Roles' dynamics inside a team: between facts and perception

Focusing on the teams' dynamics, the main aim of this study is to develop a multidimensional framework for analyzing the roles' dynamics inside teams by combining three complementary axes: task-social, perceptual-factual and attraction - rejection. Based on a complex sociometric analysis, this case study revealed the presence of a contamination effect between the social and the task evaluation of teammates' positions and a strong impact of the intra-group competition level upon how members' positions in the team are evaluated. Given the similarities between the sport and the business field, the results of this study can be extrapolated beyond sports' borders

The Face Management Challenges of Sport Celebrity

While gaining centrality within the sport field, media accelerated its commodification process and facilitated sport actors becoming competitive on the celebrity market. The aim of this paper is to discuss the reconfiguration that the celebrity logic brought in terms of the mere condition of the sport actor and the face management challenges and remedial strategies that he has to cope with. I will thus focus on two main dimensions that I find to be constitutive for the celebrity status: one related to the augmented media exposure that sport stars are subject to and to the corollary symbolic reconfiguration of the boundaries between his public and his private life, and the second one related to the vulnerability that comes along with the new visibility of the complex repertoire of identities and social roles performed by the sport actors. Within this last dimension of the sport-related celebrity cycle of promotion, I will lay stress not only on the face threatening aspects for the sport stars, but also on the vulnerability transfer within the affinal branding network and the challenges it could bring for the brands that chose to associate their image with a sport celebrity. Thus, I argue that the kaleidoscopic public figures of sport celebrities requires high impression management involvement on their part, as well as more caution on the marketeers part

Self-perceived Occupational Prestige among Romanian Teaching Staff: Organisational Explicative Factors

Most studies discuss occupational prestige by stressing out the macro-social aspects related to specific social stratification models. This paper aims to address the impact of organizational aspects on how teachers perceive the prestige of their occupational group, moving the focus on the micro-social context of their daily activity. The way teaching staff evaluate the social prestige of their profession fulfils normative and motivational functions and is, hence, reflected in how they actually perform their professional roles, serving both explicative and prospective purposes. In trying to identify the main factors that can explain the self-perceived level of occupational prestige among educators and teachers, we conducted a national level study among Romanian teachers (N=2165) from preschool to high school educational stages. Within the explicative model (R²=0.38), we were able to group the factors in three main categories: material conditions, bureaucratic and relational aspects. The findings reveal that teachers’ involvement in bureaucratic activities such as elaborating different reports, as well as a lower level of satisfaction regarding the relation they have with students, parents and representatives of the school's management end up decreasing the self-perceived occupational prestige. Our study lays emphasis on the fact that organizational factors influence teachers' selfperceived prestige and, thus, can affect the overall quality of the educational act. Therefore, to improve this, a greater involvement of national and local authorities in providing better material conditions in schools, in supporting the debureaucratization of the educational system and re-evaluating the role of teacher-student-parent communication triad is needed

Media Construction of Sport Celebrities as National Heroes

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

THE SOCIAL DRAMATURGY OF SPORT: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATIVE GOFFMANIAN MODEL

This paper analyses the social field of sports within the general frame of social dramaturgy, by using three metaphors that are grounded on Goffman’s conceptual field: sport as play, sport as game and sport as ritual. After discussing “what”, “how” and “to what extent” can Goffman’s concepts be re-contextualized in understanding the dynamics of the sport acts, I went further and integrated the three metaphors into a more comprehensive analytic model. The multidimensional model of sport dramaturgy that I have built around Goffman’s hard-core concepts covers: the dramaturgical dimension, the strategic dimension and the ritual dimension of sport acting as complementary elements that can provide an integrative perspective upon the sport dynamics. Every dimension of this interactional model implies a specific definition for the competitive situation, for the sport actor and for his dispositional orientation when faced with a competitive situatio

The mediated live experience and the spatial reconfiguration of the sport act

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

Who is responsible for the team’s results? Media framing of sports actors’ responsibility in major sports competitions

Media are no longer just a witness to sports events, facilitating our access to them, but have become the most powerful judging platform for sports competitions, serving as a guide for their interpretation and evaluation. The present study focuses on media framing of sports actors’ responsibility when it comes to major sports competitions. Who is responsible for the team’s performance and results? In analysing media discourse, framing effects of sports events coverage will be examined from two inter-correlated dimensions, textually and visually. Based on an event-related corpus of on-line press articles from four national newspapers, this case study covers two major sports events: 2010 European Women’s Handball Championship and 2011 World Women’s Handball Championship. The discursive analysis of the press articles shows that, if winning competitive settings favour the emergence of a personification effect, building up sports heroes on both textual and visual dimensions, the responsibility of failure is rather diffused towards a collective referent. However, the visual component of press articles, along with the indirect strategy of addressing the responsibility issue throughout reported speech techniques, works as an alternative to the personification effect

The Role of Host-Universities in the Process of Erasmus Students’ Intercultural Adaptation

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

The Role of Host-Universities in the Process of Erasmus Students’ Intercultural Adaptation

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