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(2022)ThesisData-driven decision making is everywhere in the modern sporting world. The most well-known example of this is the Moneyball movement in Major League Baseball (MLB), which built on research by Sherri Nichols in the 1980s, but sport analytics has also driven major changes in strategy in basketball, the National Football League, and soccer. In Australia, sports analytics has not had quite the same influence in its major domestic codes. In this thesis, we develop tools to assist the analytics community in two major Australian commercial sports. For Australian Rules Football, the largest commercial sport in Australia, data was not readily accessible for the national competition, the Australian Football League (AFL). Data access is fundamental to data analysis, so this has been a major constraint on the capacity of the AFL analytics community to grow. In this thesis, this issued is solved by making AFL data readily accessible through the R package fitzRoy. This package has already proven to be quite successful and has seen uptake from the media, fans, and club analysts. Expected points models are widely used across sports to inform tactical decision making, but as currently implemented, they confound the effects of decisions on points scored and the situations that the decisions tend to be made in. In Chapter 3, a new expected points approach is proposed, which conditions on match situation when estimating the effect of decisions on expected points. Hence we call this a conditional Expected Points (cEP) model. Our cEP model is used to provide new insight into fourth Down (NFL) decision-making in the National Football League, and decision-making when awarded a penalty in Rugby League. The National Rugby League (NRL) is the leading competition of Australia’s second largest commercial sport it is played on a pitch that is 100m long and 70m wide, and the NRL have provided us with detailed event data from the previous five seasons, used in academic research for the first time in this thesis. We found that NRL teams should kick for goal from penalties much more often than is currently the case. In Chapter 4 we develop a live probability model for predicting the winner of a Rugby League game using data that is collected live. This model could be used by the National Rugby League during broadcasts to enhance their coverage by reporting live win probabilities. While most live probability models are constructed using scores only, the availability of live event data meant we could investigate whether models constructed using event data have better predictive performance. We were able to show that in addition to score differential that the addition of covariates such as missed tackles can improve the prediction. Clubs use their own domain knowledge to test their own live win probability theories with the R scripts that are provided to the NRL
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(2022)ThesisDigital work exemplifies the impact of Information Systems (IS) on everyday life in the modern world. Digital nomadism is an extreme incarnation of digital work, entailing knowledge workers mobilising — from fixed life and work arrangements in one place, to a lifestyle of travel and mobile, location-independent work — facilitated by digital technologies. Many see digital nomadism as a promising alternative to entrenched patterns in society, particularly in how workers relate to organisations and how citizens relate to nation states. However, others may critique and question digital nomadism for its shortcomings and ethical issues. This thesis engages with this fragmented discourse on digital nomadism by making contributions through the lens of critical theory. As this thesis outlines, critical theory is an intellectual tradition that sensitises scholars to critical-theoretic perspectives: Empowerment and Emancipation; Exploitation and Marginalization; Systems and Structures; Agency and Technology; Environment and Sustainability; Ethics and Morality. This thesis is comprised of four related papers. The first paper presents an overview of different types of theorising in critical-theoretic IS research, revealing a diverse philosophical landscape of intellectual foundations that can help scholars make sense of the interplay between critical-theoretic issues and IS phenomena like digital nomadism. The second paper then leverages the findings of the first paper, to present a literature review of digital nomadism from a critical theory perspective. The second paper reveals that critical-theoretic knowledge claims are already visible in the scholarly literature on digital nomadism but have yet to be fully understood, thus suggesting the need for future research. Based on this foundational understanding of the literature on digital nomadism and the literature on critical-theoretic IS research, the third and fourth papers make contributions based on empirical findings from fieldwork in major digital nomad destinations. The third paper employs the empirical findings to envision the future of post-COVID-19 knowledge work, based on a Hegelian dialectical perspective; and the fourth paper employs the empirical findings to reveal how digital nomadism entails an avenue for achieving workers’ emancipation that constitutes a departure from the traditional conceptualisation of emancipation in the nation state.