Complexity and Control in Team Sports
eBook - ePub

Complexity and Control in Team Sports

Dialectics in contesting human systems

Felix Lebed, Michael Bar-Eli

Share book
  1. 228 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Complexity and Control in Team Sports

Dialectics in contesting human systems

Felix Lebed, Michael Bar-Eli

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Complexity and Control in Team Sports is the first book to apply complex systems theory to 'soccer-like' team games (including basketball, handball and hockey) and to present a framework for understanding and managing the elite sports team as a multi-level complex system. Conventional organizational studies have tended to define team sports as a set of highly heterogeneous physical, mental and cognitive activities within which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find common behavioural playing regularities or universal pedagogies for controlling those activities. Adopting a whole system approach, and exploring the concepts of control, regulation and self-organization, this book argues that it is possible for coaches, managers and psychologists to develop a better understanding of how a complex system works, and therefore, to more successfully manage and influence a team's performance.

This book draws on literature from the biological, behavioural and social sciences, including, psychology, sociology and sports performance analysis, to develop a detailed, interdisciplinary and multi-level picture of the elite sports team. It analyzes behaviour across five inter-connected levels: the team as a 'managed institution'; coaching staff controlling players via cybernetic flows; the team as a playing unit; the individual player as a complex dynamic system expressed through behaviour; and a player's complex physiological/biological system. Drawing these together, the book throws fascinating new light on the elite sports team and will be useful reading for all students, researchers or professionals with an interest in sport psychology, sport management, sport coaching, sport performance analysis or complex systems theory.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Complexity and Control in Team Sports an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Complexity and Control in Team Sports by Felix Lebed, Michael Bar-Eli in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psychologie & Sport- & Bewegungswissenschaft. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136661143
Part I
Methodological Aspects of Complexity in Team Sports
Introduction to Part I
This part serves as an especially broad scholarly introduction to competitive activity in sports through the complexity perspective. The discussion draws on sources from systems and complex systems theories, cybernetics, general biology, kinesiology, psychology, and management science. The outline is constructed deductively (from the general to the particular). As the most general subject under discussion, the system is the first notion to be reviewed. After that the topics narrow funnel-like in a logical progression: complex systems in general → living complex systems → human complex systems in action → athletes, teams, and sport organizations as interconnected elements of multilevel hybrid complex systems.
1
Complexity in Modern Sciences
The notion of system and main terms: main characteristics and a definition of system; the complexity phenomenon and distinctive features of complex systems.
1.1 The Notion of System and Main Terms
To substantiate the idea of complex system, it is necessary to reexamine a number of basic terms. The main term is “system.” According to early definitions, system was considered “a set of elements standing in interaction” (Bertalanffy, 1968: 33). This approach was quite popular during the 1960s and 1970s (Zeigler, 1976). But with the development of systems theory, essential new elements became key indicators, the most important of which will be analyzed later in this chapter. A logical axis for the following discussion will be based on Bertalanffy’s explanation of the theory of systems, which is one of the most fundamental generalizations in the field (Bertalanffy, 1968, see also Box 4). His opinions are presented here with additional notions and principles proposed by other theoreticians before, concurrently with and after him. One of them is Wiener’s notion of cybernetics (Box 5).
Box 4: Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) “was one of the most important theoretical biologists of the first half of this century. He developed a kinetic theory of stationary open systems and the General System Theory and was one of the founding fathers and vice president of the Society for General System Theory, and one of the first who applied the system methodology to psychology and the social sciences” (Brauckmann, 1999).
In the 1940s, he formulated his theory of open systems that shows a kind of self-regulation comparable to the behavior of an organic system. His notions of wholeness, hierarchy, equifinality, feedback, and aspiration to equilibrium were, in fact, a partial introduction to the theory of complex systems using different professional jargon.
During his professional career, Bertalanffy held positions at the University of Vienna (1934–1948), the University of Ottawa (1950–1954), Mount Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles (1955–1958), the University of Alberta (1961–1968), and the State University of New York (SUNY; 1969–1972). He was a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Naturforscher Leopoldina (Halle), the New York Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Physiological Society, and Study Groups of the World Health Organization.
Bertalanffy published over 200 articles on theoretical biology and General System Theory in journals and wrote more than 10 monographs. His works have been translated into English, French, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, and Dutch (Brauckmann, 1999).
Box 5: Cybernetics and Norbert Wiener
The Greek [kibernetiks] or “steersman” was used rather widely as early as the days of Plato (Plato: Republic, 6.488A; Laws, 12.963B; Cratylus, 390d) and later it became a common metaphor for a wise leader of society.
