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Moving away from the stories of financial disaster we encountered in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 examines what it means for fans when their club is suddenly awash with more financial muscle than some nation-states due to the generosity of a wealthy benefactor who is seemingly more interested in sporting glory than in financial gain. This chapter engages with the notion of the football club as a billionaire’s plaything. Roman Abramovich’s acquisition of Chelsea in 2003 saw the West London club embark on an eye-watering spending spree and a sustained period of on-field successes, one that was unknown in the club’s history to that point. As a result, we take Chelsea during the Abramovich era as a starting point for considering how this model of ownership affects the relationship between fans and the connection that they have with their club. The evident success that financial muscle can bring shows owners what a happy fanbase is capable of, what they are capable of doing, and what they are capable of ignoring. The success of the financially doped teams of the 2000s created a precedent for winning over a fanbase with a successful football club, but nevertheless sat awkwardly with the normative ideals of how a football club should exist in the world and relate to its supporters.

This paper introduces a methodology to identify, analyse and represent heritage site attributes, emphasizing their impact on value, authenticity, integrity and management, with a case study on Ghadames, Libya. Inscribed in 1986 and moved to the In-Danger List in 2016 due to conflict, this work seeks to update the site's attributes and values for improved management.

This methodology, focusing on Ghadames, leverages recent heritage management advancements to monitor conflict-induced changes, aiming to enhance decision-making through a detailed analysis of the site's natural and cultural attributes.

Our findings highlight the need for systematic and holistic assessments of heritage site attributes and values, crucial for managing sites of both local and global significance. This approach is a key to understanding their identity, guiding interpretation, management and preserving cultural significance.

Developed for Ghadames, the methodology requires adaptation for other sites, underscoring the importance of identifying core tangible and intangible attributes that define a site's uniqueness.

Our developed methodology offers a replicable framework that can be modified by local heritage professionals to map attributes and assess the direct and indirect impact of conflict on heritage sites.

The detailed assessment provides a foundation for crafting informed policies and effective management strategies. It specifically targets minimizing the adverse effects of conflict on heritage sites' attributes. This effort is instrumental in preparing the necessary documentation to support the delisting of these sites from the UNESCO World Heritage Site In-Danger List, promoting their preservation and recovery.

This study explores the determinants of police officer support for pre-arrest/booking deflection programs that divert people presenting with substance use and/or mental health disorder symptoms out of the criminal justice system and connect them to supportive services.

This study analyzes responses from 254 surveys fielded to police officers in Delaware. Questionnaires asked about views on leadership, approaches toward crime, training, occupational experience and officer’s personal characteristics. The study applies a new machine learning method called kernel-based regularized least squares (KRLS) for non-linearities and interactions among independent variables. Estimates from a KRLS model are compared with those from an ordinary least square regression (OLS) model.

Support for diversion is positively associated with leadership endorsing diversion and thinking of new ways to solve problems. Tough-on-crime attitudes diminish programmatic support. Tenure becomes less predictive of police attitudes in the KRLS model, suggesting interactions with other factors. The KRLS model explains a larger proportion of the variance in officer attitudes than the traditional OLS model.

The study demonstrates the usefulness of the KRLS method for practitioners and scholars seeking to illuminate patterns in police attitudes. It further underscores the importance of agency leadership in legitimizing deflection as a pathway to addressing behavioral health challenges in communities.

Faced with the growing need to find new viable water supply models for urban areas, this article studies and maps the strategies and identifies the key criteria of sustainable development present in pioneering water supply systems in the medieval period. The main aim is to determine which of its innovative principles could be applied in present-day cities.

From a methodological perspective, two types of cases were established, such as water supply models for human consumption and pre-industrial hydraulic systems, all of which are located in Italy. For the first group, the cases of Venice and Siena were analysed, while for the second, in the context of the cities along the Aemilian Way, the case of Bologna was selected.

Five key criteria resulted from the analysis of the cases: exploitation, self-sufficiency, maintenance, rationalisation and reuse. The said concepts were defined and contextualised within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Middle Ages were a historic moment in technological reinvention, before the development of modern systems of sanitation. With very limited resources, these traditional systems focused on rational use and deep cultural and geographical knowledge. This is why its recognition is of great importance today, in a time full of instabilities, with a view to the work that needs to be done for the development of more sustainable communities.

The purpose of the study was to benchmark meta-analytical conceptualizations of business-to-business (B2B) seller skills against empirical evidence in services firms.

The study is based on a deductive approach and questionnaire survey focusing on a range of services firms from different industries and corporate sizes. A total of 389 questionnaires out of 732 were returned, generating a response rate of 53.1%.

