Chapter 25
Sport and Globalization
DAVID L. ANDREWS AND ANDREW D. GRAINGER
As evidenced by the seemingly near-universal popularity of particular practices, spectacles and bodies, sport (the socially regulated expression of physical culture) and globalization (the process of spatial and temporial inter-connectivity) are emblematic features of the contemporary age (Bairner 2001). Moreover, the multifaceted inter-penetration of sport and globalization – the one being realized, and modified, by the other and vice versa – speaks to the conclusive collapse of rigid superstructural demarcations so symptomatic of late twentieth/early twenty-first century capitalism (Jameson 1991, 1998). Within this moment, sport is simultaneously a central element of the ‘global popular’ (Kellner 2003), and a vehicle for institutionalizing the global condition (interestingly, the membership of the United Nations [191 member states] is less than that of the Olympic Movement [202 national Olympic committee members], and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association [FIFA; 204 member national federations]). As such, sport cannot be simply ignored, or summarily dismissed, by the sociological mainstream for being little more than a diversion from the most pressing social issues of the day. It is, as we intend to demonstrate in this chapter, an important empirical window into such concerns, specifically that of globalization.
Sport’s innate visceral appeal and resonance have rendered it the ‘most universal aspect of popular culture’ (Miller et al. 2001: 1). Indeed, one is hard-pressed to invoke a social formation, historical or contemporary, devoid of some form of competitively based, popular physical culture. The pre-modern sporting landscape was, however, characterized by a compendium of localized game forms that, while displaying significant commonalities, were generally unable to travel beyond their place of origin and practice (not unlike the participant populace), and thereby lacked a broader coherence and influence. Prompted by the patrician-industrial power bloc’s perceived need to regulate popular physical culture to the demands and discipline of the urban industrial capitalist order, modern sport forms (originally codified by the public school elite looking to further their sporting experiences in the adult world) were encouraged and popularized in the shadows of nineteenth century Britain’s satanic mills (Miller and McHoul, 1998). Intensifying commercial, cultural and military interdependencies within Western Europe, and between Western Europe and the rest of the world, resulted in the subsequent diffusion and institutionalization of these proto-modern sport forms around the globe. In an era within which modernizing nations turned to sport as a source of self-identification, the subsequent establishment of international governing bodies allowed for the global standardization of sport, and facilitated the establishment of truly international competition through which the national could be corporeally constituted (Hobsbawm 1983, 1990). Thus, by the early decades of the twentieth century – and as facilitated through the establishment of major international sporting bodies such as the International Olympic Committee (1894), and FIFA (1904) – a global sport system and imaginary had been firmly established. Sport, as ever a local convention, was now also an elemental actor on the global stage.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the global sport landscape (at both the international and national levels) became systematically colonized (initially in the United States and Canada, subsequently in Western Europe, Japan, Australasia and beyond) by an emergent strain of capitalism (what Jameson [1991] referred to as ‘late capitalism’) prefigured on the aggressive exploitation of culture as a pivotal source, and process, of capital accumulation. Sport may previously have been a ‘semiautonomous sphere’ of culture: somewhat implicated in the capitalist order, though rarely explicitly (Jameson 1991: 48). However, sport’s appropriation by the forces of late capitalism placed the economic (profit maximization) ahead of the sporting (utility maximization), to the extent that many may lament, but few could argue against the fact that contemporary sport is, fundamentally, a vehicle for capital accumulation (Walsh and Giulianotti 2001). Virtually all aspects of the global sport infrastructure (governing bodies, leagues, tournaments, teams and individual athletes) are now un-selfconsciously driven and defined by the interrelated processes of: corporatization (the management and marketing of sporting entities according to profit motives); spectacularization (the primacy of producing of entertainment-driven [mediated] experiences); and commodification (the generation of multiple sport-related revenue streams). While there may be alternatives (premeditated or otherwise) to this corporate (Andrews 2001b), prolympic (Donnelly 1996a) or achievement (Maguire 1999) sport model, these are few and far between, and do not challenge its global hegemony. Thus, in Fukuyama’s (1989) terms, there is perceived to be no ‘viable alernative’ to what is, fundamentally, a corporate capitalist iteration of sport.
Having highlighted the globally normalized understanding of sport as a commercially managed and exploited cultural commodity, it would appear that we are about to embark on an explication of sport as a virulent agent of global cultural homogenization. This is neither our interest nor intention. The pervasiveness of the corporate sport model has resulted in a considerable degree of uniformity with regard to, in the general sense, sport’s institutional impetus and infrastructure. From certain vantage points, sport cultures located around the world would appear to be subject to revision by the conforming forces of ‘grobalization’ (Ritzer 2004a), whose over-determining quest for capital accumulation threatens, in the name of market expansion and rationalization, local sporting forms ‘generally indigenously conceived, controlled, and comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content’ (Ritzer 2004a: 7). The anticipated corollary of this sporting grobalization would seem to be a global culture of sporting ‘nothingness’, wherein a narrow economy of centrally conceived and administered, geographically and historically abstract, and corporeally dehumanizing and disenchanting forms has come to define the sporting landscape (Ritzer 2004a). Despite the seeming inevitability of this march towards sporting McDonaldization (Ritzer 2004b), at the present time, even the most arresting exemplars of proto-grobal sport operate and exist in a mutually constitutive relation to the senses and sensibilities of the local. Thus, a reassuring unevenness (Maguire 2000) persists regarding the localized engagement and experience of corporate sport forms (practices, spectacles and bodies), which continue to invoke particular geographically and historically grounded differences, in a manner which provides a context for the creative expression of human labour, and the resultant excitement and enchantment of an expectant populace. In other words, even within the throes of a truly globalized sport order, it is still possible to experience palpable expressions of locally differentiated and differentiating forms of sporting ‘somethingness’ (Ritzer 2004a). Therefore, within this discussion, and following Appadurai (1990), Dirlik (1996), Hall (1991), Morley and Robins (1995) and Robertson (1995), amongst others, our aim is to elucidate the global–local interconnections, and disconnections, operating within contemporary sport culture. Differently put, we seek to critically explicate the global in the sporting local and the local in the sporting global.
