18,051,894 articles and books Periodicals Literature Keyword Title Author Topic Member login User?name?? Password? ?Remember?me Join us?Forgot password? Submit articles free The Free Library >?Recreation and Leisure >?Sports and fitness >?Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies >?January 1, 2008 The Free Library >?Date ? 2008 >? January >? 1 >? Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies Modern sport and Olympic Games: the problematic complexities raised by the dynamics of globalization.
Introduction
The notion of globalization globalization
Process by which the experience of everyday life, marked by the diffusion of commodities and ideas, is becoming standardized around the world. Factors that have contributed to globalization include increasingly sophisticated communications and transportation ?has become commonplace. We find it in everyday conversation, throughout news reports, within scholarly discourse--seemingly everywhere. On closer inspection, however, we observe that what is meant by globalization often differs. In some usages it seems to be shorthand for the impression that the world is a "closer place." We are linked to each other more immediately by transportation and communication. For others of us, this sense of linkage is tangible: we look at the goods we purchase (and increasingly the services as well) and note their distant place of origin. Yet, in other contexts globalization is seen simultaneously as benefit and cost. For example, Americans (and many others in the world) rely on Walmart as a source of inexpensive consumer items--clearly a marker of globalization since most of Walmart's goods emanate em?a?nate??
intr. & tr.v. em?a?nat?ed, em?a?nat?ing, em?a?nates
To come or send forth, as from a source: light that emanated from a lamp; a stove that emanated a steady heat. ?from the cheaper labor pools of China. About this they feel good. At the same time, immigration immigration,?entrance of a person (an alien) into a new country for the purpose of establishing permanent residence. Motives for immigration, like those for migration generally, are often economic, although religious or political factors may be very important. ?causes consternation the world over as the apparently "border flattening" nature of contemporary globalization promotes migration, legal and undocumented, about which strong attitudes prevail. Obviously, globalization is a many-factored 'thing,' some aspects of which may be viewed with approval, whereas others are viewed with anxiety or hostility.
In this essay, I would like to attempt some "brush clearing" with the notion of globalization, bringing some clarification to its nature and the uses to which we put the concept. Having done so, I then turn to the issue of professional sport and the Olympic games Olympic games,?premier athletic meeting of ancient Greece, and, in modern times, series of international sports contests. The Olympics of Ancient Greece
Although records cannot verify games earlier than 776 B.C. ?and seek to situate sit?u?ate??
tr.v. sit?u?at?ed, sit?u?at?ing, sit?u?ates
1. To place in a certain spot or position; locate.
2. To place under particular circumstances or in a given condition.
adj. ?them problematically within a globalized context.
Some Relevant Dynamics of Globalization
Is globalization a contemporary phenomenon or an ancient phenomenon? And what difference does it make? For globalization scholars this is an important question because how one responds to it largely determines what one seeks to study within the vast amount of phenomena that make it up and the significance that is attributed to findings about it. Essentially, the scholarly world is divided into those who perceive the social history of mankind as one long journey toward the greater integration of peoples and places and those who see important interruptions in this process. From the long history point of view globalization has advanced in some degree with every new discovery, every new act of trade, every new exchange of symbols and values. This perspective has been beautifully rendered in the recent book by Professor Nayan Chandra whose detailing of this long historical movement toward contemporary integration spans huge amounts of human history. (1)
A quite different view holds that while acknowledging the force and effect of such movements toward integration as a common part of human history, something quite different has occurred in the period of the last forty to fifty years that leads us to label this period as an era of contemporary globalization. The point is not to contest the historical globalization perspective, but to emphasize that within this recent frame of four or five decades something quite novel and different is taking place in the world. These changes, as suggested by term contemporary globalization, obviously and importantly build on the whole of the integrative movements that preceded them, much we have come also to acknowledge other labels for the contemporary period such as the information age, or the knowledge society, or the network society as importantly and importantly and necessarily derived from the industrial age that preceded them. (2)
What then is so different about contemporary globalization? Out of the many possible responses to that question I want to emphasize six. I will refer to these as some of the important dynamics of globalization, by which I mean the structures and processes that have emerged over these past several decades to form and drive contemporary globalization, giving it the special character we attribute to it. The six are: the collapse of time and space; migration and urbanization; wealth creation and distribution; the transformation of global media; the primacy of trade and consumption; and the transformation of values. I have selected these six because in ways that I will develop in part two of this paper, these are the dynamics that in my view are having the most transformative impact on global sport, and by extension, the Olympic Games and movement.
The Collapse of Time and Space
As Chandra's work attests, to some degree the historically large advances in globalization have been marked by advances in technology that allowed people to "move closer" to each other in the sense that the exchange of people and goods (and all this entails, e.g. language, culture, arts, exchanges of knowledge) was enhanced. Certainly many of the inventions of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century revolutionized society as powered ships, airplanes, automobiles, radio and telephony and above all, cheap and reliable electricity, fundamentally changed the way people lived in the world and sought out each other. (For, let it be emphasized, purposes good and ill, as this period also represents successive ages of conquest, domination and imperialism as well as the massive destruction of two world wars.) Within a twenty year period from the mid-1950's to the mid-1970's three technological inventions--satellite communications, (3) the Boeing 747 and the modern container ship had the effect of speeding up the interactions of time and space (while dramatically lowering unit transmission costs) sufficiently that by the early 1990's David Harvey David Harvey is the name of: David Harvey (footballer) (born 1948) David Harvey (geographer) (born 1935) David Harvey (producer), American producer David Harvey (statistician) (born 1928) David Harvey (television), television presenter and executive ?would term this phenomena the collapse of time and space and see it as the harbinger har?bin?ger??
n.