The study aims to provide empirical evidence and structures relating to B2B sellers' capabilities in a seven-dimensional conceptualization, all of which can be used in services firms to improve their seller efficiency. Each seller skill dimension performs a different function in the sales services process.

The authors conclude that the verified meta-analytical conceptualizations of B2B seller skills seem valid and reliable in services firms. Nevertheless, further research needs to be carried out, based on other company characteristics as well as industries.

It reduces the risk perceived by customers in B2B services settings through cultivating the sellers' capabilities, based on the seven-dimensional evidence of seller skills to enhance sales performance.

The study contributes to existing theory and previous studies by offering a foundation on which to structure sales performance indicators in services firms. Specifically, it contributes to structuring B2B seller skills across a selection of principal dimensions in B2B services settings.

This study aims to identify effective behaviors in labor-management negotiation (LMN) and, on that basis, derive overarching psychological principles of successful negotiation in this important context. These empirical findings are used to develop and test a comprehensive negotiation training program.

Twenty-seven practitioners from one of the world’s largest labor unions were interviewed to identify the requirements of effective LMN, resulting in 796 descriptions of single behaviors from 41 negotiation cases.

The analyses revealed 13 categories of behaviors critical to negotiation success. The findings highlight the pivotal role of the union negotiator by illustrating how they lead the negotiations with the other party while also ensuring that their own team and the workforce stand united. To provide guidance for effective LMN, six psychological principles were derived from these behavioral categories. The paper describes a six-day training program developed for LMN based on the empirical findings of this study and the related six principles.

This paper has three unique features: first, it examines the requirements for effective LMN based on a systematic needs assessment. Second, by teaching not only knowledge and skills but also general psychological principles of successful negotiation, the training intervention is aimed at promoting long-term behavioral change. Third, the research presents a comprehensive and empirically-based training program for LMN.

As the economy re-shapes, so too must the modern organization and its governance. We examine corporate governance codes and their limits in predicting an executive’s performance. We look at the Code of Professional Practice of executive search consultants, the in-built factors that have prevented the sector from becoming a qualified profession, and how to move beyond them. We examine how sustainability is migrating to the heart of modern governance, and present eight reasons to change existing codes and a call for tolerant governance. Mining engineer Henri Fayol is considered the founder of corporate governance. Despite dramatic changes in management during the past 100 years, much of his theory still holds. We take a tour of Fayol’s thinking, how management has evolved, and examine the unstructured shape of things to come: an organic architecture, an emphasis on knowledge capital and an agile leadership culture. We conclude with “change ability” – an evolutionary leap for the chair, CFO, supervisory board and organizations as a whole. The executive search profession finally comes under a harsh spotlight. What’s next for the profession, in light of digitization, its representation on boards, its effect on diversity? And why do executive search firms need to walk the sustainability talk in the way they seek and position leaders?

An earlier form of this chapter by the author was published in Dutch in “Bestemming Boardroom: over zoeken en gevonden worden” (Boom, Amsterdam, 2018).

The study set out to understand how the regional competitiveness index (RCI) in the department of Ancash related to the human development index (HDI) from 2008 to 2021. For a more complete understanding of the findings, each component or dimension of the RCI was analyzed. Ancash's HDI and its competitiveness index over a 14-year period were used as the population for this applied, longitudinal, descriptive-correlational study, which was based on secondary data extracted from the “Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática” (INEI) and business school of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (CENTRUM) statistical databases. Multiple linear regression was used to find the relationship. The research found a strong and positive correlation between regional competitiveness and human development between 2008 and 2021. No correlations were found between the HDI and the health, education, employment, or institutional dimensions of regional competitiveness, but direct and significant correlations were established between the economic environment and the HDI and between the infrastructure dimension and the HDI.

This chapter builds upon the analysis of the last chapter, as fans have to deal with the issues that arise from their team’s financial superiority. Here, we question what happens when that financial superiority is accompanied by significant moral and ethical issues. Recent involvement of state actors in the ownership of English football has been evidencable and occasionally appears clear. Various reflexes and cognitive distancing occur from fandoms when football club ownership engages in practices that, according to the normative models that fans ascribe to their clubs, are mutually exclusive with the values of the fanbase and the club’s history. A common form of fan reflex often takes the form of distancing the players on the pitch from the club’s institutional structures, effectively teasing out the matchday experience from the structures that benefit from the raw emotion it generates. Another reflex is questioning why the fan should surrender their club when a morally, ethically problematic ownership model has acquired it. Here we have perhaps the greatest challenge to the normative model and, rather than negotiating that tension, as often as not the response is to try and ignore it.