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GLOBALIZATION, SPORT
AND POLICY
THIS CHAPTER
- provides an overview of globalization and sets the context for the rest of the book;
- reviews the influence of globalization on sports policy;
- examines the relationships between sports policy, social policy and public policy.
INTRODUCTION
Each year in the spring, the countries of Europe meet in a televised song contest, a media event watched by hundreds of millions of peo- ple. [In Sweden] a controversy erupted. … The winning tune was a Calypso tune with the refrain ‘Four Buggs and a Coca Cola’. (Hannerz, 1992: 217)
Almost twenty years ago, the Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz sketched the above scenario of a mosaic of languages, music and nationalities coming together in the Eurovision Song Contest. Along with Eurovision, a number of public events have emerged that provide important sites through which to examine the global movement of people, values, goods and experiences or what we might refer to as ‘globalization’. Of concern for this book, sport provides an important and enduring backdrop against which to consider the global connections that have been created by world capitalism and then medi- ated by contemporary and emerging communication technologies; again, what we might also call globalization. As Giulianotti and Robertson note ‘sport is an increasingly significant subject for global studies, in its dual role as a long- term motor and metric of transnational change’ (2007a: 1).
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While sporting events like the Olympic Games and Paralympics, football’s World Cup, Formula One Grand Prix or the Tour de France, among others, provide opportunities through which to consider the production and consump- tion of globally circulating cultural, political, financial and human capital (still another way of describing globalization), the concerns of this book lie else- where. My main concern is to locate debates about globalization within a criti- cal analysis of its effects on the development, implementation and analysis of sports policy in various contexts around the globe. Events such as the Olympic Games or football’s World Cup are, of course, fully implicated in any discussion about globalization and sport, however we cannot separate the consumption of these kinds of ‘sports spectaculars’ (Cheska,
- from a consideration of their production. As I note elsewhere:
Too often, studies of ‘the spectacular’ have focused on the razzle daz- zle, the pomp and the ceremony, whilst ignoring the processes of human intervention and accomplishment whereby spectacles are made to possess these qualities. In other words, it is not sufficient to assume that public spectacles are just part and parcel of the fall out of popular culture. As sports analysts, we need to address the role of human agency in the mounting of the mega-event. (Palmer, 2000: 366, emphasis in original)
Similarly, Carter maintains that
Even when our critical, analytical gaze turns towards these spectacles, the emphasis is on the media imagery of said spectacles and the con- sumption of said vistas in particular. The tendency has been to focus on the most visible, the biggest and the best, without probing the hid- den, interwoven local and global politics within the production of such events. (2011a: 132)
It is here that policy and policy-making play key roles in what sport (and sports events) looks like in this increasingly global order. A key theme developed is that sports policy is the product of considerable cultural work on the part of a whole range of individuals and organizations, and this has significant implications for the management, administration and governance of sport and sports policy. Policy and policy-making, in other words, are key to what the landscape of con- temporary sport looks like in terms of tensions between exogenous and domestic sport as well as the events that are staged, sponsored and mediated on a global scale. Shifting policy agendas and competing tensions around the funding of sport also raise a number of debates about taste, culture, values and political priorities, which further makes an understanding of the ‘work’ of policy-making an integral part of any discussion about sports policy in the twenty-first century. At the same time, a number of trends, developments and events have occurred that are significantly ‘global’ in their impact to have had a major influence on
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world has been with Western Europeans since at least the discovery voyages of Columbus and da Gama. It is the sense of urgency and speed, however, with which we now connect with one another that is perhaps the hallmark of this global, interconnected world. As I note elsewhere, ‘the defining feature of the twenty-first century is that public culture is transmitted for global consumption at extraordi- nary speeds indeed. In the time it takes to log on, open a magazine or book a plane ticket, one can experience the constituents of popular culture across truly diverse registers of interpretation’ (Palmer, 1998a: 34). Similarly, Janssen et al. write: ‘globalization … is a prolonged process that has increased greatly in speed, scope, and impact in the latter half of the twentieth century’ (2008: 72), while Giulianotti and Robertson (2007a) and McGarry (2010) note that globalization represents an acceleration of the intensity of forms of cross-cultural change and interactions due to the introduction and intensification of various agents of change such as com- munication technologies. While we have long had a sense that we are part of a bigger, interconnected ‘whole’, it took until the twentieth century for us to define and debate it. The term ‘globalization’ first appeared in the 1980s to supplement terms like ‘trans- nationalism’ and ‘internationalism’ and to characterize what was then