THEORIZING GLOCAL SPORT
There have been numerous noteworthy contributions towards generating a theoretically based understanding of the relationship between sport and globalization which, in combination, offer important insights into global–local forces, relations and experiences, as manifest in and through contemporary sport cultures. However, rather than attempting to incorporate them all into this necessarily succinct overview, we have instead chosen to discuss representative works which signpost the broader trends and shifts within this ongoing theoretical debate. Furthermore, many of the works that could have been included herein will be discussed in later sections, where the more discrete elements of global–local sporting cultures (practices, spectacles and bodies) will be dissected.
Acknowledging the impossibility of singular points of origin, the globalization of sport debate was arguably ignited by Maguire’s (1990) figurational analysis of American football’s (and particularly the NFL’s) concerted incursion onto the British sporting landscape during the 1980s. Couching his analysis within the established and emotive Americanization of culture debate, Maguire highlighted, in vivid diagrammatic form, the complex network of interdependencies (for instance, those linking corporate commercial, mass media and sport organization contingencies) responsible for what he described as American football’s ‘fairly significant’ impact on British society at this time (Maguire 1990: 233). In hindsight, Maguire may have over-estimated the position of American football within British sporting culture. Nonetheless, and significantly, he explicated how within a context of increased scale and scope of global interconnectivity, sporting development necessarily involves a constitutive interplay between the global and the local. Distancing his work from the pitfalls of a ‘crude Americanization thesis’, Maguire (1990: 231) advocated a qualified understanding of cultural imperialism as a means of explaining this phenomenon: American football’s increased presence being attributable to a complex mix of marketing and media strategizing, which resonated with the market-driven, entrepreneurial and individualistic sensibilities of the Thatcherite Britain during the 1980s. Thus, Maguire embarked on a extensive, insightful and influential explication of global–local sporting interdependencies, from an avowedly figurational perspective, which instructively highlighted the long-term, multidirectional and multicausal elements, as well as both the intended and unintended outcomes, of sporting globalization (cf. Maguire 1999, 2000).
Somewhat prompted by an implied critique of Maguire’s perceived focus on Americanization, McKay and Miller (1991) explained the commercial corporatization of Australian sport through recourse to Jameson’s (1991) cultural logics of late capitalism, and specifically their relationship to the global spread of post-Fordism and consumerism, ‘all of which transcend the confines of the United States’. This point was furthered through Houlihan’s explicit centring of the globalization process within sociological debates relating to sporting transformation. He thereby sublimated the inadequacies of Americanization and cultural imperialist theses by incorporating their partial insights into a greater interpretative whole: that of a more complex and fluid understanding of sporting globalization. Moreover, and intended to bring about some ‘consensus’ regarding the ‘nature and significance’ of the globalization process as it pertains to sport, Houlihan (1994: 357) advanced a typological schematic incorporating six patterns of sporting globalization, which highlighted the differential exposure to, and reception of, globalizing sport forms within contrasting local cultural contexts. He thus demonstrated how globalization is anything but a ‘unidimensional and unidirectional’ phenomenon; its relationship to, and influence upon, local sport cultures being equally dialectic and diverse (Houlihan 1994: 372).
Donnelly (1996b) provided a comprehensive summation of the sport and globalization oeuvre up to that point, and stressed the need to reassert the ‘articulation between the local and the global’. His aim was to encourage researchers to navigate a mid-way course between the Scylla of romanticized accounts of the resistant capacities of local sport cultures, and the Charybdis of pessimistic commentaries of globally determined corporate sport locals. In a time of accelerated and intensified global flows (of people, images, capital, ideologies, practices, languages, pollutants, crime and design etc.) – Tomlinson’s condition of ‘complex connectivity’ (1999) – the global and the local cannot be viewed as in any way discrete or autonomous entities. Rather, as Morley and Robins outlined, contemporary processes of globalization are ‘about the achievement of a new global–local nexus, about new and intricate relations between global space and local space’ (Morley and Robins 1995: 116). Hence, and paraphrasing Morley and Robins (1995: 117), the sporting global (the organization and credo of the modern sport system) and the sporting local (the lived experience of sport) can only be viewed as fluid and relational spaces constituted through their non-necessary (in terms of intentions and outcomes) interactions with each other.
