The Micro-political nature of implementing, supporting and coping with organisational change in a professional football club academy

Aim: To investigate the experiences of individuals employed within the academy of a professional football club during a period of organisational change. Key Research Questions: RQ1: How does organisational change impact individual’s day-to-day working practices? RQ2: How do individuals make sense of their actions and behaviours and the actions and behaviours of others during organisational change, and why? RQ3: What impact does organisational change have on the professional working relationships between individuals? Theoretical Background & Literature Review: Investigations into organisational change in sport have only recently received scholarly attention (Welty Peachey & Bruening, 2012). Indeed, professional football, in particular, is dependent on consistent success, with the environment in which employees have to practice characterised by significant change (Wagstaff, Gilmore & Thelwell, 2016). Consequently, investigations into understanding organisational change within professional football appear warranted. From a theoretical perspective, micro-politics has been advocated as a useful framework to understand organisational life within a variety of domains (Gibson & Groom, 2018). Furthermore, previous research (i.e. Munyon et al., 2015) has portrayed the political nature of organisational life and the political skill required by employees to effectively work within and survive in such environments. However, investigations into the micro-political nature of implementing, managing and coping with organisational change in professional football is lacking (Gibson & Groom, 2018). Methodology: Gibson and Groom (2018) have called for in-depth, contextually sensitive methodological approaches to understand organisational change. Such methodological approaches may provide a comparative, relational understanding of interactions within the football environment. In light of the above, an interpretivist approach was adopted to allow for a platform to explore and understand how individuals interpret and make sense of the interrelated, micro-political nature of organisational change in the academy of a professional football club. Data Collection: Following institutional ethical approval, data were collected at the case study site (Alder Football Club) using semi-structured interviews (n=16) with a recently employed Head of Professional Development Phase, a recently promoted Academy Manager, a Head of Foundation Phase, and an Academy Coach, ranging from 60-90 minutes each in length. In addition, ethnographic observational data were collected over three seasons by the primary researcher who was employed as the Under 16’s Academy Coach at Alder Football Club. Ethnographic observational data consisted of field notes, informal and formal meetings, in-house coach development sessions, player assessment evenings, academy training sessions and academy fixtures. Data Analysis: All interview and ethnographic data were subject to a process of thematic analysis using QSR NVIVO 11. A micro-political theoretical framework was used to guide the analysis of all data sets through an iterative process. Specifically, notions of vulnerability, professional self-interests, micro-political literacy (Kelchtermans, 1996, 2005) and social group identity were included in the framework. Findings: Findings highlighted the micro-political nature of changes being made to the image, branding and identity of Alder FC following the appointment of a new Chairman, Board of Directors and 1st Team Manager. Specifically, the creation of a new vision and strategy for Alder FC, aimed at portraying the club’s commitment to developing young players through the academy, evidenced the vulnerable nature of implementing and coping with the changes being made and the micro-political nature of successfully responding to the changes being made. Specifically, issues around increased scrutiny from senior colleagues, both increased and decreased feelings of vulnerability (dependent on the individual’s place within the organisational structure), staff turnover, moral conflict, the construction and destruction of professional working relationships, and the creation of a social group identity designed to support the successful implementation of change became pertinent during the change process at Alder FC. Conclusion: This study is the first to provide novel empirical and theoretical insights into the role that micro-political literacy, micro-political action and employment vulnerability play during periods of organisational change. In considering the applied nature of the findings; individuals tasked with implementing organisational change should consider the role that ‘identity’ plays from an organisational (identity of the football club) and a group (identity of the department i.e. 1st team or academy) perspective. From a departmental perspective, the construction of a social group identity can enhance collaboration, inform decision-making and decrease the potential for conflict amongst employees. However, it must be noted that individual identities of employees must also be congruent with the social group identity of the department. Such findings may be utilised to inform the education and development of practitioners tasked with both implementing and supporting organisational change in professional football

SIGMA: Scala Internal Domain-Specific Languages for Model Manipulations

International audienceModel manipulation environments automate model operations such as model consistency checking and model transformation. A number of external model manipulation Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) have been proposed, in particular for the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). While their higher levels of abstraction result in gains in expressiveness over general-purpose languages, their limitations in versatility, performance, and tool support together with the need to learn new languages may significantly contribute to accidental complexities. In this paper, we present Sigma, a family of internal DSLs embedded in Scala for EMF model consistency checking, model-to-model and model-to-text transformations. It combines the benefits of external model manipulation DSLs with general-purpose programming taking full advantage of Scala versatility, performance and tool support. The DSLs are compared to the state-of-the-art Epsilon languages in non-trivial model manipulation tasks that resulted in 20% to 70% reduction in code size and significantly better performance

Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of prognostic markers in prostate cancer