perceived to be an ever-shrinking social world where time, borders, local identities and cultural distinctiveness had all but collapsed. As Robertson rather apocalypti- cally put it, ‘globalization is the rapidly increasing compression of the entire world into a single, global field’ (1992: 174). Globalization became a shorthand for ‘cultural homogeneity’, with many commentators arguing that the global circulation and consumption of goods and commodities would see those produced by culturally, politically and eco- nomically dominant nation-states (read: the United States) being introduced to local markets at the expense of ‘home grown’ goods, commodities, labour and services (Hardt & Negri, 2001; Ohmae, 1995; Ritzer, 2000, 2004). Alongside these arguments, debates about local resistance began to counter such fears about the homogenizing effects of globalization, with empirical research explor- ing concepts such as hybridization and creolization (Dirlik, 1996; García Canclini, 1995; Morley, 1992; Morley & Robins, 1995). As a counter to these arguments about perceived cultural imperialism, the activities of anti-globalization and new social movements offer highly politicized and very public critiques of the dominance of the European and Northern American metropoles on the glo- bal arena and the inequalities that are embedded within (Connell, 2007; Held & McGrew, 2007; Leite, 2005). In an early piece, Houlihan (1994) outlines the variety of conceptualizations of globalization in the context of sport. He concludes that a fundamental dichotomy exists between a view of globalization as an extension of cultural imperialism and a more participative understanding of globalization where local culture is not merely a passive recipient but an active agent in its reception and interpretation. In short, debates about structure and agency coexist in con- cert, and I will return to them at several points in the book. Maguire, borrow- ing from Elias, also acknowledges these tensions, conceptualizing sport as
GLOBALIZATION, SPORT AND POLICY (^11)
existing in the ‘interlocking process of “diminishing contrasts” and “increasing varieties”’ (1994: 395). For Maguire, ‘global flows’ are a profound feature of late-twentieth-century sport. In light of these various ways of thinking about the transnational movement of people, objects and ideas, it is perhaps not surprising that there is little con- sensus as to how to define and interpret ‘globalization’. Guillén notes that ‘glo- balization has become a key concept in the social sciences, even though its meaning is contested and its systematic study has proved difficult’ (2001: 235). Similarly, in his introduction to the then new journal Global Social Policy , Deacon notes the contested nature of globalization as well as its undeniable intersection with and impact upon policy-making:
The scope and impact of the globalization process has yet to be subject to sufficient empirical investigation. The extent of globalization and the form it takes is open to normative evaluation and political struggle. Despite these areas of disagreement about the meaning, impact and desirability of globalization few would argue with the proposition that globalization, either as an economic reality or as a political project, is impacting on the making of social policy and the process of social development at national, regional and global level. (2001: 5)
As such, in the following chapter, I explore some of the debates – still largely unresolved – that have argued for a redefinition of the basic concepts that can help comprehend the complexities of the cultural, political and social effects of globalization, particularly as they relate to ‘the local’ and ‘the global’ in sports policy. Although no one single grand theory of globalization exists, considerable thinking has emerged over the past three decades within disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, politics, economics and international relations.^1 In crude terms, approaches to globalization tend to stem from either a world sys- tem theory, in which globalization is fundamentally seen as the product of the spread of capitalism; that is, globalization is seen in terms of economic determi- nants and consequences, or from a way of thinking that conceptualizes globali- zation as being fundamentally the spread of cultural relationships and exchanges; that is, as a key determinant of social experiences. Clearly, both approaches frame the tension between the production and consumption of global sporting events and sports policy, in different, but equally applicable, ways and I engage with each in the ensuing chapters.
World System Theory and Globalization
First conceived by the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) to explain development and world inequalities (Robinson, 2011: 724), World System Theory seeks to explain the dynamics of the capitalist world economy in
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necessary infrastructure – stadia, roads, transport links etc. – for the event (Bond, 2010). At current estimate in 2011, the London 2012 Olympic Games is expected to cost £11.3 billion (City of London, 2011), but the purported bene- fits of hosting this and other mega-events far outweigh their costs. Despite a global economic recession and its crippling effects, sponsors continue to come on board for reasons rather optimistically summarized by Joel Seymour-Hide, director of the sports marketing consultancy group Octagon: ‘sport tends to be relatively recession proof. … It’s an irrational love which creates more loyalty and resilience’ (quoted in Black, 2009: 40). This, of course, has implication for the development of particular forms of policy that relate to the economic regulation of sporting activity, media acquisi- tion of sporting content and the global transfer of players and athletes. Each of these issues is developed further in subsequent chapters.