Within their broad ranging examination of sport as a ‘principal front’ of globalization, Miller et al. (2001) provide countless examples of the interconnected, yet productive, tensions between global corporate capital and local sport cultures. The thematic sections of the chapter that follow this conceptual overview similarly illustrate the tensions being played out, within various facets of contemporary sport culture (practices, spectacles and bodies), between global and local imperatives. Robertson’s (1995) compelling concept of glocalization proves particularly instructive in this regard. Prefigured on an understanding of globalization as constituting, and being constituted by, the necessary interplay between the global and the local, Robertson advanced an understanding that positioned homogenization and heterogenization, universalism and particularism, sameness and difference, and the global and the local, as ‘complementary and interpenetrative’. The process of glocalization thereby pivots on the concept of relationality, as understood in the global’s complicity in the ‘creation and incorporation’ of the local, and vice versa (1995).
Informed by Robertson (1995), it is possible to conceptualize two forms of glocalization operating upon, and through, contemporary sport culture: organic and strategic glocalization (these labels being relational rather than discrete: organic glocalization frequently being subject to strategic co-optation, while the products of strategic glocalization can become incorporated as organic cultural forms). Simply put, organic sporting glocalization speaks to the process whereby either globalized or internationalized sport practices (depending on their spatial reach) become incorporated into local (communal, regional, but primarily national) sporting cultures and experienced as authentic or natural (hence organic) signs of cultural collectivity. In a general sense, organic glocalization is associated with local responses to the sporting flows that accompanied broader forces of social transformation (colonization, modernization, urban industrialization etc.). Strategic sporting glocalization is a more recent phenomenon derived from changes in the spatial ambition, organization and imagination of late capitalism (Jameson 1991) associated with the advent of transnational as the dominating logic of economic expansion and the transnational corporation as the ‘locus of economic activity’ (Dirlik 1996: 29; Morley and Robins 1995). Rather than treating, and hoping to realize, the world market as a single, un-differentiated entity (as in previous stages of development in the global economy), transnational capitalism has become increasingly concerned with commercially exploiting (through negotiated incorporation and commodified reflection) the local differences its international antecedent previously sought to overcome (Hall 1997: 32). Broadly speaking, this is achieved in two ways.
First, interiorized glocal strategizing refers to the manner in which global capital has aggressively co-opted local sport cultures and sensibilities into its expansive regime of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989); not for global dissemination per se, rather for local market accommodation, and incorporation, as a constituent element of the broader transnationalist project. Thus, the architecture and convictions of the hegemonic corporate sport model (Andrews 1999) has become truly globalized (or grobalization in Ritzer’s terms, and as operationalized by the expanding geographies of, amongst other entities: commercially driven sport organizations and governing bodies; professional sport leagues and tournaments; sport management companies; media and entertainment corporations; sporting goods manufacturers; and allied corporate sponsors), while its manifestations are expressly localized. Pace Rowe (2003), interiorized glocal strategizing acknowledges, and seeks to capitalize upon, local sporting practices’ enduring ability to stimulate popular consciousness and behaviour. While this may preclude the realization of a post-particular form of globalization, sport’s steadfastly local demeanour has been exploited by global capital’s strategic incursion into the commercial management and production of locally inflected and resonant versions of corporate sport (the various components of which are constituted through the secular trinity of sporting corporatization, spectacularization and commodification). The result being the production of a global economy of sporting locals in which, despite their contrived appeals to indigenous sporting and cultural authenticity, can be considered little more, or indeed less, than a ‘particular version of a very general phenomenon’ (Robertson 1995: 40).
Secondly, exteriorized glocal strategizing involves the importation and mobilization of – what are commonly perceived to be externally derived expressions of – sporting difference into a local market. Here, for those sport consumers looking to express their alterity from the cultural mainstream, the aim is to provide the opportunity to consume the sporting Other. For instance, far from seeking to realize a sporting monoculture, the exportation of American sport forms – even more than the American film and music genres that have become the cultural vernacular of the global popular (Kellner 2003) – represent a source of identity rooted in difference and opposition for, predominantly, youth and young adults located in disparate national settings (Andrews et al. 1996). The complicating factor being, the sense of sporting and aesthetic American Otherness communicated in, and through, these exports is by no means uniform in its cultural significance, nor in the manner in that it is consumed at the local level. As Van Elteren noted, there are ‘multifarious, and often complex ways in which US popular culture forms [and indeed the very idea of America itself] are mediated and received abroad among various audiences and in diverse local contexts’ (Van Elteren 1996).
Sporting glocalization, whether organic or strategic (exteriorized or interiorized), illustrates the fact that today’s sporting locals can only exist and operate within the structures and logics of the global. As such, the cultural economy of sport vindicates Featherstone’s assertion that ‘globalization and localization are inextricably bound together in the current moment’ (1996: 47). This necessary inter-relationship will be empirically interrogated within the rest of this discussion, wherein we explicate the global–local derivatives and implications of various sport practices, spectacles and bodies, all of which combine to form the global infrastructure, and inform the local experience, of corporate sport.
