Routledge Handbook of Sport and Politics

Alan Bairner, John Kelly, Jung Woo Lee, Alan Bairner, John Kelly, Jung Woo Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317646662
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Social Sciences

Sport is frequently considered to be an aspect of popular culture that is, or should be, untainted by the political. However, there is a broad consensus among academics that sport is often at the heart of the political and the political is often central to sport. From the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany to the civil unrest that preceded the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, sport and politics have remained symbiotic bedfellows.

The Routledge Handbook of Sport and Politics goes further than any other book in surveying the complex, embedded relationships between sport and politics. With sections addressing ideologies, nation and statehood, corporate politics, political activism, social justice, and the politics of sports events, it introduces the conceptual foundations that underpin our understanding of the sport-politics nexus and examines emergent issues in this field of study.

Including in-depth case studies from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, this is an essential reference for anybody with an interest in the social scientific study of sport.

PART I

Sport and the study of politics

As noted in the Handbook introduction, political scientists have been slower than sociologists and historians to show an academic interest in sport. The probable reasons for this have already been rehearsed. However, as the opening section of the Handbook reveals, some branches of political studies have engaged with sport to a greater extent than others. This is made abundantly clear in the chapters by Grix and Harris on governance and governmentality, by Houlihan on policy-making and by Merkel on sport and international relations.

Governmentality represents the art of government, whereby governments manage to exert power over subjects by using techniques to ensure that individuals govern themselves, but in line with the government’s objectives. Jonathan Grix and Spencer Harris note that issues linked to “governance” have become more prominent in sport over recent years not least because of the significant external funding (government and corporate) of sport, and the failure of institutions to effectively or appropriately govern sport. Their chapter takes a closer look at the governance of sport, with a specific focus on the governance of the London 2012 Olympic community sport legacy, drawing upon governance literature, specifically Foucault’s notion of governmentality. The resultant narrative draws attention to the shift from centralist decision-making and big government to devolved governance and the passing of power to the local community level. These developments underscore an intentional government strategy that promotes the ideal of shifting power from central government to networked agents, whilst using a range of tactics to retain control and to ensure that actions are aligned with government expectations. Grix and Harris offer a valuable lens through which to analyse the governance context in which the policy process evolves rather than a specific approach to policy analysis. It is the latter that forms the central focus of the chapter that follows.

Barrie Houlihan locates sport policy-making within the broader sport policy analysis literature and proceeds to examine the distinctive features of the sport policy sub-sector. The chapter reviews the major factors that shape sport policy and briefly examines the four major macro-level theories: governance; neo-pluralism; neo-Marxism and market liberalism. The significance of macro-level theory as a foundation for the development of meso-level policy analysis frameworks is identified, thereby establishing the context for a review of three meso-level frameworks. Much sport policy-making takes place within individual nation-states. However, it is also an important feature of the international community.

In the next chapter, therefore, Udo Merkel considers ways in which the study of international relations has addressed the role of sport as a foreign policy and diplomatic tool. He offers a succinct account of the history of sport’s use for diplomatic purposes, engages in a critical evaluation of selected International Relations (IR) theories that are able to embrace the world of sport, traces and outlines major trends in the post-World War II era, and assesses the changing role and efficacy of sports diplomacy, using contemporary examples. In addition to providing a stage for political and ideological rivalries, tensions and conflicts, international sports events have frequently been used as foreign policy and diplomatic tools. These high-profile events are able to facilitate cooperation, increase understanding, bridge profound differences, break down stereotypes, and confine conflicts to the playing field rather than the battlefield. Merkel develops this theme by looking specifically at the conciliatory gestures between North and South Korea in the context of the Asian and Olympic Games, whilst recognising that sport on its own cannot perform miracles.

These chapters amply demonstrate that sport has been of interest to groups of political scientists whose primary interest is in the role of institutions, particularly the state. We take the view, however, that the reach of the political extends well beyond the institutions of government and into the daily lives of billions of people, affecting the ways in which they think about the world and what sort of world they wish to live in. For this reason, the final chapter in this opening section addresses an area of political studies that has traditionally been more neglectful of the interaction between sport and politics.

