Sponsor networks and business relations orchestrated by team sport clubs

Purpose  This study investigates firms’ reasons and motives for becoming sponsors and how they benefit from this networking engagement by exploring sponsorship networks associated with two Danish team sport clubs – a Premier League football club and a second-division handball club.  Design/methodology/approach  Two online surveys were conducted with firms associated with the networks during the autumn and winter of 2013/14 (N=116). The questionnaire was theoretically anchored in existing sponsorship literature, business network research and social capital theory.  Findings  The results show that business logics were the dominating reasons for joining the network. A large proportion of the respondents reported having increased their number of business (32%) and social (26%) relations with other network members after joining the network. Furthermore, 37% of the respondents reported having made business agreements with companies external to the network via network contacts, which supports ideas of bridging social capital. More than half the respondents (59%) preferred doing business with network members rather than with non-members.  Originality/value  By investigating a local and regional sport-club context, the paper adds to our knowledge about sponsorship networks. It emphasizes the potential importance of team sport clubs for the business landscape, thus maintaining that sport clubs fulfill an important role for local communities beyond being mere entertainment industries

Resultater fra en spørgeskemaundersøgelse med frivillige hjælpere ved Europæiske Kortbane Mesterskaber i svømning i Herning 2013

This study is part of a larger project: the Event Based Innovation Project (EVINN). The project is funded by the EU. The study is part of the project "Event Organisation". The goal is to optimize the organization of sports events. The project is a collaboration between researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Oslo Idrettshojskole (NIH), Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark. In each country the volunteers' experiences were examined at a width event and an elite event.The results from this study will be compared with results from Gothenburg Varget 2013 and a similar race in Norway, as well as results from three elite events respectively: Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In Denmark volunteers involved in the organization of Aarhus City Half Marathon 9th. June 2013 were also examined. In the longer term, the study results lead to one or more peer-reviewed articles and a handbook. The results can be beneficial to the organizers of the EAM in swimming (Herning Municipality, Sport Event Denmark and the Danish Swimming Federation) and others who organize similar major events that requires many volunteers

Momentum lost or creating new constellations? Insights from an exercise-at-work project during the Covid-19 pandemic - a mixed methods approach

Exercise-at-work programmes have been identified as venues to decrease inequalities in physical activity and exercise between socioeconomic groups and to improve employees' health and wellbeing. Drawing on a multiple institutional logics perspective and adopting a mixed-methods approach, this paper investigates how employees, exercise-ambassadors and managers at five Danish workplaces experience Covid-19 induced changes to a 1-year exercise-at-work project, and how these changes impacted upon the workplace. Our results suggest that Covid-19 and the altered format of exercise and delivery polarized employees' opportunities for exercise at work. However, the generally positive experiences of exercise-at-work activities and their influence on social environment and collaboration (identified prior to Covid-19 lockdown) remained among those employees who continued with activities. Self-organized adaptions and models of employee exercise which emerged suggest that community logic endured despite the crisis. We show how Covid-19 induced organizational changes led to interplays between institutional logics, with family and state logics becoming more prominent. Specifically, the exercise-at-work programme changed from an aligned model, with complementary logics and minimal conflict, to a model where logics of profession and corporation became dominant at the expense of community logic (exercise-ambassadors activities), but constrained by a state and a family logic

Results from a survey with volunteers at the European Kortbane Championships in swimming in Herning 2013

This study is part of a larger project: the Event Based Innovation Project (EVINN). The project is funded by the EU. The study is part of the project "Event Organisation". The goal is to optimize the organization of sports events. The project is a collaboration between researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Oslo Idrettshojskole (NIH), Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark. In each country the volunteers' experiences were examined at a width event and an elite event.The results from this study will be compared with results from Gothenburg Varget 2013 and a similar race in Norway, as well as results from three elite events respectively: Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In Denmark volunteers involved in the organization of Aarhus City Half Marathon 9th. June 2013 were also examined. In the longer term, the study results lead to one or more peer-reviewed articles and a handbook. The results can be beneficial to the organizers of the EAM in swimming (Herning Municipality, Sport Event Denmark and the Danish Swimming Federation) and others who organize similar major events that requires many volunteers

Indledning

Indledning til antologien.Sport Management - broget felt i vækst

A Combined Approach of Process Mining and Rule-based AI for Study Planning and Monitoring in Higher Education

This paper presents an approach of using methods of process mining and rule-based artificial intelligence to analyze and understand study paths of students based on campus management system data and study program models. Process mining techniques are used to characterize successful study paths, as well as to detect and visualize deviations from expected plans. These insights are combined with recommendations and requirements of the corresponding study programs extracted from examination regulations. Here, event calculus and answer set programming are used to provide models of the study programs which support planning and conformance checking while providing feedback on possible study plan violations. In its combination, process mining and rule-based artificial intelligence are used to support study planning and monitoring by deriving rules and recommendations for guiding students to more suitable study paths with higher success rates. Two applications will be implemented, one for students and one for study program designers.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, conference, 30 reference

On Modularity - NP-Completeness and Beyond

Modularity is a recently introduced quality measure for graph clusterings. It has immediately received considerable attention in several disciplines, and in particular in the complex systems literature, although its properties are not well understood. We here present first results on the computational and analytical properties of modularity. The complexity status of modularity maximization is resolved showing that the corresponding decision version is NP-complete in the strong sense. We also give a formulation as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to facilitate exact optimization, and provide results on the approximation factor of the commonly used greedy algorithm. Completing our investigation, we characterize clusterings with maximum Modularity for several graph families