrived on the same boats.
translation ran through all of it as practice and as principle. Anderson translated indonesian, thai, and tagalog writers, championed pramoedya ananta toer (1925-2006) while suharto held him in the buru prison camp, recovered the multilingual indonesian chinese journalist kwee thiam tjing from oblivion, and in his last years promoted the novelist eka kurniawan (b. 1975) to anglophone readers. Translation kept him honest. A man who has fought a javanese sentence into english does not assume that “power” or “freedom” mean the same thing everywhere, and anderson held that the struggle was the best inoculation against bad theory.
suharto fell in may 1998. The following year anderson came back. In a packed hall in jakarta he stood before an audience of students and activists, most of them born after his expulsion, many of them raised on smuggled photocopies of his banned work, and addressed them in fluent indonesian on the future of indonesian nationalism. He did not flatter them. He told them their nationalism had been stolen by the state and dared them to take it back on behalf of the poor. The lecture circulated across the archipelago. The country that had locked him out for twenty-seven years now claimed him.
he retired from cornell in 2002 as aaron l. Binenkorb professor of international studies emeritus and split his years between upstate new york and southeast asia, keeping an apartment life in bangkok, writing on thai politics and buddhist asceticism, filipino novels, and the fate of the left. The memoir he wrote first for japanese readers, a life beyond boundaries (2016), defends the slow disciplines, language above all, against an academy that rewards fast theory produced at a distance.
on december 10, 2015, he lectured on anarchism and nationalism at the university of indonesia outside jakarta, then traveled east through java with indonesian friends, revisiting the landscapes of his fieldwork half a century before. On the night of december 12 he went to sleep in a hotel in batu, in the highlands of east java, and did not wake. He was seventy-nine. His friends carried his ashes out onto the java sea and scattered them, at his wish, in the waters off the country that had formed him, banished him, and taken him back.
the obituaries called him the theorist of the imagined community, and the phrase will outlive every correction filed against it. His deeper legacy is a stance. Anderson refused both available pieties about nations, the nationalist’s claim that they are ancient organisms and the debunker’s claim that they are elite frauds. Nations are constructions that became real, he argued, because people live, remember, love, and die inside them, and a construction people die for demands understanding, not a sneer. He gave the study of nationalism its method as well: learn the language, read the newspapers and the novels, sit through the puppet play, distrust any theory that has never been homesick. Once another country has made your own look strange, no nation can ever again seem self-evident. Anderson lived that condition from kunming onward and turned it into the sharpest eye his field has had.
notes
the suez scene comes from a life beyond boundaries (verso, 2016), where anderson describes trying to stop english “hearties” from attacking indian and ceylonese demonstrators, having his glasses knocked off, and hearing the attackers sing the national anthem. He says the incident angered him as nothing had before. Verify his wording: verso . Several obituaries retell the incident, including the guardian ’s obituary of december 15, 2015: benedict anderson obituary .
the “frogs under the coconut shell” proverb also comes from the memoir, where anderson applies it to parochial scholars.
for the sudisman material, anderson attended the trial in jakarta and translated the final speech, which cornell’s modern indonesia project published as sudisman’s analysis of responsibility , translated by anderson, in 1975. The trial took place in 1967, and the formal ban on anderson’s return to indonesia came in 1972. I kept the sequence loose in the text, but confirm the dates through cornell ecommons and the cornell chronicle obituary: “benedict anderson, ‘imagined communities’ author, dies” .
the 1999 jakarta lecture was “indonesian nationalism today and in the future,” delivered after his return and published in indonesia no. 67 in april 1999. My characterization that he told the audience their nationalism had been captured by the state and challenged them to reclaim it on behalf of the poor tracks the published text, but read it before retaining the sentence that he “dared them”: cornell’s indonesia archive . Search for “indonesian nationalism today and in the future.” The detail that audience members had grown up reading photocopies of his banned work appears in indonesian press coverage of the visit and in tributes after his death.
the death sequence is as follows. Anderson delivered his final lecture at the university of indonesia in depok on december 10, 2015, speaking about anarchism and nationalism. He died in his sleep in batu, east java, during the night of december 12–13. His ashes were later scattered in the java sea. The lecture and his death are covered in the new york times obituary of december 14, 2015: “benedict anderson, scholar who saw nations as ‘imagined,’ dies at 79” . The scattering of his ashes at sea appears in later tributes, including perry anderson’s memorial in new left review 97 (2016) and an essay in jacobin . Confirm the evidence before retaining the claim that this was done “at his wish.”
the detail that the state department withdrew george mcturnan kahin’s passport during the mccarthy years appears in kahin’s obituaries and cornell records: “george mcturnan kahin dies at 82” .
the quoted fragment “by the style in which they are imagined” comes from chapter 1 of imagined communities . The hegel-derived image of newspaper reading as a modern morning prayer and walter benjamin’s phrase “homogeneous, empty time” appear in chapters 1 and 2. The quip that anderson had suharto “to thank” appears in the memoir and in interviews. I paraphrased it rather than quoting it.
the extrapolations for which i did not supply links, but which i judge safe, concern the character of the chinese maritime customs service, the social texture of eton and cornell’s southeast asia program, the description of wayang performance, and the reading of josé rizal’s botanical-garden passage, which appears in chapter 1 of the spectre of comparisons .
the exile’s hero system: benedict anderson and the denial of death
ernest becker (1924-1974) lay in a vancouver hospital ward in february 1974 with cancer through his body and a tape recorder running. Sam keen (b. 1931) had flown up for psychology today to conduct the last interview. Becker told him the timing had a certain rightness to it. Keen had caught him, he said, “in extremis,” at the moment when everything he had written about death faced its test. He talked for hours, lucid, wry, dying in character. Two months after his death the denial of death won the pulitzer prize. The committee handed a dead man the reward his book said all men chase: a name that outlasts the body.
becker’s argument fits in a paragraph and takes a lifetime to absorb. Man is the animal that knows it will die and cannot live with the knowledge. Culture exists to manage the terror. Every society is a shared drama of significance, a structure of roles and ranks through which a man can feel himself an object of primary value in a universe of meaning, a contributor to something that does not rot. Becker called this structure a hero system. “Society itself is a codified hero system,” he wrote. The businessman building a firm, the mother raising sons, the monk mortifying his flesh, the professor compiling footnotes: each performs heroism as his culture defines it, and each performance is a bid for immortality by other means. The systems differ. The hunger under them does not.
nine years after becker died, a political scientist banned from indonesia published a book whose emotional center is a tomb. Benedict anderson never cites becker in imagined communities, and there is no evidence he needed him. He had reached the same nerve from the other side of the world. His question was the one that had embarrassed liberal and marxist theory alike: why do men die for nations, communities of strangers they will never meet? His answer was that the nation had inherited religion’s oldest job. Where liberalism speaks of interests and marxism of classes, the nation speaks of the dead and the unborn. It converts the accident of birth into destiny and the fatality of death into continuity. Its purest shrine is the tomb of the unknown soldier, empty of any nameable man and saturated with immortal meaning. Anderson found becker’s engine in the archive, without the psychoanalysis, and described its national model more concretely than becker ever managed.
becker’s rule admits no exemptions. The analyst of hero systems has one. The man who explains why others chase immortality is chasing it in the explanation. So the question this essay asks is the one anderson’s admirers skip. What was his?
start with what he counted as heroism. In anderson’s cosmology a man earned significance by crossing. He began latin at nine and greek at twelve, added french, german, russian, and spanish as a schoolboy, taught himself dutch for the colonial archive, mastered indonesian in his twenties, javanese after that, thai in his forties when indonesia locked him out, tagalog and spanish past fifty for the sake of a novelist executed in 1896. Each language was an entry fee paid to another world, and the payment had to hurt. Quick acquisition earned nothing in his system. The years of humiliation, the misplaced honorific in javanese that insults a host, the joke that dies in translation, these were the ordeals that certified the crossing, the way lost toes certify the mountaineer.
