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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 paper is to foster a better understanding of how decision-making processes work in sport clubs and to develop appropriate advisory concepts or management tools in order to successfully realize structural changes in sport clubs. This paper examines the decision-making processes associated with an external advisory programme. Based on the assumption of bounded rationality, the garbage can model is used to grasp these decision-making processes theoretically and to access them empirically.

Based on a case study framework, an in-depth analysis of the decision-making and implementation processes involved in an advisory programme was performed in ten selected football clubs. Guided interviews were conducted on the basis of the four streams of the garbage can model. The interviews were analysed with qualitative content analysis.

Results show that three types of club can be distinguished in terms of their implementation processes: low implementation of the external input; partial implementation of the external input; and rigorous implementation of the external input. In addition, the analysis shows that the participants in the advisory programme are the key actors in both the decision-making process and the implementation.

The paper provides insights into the practicability of advisory programmes for sport clubs and the transfer to the clubs’ practical decision-making routines. Additionally, it shows how sport clubs deal with (external) advisory impulses, and which different decision-making practices underlie these processes.

The purpose of this paper is to understand why some sports show a positive economic impact and other sports do not, and to identify a common set of explanatory factors explaining the differences.

This explanatory research reviews the economic impact literature to identify the underlying conditions that would theoretically allow any sport, large or small, to generate positive economic effects.

Nine conditions are identified that, when present, could allow a community to experience a positive economic impact from a team or stadium. These are then used to explain the discrepancy in known empirical outcomes in major and minor league baseball (MiLB). It appears as if major league teams are more likely to violate the conditions than minor league teams. This research finds theoretical support for previous suggestions that smaller teams and events may be beneficial to local economies. In doing so, it also explains previous empirical results that found some MiLB classifications are associated with positive gains in per capita income.

Stakeholders can use the nine conditions to understand expected economic impact of their relevant sports. This research provides a comprehensive guide to understanding when economic impact can be positive.

This research helps explain some of the existing controversy regarding economic impact analysis.

It is the first research to help provide a pre-set of conditions that can help predict whether positive economic impact will occur for specific sports teams or stadium projects.

Presents a series of articles on each of the following topics: digital strategy in the next millennium (Digital strategy – a model for the millennium; Searching for the next competitive edge; The technology link; Value web management opportunities; clash of the Titans: communications companies battle for new ground; and a guide through the maze); retailing and distribution in the digital era (The business case for electronic commerce; superdistribution spells major changes; VF Corp. sews up software operation; IBM seeks to harness digital revolution; Egghead’s bold move to a Web‐based strategy; achieving successful Internet banking; and enterprising uses for IT); and the changing shape of the aviation industry (boom times ahead for air cargo; United Airlines flies high through employee ownership; Asian practices to West at Cathay Pacific; and Ryannair strips to the bone).

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the complexity of – and conflicts inherent in – managing sports leagues at both the league and franchise level.

The paper draws on changes to the National Basketball Association's (NBA) amateur entry draft, which has attempted to balance the need to preserve league parity and reduce the incentive for teams to deliberately lose games in order to improve draft position.

The discussion reveals the conflict between league and team goals. In addition, using Oliver's strategic decisions as a framework, the findings also illustrate how sport league commissioners have to balance pressures from both the internal and external environments.

This paper expands our understanding of how leagues manage institutional pressures, and how these pressures impact the team, leagues, and the decision makers involved.

Two of the primary growth strategies for Major League Soccer (MLS) have been team expansion and the construction of soccer-specific stadiums. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between these factors and game-specific MLS spectator attendance.

Two multiple regression models, one using multi-level mixed effects linear regression and another using interval regression, were developed to explain the variation in attendance utilizing the two factors of interest along with other control factors that have been identified as attendance determinants in previous literature. Game-specific data were collected for five MLS seasons, 2007-2011.

The two regression models explained approximately 40 percent of the variation in spectator attendance and the results showed that expansion teams and soccer-specific stadiums were significantly related to attendance. However, the effect of soccer-specific stadiums was minimized due to the extreme success of the Seattle Sounders in drawing about twice as many fans as the next highest drawing franchise, yet playing in an American football stadium.

While many of the standard factors such as the presence of holidays and novelty players, competition from other professional teams, and day of week, competition from other professional teams; team quality failed to show significance. Expansion teams drew better than incumbent teams and the impact from soccer-specific stadia is weak given the success of the Seattle franchise (and possibly negative when excluding Seattle). Censoring of the dependent variable had a discernible impact on many of the attendance factors.

These findings may be useful to managers of MLS and their teams along with other professional teams and/or leagues that are investigating the use of either team expansion or the construction of new facilities to increase spectator attendance.

This is the first study to investigate the relationship between expansion and new stadium construction in MLS over multiple years. The results indicate that MLS’s decision to use team expansion and the construction of soccer-specific stadiums has been beneficial with respect to spectator attendance.

The article discusses findings from a research project on the communication history of the League of Nations. It departs from the League's normative goal of “open diplomacy”, which, from an analytical standpoint, can be framed as an “epistemic project” in the sense of a non-linear and ambivalent negotiation by communication of what “open diplomacy” should and could be. The notion of the “epistemic project” serves as an analytical concept to understand this negotiation of open diplomacy across co-evolving actors' constellations from journalism, PR and diplomacy.

The study employs a mixed-method approach, including hermeneutic document analysis of UN archival sources and collective biography/prosopography of 799 individual journalists and information officers.

It finds that the League's conceptualisations of the public sphere and open diplomacy were fluent and ambivalent. They developed in the interplay of diverse actors' collectives in Geneva. The involved roles of information officers, journalists and diplomats were permeable, heterogenous and – not least from a normative perspective – conflictive.

The subject remains under-researched, especially from the perspective of communication studies. The study is the first to approach it with the described research framework.