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Olympic Values, Beijing’s Olympic Games, and the Universal Market
Abstract
Whether it is a comparative cultural, critical investigative, anthropologically rooted, or media-oriented approach to understanding the Olympic phenomenon, it is notable that the place of the sponsor in the cultural and social construction of the Games is less subject to scrutiny than are other aspects of the event, such as the media coverage, the nationalist elements, and selected ceremonial dimensions. The relationships within the purported Olympic Family-in particular, the increasing profile and influence of corporate partners of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)-have received less extensive or sustained critical analysis. In a trilogy of studies, Andrew Jennings has pursued a relentless course of investigative journalism (Symson and Jennings 1992; Jennings and Sambrook 2000; Jennings 1996). His works have revealed the underlying political and economic interests that have driven the Games in the period since the former Francoist Juan Antonio Samaranch's succession to the IOC presidency in 1980, and the success of the 1984 Los Angeles Games that rewrote the rules for the staging of the international sporting event. If the modern Olympics was in its early years (1896-1928) based upon fragile alliances of political, cultural, and economic interests, developing as a more explicitly political phenomenon from 1932 to 1980, Los Angeles 1984 introduced a new economic order that underpinned the initial survival of the Games-on the with- drawal of Teheran, Los Angeles was the only candidate to stage the event-and its consequent expansion and escalation (Tomlinson 2005a, 50-56; Tomlinson 2005b). Writing on the eve of the 1984 event, Richard Gruneau argued that for some time sporting practice had been incorporated into an expanding international capitalist marketplace, but that Los Angeles' capacity to rewrite the rules of the host city's game produced a "unique" and "one of the most publicly visible business deals in the history of corporate capitalism" (Gruneau 1984, 11). Anything was now up for sponsorship, from the AT&T-sponsored torch relay to the only two newly constructed sites, the McDonald's Olympic pool and the Southland Corporation velodrome (Tomlinson 2006a, 167); after the event, the organizing committee reported a surplus of more than US$222 million. The claimed and perceived success of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 established the framework for the political economy of future Games, based upon escalating media rights and forms of corporate sponsorship secured by both the IOC and the local organizing committees of the host city: "From that point on, the Games were guaranteed a future as one of the most high-profile global commodities" (Tomlinson 2005a, 56). A study focusing upon the Beijing event has foregrounded this political economy, arguing that "there is an extraordinary convergence, or elective affinity, between modern Olympism and the ideals and tendencies of modern market capitalism" (Close et al. 2007, 1-2, 117). The Beijing Olympiad and Olympics are seen, in this light, as a catalyst "in the re-alignment process of the global political economy" (Close et al. 2007, 2, 117), as well as a focus for some potential internal reform, in relation to human rights. The term elective affinity derives from the work of the German sociologist Max Weber, whose studies were, to some degree, framed as a methodological and epistemological debate with what he saw as a form of economic determinism in the work of Karl Marx. An elective afnity could be identified, Weber proposed, between, say, a set of religious beliefs and a particular social group or system (Weber 1948, 62-63), and he referred-in contemporaneous exchanges concerning his study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1965)-to "the unique and long-established elective affinity of Calvinism to capitalism" (Weber 2001, 107). The notion of elective affinity refers, therefore, to a correspondence between sources of meaning that may not initially seem to be connected: "the contents of one system of meaning engender a tendency for adherents to build and pursue the other system of meaning" (Scott and Marshall 2005, 182). Adapted to the Olympic context the argument goes that the Olympic Ideals or Movement converge with the spirit of contemporary market capitalism. The implication here is that neither one determines the other, but that the values of the two meaning-systems are conducive to a kind of reciprocal development. Weber concluded The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on a cautionary note, claiming that it was not his aim to "substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and history" (Weber 1965, 183). "Historical truth," he implied, does not lie in the application of such theoretical extremes. Close et al. offer the synonyms for elective affinity of mutual attraction and irresistible mutual desire (2007, 118). When referring to Beijing as a catalyst they refer to how the city/event and