the system had its saints. José rizal, who wrote the philippines into existence in spanish and took a firing squad for it. Pramoedya ananta toer, who composed novels aloud to fellow prisoners on buru island when the camp denied him paper. Kwee thiam tjing, the indonesian chinese journalist who wrote in a mongrel prose of malay, javanese, dutch, and hokkien, and whom the national canon forgot because he fit no national box. Anderson translated the dead and the silenced back into circulation, and here his hero system shows its distinctive engineering. Becker says every man seeks a self that persists beyond the body. Anderson’s heroic act was to confer that persistence on others. Translation, in his drama, was a raising of the dead.
the system had its coward. Anderson passed on an indonesian proverb as a professional curse: the frog under the coconut shell, who sits in the dark and takes the shell for the sky. The monoglot theorist, the desk orientalist, the professor who processes the world through english and calls the residue universal, this figure held the place in anderson’s moral universe that the coward holds in a warrior’s and the apostate holds in a believer’s. The judgment looks like method. Underneath, it is theology. The frog is damned because he refused the ordeal on which the whole economy of significance runs.
and the system had its wound. In 1972 suharto’s regime barred anderson from indonesia, and the ban ran twenty-seven years. Measure the same event inside two hero systems and watch the meaning change. Inside the academic career system, the one that counts grants, access, and cited work, the ban was a catastrophe: a fieldwork scholar severed from his field at thirty-five. Inside anderson’s system it was a decoration. The regime that murdered half a million people had certified that his sentences told the truth at a price. He wore the ban the way an old soldier wears a scar, and he liked to say he had suharto to thank for imagined communities. The joke carried the system’s accounting: exile was the tuition, the book was the degree.
hold that word, exile, up to the light and turn it. Becker’s framework predicts what happens: the word will refuse to mean one thing, because meaning is minted inside a hero system and the coin does not convert at par.
to the old man on calle ocho in miami, exile means vigil. He left cuba in 1961 with a law degree that became a parking receipt, and his heroism consists of refusal. He has not gone back, he will not go back while they hold it, and the deferral is the badge. His drama assigns significance to waiting, and a man who returned to havana for a beach holiday would be, inside that drama, a small traitor to the dead.
to the tibetan monk in dharamsala, exile means custody. The civilization lives in his memory and his ritual hands, and his heroic task is to carry it uncorrupted until the mountains open. Time works differently in his system; a half century is an episode.
to the oil-company manager in a singapore tower, exile is a word he uses at dinner parties for a posting that came with a housing allowance and school fees. His hero system is the corporation’s, heroism is the number at year’s end, and the distance from home is hardship pay, already priced.
anderson’s exile matched none of these. It was consecration. The banished witness outranks the accredited insider, and the twenty-seven years were the proof of witness. Four men, one word, four currencies.
run the same experiment on language, the most sacred term in his lexicon. In the spring of any year, at the missionary training center in provo, utah, a nineteen-year-old from idaho sits in a fluorescent classroom learning tagalog, the same tongue anderson took up in his fifties. The boy gets nine weeks. His teachers are returned missionaries barely older than he is, the vocabulary lists run to baptism and repentance, and the pace is brutal because the language is an instrument of salvation, to be spent like ammunition over two years in manila and then, mostly, let go. Inside his hero system, the church’s, the language has served its purpose if a family enters the water. Fluency for its own sake would be a vanity.
anderson’s tagalog obeyed opposite laws. Slow, literary, historical, acquired to read a dead novelist in the original and to hear what spanish had done to the islands, it was an end and a sacrament. Neither man is confused. The missionary is right inside his drama and anderson inside his. The word language names two different heroic acts.
add the grandmother in astoria whose grandchildren answer her greek in english. For her the language is blood, and each english answer is a small funeral, because her hero system is the family line and the line is losing its tongue. Add the strategy consultant for whom languages are a line on slide forty, dead weight next to english, an interpreter a cost center; his heroism lives in the closed deal, and anderson’s decades over javanese would strike him, if he thought about it at all, as a hobby that got out of hand. Add the hebrew revivalist, heir of eliezer ben-yehuda (1858-1922), for whom the heroic act was forcing a liturgical language to carry groceries and quarrels, resurrection performed on the tongue of an entire people. Five hero systems, five languages called language.
the word death splits the same way, and here the stakes rise, because death is what every hero system exists to manage. Anderson’s account says men die for the nation because the nation promises that dying joins them to the unbroken procession of the dead and the unborn. The combat literature complicates him from below. Interviewers have worked over soldiers since the 1940s, from the wehrmacht studies of 1948 through every american war since, and the sentence that keeps coming back is some version of the same one: i didn’t do it for the flag, i did it for the guys next to me. At the moment of fire the immortality vehicle shrinks to the squad. The nation supplies the war, the training, the tomb afterward; the dying gets done inside a brotherhood of eight. Becker might reply that the squad is a hero system in miniature, the smallest community a man can disappear into, and that the flag and the fire team are nested vessels for the same terror.
set beside the rifleman the software engineer in san francisco who has signed the cryonics paperwork and gives ten percent to longevity research. Inside his hero system death has no dignity to exchange. It is a bug, an engineering failure his generation might be the last to suffer, and the idea of dying for something reads to him as a category error, the way burning money honors no one. And set beside him the confucian eldest son in taipei, sweeping the family graves at qingming, for whom death is a change of address within the lineage. He will be fed and remembered as he feeds and remembers, and his immortality runs through sons performing rites, an arrangement anderson’s nation partly copied and scaled to millions. The soldier, the engineer, the son, and anderson’s citizen at the tomb are strangers to one another across the same six letters.
this is the point the hero-system essays keep circling and this one should land on directly. There is no neutral floor under these words. Sacrifice, exile, language, death, each takes its meaning from the drama a man is starring in, and the dramas are plural, simultaneous, and mutually illegible at the core. Anderson knew this better than almost anyone alive, because his life’s work was a study of how one drama, the national one, builds its meanings and gets strangers to die inside them. What he could not do, because no one can, was resign from drama as such.
watch his final act with becker’s eyes. In 1999, suharto gone, the visa granted, anderson walked into a packed jakarta hall and lectured in indonesian to students who had grown up on photocopies of his banned pages. Hero systems rarely pay out while the hero lives; his did. The occasion has a name in older vocabularies: the return of the exile, the vindication scene, the beatification. He told the students their nationalism had been stolen by the state and challenged them to take it back for the poor, which is to say he performed his heroism one more time, the outsider telling the inside its truth.
sixteen years later he lectured on anarchism and nationalism outside jakarta, traveled east through java past the landscapes of his fieldwork, went to sleep in a hill town called batu, and did not wake. Indonesians mourned him as om ben, uncle ben, a kinship term extended to a foreigner, and his friends carried his ashes onto the java sea and gave them to the water. Consider what the machinery did with him. The country that expelled him absorbed him. Strangers grieved in a language he had crossed into by decades of labor. The theorist of imagined communities finished as a minor immortal inside one, his death assigned a place in another nation’s story, mourned by thousands who felt they knew a man they had never met. The process he had anatomized, the one that turns anonymous death into collective continuity, processed him without irony and without asking.
becker held that a hero system works only while it stays invisible to the man inside it, a vital lie the psyche protects. Anderson stands as a partial exception, which is the most anyone gets. Exile handed him the outside view of every national drama including the ones that raised him, and he built comparison into a discipline for catching communities in the act of imagining. He saw further into the machinery than the machinery usually permits. Then he chose his seat in it anyway, played the crossing hero for sixty years, took the wound, banked the vindication, and let the sea off java close over what was left. The choice was not a failure of his theory. It was the theory’s last demonstration. A man can learn what the dramas are made of. He still has to be in one to die well.
bodies in rooms: benedict anderson, randall collins, and the ritual theory hidden inside print
go back to the cambridge street in november 1956 and watch it again, this time counting ingredients. Bodies assembled in one place: the marchers from india and ceylon, the english athletes who fell on them, the bystanders pulled in. A boundary marking who belongs: drawn in the oldest way, by skin, and enforced with fists. A single focus of attention: the beating, which no one on that street could look away from. A shared mood: rage on one side, fear on the other, each feeding the other. Then, when the marchers were down and the work was done, the men who did it stood together and sang the national anthem, voices finding one rhythm, and walked away taller than they came.