One that indicates or foreshadows what is to come; a forerunner.
tr.v. har?bin?gered, har?bin?ger?ing, har?bin?gers
To signal the approach of; presage. ?of the contemporary age which he termed the "condition of post modernity." (4)
For Harvey and other commentators of this predisposition, a host of structural and behavioral transformations arise from this technological conjunction. Global instantaneous communications such as those made possible by satellite technology have been the preconditions for such different innovations as the creation of 24/7 equity and currency markets, off-shoring of many services (including the people who answer the phones when you purchase something from your favorite catalogue), simultaneous global transmission of mega events including the World Cup and the Olympics and all the marketing demand that results from that, to the sustaining structures of remittance economies, and the uncountable uncountable - countable ?linkages created and sustained by the Internet. (5) Modern air travel has resulted in the ability of literally hundreds of millions of persons annually to cross national borders any place on the globe within the span of a day. Moreover, an entire global industry has arisen based on the reliable and relatively inexpensive delivery of lower weight packages. But, the backbone of what economic globalization has become relies on the revolution in shipping and the continual innovations that bring declining unit costs to global shipping. If one root meaning of globalization is economic globalization--the trading of goods and services--shipping more than any other single variable has made it possible. Collectively, these three innovations stand at the apex of the complex processes that relocated global manufacturing from the older industrial countries to those of what was then the developing world, and which is now constituted largely as the newly developed countries, primarily those of Asia.
Migration and Urbanization
We now live on an urban planet. For the first time in human history by 2000 more people lived in cities than in the countryside, and the trend will continue. As Mike Davis has remarked, following UN Habitat data, within two decades the global countryside will have reached maximum carrying capacity carrying capacity
the number of animal units that a farm or area will carry on a year round basis, including that needed for conservation of winter feed. Usually stated as dry cows or dry sheep equivalents per hectare. : from that point on, all net growth will be in the cities. (6) Commonly accepted population projections anticipate that the global population will peak in 2150 with approximately 9.6 billion inhabitants. With roughly 6.7 billion inhabitants, the world has experienced enormous population growth over the past four decades, but we are only 2/3's toward this projected peak, currently adding approximately 76 million new inhabitants a year. Most of the growth is occurring in lesser developed countries; indeed, the older, industrial countries of the world exhibit demographic patterns of aging, declining populations.
As we globally cluster together, cities are becoming larger. The largest are now seen as mega cities--aggregations of 15 and 20+ millions of people. As these largest of cities grow, they become complex urban phenomena: aggregations or conurbations. They and their surrounds come to constitute contiguous populations measuring in the twenties and thirties of millions, so large and growing so rapidly that they challenge our very definition of what constitutes a city (What is its governmental definition? What is the source of its authority (ies)? Who is in charge of what?) The urbanist Michael Douglass looks at some of this massive growth and hypothesizes that the next century may witness the rebirth of the "city-state", for it is in these entities that not only populations are aggregated but increasingly also wealth and power. (7) Recent analyses of China indicate just such a power shift between government at the national and at the local and regional level. (8) Cities in the globalscape are centers of growing importance, especially as nodes in the linking of global finance, trade, cultural production, social change and communications. (9)
This combination of rapid and continued population growth and its aggregation in urban conglomerates has done much to give contemporary globalization its distinctive character. These factors combine in an almost infinite number infinite number
a number so large as to be uncountable. Represented by 8, frequently obtained by 'dividing' by zero. ?of ways to speed up the processes of social and cultural change, especially with respect to the diffusion of technological innovations. One way to characterize globalization is to gauge its reach and density. Reach in this sense reflects distribution of effects over time and space; density refers to the number of factors that make up social life than can be directly linked to the various identifiable processes of globalization. Collectively, these are sometimes referred to as the "circuits" of globalization, utilizing this metaphor to suggest the kinds of exchanges and traffic taking place, their relative volume and importantly, the speed at which they take place. Harvey emphasizes that the speed of change itself is one of the factors that makes contemporary globalization distinct from its historical predecessors. (10)
Wealth Creation and Distribution
Globalization over the past five decades has been responsible for the enormous growth of overall wealth. Historians suggest that in relative terms, other historical periods may have been responsible for greater increments in the amount of wealth relative to existing social levels, but the amount of aggregate wealth existing in the world having been produced unparalleled. The distribution of wealth and income, however, has become increasingly biased, in part the result of most global population growth having occurred in the poorer regions of the world. Overall, throughout the world the distribution of income within and between countries has become more uneven: there are more rich people in the world and there are more poor people in the world. It is estimated that the richest 1% of the world has more wealth than the bottom 57%. (11) The richer countries of the world are farther away in income terms from the poorer countries than they were thirty years ago. Within most of the industrial and rapidly industrial countries, the social policies developed by neoliberal ne?o?lib?er?al?ism??
n.
A political movement beginning in the 1960s that blends traditional liberal concerns for social justice with an emphasis on economic growth.
ne ?political regimes have led to a concentration of wealth in a smaller portion of the population--this is true in Europe, North America North America,?third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. , South America South America,?fourth largest continent (1991 est. pop. 299,150,000), c.6,880,000 sq mi (17,819,000 sq km), the southern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. , Asia and Australasia. Often, these distributions are geographically oriented, as in the case of China where the beneficiaries of the booming industries of the coastal crescent, marked by its expanding cities that have drawn millions upon millions of migrants, stand in stark contrast to the lands and peoples of the western regions, who are commonly referred to in both government policy and popular texts as "the left behind." However, the trend is world-wide: an analysis of global cities documents this pattern of increasing inequality in virtually every case of a rapidly growing global conurbation. (12)
This relationship between globalization and increasing income inequality is not itself uncontested. In the United States United States,?officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000),Timberland Boots, 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. ?for example, the perception of increasing income inequality has become part of the dispute over the relative status of the middle class and whether it is declining in relation to overall wealth and income distribution. Neoliberal commentators will point out that the amount of wealth possessed by the middle-class has grown consistently. Those disputing this view argue that measured in terms of historical (and widely accepted) measures of income inequality such as the Gini Index, inequality in the United States declined in the post-war years through those of the Carter Administration Noun 1. Carter administration - the executive under President Carter
executive - persons who administer the law ?and then have been progressively on the rise. Data from the Congressional Budget Office The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is responsible for economic forecasting and fiscal policy analysis, scorekeeeping, cost projections, and an Annual Report on the Federal Budget. The office also underdakes special budget-related studies at the request of Congress. ?are often cited to demonstrate the progressively unequal shares of economic growth in the decades of robust globalization. Data compiled by the World Bank to illustrate the extent of world poverty tend to reflect a similar story of growing world wealth capacity in the face of persistent distribution issues.
