Transnational and Comparative Research in Sport

Globalisation, Governance and Sport Policy

Ian Henry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415401128
• eBook ISBN: 9781134145218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

The wider adoption of a post-modern understanding of truth and knowledge, an acceptance of the prevalence of Orientalism inherent in much Western research, and the diminished significance of the 'local' within the rhetoric of globalization have all combined to constrain comparative and transnational research under the weight of theoretical and methodological concerns.

Transnational and Comparative Research in Sport addresses these difficulties in the context of sport studies, with the aim of developing typology which can be adopted to help re-establish meaningful transnational and comparative research. The book covers theoretical and substantive contexts and introduces a four-fold typology of approaches to comparative research, each supported by case studies and full discussion.

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Part I
Theoretical perspectives and methodologies

1
Globalisation, governance and policy

Ian Henry

Introduction

The first question one might ask in embarking on a project such as this is ‘why?’. What is sufficiently intrinsically interesting or extrinsically significant about the topic to dedicate resources to the production of an extended argument in the form of a book? That sport itself is regarded by a large proportion of the global population as sufficiently intrinsically interesting is evident from phenomena such as the television viewing figures for the Olympic games – the International Olympic Committee (IOC), for example, claims that:

The Athens Olympics broke global TV viewing records, with nearly 4 billion people tuning in … 3.9 billion people watched an Olympic broadcast at least once during the Aug. 13–29 games, beating the previous record of 3.6 billion viewers for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

(European Tour Operators Association 2006)

Moreover, the Men’s Soccer World Cup Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) estimated viewing figures of 28 billion for the 2002 World Cup (Federation Internationale de Football Association 2002). Sport is thus a significant indicator of global cultural trends. In economic terms, sport is also seen as an important contributor to the GDP of, for example, European economies (Andreff et al. 1995; Jones 1989), and it has become increasingly important to, for example, Asian economies with the global outsourcing of much of the physical production of sports goods and clothing to non-Western economies (Donaghu and Barff 1990; Laabs 1998).

In political terms, the importance of sport became increasingly evident throughout the twentieth century with, for example, the clamouring for the recognition of the IOC (as well as of the United Nations) by the newly independent states in the post-colonial period of the 1960s and 1970s (Al-Tauqi 1993) and by the post-Soviet Union independent republics in the 1990s (Bowker 1997; Goodbody 1991; McElvoy 1994). The significance of sport for Western hegemony is also evidenced in the effort by the USA to aid the restarting of the Olympic movement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The USA is spending over $10 million of “coalition forces” and US taxpayer money to create a new Iraqi National Olympic Committee and prepare its athletes for the Olympic Games. Although none have yet to qualify for any Olympic competition, already numerous young Iraqi athletes are training in the USA and are flown, with military escort, all over the world to compete in qualifying events. … The IOC has already agreed to allow any qualifying Iraqi athlete to compete in the summer games. The question is whether they compete as individuals, under a neutral flag, such as the Olympic flag, or be sponsored by a recognized Iraq National Olympic Committee and participate under the flag of Iraq.

Under what flag Iraqi athletes compete in the 2004 Summer Olympics may seem a trivial matter but it is critical to whether the IOC will allow the Bush Administration to use the Olympics for propaganda purposes. The US-led occupation government is going to great lengths to show a global television audience that, thanks to American intervention, there is now a new “free” Iraq on the world stage. For the IOC, it would be an unprecedented decision to allow a National Olympic Committee to participate without an independent – let alone internationally recognized – government. The Olympic Movement would suffer immeasurable damage as a result.

(Calmes 2004)

However, as the successful bids of Beijing for the hosting of the 2008 Olympics, and of South Africa for the 2010 Men’s Soccer World Cup, illustrate, the attraction of sport in political, economic and cultural terms is increasingly diffi-cult to confine to, or explain as, a concern of the ‘developed’ economies of the West. Thus, a prima facie case can be made that sport is a compelling topic in its own right and an interesting vehicle for discussion of many of the problems and issues affecting societies globally.

Thus, it is evident that sport is a significant phenomenon worthy of serious treatment, but what of the focus on comparative policy? The vogue for comparative analysis has been in decline for some years now – certainly, a literature search employing keywords of ‘sport’, ‘policy’, ‘comparative’ or their equivalents will render a relatively modest return. Indeed, the social analysis of sport (in terms of sociology, economics and politics) has burgeoned in the literature contemporaneously with the decline of comparative analysis. This decline can be ascribed to three key factors. The first is the phenomenon of globalisation, with its emphasis on the interconnectedness of political, economic and social systems, which has led some to question the appropriateness of using the individual nation state as the default unit of analysis, and thus questioned the value of simple comparisons of national policy systems.

The second factor is theoretical pluralism and the associated epistemological difficulties involved in making comparisons. This is not simply a matter of the critique of positivist claims to be able to compare ‘social facts’ relating to one national system with those relating to a comparator but also the whole panoply of issues associated with post-modernism and the relativist nature of claims made about national systems. This set of issues is addressed in Chapter 2 in which the argument made is that although such a concern does not represent an impasse for comparative studies, it has provided a significant discouragement for those who might otherwise have employed the term ‘comparative’ to describe their work.