a sociologist in california later spent a career explaining what happened in that street. Randall collins (b. 1941) built his theory of interaction ritual chains from Émile durkheim (1858-1917) by way of erving goffman (1922-1982), and its core claims fit in a page. When human bodies gather with a barrier against outsiders, a mutual focus of attention, and a shared mood, the participants entrain, rhythm catching rhythm in voice and gesture and glance, and the entrainment generates what durkheim called collective effervescence. The effervescence pays out in four currencies: solidarity in the group, emotional energy in the individual, moral standards that make violation of the group feel like sacrilege, and sacred objects. A flag, a phrase, a face, a book absorbs the charge of the assembly and holds it, a battery for group feeling. The battery drains. Symbols keep their power only as long as fresh assemblies recharge them, and social life is a chain of such assemblies, each person carrying charge from the last gathering into the next. After september 11, collins counted flags on american houses and watched national solidarity spike and then decay over roughly three months as the assemblies thinned. For collins the macro world of nations and institutions has no separate existence. It is chains of situations, bodies in rooms, all the way up.
the men in the cambridge street ran a complete interaction ritual. The beating gave the focus, the anthem gave the entrainment, the singing charged the flag inside each singer, and every man left with more emotional energy than he brought. Collins would add one refinement anderson might have appreciated: rituals also forge their victims. The twenty-year-old with the smashed glasses walked away charged in the opposite direction, loaded with an anger he said exceeded anything he had felt, and that counter-charge ran a sixty-year chain of its own.
here is the friction, and it is real. Imagined communities stands as the great anti-collins theory of nationalism. Anderson’s nation is sustained by print: by novels and newspapers consumed alone, by millions of readers imagining one another rather than meeting. His famous image makes the solitude explicit. The newspaper reader performs his morning ceremony, anderson writes, “in the lair of the skull,” aware of unseen thousands performing it with him but sharing a room with none of them. Simultaneity in the theory is imagined, calendrical, a matter of shared clock time rather than shared breath. Collins’s framework issues a blunt verdict on this picture. Solitary media consumption is a weak ritual at best. No co-presence, no feedback, no entrainment, minimal charge. A community sustained only by private reading might resemble a mailing list. It might not field an army. If anderson is right about how nations live, collins’s micro-sociology has a hole in it. If collins is right about where solidarity comes from, the print theory of nationalism explains the wrong layer.
the argument of this essay is that anderson’s own evidence sides with collins, and that anderson half knew it. A ritual theory runs through his work from the first monograph to the last lecture, unnamed, doing the load-bearing work while print gets the credit. Read his best scenes with collins’s checklist in hand and the pattern comes up page after page.
start where anderson started, in the dark in java. Wayang is not reading. A performance begins in the evening and runs to dawn, a village or a neighborhood gathered on both sides of a lit screen, the dalang working the puppets and voicing every character for nine hours while the gamelan keeps the pulse underneath. Every collins ingredient sits in the scene at maximum strength. Bodies packed together through the night. A boundary of language and repertoire that no outsider can cross, as anderson the fieldworker learned by the years it cost him to cross it. One glowing focus of attention. A mood that the dalang tunes for hours, comedy against dread, and a rhythmic engine underneath entraining hundreds of nervous systems at once. Anderson read wayang as a political vocabulary, a stock of characters through which javanese audiences judged refinement, power, and rule, and the reading holds. But a vocabulary is a set of symbols, and collins’s question is where symbols get their voltage. Arjuna could serve sukarno as a template because ten thousand nights of gamelan and shared darkness had charged arjuna in javanese bodies. Sukarno drew on a battery that assemblies had been filling for centuries. Anderson described the battery and skipped the charging.
take the newspaper next, on anderson’s own terms. His metaphor for the morning paper was already ritual: a mass ceremony, the secular heir of morning prayer, an image he borrowed from hegel. Collins would point out what the borrowing conceals. Prayer, in the world the image comes from, was collective. The congregation stood and knelt and responded in one rhythm, and that rhythm, on durkheim’s account, was where god’s felt reality came from. A man reading alone performs a ceremony from which the congregation has been subtracted, and collins’s theory says the subtraction costs almost everything. But watch what newspapers did in the world rather than in the theory. They were read aloud in cafés to the illiterate. They were argued over in barbershops, warung, union halls, officers’ messes. Every edition scheduled ten thousand small assemblies by giving scattered talkers the same object of attention on the same morning. Print did not replace the gathering. Print synchronized the gatherings and stocked them. The genius of print capitalism, restated in collins’s terms, was the mass production of mutual focus, the one ritual ingredient that had never scaled before. The other ingredients, bodies and barriers and mood, remained as local as they had been in the village, and there the charging went on.
the tomb of the unknown soldier makes the cleanest test. Anderson placed it at the emotional center of nationalism, the empty tomb saturated with national meaning, and asked what kind of community could make such an object. Collins would ask a prior question: on which days does the tomb work? Stand at a cenotaph on an ordinary tuesday and it is stone traffic passes. Stand there on the november morning when the crowd assembles, the veterans hold their line, the bugle sounds, and an entire country goes silent for two minutes, millions of bodies synchronized in the one act a nation can perform in perfect unison, doing nothing together at the same instant. That is the recharge. The tomb holds meaning between novembers the way a flag holds it between wars, on charge banked by assembled bodies. Anderson explained what the tomb means. Collins explains when.
then there is the passage where anderson catches the engine in his hands and sets it down. Late in imagined communities, discussing patriotism, he pauses over the experience of singing national anthems, strangers voicing the same words to the same melody at the same moment, and coins a word for it: unisonance. The experience struck him as the physical realization of the imagined community, the one occasion when the community of strangers stops being imagined and becomes audible, each singer hearing the others inside his own voice. The passage runs a paragraph and leads nowhere in the book’s architecture. It is a stray observation in a theory of print. In collins’s architecture it is the whole building. Entrainment of voices in co-presence is the paradigm interaction ritual, the strongest known generator of solidarity, the thing the cambridge mob reached for the moment its violence needed sanctifying. Anderson touched the mechanism his own theory lacked, named it, marveled at it, and returned to his newspapers. The smuggled ritual theory surfaces in that paragraph and nowhere gets its name.
the pattern extends past the books into the life, which offers a private laboratory for collins’s claims. The cornell paper was not produced by print circulation. Three scholars worked for months in closed rooms in an ithaca winter, radio transcripts and clippings spread between them, sworn to confidentiality because indonesian lives hung on it. Collins’s checklist again, at high intensity: co-presence, a hard barrier against outsiders, ferocious mutual focus, a shared mood of urgency and dread. Secrecy, in ritual terms, is barrier raised to maximum, and it charges whatever sits inside the circle. The document that emerged carried that charge for decades, a sacred object of the field, photocopied and passed hand to hand in indonesia like contraband scripture, which in collins’s terms is what it was. And the cornell seminar around anderson ran as a textbook ritual chain. The weekly assembly, the master presiding, the initiates required to attack the master’s book to his face, the charge each student carried out of the room into a career. Ask his students what they took from him and they describe an energy, which is collins’s own unit of account.
the jakarta hall in 1999 closes the chain. For twenty-seven years the banned pages had circulated in indonesia as photocopies, symbols holding charge between rituals, batteries passed among students who gathered in private to read them, and the gathering, ritually speaking, did as much as the reading. Then the exile walked onto the stage, the hall packed past capacity, every eye on one man, one mood in the room, and spoke to them in their language. Print had carried his name across the ban. Only the assembly could do what happened next, and everyone who was there talks about the room, the crowd, the feeling, before they talk about the argument. The lecture then went out in print and seeded the next round of gatherings. Ritual charges the symbol, print carries the symbol, the next assembly recharges it. That circuit, run for two centuries at the scale of millions, is a nation.
honesty requires the concession that saves anderson. Collins explains voltage and cannot explain perimeter. Rituals generate intense solidarity in rooms, and nothing in the micro-sociology says why the chain of rooms stops at the rhine or the timor sea, why the strangers a frenchman is prepared to die among number sixty million and speak french. Anderson explains the perimeter. Print capitalism drew the outer boundary of who could share a focus object, which dialects got welded into one reading public, which populations came to see themselves inside one calendar and one map. Print set the size of the congregation. Assembly supplied the heat. Extension without intensity gives a postal district. Intensity without extension gives a village. The nation required both, and each theorist held one half while writing as if he held the whole.
