COVID-19 and Sports Consumption

The production of live sport without fans has had a significant impact on many sport stakeholders throughout the years 2020 and 2021. One of the most critical of those stakeholders, the fans, is explored in this chapter. Chapter 13 assesses how sport governing bodies and broadcasters altered their product offerings to make their sports attractive to the fans who were unable to view it live on the ground. In short, this chapter considers both the psychological and the economic impacts on fans of living without live sport. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Stephen Frawley and Nico Schulenkorf;individual chapters, the contributors.

Academic Identity during COVID-19

The recent Coronavirus pandemic triggered a global shift in higher education to fully embrace online platforms. With such a significant shift of academic workload and focus, we explore potential issues arising about how this shapes academic identity. Our interest is on how the adoption of a flexible pedagogy shapes an academic's sense of work and place and whether this is for some a readjustment of what is believed to be a normative view of an academic as teacher, while for others it may be a challenge to their values. Through a sampling of academics at a UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) we determine that the rapid move to remote teaching has resulted in the establishment of a transient identity that has yet to be consolidated as the sector moves from crisis-respondent transactional delivery models, to one of permanency that reflects the skills, competencies, and values of the digitally literate academic 4.0. © 2022 Common Ground Research Networks. All rights reserved.

Rights and Parliamentary Oversight in the Pandemic: Reflections from the Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament is the only devolved legislature that has passed general coronavirus-related emergency primary legislation, and it is now debating legislation that would put emergency public health powers on a permanent footing. This paper considers whether, and if so to what effect, human rights have acted as a core concern in law-making during the pandemic in Scotland to draw out lessons for future crises. The analysis reveals a mixed picture. In situations where Parliament is closely involved in scrutiny, like legislative debates, human rights concerns were surfaced and in notable ways rights operated as an effective limit on desired state action. However, much of the pandemic response was executed by means of secondary legislation, as enabled by the Coronavirus Act 2020, and there was a clear pattern of making this secondary legislation using the made affirmative procedure. This "scrutiny-lite” legislative pathway is one in which there are reduced opportunities for and compulsions towards rights-based reasoning and justification, even though as a matter of democratic legitimacy and the limitation of state power such instruments are particularly in need of robust parliamentary scrutiny. Thus, while well-embedded parliamentary processes and an apparent hospitability towards rights by the Scottish Government resulted in admirable levels of rights-based scrutiny of COVID-19 related primary legislation, this was undermined by extensive recourse to scrutiny-lite modes of delegated law-making and the Scottish Parliament's failure to subject resulting Scottish statutory instruments to meaningful scrutiny. © 2022 Thomson Reuters and Contributors.

Improving Operational Processes for COVID-19 Ready Smart Campus

—The current COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the importance of cleanliness and social distancing. These needs will continue to be important as the world moves to a new normal whilst navigating through a post-covid environment. This paper presents a use case application that focuses on enforcing safe distance measures inside a campus building where there is limited manpower resources. Amidst the social setting within the university, staff or students may at times accidentally congregate, which may lead to spread of diseases inconveniencing all affected parties. Our proposed integrated solution consists of a network of video cameras and sensors which allows one to monitor behavior within the building. The integrated smart devices communicate with (1) an analytics server that processes the data from the various sensors and (2) a platform that integrates the analytic results and optimizes the action items to be reflected to the environment. A pilot prototype has been deployed and evaluated within a living lab setting on campus. Results show that the system is useful in streamlining the operational process resulting in more efficient processes and procedures to help enforce safe management measures needed to maintain proper social distancing among occupants in campus. © 2022 by the authors.

The organizational identification and well-being framework: theorizing about how sport organizations contribute to crisis response and recovery

During crises, sport organizations are said to play an important social role by facilitating community recovery;however, the literature lacks an overarching theoretical framework to explain how. Drawing on the social identity approach, we argue sport organizations can enhance well-being during crises to the extent that they foster shared identification among current and potential members. The Organizational Identification and Well-being Framework reflects this assertion, illustrating leadership functions to create an organization's in-group identity that satisfies the needs of members in response to a crisis. It further outlines the SPRInT (Social support, Purpose and meaning, Relatedness, In-group norms, and Trust) pathways, which mediate the effect of organizational identification on member well-being. Our framework extends prior work examining organizational-level antecedents of identification with a sport organization by considering how identity leadership functions may foster organizational identification for individuals both internal and external to the organization. Moreover, it demonstrates how sport organizations may lead shared responses to address community needs and contribute to population well-being.

Rapid development of a ventilator for use during the COVID-19 pandemic: Clinical, human factor & engineering considerations.

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 threatened to overwhelm the NH ability to provide sufficient critical care support to patients in the UK. In response to a rapid rise in cases in March 2020, the UK Government issued a call to industry to rapidly design and develop additional ventilators to expand the UK's capacity for mechanical ventilation. Three NHS consultants working in conjunction with TTP Plc (The Technology Partnership), were at the forefront, evolving the Government brief and developing a safe and effective ventilator, the CoVent™, in less than 5 weeks. The project demonstrates the ability of physicians to guide industry and pool knowledge and resources to rapidly develop and evolve technology in the face of a national emergency. This article discusses key aspects of the design process, highlights the unique human factors and engineering aspects of undertaking this amidst the coronavirus pandemic. Overall we demonstrated that when industry, healthcare and regulatory bodies collaborate and communicate efficiently, huge progress can be made in a fraction of the usual timescales.