the period (the Olympiad) leading up to the event will contribute to re-alignments of both the overall global political economy (2) and the "political economy arena of Chinese society" (117). They highlight ve developments: deepening institutionalization, on a global scale, of Olympism; a global spread of the doctrine of individualism, in Western terms; global scales of advance in liberal democracy and market capitalism; a consolidation of global society within the continuing progress of globalization; and China's emergence as a superpower and player in the political economy, in both regional and global terms. These developments are said to share "a formidable array of elective affinities" (2). All five developments are presented with the adjectival label "global," which seems to be the core feature of the meaning-systems that are claimed as converging in the period of the Beijing Olympiad and Games. This is a bold claim: That one sporting mega-event crystallizes political, economic, cultural, and social changes at all conceivable levels of social organization. The boldness of the conception may blur the specifies of the analysis, and this question will be returned to in the concluding section of this chapter. Close et al., though, rightly recognize the corporate partners as at the heart of what the authors call the "Olympic social compact." The Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) is cited as embracing, in its own sponsorship program, the "IOC's commitment to a market-oriented, private-sector partnership approach to financing the Olympics . . ." (99): with the way in which the IOC seems to have been convinced by the Chinese delegation's presentation and promises at the IOC's session in Moscow on 13 July 2001. (Close et al. 2007, 99).
... 2;Qiu, 2010). For example, Samsung has been part of The Olympic Partner Programme since 1998, which ranks as one of the most successful and transformational corporate sponsorship programmes in the history of sport marketing (Tomlinson, 2008). The promotion of Samsung's involvement with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) articulates the centrality of "smart" mobile technologies to the experience of the Games: ...
Media sport researchers are frequently neglecting to analyse the rise, effects, and meanings of mobile media and communications. This situation is partly explained by the fact mobile media encompass practices, technologies, and markets that are grounded historically in the telecommunications and information technology industries, which sit apart from the broadcast (radio and television) and print (newspapers and magazines) media that dominated the transmission, circulation, and representation of professional sport for over a century. It is now time to build a research agenda dedicated to the study of mobile media and communications, especially given the proliferation of mobile digital computing and mobile Internet. Three reasons are presented in support of this argument. First, mobile media and telecommunications introduce stories into the history of media sport that need to be recognised if its contemporary features are to be properly contextualised and understood. Second, these stories are linked to an expanded range of meanings, technologies, and infrastructures captured by the term media that must now be accounted for. Third, mobile media reveal accelerating forms of hyper-commodification that are locking media sport into privately controlled market frameworks. A mobile research agenda also offers the potential for media sport scholarship to make a sustained contribution to the study of mediatisation processes, as well as mobile media and communications studies.
... Each of the 12 global sponsors, all of them large multinationals, paid an average of USD 72 million apiece for the exclusive right of association with the Torino 2006 and Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Opening up new markets is also one of the unspoken rationales that are driving the choice of hosts of the Olympic Games in the geopolitics of expanding markets (Tomlinson, 2008). And indeed, messages underscoring the economic attractiveness and openness of host countries for business partners and investors are consistently among the strongest in international communication and signaling (Preuss and Alfs, 2011). ...
... Rule 49 of the Olympic Charter is the regulatory expression of this programme: 'The IOC takes all necessary steps in order to ensure the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic Games' (IOC, 2007: 96;emphasis added). Beginning with the Los Angeles Olympiad of 1984 (which subsequently helped to produce the highly lucrative sponsorship programme, The Olympic Programme [TOP], two years later), a compact between multinational capital, broadcast media and international sport has facilitated the extraordinary growth and wealth of the Olympic Movement (Guttmann, 2002;Payne, 2006;Tomlinson, 2008). The success of the Games as a media platform and brand that consistently attracts massive global television audiences is the fulcrum upon which this relationship pivots. ...