so the correction to imagined communities is friendly and structural. The nation is an interaction ritual chain running on mass-produced focus objects, imagined in the intervals and embodied at the nodes, and the imagining draws down charge that only bodies in rooms put in. Anderson’s material knew this even where his theory declined to. His career began in a street where singing sanctified a beating, passed through nine-hour nights in front of a lit screen, and ended in front of assembled indonesians who had waited twenty-seven years to be in a room with him. When he died among them, the mourning was not conducted by newspaper. People gathered, in jakarta and ithaca and bangkok, and did what gathered people do for their dead. The man who taught everyone that nations are imagined spent his life, scene by scene, demonstrating where the imagination gets its power. You have to stand together to sing.
the scholarship boy’s portfolio: benedict anderson in bourdieu’s mirror
two boys, born six years apart at opposite ends of the world, learned the same trick. Pierre bourdieu (1930-2002), son of a postman turned café keeper in a béarn village where people spoke gascon, won his way to the École normale supérieure and mastered the language of the parisian elite more completely than the elite’s own children. Benedict anderson, son of a customs official, born in china, parked in california, raised partly in ireland, took a scholarship to eton and beat the sons of the empire at latin and greek, the code their class had invented to mark itself. Bourdieu turned his double vision into a sociology: the outsider inside sees the game as a game, because nothing in his body lets him mistake it for nature. He called his condition a cleft habitus and said it hurt and paid. Anderson never used the term. He lived it, and he spent a career doing to nations what bourdieu did to french taste, showing the natural to be built. What neither man could fully do is the thing this essay attempts: turn the instrument on anderson.
the toolkit in brief. Bourdieu pictures social life as a set of fields, each a game with its own stakes, its own currency, its own rules for who counts. Players hold capital in several forms: money, credentials, languages, manners, connections, reputation. Capital converts across fields at varying exchange rates, and the deepest strategies are conversions, moving holdings from a market where they are cheap to one where they are dear. Every field euphemizes its interests; the academic field runs on the belief, sincere and useful at once, that its players seek truth rather than position, and bourdieu’s wager was that the two pursuits are the same actions described at different altitudes. In the fields of art and scholarship, he added, the ordinary economy runs backward. He described the artistic field as “the economic world reversed”: short-run sacrifice buys long-run standing, and he who loses wins.
now run anderson’s career through the machine.
his first holding was classical philology, the purest form of incorporated capital the british elite could issue: begun at nine, compounded daily for a decade, impossible to buy late or fast. By 1957 that asset was depreciating in its home market. The empire that had used greek verse composition to sort its administrators was liquidating, and a classics first from king’s pointed toward schoolmastering or the civil service of a shrinking state. Anderson executed, half by accident, the conversion of his life. He carried the philological habitus, the trained ear for register and rank inside a sentence, the patience for grammars, across the atlantic into a field that was almost brand new.
american area studies in 1958 was a bull market. The cold war state and the ford foundation were pouring money into knowledge of asia; the national defense education act had just made exotic languages a national security expenditure; and the field was so young that a talented entrant faced no incumbents. George kahin’s cornell program held near-monopoly authority over the study of indonesia and needed exactly what anderson carried: a linguistic engine that could be pointed at indonesian and javanese and run for years without seizing. The eton and cambridge titles paid a premium on arrival, since mid-century american academia priced british polish above par. Within a decade the depreciating classical portfolio had been converted into commanding stock in a growth field. None of this was cynical, and that is bourdieu’s point, the one his readers keep missing. The player’s investment in the game, the illusio, is sincere. Anderson loved the languages. The love and the strategy were one motion.
the cornell paper is where the reversed economy shows its logic. In january 1966 anderson held a junior scholar’s standard ambitions and a field site that his career required. The paper he wrote with ruth mcvey attacked the founding narrative of the regime that controlled access to that site, and it crossed a second orthodoxy at home, the cold war political science that served the american state and had little appetite for hearing that washington’s new ally had built its throne on scapegoats and mass graves. The heresy was priced quickly. Indonesia banned him in 1972, severing a fieldwork scholar from his field at thirty-five, a sanction that in the normal economy reads as ruin.
in the reversed economy it was the purchase of a lifetime. The ban certified the one quality the scholarly field values above productivity: disinterestedness. Here was proof, stamped by a dictatorship, that anderson’s sentences obeyed no career logic, since they had cost him the dearest asset he held. Symbolic capital, in bourdieu’s account, is capital whose origin in interest has been successfully forgotten, and nothing launders interest like visible sacrifice. For twenty-seven years anderson held a credential no rival could acquire without matching the payment: the banished witness, the man suharto feared. When imagined communities appeared, its authority arrived pre-charged. Losing indonesia won him the world.
the family completes the portfolio. Perry anderson had built, at new left review and its imprint verso, one of the few consecrating apparatuses the anglophone left possessed, a machine for deciding which books counted. The brothers had divided the intellectual field between them with the neatness of a cartel that never needed a meeting: perry took europe, theory, the long structural view; benedict took asia, the vernacular, the archive of the particular. Proximate positions compete and adjacent ones reinforce, and the anderson brothers were adjacent everywhere and proximate nowhere. Imagined communities grew out of arguments inside the family firm, above all the debate with tom nairn (1932-2023) over nationalism running through the review, and it was published by verso, refereed and amplified by the very apparatus his brother had spent two decades building. The book’s ideas earned their standing. The distribution network that carried them was social capital of the oldest kind, a brother.
the book’s timing was a market read of genius, conscious or not. It appeared in 1983, as marxism’s intellectual credit collapsed, offering the post-marxist left a way to keep its subject and change its tools: nationalism explained through print, time, and imagination rather than class, materialist enough to feel continuous, culturalist enough to feel new. Fields reward the position-taking that resolves the field’s current crisis, and anderson’s resolved the biggest one on the left’s board.
so far the analysis flatters its subject; sacrifice, conversion, timing, all can be read as virtue rewarded. The frame earns its keep at the next turn.
consider the entry fee anderson set for his field. A scholar earned the right to speak about a country, in his repeated formulation, by years inside its languages, and the man who theorized from english alone was the frog under the coconut shell. Read as morality, the demand is austere and self-denying. Read as field strategy, it is a barrier to entry, and a nearly perfect one. Language capital of the kind anderson held cannot be bought, delegated, or acquired in less than years; it shelters early investors absolutely; and every rise in the requirement raised the value of his own holdings while thinning future competition. The fast-moving rivals it excluded, the rational-choice modelers and grand theorists colonizing political science, were exactly the players whose capital threatened his. Bourdieu’s rule holds without exception: the qualities a field’s incumbents praise as virtue are the qualities the incumbents happen to possess, and the praise is sincere, which is what makes it work. Anderson moralized his moat. The stamps, the puppets, the cemetery inscriptions did parallel work as distinction, marking a sensibility that theory-fashion could neither anticipate nor imitate, the connoisseur’s refusal of the game that scores inside the game.
and then the field played its joke on him. Of everything anderson produced, the item that conquered the academy was the one commodity in his shop that required no languages at all. “Imagined community” travels friction-free. A sociologist of online fandom, a marketing scholar, a literary theorist who has never opened a grammar can cite it, apply it, build a career on it, and tens of thousands have. The concept he minted from decades of javanese and thai and tagalog became the monoglot’s favorite tool, the coconut shell’s best-loved decoration. His last decades read, in this light, as boundary-work by a man watching his product circulate stripped of its entry fee: the corrections, the complaints about promiscuous use of the phrase, the memoir written to re-attach the price tag, to insist that the book had come from somewhere, from languages and years and a ban. The field consecrated him on terms opposite to his teaching, and he spent his emeritus years contesting the terms of his own consecration.
bourdieu would recognize every move, having made most of them himself, the provincial who conquered paris and then wrote homo academicus to expose the game he had won. And bourdieu supplies the caution the essay owes its subject. Field analysis explains positions and cannot price stakes. The cornell paper was heresy that purchased consecration, and it was also three people in a room trying to establish who organized a massacre, weighing publication against the lives of named friends. The half million dead were not chips. Nor was the moat merely a moat. The era’s most consequential monoglots sat in the pentagon, quantifying a country none of them could speak to, and vietnam is what their expertise built. The language requirement protected anderson’s position, and it also guarded a truth with a body count: knowledge of other people’s countries produced without their languages tends to be wrong, and wrong at scale kills. Bourdieu never claimed that interest falsifies belief. His claim was harder, that the two are inseparable, that a man defends the truth and his position in one gesture and cannot, from inside, tell the gestures apart. Anderson’s whole method rested on the same insight applied to nations. It applies to scholarship boys, both of them, all the way down.