GLOCAL SPORT PRACTICES
Once characterized by a patchwork of locally bound, traditional forms, sport’s pre-modern diversity has collapsed into a relatively small number of highly regulated, standardized and bureaucratized sport practices that now dominate and define the global sporting landscape (Maguire 1999). The reasons for this sporting consolidation are manifold, yet primarily need to be understood in relation to the sweeping social transformations in Western Europe in the period after 1700, that resulted in the establishment of an increasingly industrialized, urbanized and Westernized world order.
Despite its global omnipresence, it should not be forgotten that contemporary sport is the regulated embodiment and affirming expression of the distinctly modern Western (and specifically North Atlantic) values of competition, progress and achievement; values which, unsurprisingly, simultaneously underpin the liberal democratic, urban industrialist and market capitalist forces that spawned the modern societies from whence modern sport forms, and the modern sport order, emerged. As numerous social commentators have observed, modern sport practices and institutions – and indeed, the very ethos of modern sport – originated within eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain (cf. Van Bottenburg 2001; Elias and Dunning 1986; Guttmann 1978; Holt 1989a). There was nothing particularly remarkable about the physical culture of pre-industrial Britain that foretold the genesis of modern sport at this time. For instance, rudimentary stick and ball games and kicking games (the respective origins of cricket and association football which provide the focus for this section) were popular pastimes within a variety of social contexts across historical and spatial divides. However, due to its position at the forefront of the transformative processes of urbanization and industrialization, the social, political and economic exigencies of the time resulted in many traditional sport forms first being standardized, regulated and bureaucratized in Britain during the social tumult of the nineteenth century; thereby providing modern sport with peculiarly British origins. It was, as Van Bottenburg (2001: 197) noted, ‘the mother country of modern sports’.
The subsequent global diffusion of modern sport forms first institutionalized within the British context (i.e. association football, boxing, cricket, field hockey, golf, horse racing, rugby, rowing, track and field, and tennis) was closely connected to the development of more complex chains of global interdependency (Maguire 1999) that arose from the intensifying imperially and commercially inspired relationships created between Britain and the rest of the world. Thus, Britain’s imperial and commercial hegemony during the nineteenth century facilitated the global spread and legitimation of the modern sport forms developed within the British context. This resulted in the relatively rapid establishment of a global sporting hegemony through which many traditional pastimes became either subsumed within, or largely expunged in the face of, the unrelenting march of the modern sport order. However, the patterns of sporting diffusion were certainly not globally uniform. For instance, cricket’s elite social habitus made it an important vehicle for the advancement of the British imperial project. It was used as a vehicle for embodying and imposing the physical and cultural superiority of the colonizer over the colonized: ‘“Playing the game” was a combined physical and moral activity, and exercise in the art of being “British”’ (Holt 1989b: 236). Whereas, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, the working class demeanour of association football (it had by that time outgrown its patrician beginnings) meant ‘Trade connections, rather than imperial links, were the most propitious outlets’ (Giulianotti 1999: 6) in the export of the game to the rest of the world. Thus, the sizeable British working class diaspora of manual labourers, combined with the influence of ex-patriot artisans, teachers and cosmopolitans (Giulianotti 1999), helped establish the game wherever their roving employment took them. Pointing to these broader social, political and economic vectors responsible for the ‘differential popularization’ of sports around the globe, Van Bottenburg (2001: 176) noted: ‘Worldwide it may be said that in countries with which Britain had close trade relations, soccer is far more popular than other sports, whereas cricket, field hockey, and rugby have done particularly well in countries over which Britain had political and military domination.’
Once exported around the globe along either imperial and/or commercial networks, in many if not all settings (cf. Kaufman and Patterson 2005), the rapid popularization of these sports resulted in them becoming understood and experienced as emotive and expressive embodiments of locality. Thus, in particular national contexts (depending on local social and sporting histories and landscapes, and the nature of the interdependency with Britain), cricket or football were incorporated into the local with such enthusiasm that they were able to conclusively circumvent their British provenance. Such organic sporting glocalization (the indigenization of globalized/internationalized sport forms) was particularly evident during the four decades leading up to the beginning of World War I; a period in which sport became a ‘crucible of nation’ (Miller 2001: 29) in the truest sense of the term. Within a historical moment in which social elites were seeking to establish precisely what it meant (in economic, political, legal and cultural terms) to be a modern nation, sport played an important role in the attendant development of ‘new devices to ensure or express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relations’ (Hobsbawn 1983: 263). Institutionalized both ‘officially and unofficially’ (Hobsbawn 1983: 263) into the life of the nation, sport thus became an important feature of the invented national traditions, and sense of nation, deemed important as internal and external demonstrations of modern nationhood.
