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The purpose of this paper is to identify types of professionalization in Swiss national sport federations (NSFs) and analyze organizational characteristics associated with specific types of professionalization. Such types reveal common patterns among the increasingly complex organizational designs of NSFs and thus contribute to the understanding of professionalization in NSFs.

An online survey of all Swiss NSFs was conducted to identify types of professionalization in these organizations using hierarchical cluster analysis, based on a multi-dimensional framework of professionalization.

The analysis revealed four types of professionalization: formalized NSFs managed by paid staff, NSFs managed by volunteers and a few paid staff off the field, NSFs with differing formalization and paid staff on the field, and moderately formalized NSFs managed by volunteers. The types differ in terms of the NSFs’ organizational characteristics, in particular, size, financial resources, Olympic status, and performance.

Applying factor and cluster analysis is a new approach to analyzing professionalization in NSFs that makes uncovering distinctive organizational patterns among a large number of NSFs possible. These results lay the foundation for understanding the professionalization of NSFs, counseling NSFs on their organizational development, and conducting future research on the design types of sport organizations.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the intercultural competence of pre-service special education teacher candidates through the contents of a graduate-level multicultural perspectives course.

This study used a graduate-level multicultural perspectives course to examine the intercultural competence of special education teacher candidates. A paired-samples t-test of significance was performed to investigate the pre- and post-growth of participants’s cultural sensitivity using the intercultural development inventory (IDI).

Participants’ intercultural sensitivity mean score suggested that their intercultural competence needs to be improved. The results showed no significant difference in the overall mean developmental scores between pre- and post-tests. However, significant differences were found between the pre- and post-test scores in perceived orientation and acceptance cluster.

A significantly higher perceived score was identified suggesting that participants might overestimate their level of intercultural sensitivity. Different from the existing literature, this study suggested that gender and education level were significant predictors of post-test developmental scores.

The trajectory of François Perroux across the Vichy regime poses about all possible range of methodological issues to the historian of ideas: individual versus collective biography, ideational versus ideological reading, internal versus external analysis, etc. The chapter outlines key elements about Perroux’s trajectory showing the entanglements and boundaries of science and politics in the transition from democratic to authoritarian rule and vice versa. A particular emphasis on uncertainties and adjustments shows, against the tendency to a teleological explanation induced by a linear interpretation of his career, that different paths were considered by Perroux, but that his choices were nevertheless constrained by the forces of both the scientific and political fields.

The chapter analyzes François Perroux’s institutional and intellectual activities under the Vichy regime (1940–1944) mainly by drawing on archival insights from Perroux’s papers. The authors argue that Perroux used his strategic position as general secretary of the Carrel Foundation (created by Marshal Pétain) to reshape French economics along a twofold trend: unifying economics with other social sciences, on the one hand; and developing its most analytical aspects, on the other hand. Thus, Perroux seized the opportunity to push for the introduction and dissemination of foreign theoretical studies within French economics, quite counter-intuitively to the expected nationalistic fallback accompanying authoritarian rule. In the end, the Vichy regime proved a suitable vehicle for the advancement of Perroux’s ideas and career: he managed in fact to make the best of a highly uncertain situation in 1940 and especially in 1944, with the impending Liberation of France. The authors show that Perroux used different strategies to neutralize those aspects of his work associated to Vichy’s ideology.