The Beijing Olympics was the largest sports mega-event in history and represents an opportunity to assess the dynamics of the media sport cultural complex in a post-broadcast age. This article argues that the internet and web are transforming and intensifying the digital mediatization of Olympic sport in terms of the amount and types of content available across multiple platforms. From the perspective of Olympic and sports officials, these developments possess a Janus-faced character, simultaneously offering additional avenues to promote the Olympic brand and experience globally and challenging their capacity to maintain control over Olympic related media in online environments. This situation is the result of long-established broadcast media strategies colliding with the networking capacity of Web 2.0 and the operation and popularity of ‘social software’ such as blogs and Facebook. The evidence presented is drawn from Olympic policy documents, media reports and interviews with sports officials and athletes.
... In his analyses of the representational strategies of London bidding media, Tomlinson (2008) notes the gap between the idealist rhetoric and the realities of olympic finances, economics, and political economy. As with any other megaevent, London's 2012 bid reveals the interdependence of sponsors -or more accurately in olympic parlance, 'partners' -and the state. ...
This paper excavates the entanglement of British nationalist identity politics with sport, terrorism, place re-imagining, mega-event bidding, and corporate neoliberalism. We focus on London's 2012 olympic bidding and the coalescence of corporate, state, civic, and sporting interests surrounding the national (re)imaginings that characterised the bid. We open with a critical reading of the bid narratives explicating how selective assertions of Britishness were envisioned through the motifs of harmonious multicultural unity, ‘youth’, and passion for sport. We focus on how these narratives offered up ‘idealised’ multicultural citizens and harmonious diversity as a reactionary form of nationalist ‘pride politics’ (Fortier 2005). We subsequently juxtapose these narratives with a critical reading of English press and political discourse in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings – the day after London was awarded the olympic games. This juxtaposition reveals the tensions and ambiguities between assertions of inclusive civic nationalism – that apparently transcends ethnic difference – and the geo-politics of the ‘war on terror’ within Britain's post-imperial self imaginings. Specifically, we tease out the place – and ambiguities – of the 2012 olympics within these imaginings reading the London games as an exemplar of a soft-core ideological spectacle informing selective nationalist narratives within the context of unfolding neoliberal politics.
Мақола Олимпия Хартияси қоидаларини таҳлил қилиш асосида Халқаро Олимпия қўмитасининг халқаро ҳуқуқдаги мақомини ўрганишга бағишланган бўлиб, унда Халқаро Олимпия қўмитасининг Швейцария қонунчилиги бўйича нодавлат ташкилот сифатидаги расмий мақоми, шунингдек халқаро ҳуқуқ субъекти сифатида тан олишга асос бўлувчи халқаро амалиёт кўриб чиқилган.
The Olympic Games are the highest-profile multidiscipline sport events in human history. Their contemporary manifestation as a global media event has attracted the largest viewing figures for any sporting event; the London 2012 Olympic Games reportedly generated 3.6 billion viewers worldwide, with Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympics coming a close second with 3.5 billion viewers. Only the FIFA Men’s World Cup has rivaled these figures. Blending historical data with contemporary evidence, this chapter (1) outlines the key issues underlying the crises and challenges faced by the IOC and the Olympics in a changing, volatile, and globalizing world since the organization’s inception in 1894; (2) evaluates and critiques theoretical and interpretive models that have been used to account for the survival of the Olympic phenomenon and its claimed ideals; and (3) examines contemporary debates concerning citizenship, participation, and the future of the Games as their existence has become increasingly questioned in the face of the realities of their overexpansion, excessive costs, vulnerability to corruption, and ethical myopia—and never more so than throughout the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021.
