Successful Careers in Football – Findings of a Person-Oriented Study

A successful career in football is the result of the appropriate interaction between different aspects of an individual’s life, since the various areas and phases of one’s life depend on each other. An endogenous causal relationship exists throughout a person’s entire history (Mayer, 1990). In particular, their family, work and sports career must be tuned to each other. The transition from the initial stages of education (compulsory schooling) to vocational training, which coincides with the beginning of the selection for the national youth teams, is a particularly critical phase (Wylleman, Theeboom, & Lavallee, 2004). In order to do justice to the overall life situation of a young sports talent during this transition phase, we have adopted a holistic perspective and follow Bergman, Magnusson and El-Khouri (2003) in using a person-oriented and systemic approach. In doing so, our main focus lies on the person-environment system. This overall system is made up of various subsystems, consisting of several operating factors which interact with one another. The different levels to which these operating factors are expressed lead to observable patterns, which can be summarised in the form of types. Particularly promising types can therefore be identified and the developmental process can be described. Former players on the Swiss U16 to U21 national football teams, born between 1981 and 1987 (n=159), were interviewed concerning their careers, and the operating factors school/vocational training, family support and sports environment were examined. With the help of the LICUR method (Linking of Clusters after removal of Residue) (Bergman et al., 2003), developmental types were identified which were promising in terms of achieving top performance in adulthood. A range of developmental types and anti-types emerge for the transition from the under-15 phase to the over-16 phase. One particularly promising type is observed in the over-16 phase, for which the operating factors education, family support and participation in national U16 to U18 teams have slightly above-average scores, with scores that are well above average in the sports environment.

A Team-Oriented Investigation of ERP Post-Implementation Integration Projects: How Cross-Functional Collaboration Influences ERP Benefits

The benefits companies achieve by implementing an ERP system vary considerably. Many companies need to adapt their ERP integration solution in the post-implementation stage. But after the completion of such a usually very complex integration project, benefits do not emerge by all means. A misfit between the organization and the IS, especially the aspect of cross-functional team collaboration, could explain these divergences. Using an initial theoretical framework, we conducted a single case study to explore the team-oriented perceptions in a post-implementation ERP integration project. To analyze the benefits and the influences in greater depth we disentangled the integration benefits into their particular parts (process, system and information quality). Our findings show that post-implementation ERP integration changes are not always perceived as beneficiary by the involved teams and that cross-functional collaboration has an important influence.

A distributed, semiotic-inductive and human-Oriented approach to web-scale knowledge retrieval

Web-scale knowledge retrieval can be enabled by distributed information retrieval, clustering Web clients to a large-scale computing infrastructure for knowledge discovery from Web documents. Based on this infrastructure, we propose to apply semiotic (i.e., sub-syntactical) and inductive (i.e., probabilistic) methods for inferring concept associations in human knowledge. These associations can be combined to form a fuzzy (i.e.,gradual) semantic net representing a map of the knowledge in the Web. Thus, we propose to provide interactive visualizations of these cognitive concept maps to end users, who can browse and search the Web in a human-oriented, visual, and associative interface.

A Health- and Resource-Oriented Perspective on NSLBP

Nonspecific low back pain (NSLBP) is an important health issue of our time. Personal as well as economic factors, like suffering pain and experiencing disability on the one hand and enormous and still increasing costs to the economy and society on the other hand, display the importance of the matter. Tremendous research has been conducted in the last few decades on NSLBP. A PubMed search (June 17, 2013) on “low back pain” provided 22,980 hits, and when specifying for “low back pain, systematic review,” 3,134 hits were still generated. Most research has been done examining the development, risk factors, or therapeutic measures of NSLBP, but hardly any literature exists on resources related to NSLBP. The aims of this review are twofold. In order to shade light on the salutogenetic approach of NSLBP, and thus to focus on health instead of illness, the first aim is to facilitate the understanding of which therapeutic measures enhance the ability to cope with chronic NSLBP and enable (more) normal functioning in life. The second aim is to stimulate the understanding of resources protecting against the onset of NSLBP or against the development of chronic NSLBP and its resulting work absence.