Cultural Approaches to Globalization
While world system approaches to globalization cast transnational movement very much in terms of the circulation of goods, capital, labour and commodities (that is, the stuff of a world economy), such approaches have been criticized for failing to acknowledge the cultural or social dimensions of cross-border travel, communication and consumption (Bauman, 1998; Cohen & Kennedy, 2007; Eriksen, 2003, 2007; Featherstone, 1990, 1995; Featherstone & Venn, 2006; Held & Kay, 2007; Held & McGrew, 2007; Robertson, 1992; Robertson & Scholte, 2007; Tomlinson, 1999). As Hannerz writes, ‘the world has become one network of social relationships, and between its regions there is a flowing of meaning as well as goods’ (1990: 237, emphasis in original). Rather than focusing on the economic nature and effects of the movement of capital and commodities, the approach espoused by Hannerz and others concep- tualizes such movement as being first and foremost a cultural activity whereby people, values, attitudes and beliefs move between and across borders. As Tomlinson notes: ‘globalization lies at the heart of modern culture; cultural practices lie at the heart of globalization’ (1999: 1). Such an approach argues that events that occur between and beyond national borders shape the collective life of those nations, as well as the individual lives and outlooks of their citizens (Tomlinson, 1999). Thus, globalization cannot be conceived in purely economic terms; understandings of globalization must also consider the impacts of cross- border movement on the social lives and interactions between and within nations, states and regions. Such sentiments resonate with the work of the sociologist Roland Robertson, who has argued for the development of a ‘global consciousness’. For Robertson, globalization represents ‘the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ (1992: 8). This notion of a global con- sciousness understands globalization as an inherently social, reflexive process, in which there is an intensified awareness of the world at large. Robertson argues
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that, as individuals living in a world in which we are connected to others at an accelerated pace, we are in a unique, historical position from which to gauge the impact of global change upon our individual and collective lives. That is, as Robertson suggests, we must identify our own social position in relation to wider global processes (1992, 1995; Giulianotti & Robertson 2007b). Such sentiments echo those of C. Wright Mills and his formulation of a ‘sociological imagination’ that can ‘grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in soci- ety’ ([1959] 2000: 20). Indeed, Robertson’s formulation of the global conscious- ness seeks to develop a global sociological imagination that understands the historical and social contexts in which practices and experiences are located, and the impact of global events, processes and consequences on these. It is perhaps not surprising that such cultural approaches to globalization find their ontological and epistemological origins in disciplines such as social anthro- pology. Over the past three decades, the Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz has been particularly influential in terms of pursuing an intellectual programme that examines the cultural dimensions of globalization, a programme developed more recently by his compatriot, Thomas Hyland Eriksen (2003, 2007), who has equally been influential in ‘shifting world anthropology’s focus to the global dimensions of local processes’ (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2007a: 2) that is elaborated further in the following chapter. Describing his approach to globalization as a study of ‘the world system of culture where the varied currents of cultural flow come together and mingle’ (Hannerz, 1992: 22), Hannerz has developed a research agenda that focuses on the use of ethnographic inquiry in the comparative study of global moder- nities and local modernities (Eriksen, 1997; Hannerz, 2003). Central to Hannerz’s (1989) interpretation of globalization is his concept of the ‘global ecumeme’ or ‘a network of networks’. As he writes: ‘now more than ever, there is a global ecumene. The entities we routinely call cultures are becoming more like subcultures within this wider entity, with all that this suggests in terms of fuzzy boundaries and more or less arbitrary delimitation of analytic units’ (Hannerz, 1992: 217). In much the same way, the terrain of sports policy can be thought of as a network of networks; as an interconnected, inhabited world. The governance of many aspects of sports policy is made up of a range of interconnected organiza- tions and agencies – the case of the worldwide fight against doping in sport is a prime example of this. While this is a theme I develop in Chapter 3, the point here is that in attempting to develop coordinated responses to anti-doping across countries, regions and jurisdictions, policy has become uniform and fragmented in equal parts. It is unilaterally governed by the World Anti-Doping Agency yet regulated by local and national agencies, reflecting an extension on the debate about the dichotomous relationship between the global and the local elaborated in the next chapter. Although I have posited a fairly crude distinction between globalization as being the product of the spread of capitalism or the product of the spread of cul- tural relationships and exchanges, this is done for reasons of analytical simplicity.