the tribe and the newspaper: anderson, mearsheimer, and the question of what nations are made of
in the winter of 1978 vietnam invaded cambodia, and in february 1979 china invaded vietnam to punish it. Three states ruled by communist parties, three governments professing an ideology that named the workers of the world as the real community, went to war along national lines, and benedict anderson opened imagined communities with the spectacle. The wars were the prompt for the book. Marxism had predicted nationalism’s death for a century and now marxist armies were killing each other under national flags, and anderson drew the conclusion his tradition had refused: nationalism was the strongest political force alive, and the left had built its house without studying the ground.
twenty-five years later an american realist watched a different universalism repeat the experiment. The united states after 1989 set out to remake the world in liberalism’s image, wars included, on the premise that people everywhere were rights-bearing individuals waiting for delivery from their circumstances. John j. Mearsheimer (b. 1947), west point graduate, air force officer, then for four decades the university of chicago’s resident scourge of liberal foreign policy, watched the project break on iraq and afghanistan, where the deliverees turned out to be members of nations, sects, and tribes that fought the deliverance. The great delusion: liberal dreams and international realities (2018) is his autopsy, and its deepest chapter is anthropology rather than strategy. “We are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives,” he writes. Individualism is secondary. People are born into groups that shape their identities before reason wakes, they develop fierce attachments to those groups, and they sometimes die for them. Of the three sources of human preferences, innate sentiment, socialization, and reason, reason ranks last. Survival drives the arrangement: the individual lives through the group that protects him, so loyalty to the group is not a sentiment layered over self-interest. It is self-interest, in the only form the species has ever reliably practiced. Nationalism, on this account, is the political expression of standing human equipment, and liberalism keeps losing to it because a theory of atoms keeps meeting a world of tribes.
so the two men agree on the phenomenon and its power, and each earned the agreement the same way, watching a universalist creed he knew from inside get its teeth broken. They even agree on the boundary. Anderson’s definition builds it in: the nation is imagined as limited, and no nation dreams of becoming “coterminous with mankind.” The boundedness that liberal universalism treats as a defect to be overcome, both men treat as constitutive. Almost nobody has put them in one room, because the disciplines keep them apart, constructivist southeast asianists in one wing, realists in another. Put them in the room and the fight starts immediately, and it is a fight worth having, because the question under it is what nations are made of.
mearsheimer’s nation is old. The tribe scaled up. Humans have lived in survival groups since before they were fully human, the disposition to bond with insiders and fear outsiders is written in the body, and the nation is the form the disposition takes when the group grows to millions and acquires a state. Anderson’s nation is young. It has a birth certificate, late eighteenth century, and a list of preconditions: print capitalism to weld dialects into reading publics, the novel and the newspaper to teach millions the experience of moving together through calendar time, the decay of sacred languages and divine kingship to clear the ground. Before those conditions, no nations, whatever groups there were. The disagreement is total on its face. One theory says the fuel is ancient. The other says the vessel is modern. The question anderson’s admirers should sit with, because it is the harder one for them, is this: what if mearsheimer’s anthropology is right?
grant it, and watch what it explains that anderson cannot. The voltage, first. Anderson’s machinery builds communities of shared reading and shared time, but shared reading is cheap. Print capitalism also built the community of stamp collectors, the readers of detective fiction, the subscribers to gardening weeklies, publics in every formal respect resembling his national one, simultaneous, anonymous, bounded by language, and no philatelist has ever charged a machine gun for the community of collectors. Something separates the nation from every other print community, and anderson knew it, which is why his book keeps reaching past print toward kinship, fatality, and death. Mearsheimer supplies what the reaching gropes for. The nation commands sacrifice because it has captured the survival circuitry, the ancient wiring that binds the individual to the group that protects him, and no hobby public ever plugs into that socket. Second, the recurrence. Anderson’s theory ties the nation to a media environment, and media environments keep changing. Print gave way to radio, radio to television, television to a networked medium that shreds shared attention into fragments, and the nation has survived every transition, including the current one that was supposed to dissolve borders into a global conversation. A form tied to its founding technology should weaken when the technology goes. Standing equipment does not. Third, the record of failed obituaries. Marxists predicted nationalism’s death, then liberals did, and mearsheimer’s anthropology explains the serial failure in one sentence: both creeds theorized man as something he has never been, a reasoning atom, and the group keeps reasserting itself because the group is what man is.
anderson’s life, read through this anthropology, confirms rather than refutes it, which stings. Here was the most deracinated of scholars, the perpetual crosser, irish passport, chinese birthplace, american employer, a man who chose his attachments with a freedom almost no one has. And what did the freedom produce? Serial embeddedness. He left the tribes of his birth and was adopted by others, the cornell program with its initiations and its house journal, and above all indonesia, which banned him like a traitor, readmitted him like a son, named him om ben, and took his ashes into its sea. The great individualist of the passport queue never spent a season outside a group. If reason were the master faculty, anderson is where it should have shown itself, and what his reason chose, every time, was another belonging. Mearsheimer’s chapter could enter him as exhibit a: even the exception transfers; no one exits.
that is the case for the prosecution, and it is strong. Now the defense, because mearsheimer’s anthropology, granted in full, stops one step short of everything anderson explains.
groupness underdetermines the group. Say the body demands belonging and the group secures survival: nothing in that wiring names the nation as the beneficiary. The family satisfies it. The clan, the village, the sect, the guild, the dynasty’s subjects, the umma, the class, all satisfy it, and for most of human history they did, while the nation did not exist as a claimant. A javanese man in 1700 was a muslim, a subject of mataram, a member of a village and a lineage, and the survival circuitry ran through all of it without once producing an indonesian. Two centuries later his descendants died for indonesia, a community assembled out of three hundred ethnic groups, seven hundred languages, and a colonial bookkeeping unit, in the name of a national language that in 1900 was the mother tongue of almost no one. The wiring did not change between 1700 and 1945. The channels changed, and the channels are anderson’s subject: the presses, the schools, the maps, the census categories, the administrative pilgrimages that took the loyalty the body always offers and redirected it toward a container that had to be built first. Mearsheimer explains why the loyalty exists and cannot say why it landed there. His anthropology predicts that men will die for their group and goes silent when the groups nest and conflict, when java competes with islam competes with indonesia for the same man’s death. Deciding that competition is what anderson’s machinery does all day.
the immigrant nations press the point. A strictly tribal anthropology, read as blood, predicts that national boundaries track descent. Argentina and the united states built nations out of arriving strangers at industrial scale, absorbing sicilians and poles and lebanese into national communities their grandparents had never imagined, and the solvent was anderson’s, language and print and schooling, the manufactured memory of a shared past most members’ ancestors did not share. Mearsheimer can answer that the group redefined its membership rules, which is true and concedes the case: rules that can be redefined by newspapers and naturalization ceremonies are conventions riding on the wiring, and the conventions are where the action is.
then there is the fault line neither man can paper over, the relation of nationalism to hatred. Anderson built a firewall between them. Nationalism, he argued, thinks in historical destinies, racism in eternal contaminations, and he traced racism’s pedigree to class ideologies of breeding rather than to the nation. His nation is defined by what it loves. Mearsheimer’s anthropology tilts the other way without saying so: if the group bond is survival equipment, then fear of the outside is not a corruption of the bond. It is the bond’s other face, selected by the same dangers, and the firewall between loving the inside and dreading the outside is a hope rather than a structure. The twentieth century’s ledger lets both men cite it. Civic nations absorbed millions peaceably, as anderson’s firewall predicts. Nation-building also ran on expulsion and massacre often enough, from anatolia to punjab to the drina, to suggest the firewall fails exactly when the survival circuitry believes what it was built to believe, that the neighboring group is a threat. Anderson watched the largest massacre of his lifetime performed by his adopted country on its own citizens, neighbors killing neighbors sorted by a category, and his framework filed it under the politics of the army rather than the anthropology of the group. A mearsheimerian reading of 1965 is grimmer and simpler: the machinery of belonging, pointed inward.
