The ontology of team: a teleo-structural account

ABSTRACT

An explication of the notion of sports team involves a structural and a teleological element. The basis of a team is structural – a team is a group that containing a Distributed Internal Decision (DID) structure, that is, a structure in which the parts maintain autonomy while seeking a collective goal. A sports team is a team with a game-focused (or ludic) goal. Sports teams are associated with related, but distinct groups: sports organizations and sports communities. These differ in terms of their structure and the temporal orientation of their goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Team
• team membership
• teleology
• distributed cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.