As this is being written the world is experiencing the most profound recession of the modern globalization era. The crisis emphasizes the complexities of interdependence on a global scale, illustrating that the dynamics of the American housing market can come to be represented in financial instruments that are traded throughout the world. As they evolved from representing "poor banking judgments" to "toxic assets," they have effected the entire global financial system, which in turn has triggered economic downturns throughout the world. It needs to be emphasized in this regard that as the world quickly "gives up" some of the vast amounts of wealth that it accrued over the past several decades, the human costs of this set of events will be distributed in both relative and absolute ways--those who have already found themselves disadvantaged by the structural inequalities of globalization will experience even greater difficulties in managing the necessities of daily life. Those who were significant beneficiaries of the vast wealth explosion with have suffered enormous and traumatic relative declines in their wealth and income status.
Transformation of Global Media
Changes taking place within the overall structure of global media illustrate a pattern of rapid and extensive distribution of capacity and content and relative consolidation and integration of media industries. The older media companies based in print or electronic forms have shown a dramatic propensity to aggregate into larger firms, in part a response of some of the most powerful national firms becoming transnational firms to dominate the global media space. It is widely accepted that global media are dominated by the largest firms, as illustrated in Table 1. This pattern of domination by the largest firms is reproduced at a national level in most countries with well-developed media. This leads to the notion of two levels of media "domination" that of the "A" list--the top six or eight global firms that operate in most of the countries in the world--and the "B" list--those not in the big eight that dominate national media markets.
Global domination Global Domination may refer to World domination Global Domination (computer game) ?by the survivors of the competition among traditional media has been increasingly challenged by the economic power and reach of media conglomerates whose core businesses lie either in newer technologies, such as the largest of the cable companies and direct provision of content (e.g. DIRECTV), or have risen out of the internet. Table 2 ranks companies based on gross advertising revenue and market capitalization Market Capitalization
A measure of a public company's size. Market capitalization is the total dollar value of all outstanding shares. It's calculated by multiplying the number of shares times the current market price. This term is often referred to as market cap. . As can been easily seen, changing the criteria of relative domination brings a new set of players to the list. I wish to emphasize three things about the media as they have developed globally into these configurations. One is the historical argument made by McChesney and others that links the very size of the largest media forms to their capacity to dominate. Such domination takes many forms from the ability of the most wealthy to aggregate their wealth across media platforms, as has now become the case with the integration of media in such firms linking print, film and digital publication, advertising, and distribution throughout the world. Critics link this capacity to an ability to set agendas, to determine what is being said and seen by whom, and to the ability of the largest firms to assure their access to the highest levels of decision making throughout the world. This is an argument about power--political, economic, social and cultural power--and its concentration in the hands of the few. The clear implication is that the few rarely employ such power for ends that stray far from their own. It is also an argument about convention--the largest media have the ability to establish media conventions throughout the globe by their almost limitless capacity to generate images and to iterate it?er?ate??
tr.v. it?er?at?ed, it?er?at?ing, it?er?ates
To say or perform again; repeat. See Synonyms at repeat.
[Latin iter ?them through any number of texts and contexts. For McChesney and Schiller one of the critical social losses to their capacity is the fact and value of difference--the ability of other points of view to gain attention and to establish themselves as sites of legitimate interest and concern--power seeks conformity with the dominant norms and folkways folkways,?term coined by William Graham Sumner in his treatise Folkways (1906) to denote those group habits that are common to a society or culture and are usually called customs. ?of that power. (13)
From another perspective, and the second point to make, the specter of global media domination and its constrictive constrictive
restricting movement or dilatation of an organ. ?effects is lessened by the explosive rise of "face to face" media, represented by You Tube, My space and their many variants, which give relatively cost-less access to anyone. This capacity has demonstrated in any number of instances to be capable of generating an "immediate coherence" around a topical issue or story, a capacity that is enhanced by the equally burgeoning blogosphere The total universe of blogs. See blog. . (14) Coupled with the unlimited power of Search, it is argued, these new media generate "new realities" as rapidly as the powerful conventional media constrain them. Indeed, it clearly seems the case that when an issue or story emerges in the new media worthy of attention, the conventional media are quick to cover it and make it their own.
The third point is to emphasize how little we still appear to know about the phenomenon of Search and its linkages through new devices to the Internet and various other components of broadband communication. If, as Google and its companionable com?pan?ion?a?ble??
adj.
1. Having the qualities of a good companion; friendly. See Synonyms at social.
2. Suggestive of companionship: reading together in companionable silence. ?competitors claim, it will be the case in the not too distant future that the whole of the world's surviving print experience is available to us (at nominal cost), then surely it is probably the case that the digital information world also promises such availability. Indeed, in his exploration of the long tail Chris Anderson Chris Anderson may mean: Chris Anderson (TED), curator of the TED Conference Chris Anderson (writer), author, journalist, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine ?suggests that digital storage and distribution of media have already begun to significantly affect the economics of storage and distribution for many products--anything that can be digitized-- music being perhaps the most immediately noticeable. (15) The point, as most of us suspect in our exploration of our IPhones, cable boxes, related devices, is that the generational cycles of digital invention and diffusion are tending to briefer and shorter periods with ever-decreasing capability for confident prediction about how we will communicate and make up the world one or two cycles down the road. It does seem clear that what we have over the past several decades confidently termed "media" has changed much and will continue to do so.