death divides them last. Mearsheimer’s man dies for the nation because the nation is the survival vehicle and sometimes the vehicle demands a payment; the logic is protective, and the tomb of the unknown soldier is group memory doing maintenance for the next war. Anderson’s man dies for the nation because the nation answers death, converting his single extinction into a place in the procession of the dead and the unborn; the logic is religious, and the tomb is a theology in stone. Danger against oblivion. The soldier’s letters home have always contained both, and neither theorist can evict the other from that archive.
so render the verdict the essay promised. If mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, and the record of failed obituaries argues it is, anderson survives, demoted and deepened at once. Demoted, because imagined communities becomes the history of one container rather than the theory of the force, a magnificent account of how the ancient loyalty was rerouted into its modern channel. Deepened, because the observation his critics found softest, that nations are loved, gains a floor under it: the love is not a print effect, it is the oldest equipment the species owns, which is why the internet has not dissolved it and the next medium will not either. And mearsheimer, granted his anthropology, still needs anderson the day he asks why the equipment serves indonesia rather than java, france rather than christendom, the nation rather than the thousand other groups on offer. The body brings the loyalty. History appoints the recipient. One man studied the demand and the other studied the supply, and the discipline that keeps them in separate wings has spent forty years discussing halves.
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| The Global Grind: Osunniyis Eastern Shift Reflects a Deeper European Game |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (9 reads) | |
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Policy wire — warsaw, poland — the steady drumbeat of international talent moving through europe’s professional basketball circuits rarely registers beyond niche sports columns. But osun osunniyi’s latest journey—a transfer to dziki warsaw in the polish obl for the 2026-27 season—isn’t just about another 6-foot-10 center landing a gig. It’s a sharp observation point, reflecting how the continent’s leagues are quietly reshaping the global pipeline for athletic prowess, often pulling players through a series of proving grounds from the germanic west to the slavic east.
it’s a peculiar path, osunniyi’s; a testament, perhaps, to the mercenary yet meritocratic nature of professional sport. This isn’t some glamorous transatlantic leap to the nba’s gilded arenas. Instead, it’s the grinding, continental reality—a journey from iowa state, through germany with mlp academics heidelberg, a notable stint in belgium, and now, poland. One can’t help but notice the quiet ambition of these smaller european leagues, stitching together a competitive landscape that challenges established sporting narratives. They’re less about megastars — and more about gritty, effective players who can impact a team’s fortunes. [Quote_placeholder]
osunniyi, the american import, has steadily built his european resume. Before landing the warsaw deal, he’d spent the last two years with mlp academics heidelberg in the german bbl (first tier). That’s no walk in the park. His stat line there—he averaged 7.4 points, 4.7 rebounds, and 1.2 blocks per game—shows a player whose value isn’t just in flashy dunks but in the often-unheralded work of defending the rim and cleaning the glass. In the basketball champions league, where the stakes are higher, he demonstrated a different kind of impact, where he recorded 1.6 blocks and 1.1 steals per game. It tells you something about his defensive versatility.
but before all that, the big man made his mark in belgium with limburg united. In 2024, he helped lead his team to a belgian cup victory. He wasn’t just a passenger either—he was honored as the eurobasket.Com all-bnxt league defensive player of the year. It’s the sort of recognition that whispers about consistent excellence rather than flashes in the pan. Because these european leagues, especially those outside the traditional western powerhouses, rely on precisely that type of reliable performance.
and then there’s the college backstory. Osunniyi didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. His professional success followed a storied collegiate career where he recorded 1,372 points, 1,027 rebounds and 340 blocks. This man is a bona fide shot-blocking machine. His reputation as a premier rim protector began at st. Bonaventure, where he finished as the program’s all-time leader in blocks with 305. He was also the first player in the school’s history to be named the atlantic 10 defensive player of the year, an honor he won in both 2021 and 2022. It wasn’t just individual accolades either. His impact was most visible in 2021 when he anchored a defense that ranked in the top 10 nationally. He led the bonnies to a conference title, for which he was named the atlantic 10 championship most outstanding player. Even as a freshman, he led all ncaa division i freshmen in blocks, signaling his immediate impact on the college game.
his final collegiate season at iowa state didn’t slow him down, either. Osunniyi continued his dominance, leading the cyclones in both blocks (35) — and dunks (32). He shot a respectable 57.7% from the floor, which ranked him fifth in program history for field goal percentage by a senior. This statistic, pulling from his final collegiate year, underlines his consistent efficiency around the basket, making him a sought-after commodity.
the movement of players like osunniyi across borders—from north america to western europe, and now to eastern europe—offers a microcosm of global economic trends. Much like skilled professionals from developing economies in south asia—say, software engineers from pakistan or textile designers from bangladesh—who seek out opportunities in richer european union nations or north america, basketball talent similarly navigates a global marketplace. Players, just like these engineers, are economic units seeking the best fit, career progression, and financial stability, albeit on a much more visible, athletic stage. It’s a human capital flow, driven by aspiration and market demand, irrespective of cultural backgrounds or origins in the muslim world or elsewhere.
what this means osun osunniyi’s signing with dziki warsaw carries implications extending beyond mere roster changes. For one, it highlights the increasing sophistication and financial muscle of basketball leagues in central and eastern europe. These leagues, traditionally secondary to powerhouses in spain, greece, or even germany, are becoming legitimate landing spots for quality talent. It means more competition for top players and, potentially, an even more exciting continental basketball product for fans. This also signals a growing financial ecosystem around these sports in regions like poland, a sign of broader economic maturation there.
politically, the continuous flow of american athletes into these markets represents a subtle yet persistent form of soft power and cultural exchange. It’s an exposure—however tangential—to american sporting culture, which subtly influences local communities and media narratives. From an economic perspective, it’s a direct injection of foreign talent and, by extension, foreign capital into the local sports economy. These players, while performing, also consume locally, pay taxes, and sometimes invest—though often less dramatically than high-net-worth individuals. But collectively, these movements contribute to a globalized sporting labor market, a market that the gulf states, too, are eyeing with ever-growing interest, recognizing its dual potential for entertainment and economic diversification, especially as they look beyond oil. They’re watching these talent flows keenly.
it also forces american scouts and coaches to pay closer attention to the quality of basketball being played outside the established nba-g league pipeline. Because good players, it turns out, are everywhere. Just like they’re finding them in these unexpected corners of europe. And this is going to make the global game more interesting, more competitive, and certainly, more perplexing for those who assume talent only grows in familiar soil. The sports landscape is global, folks, whether we always remember it or not. |
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| TBT The Ville vs. La Familia | Game Details |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (9 reads) | |
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series: the basketball tournament – kentucky-louisville alumni rivalry
game 1: saturday, july 18, 2026 | 12:00 pm et location: memorial coliseum, lexington, ky tickets: available now
game 2: monday, july 20, 2026 | 7:00 pm et location: freedom hall, louisville, ky tickets: available now
game 3 (if necessary): wednesday, july 22, 2026 | 6:00 pm et location: memorial coliseum, lexington, ky
one of college basketball’s greatest rivalries moves from the ncaa stage to the basketball tournament as
the ville (louisville alumni)
and
la familia (kentucky alumni)
meet in a highly anticipated alumni showdown. Featuring former stars from both programs, international professionals, g-league veterans, and players with nba experience, the matchup represents one of the most talented rivalry games in tbt history.
the best-of-three series will begin at memorial coliseum in lexington before moving to freedom hall in louisville for game 2. If necessary, the deciding game 3 will return to lexington, adding another layer of intensity to an already emotional rivalry between two of college basketball’s most passionate fan bases.
the ville enters the series with a roster built around defensive toughness, size, and experienced perimeter play. Led by former louisville standout russ smith, who serves as both a player and general manager, the louisville alumni squad features a collection of former cardinals who have continued their careers around the world.
at point guard, trey lewis brings veteran leadership and international experience after playing professionally with kk mornar bar in montenegro. Lewis’ ability to control tempo and create scoring opportunities will be critical against kentucky’s athletic backcourt.
