Managers Making Sense of Millennials: Perceptions of a Generational Cohort

The study of generational cohorts has seen an increase in popularity in scholarly and popular literature. Millennials comprise the newest cohort to enter the workplace. This study explores how managers use social categorization to make sense of their Millennial-generation employees. Data were collected through interviews conducted with managers in order to learn how they viewed and described Millennials. Twenty-five managers in the hospitality industry were interviewed. Data were analyzed by searching for membership categorization devices (MCDs), then patterns in usage and meaning of the devices were explored. Three patterns were identified in using MCDs to reference Millennials: “kids”, “age group,” and “Millennials”/variations of the term. These findings are examined in reference to how they may inform managerial behavior as well as guide further study of generational cohorts.     

Joining forces for public value creation? Exploring collaborative innovation in smart city initiatives

Creating public value is a key goal of public administrations, both in their daily business and in the growing field of smart government and smart cities, which focuses on IT-enabled innovations in the public sphere. However, many public administrations still struggle with such innovations due to complex technologies, high investments, and the numerous stakeholders involved. To address this issue, some local governments in continental Europe have turned to collaborative innovation approaches, partnering with (semi-)public utility companies in the hope that their additional innovation assets will boost innovativeness. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how exactly such collaborations should be governed to ensure that the focus remains on creating public value, as utility companies may have their own agendas. To explore this question, we conducted a comparative case study in the context of smart city initiatives with four cases in Swiss local governments. Drawing on agency and stewardship theory, we then propose a model of public-value-focused collaborative innovation, enabling us to explore various collaboration characteristics and their effects on public value creation. Our findings suggest that both agency- and stewardship-based collaborations increase innovativeness. However, while agency collaborations tend to produce smart city innovations that mainly serve the utility companies' business interests, stewardship relationships lead to innovations that are focused more on public value creation. As such, our study extends the literature on the effects of collaborative innovation on public value, and it provides practical recommendations on how such collaborative innovation should be designed.     

Utility of international normative 20 m shuttle run values for identifying youth at increased cardiometabolic risk

The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of international normative centiles for the 20 m shuttle run test (20mSRT) to identify youth at increased cardiometabolic risk. This was a cross-sectional study involving 961 children aged 10–17 years (53% girls) from the United Kingdom. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves determined the discriminatory ability of cardiorespiratory fitness percentiles for predicting increased cardiometabolic risk. ROC analysis demonstrated a significant but poor discriminatory accuracy of cardiorespiratory fitness in identifying low/high cardiometabolic risk in girls (AUC = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.54–0.63; p = 0.04), and in boys (AUC = 0.59, 95% CI: 0.54–0.63; p = 0.03). The cardiorespiratory fitness cut-off associated with high cardiometabolic risk was the 55^th percentile (sensitivity = 33.3%; specificity = 84.5%) in girls and the 60^th percentile (sensitivity = 42.9%; specificity = 73.6%) in boys. These 20mSRT percentile thresholds can be used to identify children and adolescents who may benefit from lifestyle intervention. Nonetheless, further work involving different populations and cardiometabolic risk scores comprising of different variables are needed to confirm our initial findings.     

The impact of referee training: reflections on the reduction of home advantage in association football

The effect of increased development and professionalization in elite Association Football referee training and the relationship with reduced home advantage in the English professional leagues were examined. The central aim was to chart the evolution of referee training, and how these developments in referee training have assisted in reducing home advantage. Interviews were conducted with elite and ex-elite referees, as well as those involved in the management, training and administration of elite referees in order to identify more recent adaptations to elite referee training and further explain the relationship between training and the reduction in home advantage. Findings indicate training and support is pronounced within elite refereeing has developed appreciably over time, and has contributed significantly to an increase in performance, decision-making correctness and subsequent decline in home advantage.     

Batting last as a home advantage factor in men's NCAA tournament baseball

In baseball and softball, there is a rule that allows the home team to have the last at-bat and thus the final opportunity to win the game. However, in tournament play, this rule is often set aside and, instead, batting order is decided by other means (e.g. tournament rules, the flip of a coin). The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the batting last rule on game outcome in NCAA men's regional tournament baseball. It was hypothesized that host (i.e. home) teams would win a greater percentage of the games in which they batted last compared with when they batted first. This hypothesis was not supported. Closer examination of the last inning of play showed home teams were no more likely to have won the game during their last bat than visitors playing other visitors. The results suggest that the batting last rule contributes minimally, if at all, to home advantage in NCAA tournament baseball.     

The News Session in Infants and Primary School Classrooms

This paper presents an analysis of the social organisation of news sessions in infants and primary classrooms. We argue that these events are essentially occasions for the initiation of pupils into aspects of school knowledge and culture, although they are ostensibly spaces in the school day where children may introduce their own topics and interests. We show, through a detailed conversational analysis of varieties of morning news events, how these activities are stage‐managed, what the nature of the children's contributions are, and how these are organised to legitimise school knowledge and to define pupil‐teacher relationships, especially the teacher as primary receiver and announcer of news. The transformation of children into pupils is seen to occur in news sessions as much as in any other classroom activity. The distinctive feature of news sessions in the first years of schooling is that these are early instruction in how the private/personal realm can be fitted to the contours of the public/official curriculum, how everyday life interests are subordinated to and appropriated by the culture of the school.