The third factor explaining the paucity of recent comparative material grows out of the first two. It is associated with the general critique of the Western-centred nature of much social analysis. This is given powerful expression in the Orientalist critique initiated in literary and cultural analysis by Edward Said (1991, 1994, 1997) and taken on in political analysis by writers such as Ziauddin Sardar (1998, 1999). The critiques of such writers underline the fact that the promotion of Western views of the world is often made on the basis of the (implicit or explicit) disparaging of the ‘other’, the non-West (which increasingly in the post-communist era represents an Arab/Muslim other), such that writers such as Huntington (1996) can allude to the ‘clash of civilizations’ in ways which suggest irreconcilable differences between Western and non-Western ways of viewing the world.

In summary, this book represents a qualified rejection of each of these arguments. In essence, it will seek to oppose the following claims:

• first, globalisation diminishes the role of the nation state to such an extent that an understanding of the roles and activities of nation state actors is no longer essential to explanations of the determination of policy;
• second, epistemological difficulties have become so intransigent that comparison of policy systems and contexts is no longer feasible; and third, ‘Western’ ways of viewing the world are incompatible with non-Western perspectives such that comparisons become impossible.

In this chapter, we take on the first of these issues, globalisation, the role of the nation state and transnational bodies in the development of sports policy. In Chapter 2, we address epistemological issues in comparative policy and seek to steer a course between the claims of universal truths of the ‘Enlightenment project’ and relativism of radical post-modern analysis. This chapter develops a typology of approaches to comparative analysis based on contrasting epistemological and theoretical perspectives. In Chapter 3, the issue of the limitations of Western-based perspectives on non-Western contexts is considered, in particular the issue of linguistic particularism, and the critiques of Orientalism and the ‘clash of civilisations’ that seek to undermine the potential for cross-cultural analysis are rehearsed. This chapter takes the line adopted by Bassam Tibi (2001) and others that reference to civilisational blocks that are monolithic and coherent in terms of world view, moral position and epistemological approach is mistaken.

Chapters 4–8 deal with case studies of comparative sports policy analysis which fall into the four categories of comparative analysis identified in Chapter 2. The last of these case study chapters deals with discourse analysis approaches to understanding policy which allow us to reconcile Western and non-Western accounts of policy. Finally, the concluding chapter reviews the ethical dimension of policy and, in particular, difficulties associated with establishing moral consensus across different cultural and policy communities.

Globalisation and social analysis

Globalisation as a concept and as a social phenomenon had, by the beginning of the 1990s, become one of the most discussed topics in the social analysis literature in general and in the sociology of sport in particular. It was not that globalisation itself represented a recent phenomenon. Robertson (1992), for example, identified phases of globalisation from as early as the sixteenth century, and other writers have adopted an even longer timeline. However, the pace and spread of change bound up with globalisation processes had accelerated so quickly in the period since the 1960s that, for many, it seemed that globalisation represents not merely a major feature of the contemporary world but rather the major feature.

The recognition that globalising tendencies impinge on virtually every sphere of economic, cultural and political life has thus become commonplace. Much of the initial work on globalisation reflected the growing economic interdependence of nation states and national economies (Rhodes and vanApeldoorn 1998). Political interdependence was also subject to debate (Casanova 1996; Rosenau 1989), and there was a particular focus on the impact of globalising tendencies on the role of the nation state (Hirst and Thompson 1995; Mann 1997; Morris 1997; Shaw 1997; Smith 1998). This is allied to the apparent growth in importance of the region and the city as the locus of significant political activity (Andrew and Goldsmith 1998; Jones 1998; Keil 1998). In addition, considerable research effort went into identifying ways in which cultural or leisure forms, including sport, have been either, or both, a reflection of such tendencies or a reaction to globalising phenomena (Featherstone 1995; Maguire 1993a,b, 1994, 1995; Negus 1993; Robertson 1992; Stevenson 1997).

Perhaps what have been regarded as the two key characteristics of globalisation are the speed and geographical scope of change in the contemporary world. Giddens (1990) characterises globalisation in terms of time–space distanciation, that is, the phenomenon of people’s lives being increasingly less tied to local circumstances, while Harvey (1989) focuses on time–space compression, the speeding up of processes given the technological and economic change, in particular across the period since the end of the 1960s. Both acknowledge the increasingly evident interdependence between markets, polities and everyday life in formerly spatially, culturally, politically and economically distinct constituencies. The hierarchy of causes of such globalising phenomena is subject to considerable debate, with some authors giving primacy to economic factors (Sklair 1991; Wallerstein 1983) and others to advances in technology (Rosenau 1989) or to culture (Perlmutter 1991) while both Giddens (1990) and Robertson (1992) argue that globalisation represents the results of multiple dimensions of change. Hay and Marsh (2000), in addition, underline the view that globalisation represents a range of processes or flows which are contingent outcomes of related phenomena in a number of different domains They point to a ‘first wave’ of globalisation studies which they argue was characterised by studies with different disciplines emphasising particular trends or tendencies but with a lack of attention to detailed evidence. Thus, deregulation and financial liberalisation are emphasised by economists; the withering of the state by political economists; the decline of the nation state by political scientists and international relations scholars; Westernisation, McDonaldisation and cultural homogeneity by sociologists; and post-national, post-modern, post-colonial global culture by cultural theorists. They point to a second wave of studies which critically evaluated many of the taken-for-granted claims of the evidence (Busch 2000) and support Taylor’s (2000) contention that globalisation should be seen as a set of tendencies to which there are countertendencies.