Alan Bairner argues that there has always been room for debate about the aspirations of specific political ideologies and, even more commonly, about the strategies required to fulfil these aspirations. In almost every instance, but perhaps most markedly in the case of communism, gaps exist between the ideological ideal and the reality. Bairner’s chapter examines the general relationship between political ideologies and sport. After a brief introduction to the concept of ideology, the chapter proceeds to consider the ways in which different ideologies have engaged and continue to engage with sport. With specific reference to sport, the actual influence and/or relevance of political ideologies varies enormously. Nationalism is arguably a constant presence. It is clear too that other ideologies have sought to directly affect the ways in which sport is organised and played. One thinks of fascism/national socialism and communism in this respect. In the case of most ideologies, however, the degree of direct influence is harder to detect. Feminism and environmentalism regularly attempt to influence sporting practices, albeit with limited success. As for conservatism, liberalism and socialism, it is perhaps easier to argue that their core values are often reflected in or antithetical to sport than that they have directly affected the world of sport over extended periods of time. By offering an overview of this kind, the chapter lays the foundations for contributions in the next section of the Handbook, which examine at greater length, and with reference to specific examples, the relationship between ideologies and sport.

1

GOVERNANCE AND GOVERNMENTALITY OF SPORT

Jonathan Grix and Spencer Harris

Introduction

A number of issues have ensured the rise in prominence of the term “governance” in relation to sport in recent years. First, a series of scandals have taken place associated with the governance of sporting structures commonly referred to as management corruption (e.g. FIFA). Second, a series of problems associated with competition in sport, commonly referred to as competition corruption (e.g. doping in sport), has occurred. Third, governments globally appear to be increasingly intervening in sport policy for non-sporting – and mostly political – ends. Finally, scholars have grappled with the term in order to explain a change in the manner in which public policy is delivered in a number of advanced democracies. “Governance”, as a concept, has started to be used in sports studies to understand sport more often since the early 2000s. This is despite the fact that sports studies is relatively slow at taking on concepts from “main” academic disciplines, as the trajectory of the core terms from sociology, “social capital”, and from international relations, “soft power”, show. The rise to prominence of “governance” followed the development in most advanced capitalist states, and many “emerging” states, of a mixture of New Public Management – that is, a “devolved” central power and a desire to deliver public policy more efficiently. New Public Management appears to be an almost universally accepted governance type that is ideologically driven and purports to allow policy practitioners autonomy from a centralised state, while “steering” from behind the scenes.

Sport governance takes place at many levels, perhaps most clearly at the domestic and the international level of governance. The former concerns itself with how sport policy is delivered, how sport is funded and which type of organisations make up the so-called “sportscape”, including National Sport Organisations (NSOs). International governance of sport concerns itself with those organisations that are responsible for transnational sport, for example, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) and the IOC (International Olympic Committee). Such global organisations set the context within which NSOs operate; decisions made at a supra-national level often impact on and directly affect NGBs and their policies. The governance of sport is, therefore, not just a matter for individual nations. Key actors in world politics, for example, the United Nations (UN), and increasingly the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe, have a direct impact on national sport. An example of agenda-setting policy at supra-national level is the European Commission’s 2007 White Paper on sport, which suggests that member states ought to encourage a greater role for equal opportunities in sport. This is likely, in time, to force traditionally gendered sports such as golf to change their archaic policies and practices. The focus in this chapter is, however, on the domestic or national level of governance and we do so by arguing that the so-called “governance narrative”, outlining a shift from big, central government to devolved “governance” of policy does not hold for the sport policy community. Further, we propose that fusing insights from the literature on “governance” – together with those from “governmentality” – can be fruitfully used to shed light on understanding the sport policy community. This offers a new analytical framework to assess the governance context in which the policy process evolves rather than a specific approach to policy analysis. The chapter unfolds as follows: after an overview of the “governance” debate, we introduce a “new governmentality” approach, we then set out the community sport policy context before analysing community sport from a new governmentality perspective.

Governance and the “governance narrative”

Issues around “governance” have become increasingly important in the last 30 years, as sport has become more politicised and as governments have invested more in sport. With heavy financial investment comes strict accountability and the need to modernise often archaic practices. In the world of sport this has led to a number of key tensions, for sport in many countries has been – and still is to a large extent – run by amateur volunteers. The delivery of sport policy in the majority of advanced capitalist states or advanced liberal democracies runs from government departments via NSOs (in the US the Olympic Organisation distributes monies to NSOs). It is clear to see how increasing levels of government funding and interest can give rise to difficulties in sport policy delivery: as modern, technocratic modes of governance meet archaic, amateur sport structures there is bound to be friction. Two strands of literature are of interest in understanding the manner in which sport is governed at the domestic level: the so-called “governance narrative” literature and Foucault’s ideas about power encapsulated in the concept of “governmentality”. Why this is of interest to sport politics is also clear: the domestic governance of sport covers key issues such as the funding for NSOs (who gets what, when and how), the mechanisms developed to monitor them (the checks and balances) and the effects such systems have on long-term sport development.