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interlocking and multidirectional. For Appadurai, the relationship between these scapes is ‘deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable because each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives, [...] at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movement in the others’ (1996: 35). Importantly for this book, Appadurai’s conceptualization of ‘scapes’ offers a useful way of framing global sports policy. Ethnoscapes can take the form of athletic migration across international borders (Bale & Maguire, 1994) or the geographic relocation of professional sports workers, such as professional foot- ballers (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2006, 2007b) and the effects of this on their partners and families (Roderick, 2006). They can also take the form of new policy responses for culturally appropriate and inclusive sporting provision for refugees, asylum seekers and those crossing borders to flee abuses of human rights (Amara, 2008; Benn et al., 2010; Kay, 2008; Palmer, 2008, 2009). Technoscapes are most obviously reflected in the speed with which informa- tion and images, particularly those from globally broadcast sporting mega- events, can be transmitted to audiences worldwide. They can also take the form of new and emergent technologies through which resistant or counter-hegemonic critiques of the politics of sporting mega-events, and their governance, can be communicated. The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, in which China’s alleged poor record on human rights was globally condemned by Amnesty International, or the activist work of the Olympics Resistance Network, which critiqued the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver on environmental concerns, its cost and its representation of First Nation Canadians, both provide examples of this. Financescapes are most easily thought of in terms of the global economy of sport. As argued by Horne and Manzenreiter, ‘sport has become inextricably linked to agents, structures and processes of global capitalism’ (2002: 5). The sheer capacity of sport to generate revenue of stratospheric proportions outlined in earlier comments on the World Cup and the Olympic Games involves the global circulation of financial resources from investors and sponsors from around the world (Miller et al., 2001). Sport has long been conceptualized as a mediascape ; a site for the production and consumption of a number of well-chosen images and narratives of local, regional and national identity (Rowe, 2004; Tomlinson & Young, 2006). Jackson, for example, describes the concept of a ‘mediascape’ as ‘the process by which corporations (both local and global) use “the nation”, national symbols, images and memories as part of their corporate advertising and marketing strat- egy’ (2004: 20). In my own work on the Tour de France (Palmer, 2002a, 2010), I show how particular images of France and ‘Frenchness’ are selected and then progressively elaborated to a global media audience by the key cultural interme- diaries who are responsible for the image management of the race. Finally, there is no shortage of literature on how ideoscapes are borne out in sport (see Bairner, 2001). As Bale and Maguire point out, ‘at the level of ide- oscapes, global sports festivals such as football’s World Cup, the Olympics and the Asian Games have come to serve as vehicles for the expression of ideologies
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that are trans-national in character’ (1994: 5). There is far less literature, how- ever, about how counter or resistant ideologies are produced. Jackson, Batty and Scherer (2001), in their analysis of the global sporting goods company Adidas and its 1999 sponsorship deal with the All Blacks (the men’s national rugby union team of New Zealand), illustrate how Adidas faced resistance for its (mis) representation of Ma-ori culture by using the All Blacks’ infamous pre-game challenge, the haka , in their advertising (see also Jackson & Hokowhitu, 2002). As I have documented elsewhere (Palmer, 2001, 2010; Polo, 2003), the Tour de France provides an important, annual opportunity for the expression of both dominant and resistant ideologies that draw on particular political images and symbols that provide a way of organizing the political culture(s) in France.