Historically, after ancient Greece, the new use of “cybernetics” appears in the 19th century. The famous French physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) used the term “cybernetics” for his vision of governing society in the 1830s. Additionally, Zeleny (1979) cited three relatively old works from the late 19th to early 20th centuries dedicated to social governing analyzed through cybernetics, tectology, and holism, and joined by him into one vision of a system based on feedback flowing from those governed to the governor. According to Zeleny, the Polish philosopher Bronislaw Trentowski published a small volume entitled The Relation of Philosophy to Cybernetics as an Art of Governing the People in 1843.
Thus, when Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) suggested the term “cybernetics” for the “entire field of control and communication in the machine or in the animal” (Wiener, 1948/1965: 11) in 1945, he thought he was the first, but in truth he was not.
Nevertheless, the connotation of cybernetics pertaining to a science and to weapon technologies is connected to Wiener (Zeleny, 1979). He himself traced this term to Karl Maxwell’s principles of “feedback mechanisms,” published in 1868 (ibid.: 11).
Wiener used Maxwell’s principle of feedback in his mathematical models for antiaircraft fire control in World War II (Wiener, 1956). Wiener conceived the idea of considering the operator as part of the steering mechanism and of applying to him such notions as feedback and stability, which had been devised for mechanical systems and electrical circuits. As time passed, such flashes of insight were more consciously put to use in biological research. Cybernetics has contributed to popularizing a way of thinking (Ashby, 1957; Bertalanffy, 1968; Conant and Ashby, 1970) in communication theory terms, such as feedback, information, regulator, variety, control, input, output, stability, homeostasis, and prediction.
A lunar crater is named after Norbert Wiener.
The first indicator of a system is wholeness, the encompassing of “a set of elements” within a frame. Although classical philosophy dealt with the relations between the whole and the part, the concept of wholeness has deep roots in the sciences as well. This is especially true of Gestalt psychology (e.g., Koffka, 1935/1963). (“Gestalt”—a German word meaning “configuration or “form”— presents a psychological school which was primarily interested in the wholeness of perception.)
Gestalt psychologists believed that perceptual experiences and/or what they called “productive thinking” depend to a great extent on the sensory organization of human experiences, that is, on organized entities reflecting cognitive patterns formed by stimuli rather than on the stimuli themselves (see, e.g., Koehler, 1947; Wertheimer, 1959).
This approach has developed in parallel with other systemic views of the world since the 19th century, as was shown by Zeleny (1979), but the notion of wholeness, which maintains that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, is common to both ideas (Bertalanffy, 1968; Lendaris, 1986; Dimitrov, 2005). But what is meant by “greater”?
In the case of living systems, the interactive dynamics of particular elements serve to enhance self-organization and to help maintain structural integrity. This interaction is oriented toward equilibrium and increasing order (von Foerster, 1960). “Living systems maintaining themselves in a steady state can avoid the increase of entropy, and may even develop toward states of increased order and organization” (Bertalanffy, 1968: 40–41). Here one can see the “greater “as a function of the wholeness of living systems: equilibrium as a minimally needed state and increasing order as a maximally required state (Koopmans, 1998).
In addition, Lendaris (1986: 605) looks at the epistemological aspect of the “greater” of wholeness and concludes: “There is no way for an observer to deduce the attributes-of-the-whole by studying the parts and their individual operation, and then somehow ‘adding’ these up.”
The second important indication of system is persistence, which can be achieved by boundaries (Bar-Yam, 1997). A system is anything that, according to Fuller (1979), has “insideness and outsideness” (Edmondson, 2007). The notion of insideness demands that a minimal number of parts form an interacting system, where not only its parts but also the relations between them are known. Interestingly, both Bertalanffy (1968: 54) and Fuller (1979), thinking mathematically, saw a quadrangle as an elementary unit having insideness and becoming a system: “We can put … four points … and we invariably divide space into two sections: that which is inside the four-point system and that which is outside. Unwittingly, we have created the minimum system” (Edmondson, 2007: 25).
The question of outsideness, and thus boundaries, leads us to the next important notion of system, which is system openness and closedness . Closed systems are the subject of physics and other sciences dealing with inanimate matter. They are not connected to the environment (Bertalanffy, 1968: 39). Open systems interact with the environment and interchange energy and information with it. All living systems are open. However, their dynamics of interchange with the environment vary depending on their level of development. Plants and lower levels of animal systems manifest passive, reactive adaptation. Human systems are also open, but their essential distinction is an active adaptation to the environment suited to their own will and aims. This leads to the notion of function and to functionalism in Spenserian philosophy. In sociology (Malinowski, 1944; Parsons, 1978) and psychology (Angell, 1907; Carr, 1925), function usually connects the systems approach to different levels of human and social existence. In their philosophical review of function and functionalism, Mahner and Bunge (2001) apply a special term to reflect a purpose focused on the character of adaptive behavior in human systems. That term is “teleofunction,” which involves “the notions of intention, purpose, or goal” (ibid.: 80). This Aristotelian focus on “teleo” (goal) is well illustrated by Juarrero’s (1999) question about the difference between wink and blink. Summarizing, it is possible to distinguish the following types of systems: closed inanimate systems, open low-level living systems with passive adaptation, and open high-level living systems with active adaptation to the environment, which include human activity in general and human playing in particular.