The transformation of an imposed or transplanted sporting practice into a local context is vividly illustrated in C.L.R. James’ (1963) classic account of cricket in the West Indies. At one moment a symbol of British colonialism, James illustrated how cricket’s enthusiastic and creative appropriation by the West Indies’ populace rendered it an emotive and embodied expression of self-identification and – ironically but not surprisingly – cultural resistance over whence the game originated (see also Beckles 1998). A similar scenario was also enacted in India, where cricket’s position and influence as a central part of the ‘colonial ecumene’ became so eroded that the very ‘idea of the [independent] Indian nation emerged as a salient cricketing entity’ (Appadurai 1996: 91, 97, italics added). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the colonial rulers of ‘British’ India used cricket as a mechanism for constituting communal groupings (organizing teams along religious and ethnic divides), in a manner which prohibited the development of a more collectively encompassing, and difference transcending, sense of Indianness, and of the Indian nation as a whole. However, cricket’s growing popularity, and its rapid vernacularization – initially through the English language broadcasts of All-India Radio, and later through blanket coverage from all popular media channels – led to the game becoming an important source of collective identification with the political and popular movement towards realizing the goals of Indian nationalism. Through ‘experiential’ (the widespread practice of the game) and ‘pedagogical’ (the mass mediation of the game) impulses, cricket within post-1947 India became a ‘critical instrument of subjectivity in the process of decolonization’ which, simultaneously, realized the ‘unyoking of cricket from its Victorian value framework’ and the dismantling of any residues of colonial power and authority exercised through the game. As Appadurai (1996: 105, 110) wryly noted, the empire had struck back.
Football’s global diffusion having been significantly more widespread than that of cricket (it not being primarily restricted to those nations with British colonial connections), there are countless examples where football – generally understood to be ‘a world game’ (Dunning 1999) and/or the ‘global game’ (Giulianotti 1999) – has assumed the mantle of the national sport (cf. Armstrong and Giulianotti 1997), and one striking example where it has not (Markovits and Hellerman 2001; Sugden 1994). As Hobsbawm famously noted, in understandably ambiguous terms (there being a plethora of football nations after all): ‘The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. The individual, even the one who only cheers, becomes a symbol of his nation himself’ (1990: 143). The global game is thus perhaps better understood as the (organically) glocal game; simultaneously existing and operating as a source of collective identity and pride for the national populaces, in numerous locations, at one and the same time. In doing so, football serves as a source of the ‘vitality of specific local cultures in relation to globalization’ (Giulianotti 2005: 204).
GLOCAL SPORT SPECTACLES
The essence of the late capitalist condition lies in an accentuation of the constitutive interrelationship between culture and the mechanisms of capital accumulation. The mass media has played an important role realizing this state in which ‘economics has come to overlap with culture … everything … has … become cultural; and culture has equally become economic’ (Jameson 1998: 73). Specifically, the commercial media has become both a core product (the centrality of mediated products and services within the consumer economy) and, equally importantly, a core process (marketing and advertising media stimulating, and to a large degree constituting, the consumer market) leading, almost unavoidably, to the ‘institutional alignment of sports and media in the context of late capitalism’ (Real 1998). Within this moment, sports merge into ‘media spectacle, collapse boundaries between professional achievement and commercialization, and attest to the commodification of all aspects of life in the media and consumer society’ (Kellner 2003: 66). As a result, sport has irrevocably morphed into a culture industry (Andrews 2001a), in that its unquestioned focus is now on the production and delivery of entertaining mediated products and experiences designed to maximize profit. Mediated sport spectacles now constitute the integrative heart of corporate sport’s entertainment economy, and it is consumers of media content (the sport spectacles delivered and discussed via television, video, radio, magazine and web platforms), as opposed to event attendees, through which corporate sporting entities primarily attempt to penetrate the consciousnesses of, and seek to extrude capital from, the viewing/consuming global masses.
Williams (1994: 377) has charged sport (specifically what he termed ‘sporting “muzak” ’) as being a major contributor to the ‘flattening out of difference in postorganized capitalism’ through the indiscriminate global dissemination of sports ‘taken from localized cultural contexts’. Countering this position, due to the manner in which global spectacles are produced and consumed at the local, it is possible to argue that the economy of globally mediated sport spectacles actually contributes to the ‘constant reinvention of particularity’ associated with the process of glocality (Giulianotti 2005: 204). There are a number of ‘global sport spectacles’ (Tomlinson 2005: 59) that, superficially, would seem to unite the world’s populace in acclamation for sport in general (i.e. the Olympic Games or the Commonwealth Games), or for a particular sport (i.e. the FIFA men’s World Cup or the IAAF World Championships), or for a particular nation (the NFL Super Bowl). However, such institutionalized and spectacularized paeans to sporting universalism are misleading and inaccurate (cf. Martin and Reeves 2001), as will be demonstrated through reference to the glocalizing Olympic Games.
The global penetration of Olympic Games television coverage is remarkable, with worldwide audience figures for the 2004 Athens Olympics approaching 3.5 billion individual viewers; meaning approximately 60 per cent of the world’s population watched an Olympic broadcast at least once (Wilson 2004). However, the global commonality nurtured by these sporting ‘mega-events’ (Roche 2000) is more a spectacular unity-in-difference than a serious contribution to global homogenization. Rather than transcending them as was the original, if naive intent (Guttmann 2002), today’s staged presentations, and mediated representations, of the Olympic Games have consistently been forums for the accommodation and advancement of highly nationalized interests and concerns. As Tomlinson noted, illustrating the implicit strategic glocalization of the modern Olympic phenomenon in its late capitalist incarnation, ‘the allegedly pure Olympic ideal has always been moulded into the image of the time and place of the particular Olympiad or Games’ (Tomlinson 1996: 599).
