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This paper aims to examine the two year Modern Apprenticeship undertaken by trainees in the English professional football industry.

In the first round of this three‐year project representatives of seven English clubs were interviewed in the summer of 2005; follow‐up interviews were conducted in the summer of 2006. To contextualise these results, a representative of a leading French club who was responsible for youth training was asked about provision in that country.

The paper finds that the apprenticeship system in France is more extensive and expensive but it produces players who are more likely to do well in major international competitions such as the World Cup. This in turn is due to the fact that more resources are allocated to training aspiring footballers; such spending includes extensive government subsidies. However, attrition rates are even higher in France than in England; at a micro level the system there is less successful.

This paper argues that the British government is in one sense spending too much money subsidising youth development in football; 75 per cent of all apprentices are never offered a professional contract. However, in another (macro) sense, it is not allocating sufficient resources to youth development in professional football given that England has never been in a World Cup final in 40 years.

Although a number of articles have been published concerning the physiology of training aspiring footballers, very little has been done by way of examining the resource allocations associated with the training given to young apprentices in the game, which is one of the UK's key sporting industries.

This paper will examine the two year modern apprenticeship undertaken by trainees in the English professional football industry.

Representatives of seven clubs were interviewed in the summer of 2005; all of them were responsible for youth development in their club. These interviews were the first of what will be three rounds of a longitudinal study, tracking the progress of some 126 apprentices.

The results of this empirical investigation fall under four headings; the rationale for youth development; the scale of the youth development operation; an analysis of the off‐the‐job training provided and the use of internal labour markets in football.

This paper argues that trainees will typically leave the industry having finished their apprenticeship, with heavily constrained options in the general labour market because the off‐the‐job training that is given to them is not, for the most part, appropriate

Although a number of articles have been published concerning the physiology of training young sportsmen and women, very little has been done by way of examining the resource allocations associated with the training given to young apprentices in one of the UK's key sporting industries.

This paper assesses the role of collaborative knowledge building in the co-creation of artifacts in the knowledge management field.

Fifty-eight papers published in six knowledge management-related journals were analyzed. The framework for analysis included 13 codes. Studies were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods.

Findings showed that several factors influenced the co-creation of artifacts in collaborative knowledge building. At the micro level, individual motivation, capabilities and reflexivity seemed to play a central role in co-creation processes. At the meso level, teamwork and shared understanding were identified as two key major factors. At the macro level, structural, behavioral and cognitive factors were identified; they included organizational rules and workplace setting, organizational culture and learning and memory. Managerial agency, characteristics of artifacts and knowledge brokers and boundary spanners also seemed to have an influence at the inter-organizational levels of analysis.

This study has limitations related to scope of contribution, covered time span (17 years) and restrictions in journal subscriptions.

The study will help managers understand the intricacies of collaborative knowledge building practices to increase organizational overall effectiveness and performance.

This study is a first attempt to systematically assess the role of collaborative knowledge building in the co-creation of artifacts, and therefore, it represents a primary reference in the knowledge management field. It proposes some initial propositions that can guide future empirical studies.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of artifacts in the knowledge management field in the past 18 years (1997-2015) and to identify directions for future research.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review of 101 articles published in seven journals retrieved from EBSCO and Google Scholar online research databases. The framework for analysis included 13 codes, i.e. author(s), title, year of publication, typology, theoretical lens, categorizations, methods for empirical work, relevancy, level of analysis, keywords, findings, research themes and future research directions. Codes were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods.

The findings lacked cumulativeness and consistency in the current knowledge management debate. Empirical works outnumbered conceptual contributions by two to one, and the majority of papers focused at the organizational level of analysis. Knowledge management systems, knowledge sharing and digital archives were the major research themes connected to artifacts, together with other closely aligned concepts such as learning and online learning, knowledge transfer and knowledge creation.

This study has temporal and contextual limitations related to covered time span (18 years) and journals’ subscription restrictions.

This paper is a first attempt to systematically review the role of artifacts in knowledge management research and therefore it represents a primary reference in the knowledge management field. It provides directions to future theoretical and empirical studies and suggestions to managerial practices.

The Swedish government decided in 1994, as part of the so‐called 50,000 Swedish crowns scheme, to set aside a portion of the labour market budget for the further training and retraining of local government and country council employees. The present article reports on the experiences of the training effort that took place in 1994–1995 and provides a theoretical framework for discussing staff training as an alternative to redundancies in the case of “economic overstuffing” and as part of a strategy for lifelong learning. Staff training and further development can be viewed as direct labour market measures instead of as redundancies. This article is based on a large empirical study in municipalities and county councils that have used these measures. In the study it was shown that these market measures can be defended both economically and humanly in the sense that both contribute to strengthening internal mobility and increasing the worker's adaptability to the external labour market. At the same time, this conform part of a strategy for a more flexible structuring of working time.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.

The purpose of this paper is to study how the project owner role is described in the literature, and how the role is carried out in practice. In particular, the author studies the project owner role in relation to project execution and benefit realization.

Based on a literature review, the author proposes a model for the relationships between the project owner, project manager and the operation of project delivery. The author then uses the model to describe the empirical results derived from a mapping of project owner responsibilities in a set of Norwegian information technology projects.

The author defines a project owner type 1 as a project owner that is focused on the business case and has responsibility for both project delivery and benefit realization. This project owner is the type described in most of the literature. The author further defines a project owner type 2 as a project owner that is mainly concerned with supporting the project manager and enabling project delivery. This is the type of project owner found in the empirical study.

The author identified a mismatch between the project management literature and observed practice.

There is a need to clarify the type of project owner role referred to in different contexts. Different project owners will have a different set of incentives and priorities. It is important to make sure that both investment costs and benefits (i.e., the complete business case), are seen in close relation to each other and not as separate undertakings.

There is a need for a distinction between two types of project owners. This study proposes a framework for the description, analysis and implementation of project governance, with a special focus on the project owner role.

The architecture, engineering and construction industry faces several challenges when performing life-cycle cost calculations. On the basis of activity theory, this study aims at improving our understanding of the current cost calculation in design practices as an activity system with a number of built-in contradictions.

Drawing on one of the authors’ practical experience from a design office, the research design comprises a paradigmatic case study of a Danish architecture firm, in which data are gathered through documents, observations, interviews and physical artefacts. Moreover, this paper applies a literature review on barriers for adopting life-cycle costing.

The paper identifies a number of primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary contradictions between practices of design, cost calculations and data management. Thus, hypotheses are formulated on how and to what extent these different contradictions shape cost calculations in design practices to obstruct or support the application of life cycle costing principles in design.

This study is part of an ongoing research project. Thus, additional analysis is required before the authors may conclude on final results.

This paper identifies a number of factors that obstruct or support the implementation of life cycle costing in current design practices.

This paper provides new insights into the various contradictions that shape data management in architectural offices as a prerequisite for improving life cycle design practices.

This chapter presents an exploration of the phenomenon of speaking with, or perhaps better stated “through,” a device. Autobiographical works and other published accounts of perceptions of Speech-Generating Devices (SGDs) by persons who have used them are reviewed. The bulk of the chapter focuses on insights gathered from research into the lived experiences of young people who use SGDs. Emerging themes focus on what is “said” by a person who cannot speak, how SGDs announce one’s being in the word, the challenge of one’s words not being one’s own, and the constant sense of being out of time. Reflections on these themes provide insights for practice in the fields of speech language pathology, education, and rehabilitation engineering. The importance of further qualitative inquiry as a method to gather and listen to the voices and experiences of these often unheard individuals is stressed.