Political football

Much has been written in recent years about governance in the areas of political science, public policy, local government and international relations. However, little research effort has been devoted to examining the term in relation to the organisation, administration and management of sports bodies. This paper is concerned with the way sport is governed, and in particular evaluating the utility of the concept of governance in understanding aspects of the management and policy process in English professional football. The research finds that governance broadens our conceptual repertoire, introduces greater sensitivity and subtlety into policy analysis, and highlights problems of coordination across sports' governing bodies, interest groups and policy actors

Teaching research methods: Introducing a psychogeographical approach

This paper explores teaching business students research methods using a psychogeographical approach, specifically the technique of dérive. It responds to calls for new ways of teaching in higher education and addresses the dearth of literature on teaching undergraduate business students qualitative research methods. Psychogeography challenges the dominance of questionnaires and interviews, introduces students to data variety, problematizes notions of success and illuminates the importance of observation and location. Using two studies with undergraduate students, the authors emphasize place and setting, the perception of purpose, the choice of data, criteria of success and the value of guided reflection and self-reflection in students’ learning. Additionally the data reflect on the way students perceive research about management and the nature of management itself. The paper concludes that the deployment of psychogeography to teach business research methods although complex and fraught with difficulty is nevertheless viable, educationally productive and worthy of further research

Crisis as a plague on organisation: Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to enrich the understanding of current models of organisational response to crises and offer additional perspectives on some of these models. It is also intended to confirm the value of fiction as a truth-seeking and hermeneutic device for enriching the imagination. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year to draw parallels between his portrayal of the London Great Plague of 1665 and the management of modern-day crises. Defoe uses London’s ordeal of the Great Plague to advise those subjected to future crises. Through his representation of plague-ridden streets, Defoe shows stakeholders acting in ways described in current crisis management literature. Findings – The authors note how the management of the Plague crisis was unsuccessful and they challenge the very idea of managing a true crisis. The authors are able to illustrate and offer refinements to the Pearson and Clair (1998) and Janes (2010) models of crisis management as well as confirming the value of their constructs across a lapse of centuries. Research limitations/implications – Although it is an examination of a single novel, the findings suggest value in conceptualising organisational crises in innovative and more imaginative ways. Originality/value – It confirms the heuristic value of using fiction to understand organisational change and adds value to current model

How Boston and Other American Cities Support and Sustain the Arts: Funding for Cultural Nonprofits in Boston and 10 Other Metropolitan Centers

A new study commissioned by the Boston Foundation on how Boston and comparable cities support the arts shows that only New York City has higher per capita contributed revenue for the art than Boston, among major American cities.The study, titled "How Boston and Other American Cities Support and Sustain the Arts: Funding for Cultural Nonprofits in Boston and 10 Other Metropolitan Cities," also examined Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philadelphia, Portland Oregon, San Francisco, and Seattle. "How Boston" is a follow-up of sorts to a 2003 Boston Foundation report titled, "Funding for Cultural Organizations in Boston and Nine Other Metropolitan Areas."Key findings of this study, regarding Boston, include the fact that Boston's arts market is quite densely populated. While Greater Boston is the nation's 10th largest metro area and ranks ninth for total Gross Domestic Product, its non-profit arts market, which consists of more than 1,500 organizations, is comparable to that of New York and San Francisco, and consistently surpasses large cities such as Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia, in terms of the number of organizations and their per capita expenses

What Practical use is Made of Student Evaluations of Teaching?

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are an accepted method of investigating the impact of lecturers’ work with students. Although research generally shows that student evaluations are a positive development, conflicting research on the reliability and validity of the methods used leads to our overall research objective of discovering what practical use is made of the evaluation data by lecturers. Particular focus is placed on the lecturers’ attitude to the use of quantitative and qualitative questions and the reliability of the evaluations as an effective tool. Considerations include the halo effect, students’ ability to accurately assess course content, the influence of assessment grading, and fundamentally the fitness of this instrument for the purpose of acquiring useful, objective data. In a global context SETs may be used by institutions for recruitment or promotion purposes. However, in Europe they tend to be regarded as confidential documents seen only by individual course leaders and senior management at faculty level. They are therefore more commonly expected to be used by the lecturers themselves as evidence of particular necessary steps that would improve course quality and student satisfaction. With regard to the use to which the evaluation results may be put, a certain cynicism is evident among lecturers who perhaps shrink from a perceived obligation to cater to the demands of the student in the role of consumer. Such evaluations include both quantitative and qualitative measurements, generally concentrating on the quantitative as a useful tool to produce statistically comparable data. This initial study uses interviews with lecturers and senior faculty staff at a German private business school and examines their perceptions of the procedures, including their assessment of the effectiveness and use of the results of SETs of their undergraduate students. The data analysis shows a diverse attitude to the evaluations and the call for more open debate and agreement on the format, reliability and use of these evaluations

Alirans and the Fall of the Old Order

Page range: 23-6

Typing rule-based transformations over topological collections

Pattern-matching programming is an example of a rule-based programming style developed in functional languages. This programming style is intensively used in dialects of ML but is restricted to algebraic data-types. This restriction limits the field of application. However, as shown by Giavitto and Michel at RULE'02, case-based function definitions can be extended to more general data structures called topological collections. We show in this paper that this extension retains the benefits of the typed discipline of the functional languages. More precisely, we show that topological collections and the rule-based definition of functions associated with them fit in a polytypic extension of mini-ML where type inference is still possible