Global in reach and philosophy, the Olympic Games are inveterately local in performance. Nowhere is this glocality better exhibited than in the highly choreographed spectacle of the game’s opening ceremonies (Hogan 2003; Tomlinson 1996, 2005). Although making perfunctory reference to the modern Olympic’s internationalist origins through a ‘quota of Olympic-style spirit – youth, universalism, peace, and the like’ (Tomlinson 2005: 11), the interpretative programmes within opening ceremonies, and indeed the structure and delivery of the games as a whole, speak to the ‘staging of the nation’ for internal and external audiences (Hogan 2003). The former motivated by a need to advance historical, contemporaneous and aspirational senses of self for an expectant, and potentially politically malleable, home audience (Silk 2002). The latter prompted by the need to spectacularize, through ‘place marketing’ strategies, urban/national space as a mechanism for stimulating tourism and other forms of global capital investment (Whitson and Macintosh 1993, 1996; Wilson 1996), within what is a ‘period of intense inter-urban competition and urban entrepreneurialism’ (Waitt 1999: 1061).
Despite being at the forefront of a ‘worldwide sport culture given an unprecedented profile in the mediated global culture’ (Tomlinson 2005: 36), even in terms of regular Olympic television broadcasts, local cultural proclivities often impinge upon the mediated global spectacle. Most of the television coverage of such events is selected from the international feeds of the host broadcaster. Those nations with sufficient economic and technological resources are able to locally embellish the generic coverage – much of which is bound up with the host’s ‘presentation of self’ to the global (tourist and commercial) marketplace (Silk 2001: 297) – through preferred event and athlete selection, customized commentary, expert analysis and feature segments. The largest client broadcasters also utilize their own ‘unilateral’ cameras in order to better address the Olympic preferences of their national viewership (MacNeill 1996; Silk 2001; Silk and Amis 2000). In MacNeill’s (1996) terms, this demonstrates how realizing a spectacle of accumulation (based on revenues tied to viewership) is significantly related to it also being a spectacle of legitimation (corroborates normalized discourses pertaining to sport, the nation and their relation). Hence, global coverage of the Olympic Games results in myriad different local representations of the Olympic spectacle, linked to a concomitant multiplicity in terms of the different ways the Olympics are lived at the local level (Bernstein 2000; Knight et al. 2005). Depending on the venue, partner broadcasters also frequently look to incorporate and mobilize difference within their coverage through recourse to the Otherness (social, cultural, historical, political and/or geographic) of the host location. Such broadcasts of sport spectacles thus adopt both interiorized and exteriorized forms of strategic glocalization, in that they simultaneously seek to customize coverage to internal local markets, while embellishing it through recourse to aspects of external local difference (Silk 2001).
Looking at this issue from a different institutional vantage point, sport is a significant component of television programming schedules around the world. This can be attributed to sport’s unique and seductive qualities as a form of visceral, embodied and competitively based popular televisual entertainment: all of which contribute to its capacity for attracting high concentrations of 18–34-year-old male consumers, the demographic traditionally most prized by corporate advertisers. It is precisely these properties and opportunities which News Corporation International and other media concerns have sought to capitalize upon within their sport strategizing (Harvey et al. 2001; Law et al. 2002). Certainly, sport programming – what long-time Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has described as the ‘universal language of entertainment’ (Murdoch 1998) – is at the core of News Corporation’s global multimedia empire, incorporating nine media formats, spanning six continents and purportedly reaching two-thirds of the world’s population (Herman and McChesney 1997). At the heart of Murdoch’s corporate media philosophy is the steadfast belief that ‘sports programming commands unparalleled viewer loyalty in all markets’ (Murdoch 1996), and can therefore be used as a ‘battering ram’ to penetrate local media markets more effectively, and indeed more rapidly, than any other entertainment genre. This point has been corroborated by Peter Chernin, News Corporation President and COO, when identifying movies and live sport programming as the pivotal elements in their ‘worldwide TV ventures … And sports is the more important’ (quoted in Bruck 1997: 826). Certainly, News Corporation is liable to charges of advancing globally uniform processes and technologies regarding the use of sport to facilitate the penetration of national television markets. Unlike another of their global programming staples – high profile movies and television programmes emanating from the United States’ highly developed media entertainment industry – News Corporation’s relationship with sport is based on the aggressive incorporation of local sport programming into the schedules of its nascent national television outlets (i.e. the NFL on Fox Television in the USA, English Premier League Football on BSkyB in the UK and National Rugby League on Foxtel in Australia). As Murdoch himself outlined: ‘You would be very wrong to forget that what people want to watch in their own country is basically local programming, local language, local culture … I learned that many, many years ago in Australia, when I was loading up … with good American programs and we’d get beat with second-rate Australian ones’ (quoted in Schmidt 2001: 79). News Corporation thus adopts an interiorized glocal strategy with regard to sport spectacles, in that it looks to operate seamlessly within the language of the sporting local, simultaneously, in multiple national broadcasting locations. So, the rise of a global media oligarchy has had the effect of embracing and nurturing the sporting particularism of local media environments.
