The aim of this study is to investigate how athleticism can be incorporated as selection criteria within the recruitment process. It is a descriptive case study, whereas Performiq is the company chosen to study. The reason is due to the fact that Performiq attached great importance to athleticism. The study has been built up through semi structured interviews and a content analysis of Performiq’s interview guide and work ads. It is based on the theories of Kahlke & Schmidt’s assessment circle. The results showed that Performiq sees athleticism as a merit and not a requirement and explains how the company incorporates athleticism in their recruitment process. The company does believe that individuals get useful features from their sports that can be of use in future work.

Embracing the symbolic interactionist view of the notion of self, applying dramaturgical theories of self-presentation, this study unpacks the linkage between leaders’ lifestyle behaviours (in athletic endeavours) and the formation of their sense of self as occupants of the leadership role from a self-expressive perspective.  I conducted a study of a group of sporty top managers in Sweden. With interviews and observations, I anchored the research focus in verbal expressions within storytelling and in performative expressions of the top managers. Drawing on social interpretations of sport and athleticism and with a dramaturgical analytical frame, I examine how the sporty top managers interpret their athletic endeavours to express important values, beliefs and concerns to express ‘whom they want to become’ as occupants of the leadership role. The analysis shows that lifestyle behaviours in athletic endeavours serve as a new source of self-meanings with which the sporty top managers create and express wishful notions about themselves as occupants of the leadership role. By incorporating athletic values with their distinctive understanding of a ‘good leader’, the top managers seek to present themselves with an idealized image of ‘athletic leaders’. In this process, the top managers outline a role-script that is mainly characterized with self-disciplinary qualities and masculine values, they define the leadership context with athleticism in the centre, and they express an overt intent to elevate some people and exclude others in organizational processes based on athletic values in which they personally believe. Hence, the process of formation of self as ‘athletic leaders’ is not only ‘self-relevant’, but it is personally, interpersonally and socially (organizationally) meaningful. The analysis also shows that the top managers seek to give legitimacy and an elitist status to the idealized view of self by using expressive strategies to appropriate their appearances, regulate emotions and bodily senses, and mould a gendered self-image.   This thesis contributes to leadership studies in several ways. First, the study expands on extant literature theorizing the linkage between lifestyle behaviours and the formation of sense of self as occupants of the leadership role from a new angle. It contends that lifestyle behaviours such as athletic endeavours have become a prime site where business leaders express creative narratives regarding an idealized view of themselves. Second, this study further advocates that the formation of sense of self of leaders is not a simple outcome of different forms of regulative discursive regime.  Rather, this process involves creative self-reflexive activities that address individuals’ personally held values, their distinctive pursuits in becoming an idealized leader, relations with others, and some prevailing leadership notions that they believe to be closely associated with the nature of lifestyle behaviours in which they engage and commit. Third, this study confirms the notion that the formation of the understanding of self of leaders is not only a function of verbal expressive devices, but that it also involves individuals’ performative strategies in ‘expressive control’ (e.g. Down & Reveley, 2009; Goffman, 1959). This thesis adds to understanding this point of view through a discussion of self-presentational practices in non-work related activities. Finally and most importantly, this study suggests that the process of formation of the sense of self of business leaders is expressive of meanings on personal, interpersonal and social dimensions in its own right. That is, through creating new self-meanings in micro-level practices in lifestyle behaviours, the occupants of the leadership role define the situational characteristics (the leadership context), express intentions to enact the power feature of inclusion and exclusion of others; generate new understanding of the leadership role, and they reproduce and strengthen some prevailing leadership ideals.

Focusing on classic Hollywood, I contend that overly narrow concepts of both “sport” and “sport(s) film” have contributed to the scholarly neglect of key texts and characters from this period. Just as a wider analysis of the history of women’s athletic participation has expanded definitions of “sport,” scholars need to consider examples that complicate conventional understandings of sport films. This dissertation focuses on the female athletic performances during the studio era that -- precisely because they deviate from traditional conceptions of sport -- open up space for a range of meanings and identities around issues of gender and sexuality. I look specifically at Olympic skater Sonja Henie’s nine skating musicals with 20th Century-Fox, Esther Williams’s sixteen MGM swimming vehicles, and the 1944 filmic adaptation of Enid Bagnold’s novel National Velvet starring Elizabeth Taylor. This project is in conversation with longstanding debates, particularly in film studies, about the fraught visibility granted to women’s bodies on screen, issues of embodiment and disembodiment, and questions about identification and alienation of real and imagined spectators. The physicality of these studio era protagonists raises issues about the materiality of bodies and embodied subjectivity, even when a corporeal realism that focuses closely on bodily exertion, and the potential consequences of intense physical activity including pain and injury, is denied. This project, then, identifies the specific threats -- as stars and characters – that these women’s active bodies posed and describes how the studios defused and obscured their corporeal and ideological transgressive potential. And yet, in acknowledging and analyzing how and why these studio era female stars are “not there as themselves,” and in foregrounding the consistent disavowal of female strength and athleticism, I suggest that there are critical moments where that power is dramatically and corporeally present, and aesthetically critical.