louisville also has tremendous size throughout its frontcourt. Malik williams, a 6-foot-11 center who most recently played with the college park skyhawks of the g-league, provides interior defense and rebounding, while ray spalding adds another physical presence at power forward after competing with the noblesville boom. The addition of jaylen johnson, a 7-foot-2 center who played professionally with the rain or shine elasto painters in the philippines, gives the ville one of the biggest frontcourts in the tournament.
the perimeter versatility continues with david johnson, a 6-foot-6 guard who most recently played for the tasmania jackjumpers in australia, along with jae withers, a 6-foot-9 forward with experience at both louisville and north carolina. Angel nunez adds additional length and international experience after playing professionally in poland.
head coach chance recktenwald and the louisville alumni staff will look to maximize the team’s athleticism, defensive versatility, and ability to dominate the paint.
la familia counters with one of the deepest kentucky alumni rosters assembled for tbt. Led by head coach jon hood, kentucky’s group features former wildcats with professional experience across the globe, including players who have competed in the nba, g-league, and international leagues.
the wildcats’ biggest advantage comes from their combination of size and versatility. Former kentucky standout willie cauley-stein anchors the frontcourt, bringing nba experience, elite defensive ability, and shot-blocking instincts after his professional career with varese in italy.
joining cauley-stein is reid travis, a 6-foot-8 forward who played professionally with the kaohsiung aquas in taiwan. Travis provides toughness, rebounding, and inside scoring, while chris coffey adds athleticism and defensive energy after playing with peristeri bc in greece.
kentucky’s perimeter group features several talented creators. Andrew harrison, a 6-foot-6 point guard who most recently played with the beijing royal fighters in china, gives la familia a strong ball handler capable of attacking defenses. Archie goodwin adds scoring ability after playing in china’s cba, while deandre liggins brings defensive experience and versatility after playing professionally in iraq.
the roster also includes shooters and wing depth from sean mcneil, kahlil whitney, darryl morsell, james mainor-bell, and quade green, giving kentucky multiple options on the perimeter.
with assistant coaches jazz ferguson, ethan coury, and gavin root supporting hood, la familia has the depth and experience to challenge any team in tbt.
this matchup will likely come down to a classic rivalry battle: louisville’s size and interior strength against kentucky’s balance, athleticism, and perimeter versatility.
the ville’s path to victory begins inside. With malik williams, ray spalding, jaylen johnson, and jae withers, louisville has the size necessary to control rebounds and make scoring difficult around the basket.
kentucky’s advantage comes from its ability to play multiple styles. With guards like andrew harrison, archie goodwin, and deandre liggins combined with frontcourt players like cauley-stein and travis, la familia can attack opponents from every area of the floor.
the team that controls turnovers and wins the rebounding battle will likely determine the outcome of the series.
russ smith: former louisville star and team leader who brings scoring ability, toughness, and clutch experience.
david johnson: versatile guard capable of defending multiple positions and creating offense.
trey lewis: veteran point guard who controls tempo and provides leadership.
malik williams: defensive anchor who protects the paint and rebounds.
jaylen johnson: 7-foot-2 center who gives louisville a major size advantage.
willie cauley-stein: elite defensive center with nba experience and shot-blocking ability.
andrew harrison: experienced point guard who creates offense and controls tempo.
archie goodwin: dynamic scorer capable of attacking defenses.
reid travis: physical forward who provides rebounding and interior scoring.
deandre liggins: veteran defender who can impact the game on both ends.
prediction: la familia wins the series 2-1
this kentucky-louisville alumni matchup has all the ingredients of a memorable tbt rivalry series. The ville’s size, defensive toughness, and veteran leadership will create major problems, but la familia’s overall depth and balance give them a slight advantage.
kentucky’s combination of cauley-stein’s interior defense, harrison’s playmaking, and a deep group of perimeter options should allow them to survive a physical series.
expect a hard-fought battle filled with momentum swings, big shots, and the intensity that has defined this rivalry for decades.
series pick: la familia advances 2-1 key advantage: kentucky’s depth and versatility in late-game situations
players must be 21 years of age or older or reach the minimum age for gambling in their respective state and located in jurisdictions where online gambling is legal. Please play responsibly. Bet with your head, not over it. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, and wants help, call or visit: (a) the council on compulsive gambling of new jersey at 1-800-gambler or www.800gambler.Org; or (b) gamblers anonymous at 855-2-call-ga or www.Gamblersanonymous.Org. |
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| Port City Alphas host 4th annual cookout in Shreveport |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (9 reads) | |
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Port city alphas host 4th annual cookout in shreveport
divine 9 members gather to promote unity and support youth scholarships
shreveport, la. (Ksla) - the port city alphas hosted their fourth annual port city greek cookout on sunday, june 12, celebrating community initiatives including scholarships for high school students.
community focus
members of the divine 9 came together to promote unity and highlight the importance of community-focused events in shreveport. The event featured music, socializing and food for attendees.
youth outreach
organizers said greek organizations play a significant role in the lives of young people. Joshua mitchell, an organizer with the 4th annual port city greek cookout, spoke about the impact of local divine 9 chapters.
“we have many local d9 chapters have their own youth groups, and just getting involved in their lives, because some of them don’t have mothers, fathers, or active members in their family are actually pouring into them daily,” mitchell said. “And so that is something that we do, especially events like this help to encourage those. Hey, when you go to college, if you want to go to college or a trade school, or even the military. So that’s why it’s very important.”
organizers said they are ready for next year’s event.
copyright 2026 ksla. All rights reserved. |
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| Peapack Private Appoints Kotronis as Senior Managing Director, Commercial Real E |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (9 reads) | |
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Peapack-gladstone financial and peapack private bank & trust appointed paul kotronis as senior managing director, commercial real estate. In this role, kotronis will support and expand the bank’s commercial real estate lending platform, drive relationship-based deposit growth and further strengthen peapack private’s presence in the new york and new jersey markets.
“paul’s extensive commercial real estate lending experience, deep market relationships and proven leadership make him an exceptional addition to our team,” joseph fingerman, senior managing director and president of commercial real estate at peapack private bank & trust, said. “His expertise in multifamily and commercial real estate finance will further enhance our ability to serve clients and support the continued growth of our lending platform.”
kotronis brings more than 20 years of commercial real estate finance experience, with a proven track record of building large-scale lending platforms, managing multi-billion-dollar portfolios and driving profitable loan growth across diverse markets. He has extensive expertise in multifamily and commercial real estate lending and is recognized for balancing business growth objectives with disciplined risk management and regulatory compliance.
prior to joining peapack private, kotronis served as group director and senior vice president, cre group at signature bank, where he managed a $5 billion commercial real estate portfolio with strong credit performance. During his tenure, he led and mentored a team of lenders and analysts, cultivated relationships with new york and new jersey real estate sponsors, and originated more than $4 billion in multifamily and commercial real estate loans.
kotronis also previously held the position of director and senior vice president at a&e real estate finance, where he played a key role in launching a new commercial real estate debt fund platform where he developed lending policies, underwriting standards and operational infrastructure.
his prior experience also includes leadership roles at santander bank and new york commercial bank, where he held positions of increasing responsibility in commercial real estate lending, underwriting, portfolio management and relationship management.
kotronis earned an mba in finance and real estate from the zicklin school of business at baruch college and a bachelor of arts in economics with a minor in mathematics from hunter college. Active in the community, kotronis has served as co-chairman and benefactor of the annual greek independence day parade and is a board member of the federation of hellenic societies and president of the eleftheriani benevolent society. |
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| These 11 Iowa Restaurants Are Proof Great Food And Great History Belong Together |
| Posted on Monday, July 13 @ 00:01:50 PDT (10 reads) | |
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Some restaurants serve more than a memorable meal—they serve a sense of place. The worn wood, familiar stories, and generations of guests who have gathered around the tables become part of the experience, making every bite feel connected to something larger.
across iowa, historic restaurants blend local heritage with food worth seeking out. From longtime family-owned spots and charming inns to dining rooms tucked inside historic buildings, these restaurants preserve pieces of the past while continuing to create new memories.
their menus tell stories through regional flavors, traditional recipes, and carefully prepared dishes that invite guests to slow down and stay awhile.