Trade and Consumption
Nayan Chandra views trade as the historical measure of globalization.
Trade would transform societies when a trading class would rise to challenge state power. With the expansion of long-distance exchanges, trading diasporas would emerge to connect communities even more strongly. Driven by traders--people who earned a living by exchange of goods and services, or, in the modern parlance, businesspeople--the commercial network would continually expand, thicken, and accelerate to eventually encompass the globe to an ever-tightening web. (16)
This web of increasing inter-connectiveness and interdependence is clearly at the core of the complex of dynamics, interactions and structures that we conventionally term globalization. These are Sassen's "circuits" -a myriad of exchanges, each with a content and a flow, each with a pattern of origination and distribution. Increasingly, what we trade is what we are, and seemingly we trade everything.
In the context we are developing here, and keeping in mind the arguments we will explore in part two of the paper, I want to underscore three elements of trade and consumption: its extent, its distribution, and its relative fragility.
Extent: No one knows quite how to measure the amount of trade that takes place in the contemporary world economy. The trade in goods has historically been defined by convention: it is the sum total of goods that passes borders. To confound con?found??
tr.v. con?found?ed, con?found?ing, con?founds
1. To cause to become confused or perplexed. See Synonyms at puzzle.
2. ?this simple notion we need only observe that Illegal trafficking in goods has always made this notion somewhat quaint. In this era of contemporary globalization the sheer number and amounts of things that are illegally trafficked, whether they be drugs (including counterfeit pharmaceuticals), arms, software and other digital content, or persons renders them uncountable. (17) What we do know is that the magnitudes are significant and make up a sizeable part of global exchanges.
The volume of officially traded goods also staggers staggers?/stag?gers/ (stag?erz) a form of vertigo occurring in decompression sickness.
staggers
incoordination of any kind, including a tendency to fall, and recumbency if harassed. ?the imagination. The World Trade Organization designates trade by the two major categories of goods and services In economics, economic output is divided into physical goods and intangible services. Consumption of goods and services is assumed to produce utility (unless the "good" is a "bad"). It is often used when referring to a Goods and Services Tax. . Table Three indicates both the volume of merchandise and services traded in 2006 ($11,762 Trillion and $2710 Trillion respectively) and the percentage change over the past six years. (By comparison, global GDP GDP?(guanosine diphosphate): see guanine. ?for 2007 is established by the World Bank at $42.799.2 Trillion.) (18)
Distribution: Three facts stand out when examining the distribution of world trade. One, most trade in the world is still intra-regional, rather than interregional in?ter?re?gion?al??
adj.
Of, involving, or connecting two or more regions: interregional migration; interregional banking.?. Despite the enormous advances made in cutting the cost and raising the efficiency of transportation, distance matters. And, second, despite the enormous in-roads that digitalization digitalization?/dig?i?tal?iza?tion/ (dij?i-tal-i-za?shun) the administration of digitalis or one of its glycosides in a dosage schedule designed to produce and then maintain optimal therapeutic concentrations of its cardiotonic ?has made on communication (a critical element of the trade in many services), most global trade is still in merchandise as opposed to services as indicated above. Third, the growth of Asia as a contributor to world trade continues to grow, fueled primarily by the continued spectacular growth of China, particularly as an exporting nation.
Fragility
Despite the enormous volumes of global trade and the extraordinary growth and participation rates demonstrated by new economically developed nations in global trade, as a system it exhibits a fragility that can easily be overlooked. It is useful to remember that inter-dependence has two sides to it. One is made up of the relative synergies that take place within complex systems in the face of growth dynamics--as one component of the system grows, it may do so in ways that produce corresponding growth in other parts of the system as well. This is the "up" side to global trade, the one most emphasized by the WTO See World Trade Organization. ?when it argues that the growth of global trade acts as a "pull" factor for the overall growth of gross domestic products. The other side of inter-dependence is clearly demonstrated when one part of the system contracts--especially if that is an important component, and the contraction is sudden. This happened with the bursting of the "Japanese economic bubble An economic bubble (sometimes referred to as a "speculative bubble", a "market bubble", a "price bubble", a "financial bubble", or a "speculative mania") is ?trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance from intrinsic values?. " in 1988, the effects of which were experienced throughout the world. As I write, a similar dynamic is apparent in the United States where the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the subsequent credit crunch Credit Crunch
An economic condition whereby investment capital is difficult to obtain. Banks and investors become weary of lending funds to corporations thereby driving up the price of debt products for borrowers. ?have led to a weakening of consumer demand and an economy probably already in recession. The United States is the largest single nation importer of goods in the world, increasingly those produced in China. A contraction of the US consumer market leads quickly to a slow-down in orders for Chinese goods, which leads to laying off workers and shutting factories, etc. (19)
These familiar dynamics of inter-dependence have been "speeded" up by the existence of a 24/7 financial equity system, and instant communications. A sudden downturn in US equity markets is quickly experienced in others. One part of the system transmits its signals to another in a time frame and with an effect that is unique to contemporary globalization.
Consumption: In ways suggested by the immediate foregoing, contemporary globalization has its core driving force in its economic component, and this has led to an unprecedented world-wide emphasis on consumption. In a prescient pre?scient??
adj.
1. Of or relating to prescience.
2. Possessing prescience.
[French, from Old French, from Latin praesci ?volume written in 1982 Mary Douglas Dame Mary Douglas, DBE FBA, (March 25 1921 ? 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism.
