Management of Sports Development

Vassil Girginov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780750685627
• eBook ISBN: 9781136385964
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Management of Sports Development is the first book to offer a holistic approach to a field which has been growing in importance for some years. Although many books exist on various aspects of development, never before has there been a text which addresses the process of development in such a comprehensive manner. This book offers eveything needed to develop an understanding of the process of sports development.

The book provides comprehensive coverage of the major themes in the process of sports development with contributions from an internationally renowned author team. These themes include:

• models of sports development
• funding of sports development
• mega sporting events
• networks and partnerships in sports development
• sports development and social change

It is also supplemented with a dedicated accompanying website featuring updates and extra material.

This accessible book is essential reading for students or lecturers in the field of sports development and is set to be a vital contribution to the literature in this area.

PART ONE

Management of Sports Development: Visions, Change, Delivery

CHAPTER 1

Management of Sports Development as an Emerging Field and Profession

Vassil Girginov

This chapter begins by first establishing the meaning of development as a generic concept, and its relevance for the study of sport, followed by an understanding of sports development, and finally it brings management and sports development together, before providing an outline of the structure of the book.

Development: Origins, Meaning and Paradoxes

Definitions of development abound in the literature, and it is customary for any text on the subject to offer one. However, most writers tend to agree that it is impossible to pin down this concept in a neat definition. It is not the intent of this text to contribute to the existing list of definitions, but rather to conceptualize the meaning of development that would later help establish an understanding of the related concept of sports development.

Development, as Esteva’s (1997) elegant analysis demonstrated, is a concept whose historical-political meaning has evolved in the course of 250 years. Various perceptions, events and power relations have shaped it, and as the Encyclopedia of All Systems of Teaching and Education published in Germany in 1860 indicated about development ‘this concept is applied to almost all that man has and knows’ Esteva, 1997, p. 9). As early as 1878 Eucken noted that the word ‘has become almost useless for science, except in certain areas’ (cited in Esteva, 1997, p. 9). Eucken’s remark is informative here as it expressed a realization that intellectuals’, economists’ and politicians’ preoccupations with development had created conceptual and practical confusion. But what caused the ‘uselessness’ of this word at the end of the nineteenth century? The answer to this question is critical for understanding the meaning of development.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the growth of industrial capitalism originally in Great Britain, which then spread throughout Europe, the USA and the rest of the world. This was a process of capitalist expansion and accumulation of wealth and natural resources. It was also a process of social change on a mass scale which built on itself and which was largely responsible for creating new forms of livelihood and aspirations. This social change, which Cowen and Shenton (1996) termed immanent progress, ‘implied continual improvement reaching higher and higher levels perhaps without limit’ (Thomas, 2000a, p. 25). Immanent progress is spontaneous and associated with development from within – ‘a society tendency to change its form’ (Barnett, 1988, p. 8), and also entails destruction of old forms of livelihood in order to achieve the new ones.

Industrial progress and growth became a subject of the theory of economic development which established itself in Britain around 1650 and was hugely influenced by the works of Hume (1748), Steuart (1767) and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). The main purpose of these writings, as Lewis (2002, p. 28) pointed out, was ‘to reconcile modern economic life and institutions (especially trading, interests, profit-making, and the right to hold private property) with ethics and religion, and their method was to quote from the Bible and the writings of the early Church’. Indeed, religious teachings were amongst the first precursors of the doctrine of development, which was the opposite of the idea of progress epitomized by the drive for capital accumulation.

From a materialist and theological point of view, development, as Cowen and Shenton (1995, p. 29) eloquently put it, ‘emerged to ameliorate the perceived chaos caused by progress’. Development was shaped as a problem ‘grounded in the European experience of governability, disorder and disjuncture’ (Crush, 1995, p. 8). It was in the European context that development was first conceived as a state practice and as ‘one means to construct the positive alternative to the disorder and underdevelopment of capitalism’ (Cowen and Shenton, 1996, p. 57). The nineteenth century marked the beginning of intentional development concerned with the deliberate policy and actions of the state and other agencies, which were expressed in various developmental doctrines. The visions promoted by these doctrines were rooted in the normalizing practices of the modern state and its efforts to produce disciplined citizens, soldiers, leaders and governable subjects. History reveals that sport has played and continues to play a major part in those state-building activities, not only in Europe but throughout the world (Black and Nauright, 1998; Mangan, 2000, 2002).