Only recently has sports studies looked to the mature debates in political science and public administration concerning the state’s changing role in the delivery of public policy. Yet, the so-called “governance narrative”, slowly becoming the new orthodoxy in political science (Marsh 2008a), is more often than not presented as the key approach to understanding recent developments in public policy in leading text books on the subject (see Coxall et al. 2003; Dorey 2005; Hill 2009). The “governance narrative” is a broad-brush approach that can usefully assist in “framing” particular studies of the sport policy area, ranging from those dealing with issues of meta-governance down to studies involving street-level bureaucrats, or both. The focus of the original work on “governance” was the “Westminster style” of government (for example, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), but general principles hold for the majority of advanced capitalist states investing heavily into sport. In particular, how governments fund elite sport, the mechanisms in place to make sports organisations accountable for the funds they receive, and the criteria and ideology upon which such a system rests.

In a nutshell, the “governance narrative” suggests a major shift in politics and public policy from “big” government to governance through networks, a wide array of “partnerships” and devolved bodies, thereby bringing policy closer to the street level and thus society. “Partnership” working in particular, especially in sport policy delivery, has been championed strongly. This shift has led to the erosion of central governmental power and, with it, the state’s ability to determine and deliver policy (Bevir and Rhodes 2006, 2008; Skelcher 2000). The diffusion of power moves from an hierarchical, top-down delivery of policy, to one that is sideways, with governance through a series of networks in which a wide variety of interests are represented.

The application of this approach to public policy in the UK has been critiqued for not capturing how the sport policy sector is governed. In particular Goodwin and Grix (2011) and Grix and Phillpots (2011) have shown that sport policy (and a number of other sectors) is a “deviant” case and as such does not fit this ideal type. This leads to a number of very interesting questions that shed light on the most salient aspects of the discussion around domestic governance. For example, why does sport policy (and others) not fit the notion of devolved, dispersed power among a variety of actors with increased autonomy from the central executive? After all, there is clearly a trend to “agencification” in the sport policy area, including arm’s length agencies, the rapid growth of “partnerships”, networks, charities, advisory bodies, boards, commissions, councils and other non-governmental bodies. The process described by the “governance narrative” does not result in a “hollowing out” of the state, but, perhaps paradoxically, rather in an increased capacity for central state control in most mature democracies (see Taylor 2000). The underlying, hierarchical power relations and resource dependence between networks, partnerships and government remain intact. The paradox arises between surface observation (the growth of devolved bodies) and the underlying power relations of networks and partnerships involved in policy-making and delivery. And this surface observation is usually enough evidence to confirm a shift from big, interventionist “government” to more autonomous governance by networks and partnerships (Bevir and Rhodes 2008; Marsh 2008b), a central tenet of the “governance narrative”. Therefore, the “governance narrative” ideal type does not account for the continuance of “asymmetrical network governance” (Goodwin and Grix 2011) between government and resource-dependent actors, which exist in both elite and grassroots policy delivery in the UK (see Newman 2005, for a critique of elements of the “governance narrative”). This is an important point and one that has wider significance beyond the UK case. As discussed below, such an understanding of “governance” – whereby “devolved” bodies of public policy delivery do not lead to more open, democratic processes, but can be read as a state strategy for control – touches on many of the areas central to Foucault’s notion of “governmentality”.

On the surface the “governance narrative” would appear to accurately characterise the sport policy sector in the UK. There is no doubt that there is a multitude of organisations, committees and charities involved in sport delivery, resulting in one of the most “divided, confused and conflictive pol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Routledge Handbook of Sport and Politics
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ introduction
• PART I Sport and the Study of Politics
• PART II Sport, Politics and Ideologies
• PART III Sport, Nation and Statehood
• PART IV Sport, Corporate Politics and the Global Community
• PART V Sport, Political Activism and Social Justice
• PART VI Politics and Sporting Events
• Index