Athletic potential is one of the most complex human traits. An elite athlete is produced from a complex interaction of an innumerable number of traits exhibited by the athlete. However, it’s not clear whether these traits are innate, allowing the athlete to excel, or, alternatively, are a consequence of practice. To be successful, athletes rely heavily on sensory information from the visual and vestibular systems. This study investigated the relationship eye movement control has with innate athleticism by comparing the saccadic and Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex (VOR) responses of former, no longer practicing, elite athletes against their age and gender matched counterparts who were non-elite or non-athletes. Results showed subjects who participated in athletic activities longer (regardless of type or level achieved), showed both significantly better VOR suppression capabilities, as well as higher head velocities while suppressing their VOR. Although, these results are correlative in nature, they do not support the potential that VOR suppression is a learned trait of athletes. A longitudinal study would be required to assess this relationship fully.

v angličtině Tittle (Theme works):Evaluation of condition preparedness of basketball players Student: Bc. Petra Lukešová Supervisor: PhDr. Aleš Kaplan, Ph.D. Aims of the dissertation: The main goal of the thesis is evaluation of physical shape of the elite Prague woman basketball team on the basis of repeated tests in intentionally chosen preparatory period. Methodology of work: Primary the thesis focuses on evaluation of conditional preparedness of elite basketball players in chosen condition preparatory periods for seasons 2001/2002, 2002/2003 and 2012/2013. The first method to discover basic figures was elementary anthropometric measuring where we determined the weight and height. Moreover we calculated the BMI. For the evolvement of conditional preparedness we selected the test battery of field tests. These tests differ from each other in content through the chosen periods. At the end of the preparatory condition period the laboratory test on the track ergometer was incorporated. The physical composition of the elite basketball players was found out within the laboratory test using the methods that are described in the methodology. Furthermore the lactate was taken. Results of the thesis: Through the chosen test battery and by the chosen methodology it was discovered, that the chosen sample of...

Nowadays actors within the business context are presented with a vast menu of different ideas which they can potentially adopt. This begs the question why actors choose to adopt a specific idea out of all the other available options. Our study explores the theoretical topic concerning travel of ideas, through the empirical context of leaders who practice extreme athleticism. The research question is: How and why do leaders adopt the idea of extreme athleticism? To answer this question, we assort several theoretical insights into six themes that are foremost predicated upon Scandinavian institutionalist contributions. The six themes are translation, previous practices, strategic purposes, fashion, legitimacy, and field, which is synthesised into a novel conceptual framework to help us understand how and why actors adopt an idea. The study is qualitative and collects data from 12 semi-structured interviews and 48 newspaper articles. Our main finding is that each of the six themes explored in this study are salient and helps us understand how and why actors adopt an idea, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits. A suggestion for further research is therefore to develop and refine the conceptual model presented in this study.

Swedish executives are in the pursuit of self-improvement. During the last two decades, extreme athleticism, practices like meditation and visiting retreats have been an increasingly common context within this pursuit, despite being costly in terms of time or simply being perceived as extreme. In an attempt to further understand these pursuits, the study seeks to answer the research question: How are the leader’s pursuit of self-improvement influencing leadership and what does it signal? The theoretical point of departure is previous research on athleticism and mindfulness amongst executives, through the perspective of signaling theory and charismatic leadership theory. The study is qualitative in nature with an abductive approach and consists of interviews with ten executives as well as a discourse of Swedish printed press. The data have been coded using the Gioia-methodology. The empirical findings consist of nine aggregated dimensions explaining executive behavior. How they began with their practice, what health benefits they achieved, what attributes were strengthened, the positive effect on leadership, the costs of their practice, how identity is involved, their own awareness of their practice, how they believed it influenced leadership, and what their leadership aspirations were. After analysis of the pursuits, it is concluded that the pursuits signal certain underlying qualities and attributes, an identity, and competence to lead oneself and others. Through actions inspired by their pursuits, signaling is reinforced and become signals of the organization as well as the individual leader and his or her leadership.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).

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