Her area was social anthropology; she was considered a follower of Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a ?and Baron Isherwood characterize the contemporary world as a "world of goods." They mean by this to underscore the degree to which virtually all elements of social life, certainly in the advanced economic societies, are dominated by the search for and the ability to acquire "goods." (20) It is a commonplace in speaking of the US economy to point out that it is driven by consumption, and then to add almost as an after-point that the relative health of the economy has become dependent on the willingness of consumers to sustain record amounts of personal debt in pursuit of this now-necessary consumption.
Three aspects of consumption are interest. One is the sense in which consumption in the contemporary global experience has come to constitute a "good" as either a material object or as a service. The second is that most world trade--the primary vehicle by which global interdependence and connectedness has been achieved--is primarily organized around consumption, as opposed to manufacture. The world economy increasingly depends on how much people consume--demand has come to be of relatively greater importance than supply. And, three, because of this aspect and importance of consumption, it lies at the core of global interdependence. All of the facts that underlie consumption, but perhaps most specifically the distribution of income and wealth, are critical to the overall health of the global system and what it is motivated and able to trade and consume.
Transformation of Value
In a world of goods, they are what matters. Both the argument in support of further globalization and the critiques lodged against it take this as a primary premise. The proponents of globalization look to a world made continually better by trade, by increases in the amount of global wealth, by the rationalization and liberalization lib?er?al?ize??
v. lib?er?al?ized, lib?er?al?iz?ing, lib?er?al?iz?es
v.tr.
To make liberal or more liberal: "Our standards of private conduct have been greatly liberalized . . . ?of political and economic systems. In the world of this vision, the private sector comes to be privileged over the public sector; incomes should be taxed as minimally as possible so that money can be in the hands of private investors who through processes of savings, consumption and investment will make the kinds of decisions that drive markets, which in turn contribute to the overall health of economies, and from that societies. This is a familiar story, some version of which is present in every debate in parliament, and in some form or another a part of the evening news. In work that we do at the Globalization Research Center, we call this the "globalization as progress" narrative. This is the "story" of globalization that abounds in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and with their relentless message of "you are what you acquire and consume", the tabloids as well.
Those opposed to globalization in one or another way tend to pursue a "globalization as disaster narrative." Here the "story" of globalization is related not as one of continued progress, but as various disasters, real and portending. In some versions of the story local economic viability is overcome by the massive forces of external economic development. In this story usually something precious in the provision of a local good or service is foregone fore?gone
v.
Past participle of forego1.
adj.
Having gone before; previous.
Usage Note: The word foregone has recently developed a new meaning as a truncation of the phrase ?to the less humanly hu?man?ly??
adv.
1. In a human way.
2. Within the scope of human means, capabilities, or powers: not humanly possible.
3. ?relevant attributes of the global intruder. This, for example, this is a familiar story of loss often related to bemoan be?moan??
tr.v. be?moaned, be?moan?ing, be?moans
1. To express grief over; lament.
2. To express disapproval of or regret for; deplore: ?the incursion in?cur?sion??
n.
1. An aggressive entrance into foreign territory; a raid or invasion.
2. The act of entering another's territory or domain.
3. ?of corporate fast food into local culturally related food patterns. Frequently the "local" is situated directly in the locus of language, custom and culture, which are threatened from the "outside"--a familiar human story of endogeny being challenged by exogeny. (Many of Chandra's tales of ever increasing globalization are set at this interface.) The disaster narrative has many variants and elements, ranging from the loss of local languages (21) to the threats to human planetary viability itself occasioned global warming global warming,?the gradual increase of the temperature of the earth's lower atmosphere as a result of the increase in greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution. ,Air Max 24-7, sea level rise, emerging world food shortages as industrial countries convert food stocks into fuel, and the tensions that arise from steadily increasing patterns of inequality. If economic reductionism reductionism(r??duk??sh?ni??z ?is the primary value of the progress narrative, other values such as those associated with notions of community and non-economic social values are featured in the disaster narrative.
My point is that globalization has capitalized (literally) on a value shift that reorients other historically relevant values on which society has traditionally been based, values that assign status and place within communities, guide behavior and purport to give meaning to life. The economic imperatives of globalization either act to replace such values with those of the marketplace or to diminish the relative status that non-economic values--the meaning assigned to goods--have within a nation or community's social cosmology. (22) I return to this point below.
Global Professional Sport and the Olympics
Let me draw out these six globalization themes (or dynamics) with direct reference to global professional and Olympic sport. In doing so, I emphasize that globalization in virtually every aspect displays its role as an element in a complex interdependent system whose components are all interlinked. For ease of analysis and discussion it is possible to isolate and separate these elements. In practice the interrelations are omnipresent--one part is always affecting another.
The collapse of time and space creates the immediacy that enables global sport. The instantaneous movement of images across time and space makes possible the sense of team and athlete identification on which sport marketing depends. Its vehicle is global media, which provide the enormous sums that fuel the leagues, teams and athletes and capture the attention of billions throughout the world. The current and rapidly growing linkage of sport to the emergent media of hand-held devices emphasizes this immediacy even further by creating a world in which the dedicated fan is offered significant options in the way events are portrayed and across various sporting platforms. Commercially, providers of such media array consumption options across a wide range of "products" to differentiate markets and seek to brand this differentiation itself as a way of interacting with sports.
The immediacy of sport allows for the creation of global circuits involving the exchange (trade) of symbols, images and goods. These exchanges have a local impact, in that they involve real events, happening in real time in front of real people. Simultaneously, however, they produce a value capable of being multiplied hundreds and thousands of times over through the transmission of the event image and all the spin-offs that are produced in both traditional and emergent media. As an overall phenomenon the circulation of such images generate derivative value-eddies throughout the globe, collected and concentrated in the vast centers of a now urbanized world.