for travelers who enjoy discovering destinations through their food, these iowa restaurants offer a unique way to experience the state’s character. Explore 11 places where great meals and fascinating history come together around every table.
breitbach’s country dining
the first thing you notice is the view. Rolling bluffs and river country stretch so wide that lunch can feel like an occasion before a plate even lands on the table.
then comes the smell of fried chicken, fresh coffee, and pie cooling somewhere nearby, which makes the whole room feel even more grounded.
up in sherrill, breitbach’s country dining carries the weight of iowa history lightly. Open since 1852 and rebuilt after devastating fires, it still feels warm rather than solemn, the kind of place where resilience is part of the seasoning.
you can taste that continuity in classic comfort dishes and a slice of homemade pie that feels tied to the landscape outside.
there is something moving about eating in a place that has refused to disappear. Between the blufftop setting and the deeply familiar food, this stop lingers longer than most road trip meals do.
ox yoke inn
there is a special kind of comfort in a dining room where the tables seem made for lingering. Plates arrive generously, conversation rises and falls in an easy rhythm, and the old wood around you makes the entire meal feel steadier, as if the building already knows how the evening should unfold.
that feeling comes naturally at ox yoke inn in amana, where a building dating to 1856 holds onto the spirit of the historic colonies without turning it into theater. Family-style german and american cooking keeps things anchored, with fried chicken, sausages, and heaps of sides encouraging a slower pace.
the experience feels communal in the best sense of the word.
what stays with you is not only the quantity, though no one leaves hungry. It is the way history and hospitality meet so seamlessly here, making a meal feel less like a stop and more like a tradition you have joined.
ronneburg restaurant
some places do not need to be loud to feel memorable. A quiet dining room, a basket of warm bread, and the comforting scent of roast meat can do more than any grand gesture, especially when the streets outside still carry the measured pace of another era.
in the middle of amana, ronneburg restaurant feels woven into the village rather than simply placed there. Serving guests since 1950, it leans into traditional german recipes and the kind of hearty, straightforward cooking that seems made for iowa weather.
you might settle in with sauerbraten, noodles, or a classic pork dish and realize halfway through that the simplicity is the point.
the appeal here is subtle but lasting. Between the historic surroundings and the deeply familiar food, the restaurant offers a version of the amana colonies that feels lived in, not staged, and that distinction makes the visit especially rewarding.
hamburg inn no. 2
before the coffee even hits the table, the room announces itself with the easy clatter of mugs, the swivel of counter stools, and that unmistakable diner energy that promises everyone is welcome. It feels cheerful, democratic, and a little nostalgic without trying too hard, which is rarer than it sounds.
in iowa city, hamburg inn no. 2 has been serving that mood since 1948. The restaurant is famous for breakfast, presidential campaign lore, and the beloved pie shake, but what gives it staying power is how sincerely local it feels.
pancakes, hash browns, and omelets arrive with the confidence of recipes that have earned trust over decades.
you do not come only for novelty, though the history is fun to spot in the details. You come because the place still works exactly as a great diner should, connecting politics, students, regulars, and visitors over one very solid morning meal.
the crane & pelican cafe
some restaurants make you feel as if you have been invited into someone’s exceptionally charming home for lunch. Sunlight filters through old windows, the dining rooms feel intimate rather than formal, and every creak in the floor seems to add another layer to the experience.
that is exactly the mood at the crane & pelican cafe in le claire, set inside the restored dawley house, a victorian home from the nineteenth century. The river town setting already encourages wandering, and this stop deepens it with historic architecture and a menu that feels polished but approachable.
whether you order a thoughtful lunch special or settle in for something more substantial, the backdrop matters as much as the plate.
what makes it memorable is the balance. The cafe honors the beauty of old le claire without becoming precious, and the result is a meal that feels both refined and deeply connected to the mississippi river town surrounding it.
northwestern steakhouse
there is a certain confidence to an old steakhouse that has no interest in chasing trends. The room is a little darker, the booths invite long conversations, and the sizzle arriving from nearby tables tells you people have been ordering the same beloved thing here for generations.
in mason city, northwestern steakhouse has been part of local life since 1920, and its greek-american identity gives the menu a personality all its own. The signature steaks, famously prepared with butter and a bright touch of lemon and garlic, are not trying to imitate anyone else.
that distinct flavor, paired with the restaurant’s enduring family-run spirit, makes the place feel personal rather than merely famous.
you leave understanding why legends survive. The history matters, but it is the continued certainty of the cooking that seals it, turning an ordinary dinner into a reminder that regional food traditions can still feel thrillingly specific.
archie’s waeside
even before the first bite, the atmosphere suggests you are somewhere with standards. The lighting is low, the service moves with practiced ease, and the menu carries the kind of seriousness that only comes from decades of people returning for the same ritual and expecting it to be done right every time.
that ritual lives on at archie’s waeside in le mars, a family steakhouse dating to 1949 that has earned national notice without losing its local backbone. Premium beef is the obvious draw, but the deeper appeal is how little the place seems interested in reinvention for its own sake.
a perfectly cooked steak, a classic side, and the hum of a longtime dining room are more than enough.
there is dignity in that consistency. In a small city better known to many for ice cream, this restaurant tells another iowa story, one about craftsmanship, tradition, and the quiet pleasure of a dinner that knows exactly what it is.
canteen lunch in the alley
sometimes the places you remember most are the smallest ones. A narrow room, a short menu, and a lunch counter rhythm can create an intimacy larger restaurants rarely touch, especially when the specialty is so humble that it seems almost daringly plain until you taste it.
that is the charm of canteen lunch in the alley in ottumwa, where the loose-meat sandwich has held court since 1936. The setting remains wonderfully unpretentious, and that matters because the food depends on trust, not flourish.
a soft bun, seasoned beef, maybe pie afterward, and suddenly you understand why generations have kept returning to this tucked-away spot.
it feels like a surviving fragment of everyday american dining history. More than nostalgia, though, there is real pleasure in how direct the experience is, proving that a restaurant does not need grandeur to carry a city’s story forward one lunch at a time.
the gunder roadhouse
there is always a little thrill in turning onto a quiet country road and finding a restaurant that feels bigger in local legend than the town around it. The welcome is casual, the mood is wonderfully unfussy, and the dessert case has a way of redirecting your attention almost immediately.
that sense of discovery is part of what makes the gunder roadhouse in tiny gunder memorable. People talk about the oversized homemade pies for good reason, but the place is more than a novelty stop.
its rustic atmosphere and easygoing pace fit the rural setting perfectly, making lunch or dinner feel like a brief escape from anything hurried or polished.
you do not visit for spectacle in the usual sense. You visit because the road, the small community, and the generous slice waiting at the end create a specific kind of iowa pleasure, one rooted in simplicity, appetite, and the charm of places that still surprise you.
iowa chop house
some dining rooms feel built to remind you where you are. Exposed brick, solid wood, and a certain downtown confidence can turn a simple dinner into a portrait of a region, especially when the menu is clearly speaking the language of farms, seasons, and local pride.
that is the appeal of iowa chop house in iowa city, where a restored historic building frames a meal centered on iowa-raised beef and ingredients tied closely to the state. The restaurant feels contemporary, but not detached from its setting.
a steak, a well-made side, and a drink at the bar all carry a sense of place that goes beyond branding and lands somewhere more sincere.
in a college town with plenty of energy, this spot offers a grounded counterpoint. It connects the urban rhythm of downtown with the agricultural story that surrounds it, which gives the meal a depth many polished restaurants struggle to achieve.
proudfoot & bird
there are restaurants that invite you to sit down, and others that ask you to step briefly into another era. Here, the polished surfaces, architectural detail, and hushed sense of occasion create that second feeling, making dinner seem touched by the glamour of an earlier american downtown.
inside the restored hotel fort des moines, proudfoot & bird uses the building’s 1919 heritage as more than a decorative backdrop. In des moines, it feels like a continuation of the city’s grand hotel past, translated into a modern meal with confidence and restraint.
a cocktail at the bar, a carefully plated entree, and a look around the room are enough to make the history feel tangible.
what makes the experience satisfying is that the elegance never becomes cold. The restaurant honors the building’s storied character while remaining welcoming, which allows the evening to feel special without becoming stiff, a balance historic dining rooms do not always achieve. |
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