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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify occupational groups who can act as semi-professional first responders, in order to shorten the response times to frequent emergencies, and second, to identify related opportunities, challenges and needs of training, emergency supplies and information technology (IT) support.

A case study approach was taken, combining future workshops, focus groups and an exercise. Network governance was used as an analytical lens.

The identified potential groups are security guards, home care personnel, fire services day personnel and facility service personnel. The results show that semi-professionals have a large potential to complement professional resources by carrying out first response or supportive actions vital to the emergency, partly by using already existing cars and equipment. The identified needs include additional basic equipment such as fire extinguishers and first-aid kits, training in basic firefighting, first aid and risk assessment, as well as mobile phone application-based IT support to manage alarms. The major challenges are organisational, economic and juridical, including ambiguities in responsibilities and related insurances. The analysis recognises the new collaboration as a hybrid form of hierarchical government and network governance.

The study suggests that using semi-professional resources can be one of many innovative solutions to recent public sector challenges that have put a huge strain on professional emergency response organisations.

The study provides a novel view of using semi-professional resources in emergency response, based on the joint perspectives of various occupational groups, and the fire services.

Children from disadvantaged families often already show developmental deficits at the time of school entry. The goal of Schritt:weise, a preventive, easy-access early education program for children ages one to five is to avoid such deficits through a combination of home visits by semi-professionals as well as center-based group activities. The program has been translated and adapted from the Dutch program Opstapje and is now being implemented in different regions in Switzerland. To offer the program more readily in rural areas, four adapted models were developed. This paper aims to provide a mixed-method, combined process and outcome evaluation of these newly developed models.

For this combined process and outcome evaluation, standardized testing for child development outcomes and interviews with different stakeholders were conducted.

The evaluation found that implementation of all four models was feasible and children developed along the norm in all four of the models. This finding was confirmed one year after program completion.

Building an evidence-base to better understand success of early intervention programs is key to effectively supporting children from disadvantaged families in their development.

This early education program using home-visitation with semi-professionals is feasible and successful in reaching children from disadvantaged families.

It is possible to support children from disadvantaged families through the program Schritt:weise and prevent developmental deficits at school entry.

The finding that children developed along the norm in all four models means that the key program goal was achieved and that the specific implementation model can be chosen based on the specifics of the implementation context.

The launch of the Football Association's (FA) Women's Super League in 2011 was a major milestone towards the professionalisation of women's football in England. The league's formation aimed to increase the competitiveness of elite women's football in England at domestic and international level (Dunn & Welford, 2015). In 2014 the league expanded, creating a second division now known as the FA Women's Championship. This chapter explores the impact of the professionalisation of women's football in England on the second tier of women's football, by examining how players and staff at a Women's Championship club are negotiating the transition from amateur to semi-professional status. This qualitative project adopted a single case-study approach. Observations took place on home match-days to explore the match-day experience. Follow-up semi-structured interviews were then carried out with players and staff. The empirical data highlighted the key challenges and opportunities faced by clubs and their players as women's football continues to develop in this professional era. The introduction of the Women's Championship has helped to bridge the gap between amateur and professional club football in England. However, the experiences of the players and staff illustrate that operating effectively in the Women's Championship required significant sacrifice. Players were required to meet the more professional demands that were being placed upon them, without receiving any significant financial rewards for their commitments. Paid staff roles were underpinned by precarity, with the funded staff roles disappearing should the club not be able to maintain its Championship status.

The first Australia and New Zealand semi-professional women's rugby league premiership (NRLW) was launched in 2018. This chapter charts the players' journey through the first two seasons of the competition. A questionnaire was distributed at the end of both seasons to all contracted players in each of the four clubs to capture feedback on their experiences, perceptions, challenges and suggestions for improvements. Players were asked about contracts, sacrifices, support, club culture and their views on coaching and training. The findings indicated despite significant stressors and challenges, players were highly appreciative of the chance to play in a semi-professional league, to be part of a landmark competition, and to inspire future generations of girls to play rugby league. Positive satisfaction across most dimensions of league and club practices and operations were evident in season one. By the end of season two, attitudes were changing, with data showing that players expected to obtain increases in remuneration, number of clubs, season length, media coverage and improvements in coaching, training and support services. Sports such as rugby league need to be particularly mindful of addressing issues arising, as options for women in professional team sports is growing rapidly and competition for talent will only accelerate into the future. This case study of women in rugby league demonstrates that women's experiences and perceptions are shifting from an initiation phase of gratefulness and acceptance of personal/family sacrifice for the opportunity to play semi-professionally, to having increased expectations of reasonable employment conditions and legitimacy as professional athletes.

We challenge the conventional approach to distinguish between professional and non-professional Airbnb hosts by solely using the number of managed listings.

We leverage the recently released platform policy that categorizes hosts' professionalism by their self-declared status. Our multinomial modeling approach predicts true host status, factoring in the number of managed listings and controlling for listing and host traits. We employ data from five major European cities collected through scraping the Airbnb webpage.