Over the past three decades, global sport has followed the developmental course of the more inclusive global economy. In this respect there is little that is unique to global sport, but much that is representative of other global structures. It is also useful to note that the progressive collapse of time and space of globalization was previewed in the development of national economies over a century earlier as new technologies--railroads, the telephone, electricity, internal combustion vehicles, airplanes and powered ships brought people closer together in time and space. In this earlier period these innovations in national economies and societies led to increasing integration of both production and consumption, and in time new national identities and behaviors. (23)
Modern industrial society created a middle class and with it the invention of "leisure"--time taken away from work to enjoy the increasing pleasures of a rapidly changing world. Those pleasures included the rapid expansion of arts and letters--and sport. Increased wealth allowed the commodification Commodification (or commoditization) is the transformation of what is normally a non-commodity into a commodity, or, in other words, to assign value. As the word commodity has distinct meanings in business and in Marxist theory, commodification ?of sport organized first into local and then regional teams and leagues. The Olympics themselves appear on the world scene in 1896 in the midst Adv. 1. in the midst - the middle or central part or point; "in the midst of the forest"; "could he walk out in the midst of his piece?"
midmost ?of what Daniel Boorstin would call the most "inventive" decades of world history, meaning the period from roughly 1875 to the outbreak of the first world war. (24) In the 20th century, sport developed across national scales. With the advent of contemporary globalization and the new accelerations of communication and transport, sport has become increasingly organized as a hierarchy of professionalized and global endeavors.
Sport's Dependence on Urbanization
Rapid and substantial urbanization have historically been important for the growth of professional sport. The concentration of wealth associated with urbanization combines with the human density required to provide acceptable economic return to teams and the complexity of social interactions required to produce and reproduce a viable fan base, especially one capable of sustaining regularly rising prices. Typically, significant and rapid urban growth occurred as people moved from rural to urban employment in manufacturing and service. This is precisely the phenomenon currently taking place in the developing world. For example, the rural to urban migration in China during the 1990s is held to be the largest migration in human history. In the experience of the older industrial nations, urban concentrations became aggregates for capital and finance, knowledge entities such as schools and universities, communication and media. The actions taken by China to produce the sites and arrangements for the 2008 Olympics own virtually everything to the vast collection of wealth and services capable of being aggregated in a contemporary global city, which Beijing has rapidly become.
Transportation and vast service industries such as those for healthcare, recreation, food provision, etc., are essential elements of high urbanization and historically developed quickly and with great energy. In their mature form the highly developed economies of the world are remarkably similar in economic structure: capital is concentrated in a relatively small wealth holding group, with most sectors of the economy dominated by a small number of very large, and powerful corporations, which in turn express their influence throughout society. Governmental and economic power are closely aligned. Historically, in structural terms as these economies moved toward maturity, they were characterized by high differentiation (their economies produce a large variety of products and services) and concentration (virtually all sectors function in a quasi-oligopolistic manner.)
These characteristics apply to contemporary professional sport throughout the world. The franchises of the top leagues are owned by individuals who have become significantly wealthy in industries directly tied to the vast and rapid expansion of global wealth, particularly those having made their fortunes in real estate in the global cities, in media, telecommunications or transportation, and the dot.com boom. High differentiation has come through the varieties of merchandizing of sport, its secondary distribution (e.g. 24/7 television, radio and Ipod dissemination), and the development of tertiary leagues and new, derived sports (e.g. arena football.) Its essential structures are oligopolistic. The number of franchises is strictly limited. New ownership requires the approval of existing owners. Many leagues have contracts that limit the amount that can be paid to players. And in the contemporary era, revenues are frequently shared among owners to "equal out" market gains, ensuring that the overall "product" of the competition remains suitable for its intended markets.
Wealth and Sport have become handmaidens, in large measure because of the critical role played by the media as the primary creator of wealth (a point I will discuss further shortly.) The highly inter-related bundle of "things" that make up modern sport combine to privilege wealth--as in other dimensions Other Dimensions is a collection of stories by author Clark Ashton Smith. It was released in 1970 and was the author's sixth collection of stories published by Arkham House. It was released in an edition of 3,144 copies. ?of globalized business this is an area in which the rich get richer.
As businesses, professional leagues and franchises behave like other transnational firms, pursing a logic of development firmly embedded in the "manufacture" of a product and a brand that can produce significant returns on investment by vastly expanding the pool of consumers who recognize and identify with the brand and are willing to consume it in some commodified form. The purchase of the New York Yankees Editing of this page by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled due to vandalism. ?in 1978 by George Steinbrenner is a useful case in point. In 1978, he paid $10 million for the team. The team's estimated value in 2006 was $1.026 billion. (25) Much of the value of the Yankee franchise arises out of the combination of location in America's most famous city, a "storied" history, distinctive and established brand graphics, and ownership of dedicated radio and television networks in the nation's most dense media market. This increase in corporate "unit value" compares favorably with the most successful of American Transnational Corporations, such as General Electric that grew in almost identical proportions during the same period under the leadership of Jack Welch For the illustrator named Jack Welch, see Jack Welch (illustrator)
John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr. (born on November 19 1935 (1935--) (age?73)?. (Gross GE sales in 2007 were $163 billion.)