Appadurai’s (1990) characterisation of globalisation as a system of flows – of finance, technology, media images, values and people – highlights the dimensions of the globalised context, but as Robertson argues, such flows are not ‘unidirectional’ processes. He highlights a series of tensions inherent in the processes of globalisation, underlining the fact that globalisation-related phenomena vary from one context to the next. However, though the causal accounts of different sources may vary, and though there may be disagreement about the significance of, for example, the role of the nation state in a global polity, or the spread of transnational capital, there is a considerable measure of agreement that major change is occurring in many locales in the ways in which economic, political and cultural life is conducted in the contemporary context. Our concern in this chapter is with highlighting some of the key changes which are claimed in relation to policy systems and subsequently evaluating the extent to which these have impacted on sports policy in a particular context, that of the UK.

Concepts of governance and their implications for understanding policy change

The concept of governance is intrinsically bound up with that of globalisation. As Rhodes comments, the term ‘governance’ is well used in the literature but is imprecise. He identifies six connotations of the term, namely the minimal state, corporate governance, the new public management, ‘good governance’, socio-cybernetic systems and self-organising networks, and goes on to provide his own stipulative definition of governance as consisting in “self organising, inter-organisational networks” (Rhodes 1996: p. 652).

There are perhaps three particular concepts of governance that pertain to the analysis of policy in general (and therefore to sports policy) (Henry and Lee 2004). The first is systemic governance, which concerns the way that sport is governed, not directly by national and international sports bodies (such as the FIFA or the IOC) but rather through the interaction between such bodies and other major stakeholders [media companies, governmental organisations, sponsors, athletes’ associations and transnational bodies such as the European Union (EU)] in a network of actors involved in competition, cooperation, negotiation and mutual adjustment. Here, the concern with understanding governance is with understanding the relationships between such stakeholders and the processes of their interaction. The second concept of governance which is prevalent in the literature is that of corporate, or good organisational, governance. This relates to a concern with the ethics of management and policy and the prescription of values such as transparency, democracy, equity and accountability. The third concept of governance relates to political governance. This type of analysis focuses on how governments seek to achieve their objectives, not simply by direct provision of sporting facilities or opportunities, or legal controls, but by a mixture of moral and fiscal incentives in addition to sporting provision, prescription and proscription. An analysis of political governance thus seeks to explain and evaluate the means by which policy objectives are formulated, the strategies for realising these objectives and explanations as to whether and why such policy prescriptions have been successful or unsuccessful. Our focus throughout this book will be primarily on aspects of systemic governance (how mutual adjustment between organisations is negotiated and explains policy outcomes) and political governance (how governments use a variety of policy tools in pursuing policy objectives) but will nevertheless include an ethical dimension in terms of the moral appropriateness of particular policy goals or the means of policy implementation.

As notions of systematic and political governance imply, the use of the term ‘governance’, in place of ‘government’, reflects a recognition that in contemporary developed economies governing decisions can no longer be taken by governments alone (whether national or local). Rather, effective decision-making in public policy will need to incorporate other stakeholders from the commercial and/or voluntary sectors. This in turn is a reflection of the interconnectedness of change. As economic competition has increasingly globalised, so pressures have induced nation states, in line with neo-liberal, free market philosophy, to reduce state expenditures in order to lower taxation and maintain a competitive position in relation to industrial costs. Thus, the notions of the minimal state, or the hollowing out of the state (Barnett 1999; dellaSala 1997; Patterson and Pinch 1995), are associated with globalisation of the economy and have key significance in terms of issues of governance. The transfer of knowledge and ideas about governance, whether this takes the form of political ideologies or professional/policy approaches, is also accelerated by greater internationalisation of networks, leading to what Dunleavy (1980) has termed, ‘ideological corporatism’. These processes, however, should not be exaggerated, or their manifestation taken for granted. Global–local tensions in policy are, for example, evident in many of the case studies which manifest both globalising tendencies and local responses or resistance.

Claims relating to the hollowing out of the sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• PART I Theoretical perspectives and methodologies
• PART II Case studies of comparative and transnational analysis of sports policy
• PART III Interculturalism in policy analysis: methodological pluralism and ethical discourse
• Notes
• References
• Index