GLOBAL SPORTS POLICY
I mentioned earlier that the notion of globalization or, at least, an intercon- nected, inhabited world, is by no means new; people and goods have travelled and communicated across borders (with varying degrees of speed and distance) for thousands of years. What is new, however, is the notion of global studies of policy or the development of a global policy that transcends borders and bound- aries. This relatively under-explored area is, in part, the motivation for writing this book. Moreover, sport, unlike other areas of policy, such as social welfare, health or the environment, remains, as Houlihan puts it, ‘on the margins’ despite the ‘capacity of policy analysis to provide fertile territory for conceptual innova- tion, model building, and analytical and normative theorizing’ (2005: 163). Just as sports policy sits within a broader field of social or public policy, glo- bal sports policy, I argue, has developed out of a broader field of global social policy. Sports policy, like public policy and social policy, is made in the public realm in terms of certain public issues, and in terms of particular social concerns, so some discussion of the key questions and debates that emerge is warranted. The emergence of global social policy, as an identifiable field of research, commonly dates back to the work of Deacon, who defines global social policy as ‘a practice of supranational actors [which] embodies global social redistribu- tion, global social regulation, and global social provision and/or empowerment, and … the ways in which supranational organizations shape national social policy’ (1997: 195). Borrowing from Deacon (1997), it is this coming together of actors, regulation, provision and empowerment in a context of suprana- tional and national interrelationships that I adopt as my (loose) definition of ‘global sports policy’. Certainly, the notion of a global social policy has invited considerable debate. Critics have argued that the development of global policy – policies adopted across different countries – has resulted in a regulatory, normative order or a form of social control in which countries are expected to adhere to unilaterally imposed international treaties and conventions (Deacon, 2007). While there are some positives to this (a commitment to policy initiatives to ameliorate poverty
GLOBALIZATION, SPORT AND POLICY (^19)
competing conceptualizations are ‘promulgated by international actors, mani- festing themselves in different, and at times similar ways, depending on the country and context in which they occur’ (Yeates & Holden, 2009: 31). In terms of sports policy, it is the first understanding of social policy that I adopt as the focus of the book. Aspects of sports policy have an explicit inten- tion of securing the welfare and well-being of citizens. That is, sports policy can have a fundamental concern with social justice, social redistribution, social regulation and social rights. This position distinguishes my approach to sports policy from that of others. A more common way of thinking about sports policy is to conceptualize it as being the work of sports development in which the pro- motion of sport is part of a broader government agenda whereby sport is used to achieve a range of non-sport-related objectives such as crime reduction, desistance from substance misuse, curbing anti-social behaviour, and the like (Bergsgard et al., 2007; Coalter, 2007). As Bergsgard et al. note, the particular character of sport allows it to be ‘a distinctive public service and, in many coun- tries, an important aspect of overall welfare provision, but is also an important element of the economy in terms of job creation, capital investment and balance of payments’ (2007: 3–4). Rather than seeing sport as a tool for the advance- ment of social policy and social development, as has been argued elsewhere (Bailey, 2005; Sherry, 2010; Spaaji, 2009; Walseth & Fasting, 2004), I argue that sports policy is , in fact, a form of social policy (see Box 1.1 below).
BOX 1.1 SPORTS POLICY AS SOCIAL POLICY: SUMMARY OF
KEY CHARACTERISTICS
Social policy, sports policy and global sports policy are concerned with:
- social rights, social redistribution and social regulation
- impacts of global and regional social policy orders on national social policy
- the uneven relationship between developed and developing nations (i.e. the Global North and the Global South)
- dynamics of power and exploitation that characterize inter- and intra-country relationships in the twenty-first century
- securing the welfare and well-being of citizens
My contention that sports policy is a key constituent in the broader field of social or public policy alerts us to a lacuna in the literature on public policy for sport. While there is considerable recognition by governments worldwide that sport is an increasingly important area of policy, this has not been matched by academic interest in the analysis of sports policy (Houlihan, 2005; Houlihan, Bloyce & Smith, 2009), or indeed in the level of government investment that is directed towards other areas of public policy, such as defence, education or
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health. There is something of a blind spot here: as Houlihan notes, ‘a survey of English language journals from January 2001 to September 2003 found that only 3% of the articles utilized the extensive array of concepts, analytical frame- works and theories developed in mainstream policy analysis to aid understand- ing of sport policy-making and the role of government’ (2005: 164). While Houlihan takes issue with the under-representation of sport in main- stream analyses of public policy, my concern is slightly different. While sport receives its fair share of attention from sociological and related social science theories to generate an understanding of t he phenomenon under investigation, sports policy does not. Unlike studies of social policy more broadly, which draw on established concepts and theories across the social and political sciences, the application of social theory to sports policy as social policy is far more limited. As I argue in Chapter 5, studies of sports policy remain relatively bereft in their use of social theory to generate understanding of policy outputs and outcomes, and there is a need for wider engagement with social science concepts to gener- ate a theoretically informed framework for understanding the processes of sports policy-making, and its constructed and contested nature.
CONCLUSION
The concern of this chapter has been to sketch out some of the key concepts and debates in globalization, particularly how they inform the analytical framework of this book, namely the two-way movement between thinking about the pro- duction of global sports policy and the effects of globally occurring social forces on the development, implementation and analysis of sports policy. This provides the overarching dynamic within which to consider the material developed in the rest of the book. That said, this framework is best thought of as just that – a framework. A more nuanced elaboration of the key concepts and debates intro- duced here is needed to consider sport and sports policy in a global context. With that in mind, the following chapter addresses perhaps the axial theme of studies of globalization – the tensions produced by the relationship between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’.
BOX 1.2 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
- What are the key ways in which globalization can be conceptualized?
- What are the five ‘scapes’ that underpin Appadurai’s programme of work?
- What are the implications of global sports policy for the study of social/public policy?