The oligopoly oligopoly:?see monopoly. oligopoly
Market situation in which producers are so few that the actions of each of them have an impact on price and on competitors. Each producer must consider the effect of a price change on the others. ?nature of most professional leagues tends to assure that when the activity is subsidized by long-term media contracts, franchises can prosper even when they are poorly run or are only marginally competitive. Joe Nocera, for example, points to the Los Angeles Los Angeles?(l?s ?n`j?l?s, l?s, ?n`j?l?z'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. ?Clippers as a spectacular case in point. Perennially hapless under owner Donald Sterling Donald T. Sterling is an American real estate mogul, attorney, and the current owner of the National Basketball Association's Los Angeles Clippers. Sterling acquired the Clippers in 1981 for $12.5 million, and today the team is valued at more than $240 million by Forbes magazine. , the value of the franchise, which he purchased in 1981 for $13.5 million is now estimated at between $300-400 million, and he refuses to sell, knowing that all he needs to do is not sell for the property and its value will continue to increase along with the NBA as it continues to expand into a global enterprise. (26) Salary caps and revenue assure the financial fortunes of professional sport in an odd reversal of the kinds of dynamics that exist throughout the global economy as a whole. In perspective the inequalities of professional sport are those between individuals who are allowed to enter the enterprise and those who are restricted. Anomalies such as the Green Bay Packers, a community owned team, tend increasingly to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
American college sports, especially football and basketball, can be viewed as quasi-professional sports. Their structure has been much affected in both football and basketball by the structure of season ending events such as the BCS (1) (The British Computer Society, Swindon, Wiltshire, England, www.bcs.org) The chartered body for information technology professionals in the U.K., founded in 1957. ?games and March Madness March Madness may refer to: NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship NCAA March Madness series, an EA Sports basketball video game series Mega March Madness, pay-per-view package , both of which exist in the bosom bos?om
n.
1. The chest of a human.
2. A woman's breast or breasts. ?of extremely lucrative media contracts. (27) The "take away" from such activities has grown increasingly large for the winning teams and created a growing barrier to other teams that seek to break into the routine domination by the top schools. For the so-called non-elite schools, either those in weaker classifications or with less invested programs, the cost of competing with the elite schools is constantly growing, a convenient metric for which is the annual salary of the head coach in both sports, sums that often dwarf that of the ostensible Apparent; visible; exhibited.
Ostensible authority is power that a principal, either by design or through the absence of ordinary care, permits others to believe his or her agent possesses. ?professional leaders of the campus. When universities must move outside their own dedicated resources for financial assistance to better and sustain such programs, they focus on donations from alumni. Many schools have achieved reputations based not only on the storied largess lar?gess?also lar?gesse ?
n.
1.
a. Liberality in bestowing gifts, especially in a lofty or condescending manner.
b. Money or gifts bestowed.
2. Generosity of spirit or attitude. ?of their athletic department oriented donors, but for the difficulties that arise in seeking to regulate their relationships to the departments in question.
Global Media
The linkage, or alignment, between the broader pattern of global development and that of the Olympic Games, can be similarly told for all of the major global sports. The Olympics, having started as an international event, was well poised for its commodified elevation into authentic globalism glob?al?ism??
n.
A national geopolitical policy in which the entire world is regarded as the appropriate sphere for a state's influence.
glob ?than were many national sporting leagues. To repeat points made above: the core of these developments has been the relentless commodification of the current global system, the vast populations gathered in urban centers, their linkage by modern transportation and communication, and above all the package of media and advertising essential for the creation of demand for the goods that produce the revenues. All of these been coupled to vast reservoirs of disposable income disposable income
Portion of an individual's income over which the recipient has complete discretion. To assess disposable income, it is necessary to determine total income, including not only wages and salaries, interest and dividend payments, and business profits, but also ?(often subsidized by private corporations) that can support the pricing structures of these events. (28)
The media, having themselves exploded in size and diversity over the same period, experience a rapacious appetite for content--software for the hardware as it were. Sport for this purpose is no more but no less distinctive than reality survival shows or American Idol. Each meets the demand for an arranged progression from the many to the few, from contenders to survivors, in an open cycle of repetition that favors the continual re-supply of heroes and stars, who in the current consumption cycle (the analogy to a production cycle) recreate novelty out of the familiar, with each portion of the cycle producing a targeted marketing niche.
This web of consumption and commodification provides a constant tension between the authentic and the artificial, between the familiar and the novel, between the revered and the fresh appeal (often gender based) of the (frequently brash) new. At one end of the television/marketing/commodification nexus of novelty lie the made-for-television (read: filler) "sports" designed to match broadcast minutes with advertising dollars. At the other end lie the "new" sports for which leagues, festivals and games are developed within a professionalized hierarchy of privileged market value. Some of these will "feed" the mega events at the top of the sports food chain, for example joining the Olympics as new events. Others will find a permanent niche in a modestly traffic ked area of professionalized repetition (such as the ESPN ESPN Entertainment and Sports Programming Network ?Extreme Sports extreme sports
Sports events characterized by high speed or high risk. Such sports include aggressive inline skating, wakeboarding, street luge, skateboarding, and freestyle bicycle events (wherein tricks such as back flips are performed on a bicycle). ?Games.) The link between the media and a given sport is irreducibly the "advertising demographic" that it is able to attract and capture. The addition of newer sports to the Olympic Games, particularly the Winter Festival, owes much to this equation.
The mega event becomes an end in itself, having a status not unlike that Daniel Boorstin attributed to being a celebrity--being known for being known. (29) Association with the event, statused in part because of the enormous sums spent on it, (e.g. the $2 million a minute Super Bowl commercial) or by the vast sums paid by official sponsors of the event. Outside this circle of pay-to-play participants is an ever-expanding ring of status distributed by any association with the event, ranging from actual attendance (especially in privileged seating), to corporate sponsorship events, to "seeing" a participating athlete, to eventually having watched the event on television. This hyper-value of the mega event underscores the importance of not "de-valuing" its currency through over-exposure, a lesson well-understood by Olympic and World Cup Organizers. (30)
The great unknown in this relationship is how "big" sport will fare in the rapidly evolving world of digital personalized media. As the recent screen-writer's strike in the United States illustrated, no one is quite certain how the radical diffusion of media will affect overall income--or, more precisely, how the new media may disrupt the existing business model of large-scale sport. We currently have only the music business and the movies as models of how hand-held devices and the diffusion mechanisms of face to face media impact the business model. In both industries unlicensed reproduction has devastated former income flows. Newer models, such as Itunes which "un-bundle" music have yet to prove sustainable or equal the former volumes of the bundling processes of conventional movies, DVD's and CD's. IPOD streaming of sports, e.g. within the ESPN world, would seem to be growing in popularity, but again, the overall business model has yet to be proved. In the long run, professional and Olympic sport at all levels will need to be capable of resisting the deterioration of their branded advertising base to continue to reap the enormous income that has come from the model of centralized broadcasting. (31)
Trade and Commodification
The globalization of professional sport has been accomplished primarily by its location in world trade circuits and within the dominant value mix of commodification. As such professional sport provides ample evidence for Thomas Friedman's notion of a flat world of receding borders. (32) This is evident in the cross border flow of athletes, by the cross country ownership of sport franchises, by the location of professional games in countries outside their league schedules, (33) and by the explicit ideology in many cases (certainly those of the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball "MLB" and "Major Leagues" redirect here. For other uses, see MLB (disambiguation) and Major Leagues (disambiguation).