A cultural perspective on development locates it within the broader notion of modernity. This is a world view representing a break from the bonds of the traditional social order, and which challenged the main pillars of the old regime including the authority of the Church and the absolute power of kings. Modernity challenged deeply rooted cultural values and beliefs. Inglehart (1997, p. 24) noted that ‘the essential core of Modernization is a syndrome of changes closely linked with industrialization: this syndrome includes urbanization, the application of science and technology, rapid increasing occupational specialization, rising bureaucratization, and rising educational levels. It also includes one more thing, which was the motivating force behind the whole process: industrialization was a way to get rich.’ The eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement gave rise to the belief in human progress and that the social conditions of people can be improved through application of reason and science. The philosophers of Enlightenment, as Perry (1992, p. 161) wrote in An Intellectual History of Modern Europe, ‘sought to emancipate the mind from the bonds of ignorance and superstition and to rescue people from intolerance, cruelty and oppression’. Indeed, the motto of the Enlightenment, sapere aude! (dare to know!), deeply permeates our modern way of thinking. The Enlightenment, however, should not be seen only as an intellectual triumph, but as an ideology and particular policies as well. For instance, it assumes that since reason is common to all peoples, state institutions, morality, education and other systems of thought could be based on common principles and applied to all peoples regardless of their cultures and histories. It demonstrated the dialectics between philosophy and ideology in that, while philosophy involves the organization of ideas and values, the purpose of ideology, usually expressed in doctrines, is to shape beliefs that incite people to action. The Enlightenment project was premised on a number of central ideas which have great relevance for the way we perceive sports development today, and which will be elaborated in the next section. These include reason, empiricism (all knowledge is based on empirical facts), science, universalism (reason and science produce general principles and laws which can be applied to all situations), progress, individualism, secularism (secular knowledge and structures replacing traditional religious authority), uniformity of human nature and freedom. However, Inglehart (1997, p. 23) also saw industrialization and Modernization as an ‘attractive package’ but which carried a high cost. He argued that modernization ‘dismantles a traditional world in which the meaning of life is clear; warm, personal communal ties gives way to an impersonal competitive society geared to individual achievement’.

For the first time the ideas of Enlightenment allowed humans to conceive of development as an intention and people came to see history as a linear trajectory containing a promise of a better future. The concept of development in its modern form emerged as a corollary of the notion of progress and the capitalist accumulation of wealth. Developmental ideas reflected two conflicting approaches – one which saw development as closely linked to progress (Inglehart, 1997) and the other which perceived development radiating from the limitations of progress (Cowen and Shenton, 1996). Despite a multiplicity of definitions of development, most commentators agree there are three main interrelated contemporary meanings of the term. Those meanings, according to Thomas’ (2000b) and Schech and Haggis’ (2000) comprehensive analyses include (i) a vision, description or measure of the state of being of a desirable society; (ii) a historical process of social change implying a progressive movement from backwardness to forwardness; and (iii) deliberate efforts on the part of various agencies aimed at improvement.

When considered as a vision, as Schech and Haggis (2000, p. 15) observed, ‘whether capitalist or Marxist, development theorist and policy makers have identified development with material progress and improved living standards’. This seemingly universal striving for better living should not conceal the fact that different political ideologies have different visions of what ideals should be pursued by society. For example, how should social and economic development be achieved? Shall we leave development to the market or should the state assume a leading role? Who should be the main beneficiaries of development? How should development be measured? These are all important questions to which different political ideologies provide competing answers. As Seers (1979, p. 10) noted, ‘development is inevitably a normative concept, almost a synonym for improvement. To pretend otherwise is just to hide one’s value judgements.’

A book on the management of sports development cannot do justice to these various doctrines. What follows instead sketches briefly the gist of four contemporary views on development, namely, Neoliberalism, Structuralism, Interventionism and People-Centred Development, and their relevance to how we think about sports development. The first three views represent what is regarded in development circles as mainstream doctrines, while the fourth is an alternative view of development which has recently been gaining momentum. These views do not represent coherent theories as they draw on diverse schools of thought such as Marxism, Modernization, Dependency, Feminism, Critical Theory and Alternative Development. Table 1.1 summarizes these four visions of development. Apart from the obvious differences in their basic assumptions, they share a lack of specific prescriptions of how their proclaimed goals are to be achieved. Thorbecke (2000) offered a comprehensive review of the history of these doctrines and their relationships with policies, development models and systems for performance measurement from their inception in the 1950s through to 2000.

Table 1.1 Main views of development.

Vision	Neoliberalism	Interventionism	Structuralism	People-centred development
	Liberal capitalism (modern industrial society and liberal democracy)
		(plus achieving basic social/environmental goals)
Theory of Internal social change	Internal dynamics of capitalism	Need to remove ‘barriers’ to modernization (change can be deliberately directed)	Struggle between classes (and other interests)	(not clear)
Role of ‘development’	Immanent Process within capitalism	To ‘ameliorate the distorted faults of (capitalist) progress’	Comprehensive planning/transformation of society	process of individual and group empowerment
Agents of development	Individual entrepreneurs	Development agencies or ‘trustees’ of development (states, NGOs, international organizations)	Collective action (generally through the state)	Individuals, social movements
Source: Adopted from Thomas (2000a, p. 43)

Modern developmental doctrines formulated after the Second World War drew on the economic and social theories from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and the instructive colonial experiences in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They all possess two main properties – analytical, explaining how development occurs, and normative, suggesting how it should occur. What, therefore, these doctrines share in common are two things: (i) an interpretation of development, which, as Cowen and Shenton (1996, pp. 444–5) posited, ‘in both its classical and modern expression, includes processes of decay, decomposition and destruction as well as growth, expansion and improvement’, and (ii) the intent to develop. Where they differ is on matters of principles, en...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Management of Sports Development: Visions, Change, Delivery
• Part Two Visions of Sports Development
• Part Three Sports Development as Process of Social Change
• Part Four Sports Development Delivery
• Notes on Contributors
• Index