Hierarchy is a third essential indicator characterizing mostly open systems (Bertalanffy, 1968: 27–28). This quality of systems indicates that they usually are parts of a larger whole and, at the same time, they themselves are a whole for smaller parts included within. One of the better ways of understanding living systems is to create a hierarchical model of their separation between higher and lower levels (Zeigler, 1976).
In recent decades, however, alternatives have appeared to the hierarchical approach to the issue of intrinsic systems connections. Mathematical applications of systems theory speak increasingly about net constructed systems, for example, the Boolean network (Kauffman, 1993), which emphasize the absence of hierarchy between elements and their “each with all” connection.
Based on human structures in organizations, Bar-Yam (1997) proposes the notion of hybrid system as a domain composed of elements that derive from both hierarchical and net structures. This idea is highly significant for the subject under discussion in this volume because of at least two suggestions delineated in later chapters: (1) every team in game sports is not only a hierarchical structure; of necessity it includes a net structure of players interconnecting on the playing area surface; and (2) every net structure of playing athletes strives for order through leadership processes and covert self-organization within peer hierarchies (see Chapter 8).
Equifinality is another highly significant indicator of living systems. Bertalanffy (1968: 40) defines equifinality in the following manner: “Here, the same final state may be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways. This is what is called equifinality ….” Because each individual has free will, in any human system an infinite series of behaviors can motivate individuals and groups to reach the same final state. Equifinality as a principal and normative aspect of behavior in human systems strongly influences our understanding of how sport competing, coaching, and training can be managed and controlled. Dimitrov (2005: 8) refers to equifinality when he talks of “different ways of self- organization” in a system.
Feedback between elements within a system is a very important quality. This basic concept of system functioning can be traced back to Wiener’s notion of cybernetics (Wiener, 1948). In his view of the informational exchange between elements of a system, feedback was the response of “governed” elements to the “governing” subject in the system. Furthering this outlook, Ashby (1957) suggested that cybernetics was especially interested in cases where each element affects the others. “When this circularity of action exists between the parts of a dynamic system, feedback may be said to be present” (ibid.: 53).
Today, more than half century later, feedback has assumed a broader meaning. It refers to a process of returning information and/or energy: (1) from one element to another in a system or (2) from the environment to a living system as a whole. In the first case, this suggests the existence of at least two least interacting parts: one that directly influences and initiates the interchange of information or energy, and the other that reacts to this influence through a response. This can be described quite simply in hierarchical systems because they have a managing (controlling) subject and managed (controlled) objects (Figure 1.1-A). In net systems, where interacting elements are equal, every connection is both a directive and feedback (Figure 1.1-B).
images
Figure 1.1 Feedback and direct connection in (A) hierarchical and (B) net systems.
Environmental to living system feedback is usually explained by means of the functionalist S→R (Stimulus → Response) schema, where environmental stimuli influence a system, and in turn, the system reacts and produces an environmental response (Bertalanffy, 1968; Anokhin, 1975). The response parameters are picked up by receptors in the living system, forming parameters for a second stimulus, and thus create a closed loop of information or energy. Such a “closed loop” view is characteristic of widely accepted explanations of the coordination and regulation of movements (Bernstein, 1947; Bernstein, 1967; Adams, 1971).
Skinner’s (1953) view of feedback as a response to a stimulus has been accepted in pedagogics, too. It is often observed in the systematic approach to management of human groups and is still widely accepted and popular in team sport coaching and management (Carling et al., 2005:10; Figure 1.2). In contrast, in motor learning (for instance, see Magill, 1993), feedback is an instructive response to executing a new skill by a learner.
images
Figure 1.2 The “coaching cycle” or cybernetic loop (by Carling et al., 2005:10).
1.1.1 The Categorization of Systems
After an extensive review of what has been written about systems over the past 60 years, we suggest using the definition given by Dubkaer (2004: 32) because it is the most general and the least likely to raise serious opposition: “A system is a part or phenomenon of the perceivable or conceivable world consisting of a demarcated arrangement of a set of elements and a set of relationships or processes between these elements.” This definition includes human systems characterized by openness toward the environment and active adaptation, hierarchy, equifinality, and a dialectical unity of intrinsic synergism and competition.
As defined, systems can be perceivable or conceivable. They surround the person, and one interconnects with them by means of flows of energy and information. Only humans can create systems (models of reality) in their consciousness, in other words, artificial systems in the form of mathematical, logical, and verbal models. Here, there are two...

Table of contents