Major League Baseball (MLB) is the highest level of play in North American professional baseball. , the National Football League and the National Hockey League, the English Premiere League, etc.) of making these sports global in their appeal, execution and future location. (34)
Viewing it from the perspective of trade and consumption indicators, the precise size and dollar value of global sport are difficult to determine and thus their value as trade is also indeterminate. Some indicators, however, suggest the enormity of its activities. One study examining four major components of sport consumables--footware, equipment, apparel and bikes, estimated in 2006 that these products accounted for $256 billion of activity, with a growth trend of 4%. In fractions this amounted to: footware, $49 billion at 3%; equipment $67 billion at 4%; apparel, $113 Billion at 6%; and bikes, $27 billion at a stable 1%. A significant majority of these "sport outputs" (as it were) are manufactured, of course, in China. (35)
The English Premiere League, formed in 1992 out of the first division by clubs intent on maximizing their financial potential, is arguably ar?gu?a?ble??
adj.
1. Open to argument: an arguable question, still unresolved.
2. That can be argued plausibly; defensible in argument: three arguable points of law. ?the richest and most profitable sport league in the world. Its current television contract through 2010, cost broadcasters 1.7 billion [pounds sterling], and an additional 625 million [pounds sterling] for overseas rights, the largest overseas deal in the history of sport. (36) The Deloitte Football Money League The Deloitte Football Money League is a ranking of football (soccer) clubs by income. It is produced annually by the accountancy firm Deloitte. Rankings for the 2006/07 season
The rankings are not yet complete but the first three are evident. ?Table, published annually by the accountancy firm Deloitte and Touche, gives the revenue of the top 20 football teams in the 2005-6 season as 3.3 billion [euro], with Real Madrid, followed by Barcelona topping the chart. Real Madrid indicated revenues of 292 million [euro]. At the time of the report, prospects were for continued growth, fueled largely by ever-increasing television revenues, underscoring the critical role of media in creating and sustaining global sport.
Developments in the broadcast market have underpinned many of the changes in the Money League, and these give some pointers to the composition of future Football Money Leagues. Alan Switzer commented: 'Revenue from the new French broadcasting deal has seen Olympique Lyonnais move up to their highest Money League position of 11th, while Real Madrid and Barcelona's announcement of new deals should see them challenge at the top of the table in coming years. The Premier League's recently concluded broadcasting deals may see English teams contribute half of the top 20 clubs in 2007/08. (37)
Compare these data with those for the four largest US sport leagues. For the first time in many years major league baseball has revenues approximating those of the National Football League at just over $ 6 billion annually. Baseball has doubled its revenues since the 2000 season, and has a growth rate twice that of football. (38) 2007 revenues for the NBA amounted to $3.6 billion, and for the National Hockey League to $2.4 billion. (39) The major sources of income for professional sports The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.
Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page. ?are television, gate receipts, corporate sponsorship, naming rights Naming rights are the right to name a piece of property, either tangible property or an event, usually granted in exchange for financial considerations. Institutions like schools, places of worship and hospitals have a tradition of granting donors the right to name facilities in ?and branded merchandise, and premium seating. There are over 800 professional teams in the US. Franchise value tends to vary from 2.5-6 times total annual revenues.
Professional sport in Africa demonstrates a similar pattern, albeit on a smaller scale, but extraordinary nevertheless for the size and nature of the economies supporting it. The African National Cup 2008, for example, is expected to draw a global television audience of 2 billion people. Corporate support and television revenues will provide over $100 million dollars of support for the games. As Table 4 indicates, even Latin America Latin America,?the Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, and French-speaking countries (except Canada) of North America, South America, Central America, and the West Indies. ?boasts soccer leagues with surprising levels of financial support, compared to the major European professional leagues.
Virtually all professional sports have culmination events at the conclusion of their league seasons. All take a play-off format, the better to highlight drama, extend the length of the season, and promote additional revenues from these "second" seasons. Increasingly, mega events such as the World Cup serve the purpose of focusing global attention on the particular sport. (40)
These dynamics directly parallel those of the Olympic Games, especially since the ascendance as?cen?dance?also as?cen?dence ?
n.
Ascendancy.
Noun 1. ascendance - the state that exists when one person or group has power over another; "her apparent dominance of her husband was really her attempt to make him pay ?of Mr. Samaranch to the head of the IOC IOC
abbr.
International Olympic Committee
IOC?n abbr (= International Olympic Committee) ? COI m
IOC?n abbr (= ?in 1980. The story of the commodification and commercialization of the Games is wonderfully told by Barney, Wenn and Martyn, pivoting around the Los Angeles Games of 1984, which established the template for subsequent private sector support of the Games and their enormous increase in commodification. (41) In this sense, the "story" of the Games is a special case of the globalization of sport, which in turn is a special case of global-ist expansion in general.
Transformation of Value and the Narratives of Sport
The transition of professional sport from national to global commodities illustrates a common "problem" with "reading" and interpreting glob
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