GLOCAL SPORT BODIES
As Hargreaves reminded us, ‘it is the body that constitutes the most striking symbol, as well as constituting the material core of sporting activity’ (Hargreaves 1987: 141). Evidently, the body is implicated in a number of different ways within globalizing sport culture: not the least of which being the manner in which the bodies of workers in developing nations are routinely exploited in order to produce the sporting goods and apparel, which strategically adorn the bodies of corporate sport’s celebrity endorsers, and those of the globe’s consuming masses. This interconnection between disparately located, and differentially empowered, bodies materializes ‘a perversely postmodern irony that a First-World company exploits workers in the Third World, while deploying images of black men to embody freedom and individualism’ (Miller et al. 2001: 58). The inhuman plight of the developing world’s exploited labour force is not the focus of the present discussion (see Boje 1998; Enloe 1995; Ross 2004; Sage 1999; Stabile 2000); rather, we turn our attention to the materially and symbolically trafficked bodies of athletes, and their relationship to forces and experiences of glocalization.
The expanded channels of official and unofficial migration created by the post-industrial, developed world’s need to bolster its menial and servile labour, offer an interesting correlative to corporate sport’s scouring of the world for superior athletic talent. The ensuing establishment of talent pipelines provides the athletic raw materials required to enhance, or at the very least maintain, the marketability of the corporate sport product. So, in the sport economy, as in the broader economic formation, ‘the core states dominate and control the exploitation of resources and production’ (Maguire 1999: 19). That having been said, it would be wrong to assume a unidimensionality of athletic labour migrancy, for there are various iterations of, and motivations for, the sport migrant experience, the variations of which depend on the sporting migrant’s range of movement, length of stay in any one given place and level of remuneration (Bale and Sang 1994; Magee and Sugden 2002; Maguire 2004; Maguire and Stead 1998).
Once largely demarcated along national boundary lines (the odd sport migrant being the exception that proved the homespun rule), the multinational composition of playing rosters has become a defining feature of many nationally based professional sport leagues and teams. In some instances, the proliferation of a class of globally mobile athletic migrants has led to a re-structuring and/or re-evaluation of local sport cultures in both host and donor settings. For instance, the multinationalization of NBA player personnel – during the 2004–5 season, the NBA featured 77 ‘international’ players drawn from 34 different nations – has transformed the manner in which the league presents itself to the global market (Andrews 2003). The initial phase in the process of globalizing the NBA spectacle centred on selling the league as an explicitly American entertainment product, with high profile players (mostly African American) being used as the embodiments of what it meant to be American in sporting and cultural terms (something less comfortably realized on US soil). Prompted by the emergence of players such as Tony Parker (France), Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) and Pau Gasol (Spain) plying their trade to such effect in the NBA, the league began marketing itself differently to those who follow their local NBA heroes from afar (Fisher 2003). The NBA spectacle now exists and operates in numerous national locations at one and the same time, albeit customized – through media and commercial relationships with locally based broadcasters and sponsors – according to the player-oriented interests and expectations of local audiences. In this way, the NBA has moved from being an exclusively externalized form of glocal strategizing (the selling of the NBA through its explicit Americanness) to one that, in specific settings, additionally engages internalized forms of glocal strategizing (the mobilization of local affinity for specific NBA players).
Professional basketball is also an interesting exemplar of sporting glocalization since, like ice hockey (cf. Kivinen et al. 2001; Maguire 1996) and football (cf. Magee and Sugden 2002; Maguire and Stead 1998; Stead and Maguire 2000), a complex international hierarchy of professional leagues exists, resulting in multidirectional player movement. Not only do elite foreign players migrate from lesser leagues to the NBA and its feeder and developmental leagues, American players of not sufficient ability to play professionally in the USA have the opportunity, depending on their talent level, to make the reverse journey (Maguire 1994). Even so, at times, this seemingly benign sporting diaspora brings global and local issues and identities into sharp relief (Carrington et al. 2001). For example, local responses to American basketball migrants evoke a paradoxical mix of civic resentment for inhibiting the development of local talent, coupled with a tacit gratitude for the abilities they bring to the team (Falcous and Maguire 2005a, 2005b).
The athletic labour migration situation is considerably more exploitative in cases where the balance, in economic and political as much as sporting terms, between the donor and host countries is more unequal. This is frequently the case where developed nations mine developing or under-developed nations for their athletic talent, with little or no interest in the sporting and, more importantly, the social and economic consequences of such actions. Indeed, this problem is so significant that in December 2003, FIFA President Sepp Blatter, not renowned for his political incisiveness, made the following statement in a column that appeared in the Financial Times:
I find it unhealthy, if not despicable, for rich clubs to send scouts shopping in Africa, South America and Asia to ‘buy’ the most promising players there … This leaves those who trained them in their early years with nothing but cash for their trouble … Dignity and integrity tend to fall by the wayside in what has become a glorified body market … Europe’s leading clubs conduct themselves increasingly as neo-colonialists who don’t give a damn about heritage and culture, but engage in social and economic rape by robbing the developing world of its best players. (Quoted in Anon 2003)
While the ‘host’ European football clubs – and, for that matter, Major League Baseball teams (Arbena 1994; Klein 1991) and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sport programmes (Bale and Sang 1996) – benefit from this form of corporeal neo-colonialism in their ability to draw from a larger talent pool, and even market their sporting products to local diasporic communities, the situation in the donor countries is less positive. The exploitation of athletic talent in developing nations by sporting institutions from the developed world hinders the growth of national communities in sporting, social and economic terms. In the first instance, such drains on athletic talent lead to the ‘de-skilling’ of the sport in the donor countries (Maguire et al. 2002) which, in the Latin American context, leads to ‘a sense of loss, a feeling that the home country is being robbed of its own human and recreational resources’ (Arbena 1994: 103). Moreover, among many individuals and families within donor countries, such sporting neo-colonialism creates a sense of unrealistic opportunity through professional sport, and an ultimately unfulfilled dependency on the host nation, which when magnified across the local populace, can seriously impinge upon social and economic development in the local setting. In this way, the broader economic relations and inequities between the ‘west and the rest’ (Hall 1992) are replicated within the sporting context.
