The overall objective of this study is to establish the extent to which an ERP system could be used within the management of British Tennis. Whilst ERP systems are used extensively in commercial organisations, there is little research into the use of these systems in the management of sport by the National Governing Bodies and by the operational providers of sport facilities. This supports the specific finding in the Game Plan (National Strategy Unit, 2002), which identified that the management systems within sports administration need to be improved and that there is a general lack of research within this specific area. The research proposes an ERP framework which can be implemented to achieve a number of improvements in operations and to enable other opportunities such as targeted marketing. Porter’s Value Chain is used as a model to investigate the organisations involved in the provision of tennis, and this model brings together the two concepts of multi-organisational structures and ERP systems. This enables the selected modules of the ERP system to be mapped on the value chain, and a new value network to be created. This research uses a predominantly qualitative method which incorporates an iterative approach to the investigation, based on the model by Bryman. Iteration One uses a mixture of indepth and semi-structured interviews to establish and corroborate the themes identified as part of the literature review. Also there are additional areas of theory identified as part of the data collection process which are explored in more depth. The second iteration is then used to gather further information and information confirmatory to the first iteration. Findings demonstrate a mixture of governmental, commercial, profit-making and not-forprofit organisations that have no central system in use. The research proposes that a central ERP system, including a number of functional modules, could be implemented into this environment and that it would deliver benefits to all organisations, including cost reduction, managerial benefits, strategic benefits, improved IT infrastructure and organisational benefits.

The principal aim of this thesis is to establish the extent of the impact of the introduction of CCT on the changing role of the local authority leisure professional. CCT was introduced into the management of local authority leisure facilities in phased stages between January lst 1992 and January 1st 1993, following the publication of the Parliamentary Order (Competition in Sports and Leisure Facilities, November 1989). As a policy it was one of a series of measures implemented by the Government in the 1980s and early 1990s to reduce the power of local authorities and reform the processes, systems and structures of these institutions. Change initiated at this structural level, stimulated change at the operational and individual levels of the policy process and it is at this individual or `agency' level that this thesis is most concerned. The empirical work undertaken to identify the impact of CCT at the agency level was based on 26 in-depth qualitative surveys administered on local authority leisure professionals who had worked in leisure services between the mid 1980s and 1998. At the individual level, the research considered in detail the role of the leisure professional as s/he was both a participant and spectator in the implementation of CCT. Individual officers' responses to the implementation were mediated by factors such as training, background, previous work experiences and the contextual local authority situation within which they found themselves. The findings demonstrate that the dominant values in the institutional environments within which leisure professionals operated, changed significantly with CCT as `goal governance' and `competitive individualism' came to the fore. Within this often aggressive and competitive environment, the implementation of CCT resulted in staffing restructuring and realignment of responsibilities and there was severe pressure to achieve the policy requirements. Relationships between colleagues became strained and some elements of leisure provision suffered as a result. Terms and conditions of employment deteriorated and many staff became de-motivated and disillusioned. However, in some instances CCT was seen as beneficial as it gave officers opportunities for career enhancement, it led to the development of generic leisure managers and heightened the profile of the leisure professional. Thus, CCT had a huge impact on local authority leisure professionals, as it imposed significant constraints and inhibitions on officers in their working relationships and environment. However, it also enabled some officers to advance within the leisure management industry and benefit from improved employment opportunities and heightened status. CCT as a policy both constrained and enabled leisure professionals. It was at the individual level that these constraining and enabling effects were most felt although previous research has given scant recognition to the human resource implication of CCT implementation through statistical analyses of outcomes. This research, however, recognises that one should use statistics `for support rather than illumination" (Lang as quoted in Cohen, 1960) and in so doing underlines the importance of the `bottom up' approach to policy analysis where the emphasis is on the role of the individual in the policy process.

Csikszentmihalyi's (1975b) 'flow' theory has been extensively developed and utilised, providing the leading explanation for positive subjective experiences in the study of leisure. The prescriptive tenets along with the archetypal descriptive characteristics of the flow state have been well documented. What is less explicit, however, is what occurs within experience in the instances immediately prior to the onset of flow and those immediately following: in what the author has come to term as pre-flow and post-flow experience (Elkington, 2006 and 2007). This research approaches the dearth of knowledge concerning pre- and post-flow experience from the perspective of existential-phenomenological psychology with the aim of bringing clarity to the experiential, conceptual, and theoretical uncertainty surrounding what goes before and after a state of flow and with it a more complete and holistic understanding of flow experience. The research explores the intricacies of flow experiences of participants from one activity characteristic of each of Stebbins' (2007a) amateur, hobbyist, and career volunteer serious leisure categories, namely: amateur actors, hobbyist table tennis players, and volunteer sports coaches. Using narrative meaning as an interpretative tool to generate descriptions of the specific experiential situations and action sequences that comprise pre- and post-flow produced a single representative narrative of pre- and post-flow experience, and the first empirical insights into the phenomenology of such phases of experience. Examining flow in the context of serious leisure has revealed there to be significantly more to the act of experiencing flow than depicted in Csikszentmihalyi's (1975b) original framework, re-conceptualising flow as a focal state of mind in a broader experience-process model comprising distinct, intricate, and highly-personalised phases of pre-flow, flow-in-action, and post-flow experience. Combining flow and serious leisure has evoked the affinity of serious leisure activity for flow experience and the discovery that serious leisure and flow are not two disparate frameworks, but are structurally and experientially 'mutually reinforcing' of one another, revealing an explanatory framework of optimal leisure experience. The newly-emerged process view of flow was used to provide insights into the phenomenology of flow in serious leisure, adding to the explanatory capacity of Stebbins' serious leisure theoretical framework. Conflating flow and serious leisure in this way provides for significant and exciting opportunities for knowledge transfer between these two established leisure-related frameworks and signifies new vistas for future research in both fields.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether goal congruence exists among administrative, supervisory and direct service personnel within public leisure service organizations and among public leisure service organizations of different sizes,. The source of data for the study was a Goal Study Questionnaire distributed to 344 employees of selected leisure service organizations. The results indicated that goal congruence was not established either among duty levels within public leisure service organizations or among public leisure service organizations of different sizes.