This paper demonstrates how economic modelling can be used to derive estimates of the cost-effectiveness of prognostic markers in the management of clinically localised and moderately graded prostate cancer. The model uses a Markov process and is populated using published evidence and local data. The robustness of the results has been tested using sensitivity analysis. Three treatment policies of 'monitoring' (observation), radical prostatectomy, or a selection-based management policy using DNA-ploidy as an experimental marker, have been evaluated. Modelling indicates that a policy of managing these tumours utilising experimental markers has an estimated cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) of pound 12 068. Sensitivity analysis shows the results to be relatively sensitive to quality-of-life variables. If novel and experimental markers can achieve specificity in excess of 80%, then a policy of radical surgery for those identified as being at high risk and conservative treatment for the remainder would be both better for patients and cost-effective. The analysis suggests that a radical prostatectomy treatment policy for the moderately graded tumours (Gleason grades -7) modelled in this paper may be inferior to a conservative approach in the absence of reliable prognostic markers, being both more costly and yielding fewer QALYs

Pattern-based model-to-model transformation: Handling attribute conditions

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02408-5_7Proceedings of Second International Conference, ICMT 2009, Zurich, Switzerland, June 29-30, 2009Pattern-based model-to-model transformation is a new approach for specifying transformations in a declarative, relational and formal style. The language relies on patterns describing allowed or forbidden relations between two models, which are compiled into operational mechanisms to perform forward and backward transformations. In this paper, we extend the approach for handling attribute conditions expressed in some suitable logic, adapt the operational mechanisms based on graph transformation to relax attribute handling by constraint solving, and discuss heuristics for the compilation of patterns into rules.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, projects METEORIC (TIN2008-02081),MODUWEB (TIN2006-09678) and FORMALISM (TIN2007-66523).Moreover, part of this work was done during a sabbatical leave of the third author at TU Berlin, with financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci´on (grant ref. PR2008-0185). We thank the referees for their useful comment

Correctness, completeness and termination of pattern-based model-to-model transformation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03741-2_26Proceedings of Third International Conference, CALCO 2009, Udine, Italy, September 7-10, 2009.Model-to-model (M2M) transformation consists in trans- forming models from a source to a target language. Many transformation languages exist, but few of them combine a declarative and relational style with a formal underpinning able to show properties of the transformation. Pattern-based transformation is an algebraic, bidirectional, and relational approach to M2M transformation. Specifications are made of patterns stating the allowed or forbidden relations between source and target models, and then compiled into low level operational mechanisms to perform source-to-target or target-to-source transformations. In this paper, we study the compilation into operational triple graph grammar rules and show: (i) correctness of the compilation of a specification without negative patterns; (ii) termination of the rules, and (iii) completeness, in the sense that every model considered relevant can be built by the rules.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, projects METEORIC (TIN2008-02081), MODUWEB (TIN2006-09678) and FORMALISM (TIN2007-66523). Moreover, part of this work was done during a sabbatical leave of the first author at TU Berlin, with financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant ref. PR2008-0185). We thank the referees for their useful comment

Romiplostim and Eltrombopag for Immune Thrombocytopenia: Methods for Indirect Comparison

Objectives: Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) causes increased platelet destruction and suboptimal platelet production, increasing risk of bleeding. This analysis uses a Bayesian metaregression model to indirectly compare effectiveness of the thrombopoietin mimetics romiplostim and eltrombopag for increasing platelet counts, and contrasts the results with those of non-Bayesian approaches. Methods: Ten databases were searched during 2010. Placebo-controlled trials of 24 weeks’ duration were included. An indirect comparison was undertaken using Bayesian metaregression, which includes all trials in a single model. This was compared with previous analyses in which data for each intervention were combined using simple pooling, logistic regression or meta-analysis, followed by indirect comparison of pooled values using the Bucher method. Results: Two trials of romiplostim and one of eltrombopag were included. The indirect evidence suggests romiplostim significantly improves overall platelet response compared with eltrombopag. Bayesian metaregression gave an odds ratio (OR) for eltrombopag versus romiplostim of 0.11 (95 percent credible interval 0.02–0.66); p values and Bayesian posterior probabilities ranged from 0.01 to 0.05 for all analyses. There was no significant difference in durable platelet response in any of the analyses, although the direction of effect favored romiplostim (OR = 0.15; 95 percent credible interval, 0.01–1.88); p values and Bayesian posterior probabilities ranged from 0.08 to 0.40 across analyses. Results were relatively consistent between analyses. Conclusions:Bayesian metaregression generated similar results to other indirect comparison methods, and may be considered the most robust as it incorporates all data in a single model and accounts appropriately for parameter uncertainty

An invariant-based method for the analysis of declarative model-to-model transformations

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87875-9_3Proceedings of 11th International Conference, MoDELS 2008, Toulouse, France, September 28 - October 3, 2008In this paper we propose a method to derive OCL invariants from declarative specifications of model-to-model transformations. In particular we consider two of the most prominent approaches for specifying such transformations: Triple Graph Grammars and QVT. Once the specification is expressed in the form of invariants, the transformation developer can use such description to verify properties of the original transformation (e.g. whether it defines a total, surjective or injective function), and to validate the transformation by the automatic generation of valid pairs of source and target models.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, projects MOSAIC (TSI2005-08225-C07-06), MODUWEB (TIN2006-09678) and TIN2005-06053, and an UOC-IN3 research gran