With regard to the global flow of symbolic bodies, within the context of a late capitalist order dominated by the hyper-individualizing medium that is television (Andrews and Jackson 2001), it is little wonder that the celebritization of culture in general has similarly been replicated in sport which has, not unreasonably, been described as ‘basically media-driven celebrity entertainment’ (Pierce 1995: 185). Sport’s position as an agent and expression of celebritization can be attributed to the embodied nature of sport performance, which encourages a focus on individuals and attracts the televisual gaze required for their mass circulation. Thus, within the popular media, ‘These sports celebrities … [such as Pete Sampras, Magic Johnson, Martina Hingis, Lindsey Davenport, Tiger Woods, Michael Owen and David Beckham] … are typically portrayed as superlatively talented and hard-working individuals who contribute to the pre-eminence of the dual ethic of individualism and personal competitiveness in society’ (Rojek 2001: 37). The lure of sport’s public figures has seen them sucked into the vortex of promotional culture (Wernick 1991) as seductive conduits allowing more prosaic commercial forms to engage mass markets. Hence, certain athletes have become truly ‘international figures, marketed in global advertising campaigns, films, music, and other venues of media culture’ (Kellner 2001: 42); however the list of truly global celebrities is relatively small, including such individuals as Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods and perhaps David Beckham. Like the Martina Hingis described by Giardina (2001), these global sport icons are the product of, and have the potential to project, ‘polymorphous media representations’ according to the context in which they are being consumed. They are thus exemplars of exteriorized glocal strategizing in that their ‘transnational celebrity’ renders them ‘flexible citizens’ able to successfully negotiate and transcend the ‘borders of the global market’ (Giardina 2001: 201).
In addition to the exteriorized glocalizing capacities of sport celebrities, they probably exist and operate more abundantly through more interiorizing iterations. The structural and symbolic importance of the sport celebrity within the corporate sport model is widely accepted as both an important feature of sport’s spectacularization and commodification, and an important conduit for other corporate interests looking to capitalize upon sports popular appeal (Amis and Cornwell 2005). Hence, transnational sport corporations such as Nike, Adidas and Reebok, and equally non-sport transnationals such as Ford, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola (Silk and Andrews 2001, 2005), have, within various national cultural settings, used locally resonant sport celebrities as a means of incorporating ‘localities into the imperatives of the global’ (Dirlik 1996: 34). Of course, this marketing strategy is not without its problems:
rather than romanticize or celebrate the sophistication of such campaigns, it is important to outline that these campaigns point to the ways in which transnational corporations are providing commercially inspired representations of locality. In this case, Nike have done little more than select celebrities who represent a superficial and depthless caricature of national cultural differences, sensibilities, and experiences – modern nation-statehood effectively being replaced by late capitalist corporate-nationhood. (Silk and Andrews 2001: 198)
The role of sport celebrities as potentially potent sources of ‘representative subjectivity’ pertaining to the ‘collective configurations’ through which individuals fashion their very existence (social class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, nationality) is troubling enough (Marshall 1997: xi, xii). However, this becomes even more problematic when the local is imagined and authenticated through an external and commercially inspired locus of control, which produces little more than ‘generalized recipes of locality’ (Robertson 1995). However, such, perhaps, is the corollary of sporting glocality.
CONCLUSION
Making something of a departure from some of his earlier contributions (Rowe 1996a, 1996b), and perhaps prompted by a perceived need to stimulate debate within what was threatening to become an all-too-predictable intellectual forum, Rowe (2003) provocatively contested sport’s ability to ‘resonate at the global level’ and argued that sport may, in fact, ‘be unsuited to carriage of the project of globalization in its fullest sense’. Rowe’s position was prefigured on sport’s importance as an emotive marker of local (communal, regional, national) belonging and identification. Specifically sport’s ‘constant evocation of the nation as its anchor point and rallying cry’ evidences its ‘affective power’, making it impossible for sport to be ‘reconfigured as postnational and subsequently stripped of its “productive” capacity to promote forms of identity’ (Rowe 2003). Sport’s symbiotic relationship with nationally contoured forms of identity makes it antithetical to the process of globalization, and to be leading to the emergence of supra-national social systems and institutions that transcend the local in establishing a post-particular global order. This discussion will have provided an alternative to Rowe’s (2003) dichotomizing of the global and the local. Our aim has been to point out the constitutive inter-relationship between globality and locality, as illustrated within the various iterations and expressions of sporting glocality. In doing so, we hope to have provided another conceptual platform from which it becomes possible to delve further into the contested structures and experiences of sport within the glocal age.
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