Our research reveals that relying solely on the number of listings managed falls short of accurately predicting the host type, leading to difficulties in evaluating the platform's impact on the local housing market and reducing the effectiveness of policy intervention. Moreover, we advocate using more fine-grained measures to differentiate further between semi-professional and professional hosts who exhibit heterogeneous economic behaviors.

Reliable professionalism metrics are essential to curb unethical practices, promote market transparency and ensure a level playing field for all market participants.

This work pioneers the revelation of the inadequacy of a commonly used measure for predicting host professionalism accurately.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the levels of athletic identity influenced the relationships among college experiences, career self-efficacy, and the career barriers faced by semi-professional student-athletes in Taiwan.

Survey data of athletic identity, college experiences (involvement in social, academic, career orientation activities, etc.), career self-efficacy, and career barriers (inherent difficulties in career exploration in a dual student-professional role) were collected from 345 varsity student-athletes in Taiwan sport universities. The conditional process analysis was conducted to test whether the mediating role of career self-efficacy in the association between college experiences and career barriers was dependent on athletic identity levels.

The results indicated that enriching college experiences contributed to fewer barriers regarding career exploration post graduation through high levels of career self-efficacy. Particularly for assorted and social experiences, the indirect effect reduced as the levels of athletic identity increased.

These findings may be applied to athletes who pursue early specialization and students who engage heavily in a specific sport or other co-curricular activities while neglecting the importance of scholastic learning and career exploration. Career counseling practitioners and sport psychologists are advised to take account of athletic identity and contextual specificity while providing career interventions to student-athletes.

This study extends the understanding of the impacts of athletic identity on college student-athletes’ career explorations within a specific sport context.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020 prompted widespread global lockdowns as the world looked to contain and reduce the impact of the virus, including a pause on most sporting competitions (Parnell et al., 2020). COVID-19 has greatly affected the world, exposing stark inequalities, especially across gendered lines, in areas of society such as the labour market, domestic responsibility and economic hardship (Alon et al., 2020). Sport is a crucial, interwoven aspect of society and like wider societal trends, elite women's sport has been adversely affected by the pandemic, facing an existential threat (Bowes et al., 2020; Clarkson et al., 2020; Rowe, 2020). The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of how the pandemic is negatively impacting a wide variety of elite women's sports. Specifically, we cover sports where women have traditionally existed on the margins of the sport and could be considered as male-dominated labour industries. Centring primarily on the United Kingdom, we present a brief chronology of the impact of the crisis on elite women's sport, across football, rugby, cricket and golf – in many ways different from the men's versions – spanning the eight months since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 until the time of writing in November 2020. Throughout, the chapter utilises qualitative data from elite sportswomen encouraged to share their experiences during the pandemic (see Bowes et al., 2020). Subsequently, this chapter concludes with a summary of the challenges for women operating in (semi-)professional sports environments.

Women's rugby in South Africa is a recent development. Inaugurated four years after the professionalisation of the men's game in 1997, the ‘Springbok Women’ national team faced an uphill battle in their struggle to match the century-old reputation and international respect enjoyed by the male ‘Springboks’. The women's game grew slowly over the last two decades, starting from a low base with only a few clubs in 2000. Despite its designation as a national team with the title of ‘Springbok’ in 2012, the women's game on the national and club level remains an under-resourced largely amateur game with only a small group of semi-professionals. Given the country's lack of a dedicated professional league or national competition, the national team struggled in the international arena. Poor results, in the end, resulted in the prioritisation of rugby sevens, despite this shortened version retarding the growth of the traditional game. After two decades, the semi-professional ‘Women Springboks’, known as ‘Imbokodo’ or ‘grinding stone’ since 2019, is still facing salary discrimination, inadequate resourcing and a lack of genuine recognition as its exclusion from Team South Africa for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games demonstrated. At the start of the second decade of the millennium, the situation looks decidedly bleak for women's rugby in the country despite the South African Rugby Union's endorsement of World Rugby's international programme for game development.

The conclusion brings together the narratives and empirical case studies that have been presented in the collection and propose future research agendas. We conclude that emergent, and established, professionalisation of women's sport will continue to pose challenges that need to be made visible. We discuss a need for continued engagement in research media coverage, in all its formats, given its centrality to the commercial success of sport. We also articulate that experiences in and of women's professional sport are characterised by gender inequities. We advocate that it is not enough to think about women's professional sport as the little sister of men's professional sport are argue that there is work to be done for researchers in this area.

This paper aims to argue for a conception of information literacy (IL) that goes beyond the abilities of finding information as it includes communication skills. An important issue in this is that abstractors exercise IL on a professional level.

By stressing the importance of the fact that information literacy extends towards verbal communication the paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, the main component of which is linguistics.

It is found that verbal communication and especially analytic‐synthetic writing activities play an important role in information literacy at the level of everyday language use, semi‐professional and professional summarising of information. The latter level characterises abstracting.

The paper adds to the body of knowledge about information literacy in general and in connection with communication and abstracting.