The Olympics is one of the world’s biggest marketing platforms and, as such, presents the private sector with a vast range of advertising opportunities. One new area of opportunity is school-based Olympic education. While previous studies have revealed some of the marketing strategies used by Olympic sponsors in Olympic education, there is still a lack of understanding about how advertising tactics are employed by private sector players in Chinese Olympic education. In this article, we draw on a critical ethnographic research project conducted within two primary schools in Beijing to examine how and why private sector actors extend ‘market logic’ into schools through Olympic education programmes in 2022. We use the Foucauldian-inspired concept of technologies of consumption [Miller & Rose. (1997). Mobilizing the consumer: Assembling the subject of consumption. Theory, Culture and Society, 14(1), 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327697014001001] to demonstrate three technologies that private companies used to market their brand through Olympic education: provision of winter sports equipment and initiatives; collaborating with ‘experts’; and, hidden support from ‘star’ teachers. We argue that these technologies enabled private sector organisations and actors to promote their products and brands in schools under the umbrella of Olympic education, and attempt to shape students, teachers, and schools as consumers. We also argue that the ‘master key’ used by these businesses to access public education in China was aligned with the needs of government, the formation of mutually beneficial relationships with authorities, academics, and schools, as well as the covert involvement of teachers. We conclude by considering ethical and political issues that arise as external Olympic education providers profit from their relationships with children, teachers, and schools.
This paper examines so-called ‘adiZones’ – small colourful outdoor gyms, built as a UK-wide initiative. adiZones represent the pairing of sport giant adidas with the London 201212.
London (2012): ‘Lower Lea Valley regeneration Strategy Launched’. Retrieved June 12, 2012, from http://www.london2012.com/news/articles/2006/05/lower-lea-valley-regeneration-strategy-launched.htmlView all references Olympics. Their location within some of the poorest neighbourhoods in London means that adiZones not only fit within the Government's promise of an inclusive, community-orientated Olympic ‘legacy’, but also the targets concerning the reduction of childhood obesity and youth crime. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with users in three London adiZones, this paper explores the political, social and spatial implications of adiZones. Dovetailing empirical analysis with Henri Lefebvre and Emile Durkheim's theoretical accounts of space, the paper suggests that adiZones provide a case study for illustrating the aggressive corporatisation of public space. It argues that adiZones are a branding exercise, the corporate flavour of which is neutralised by the Olympic narrative. ‘adiZones’ were a way to build physical and social ‘legacy’ before legacy had even begun.
The awarding of the 2016 Summer Olympics to the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil continues the trend of international sports mega-events being hosted in the global South and constructed and promoted as part of long-term development plans and policies. Rio 2016 also connects with the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) current commitment to international development and global humanitarianism. In this paper, we examine the proliferation of this agenda through official online Olympic communication and compare it against critical perspectives from activist bloggers concerned with development issues specific to Rio 2016. The results support the notions that the internet can be used both to serve and challenge processes of capitalist accumulation and that political debates and contestations, such as those regarding development policy, are increasingly 'amplified' online. We argue, therefore, that while the IOC and Olympic stakeholders use the internet in support of neoliberal and modernist notions of development, online communications also offer important avenues for disseminating current critiques of, and resistance to, Olympic hosting.
The Olympic games have long served as a platform for political debate and ideological expression, and the 2008 Beijing games were no exception. The United States Olympic team selection of “Lost Boy of Sudan” and Team Darfur spokesperson Lopez Lomong as its flag bearer made this eminently visible. This article explores the links between the Olympics and global citizenship through examining how the 2008 Beijing games became an international platform for critiques of China’s political and economic relationships with Sudan, in light of the continued civil war ravaging the Darfur region. First, it examines how the critiques of China’s role in Darfur mirrored the discursive premises of an international relations theory known as “good international citizenship” that accused China of forsaking its global moral responsibilities in favor of enhancing its private economic concerns, thus exacerbating human rights in Darfur. Second, it examines how China offered a traditional Confucian concept of “harmonious society” as a theory of international relations that stresses nation- state sovereignty or privacy (China’s nominal policy of noninterference) and mutual economic development. While on the surface, these two approaches to responsible citizenship differ, this article argues 1) that even as China is critiqued, through the Olympics venue, for its “inadequate” global citizenship in Darfur, the Olympic lens through which it is appraised and found lacking mirrors the very reason it has achieved global prominence—its economic growth and market privatization; and 2) that despite the classic Confucian language of China’s own configuration of responsible global citizenship, its model does not merely reflect some essentialist concept of cultural China but rather lays bare the oftentimes opaque global economic coding of the rhetoric of stake-holding in which capitalist market praxis is philosophically configured as a means to the ends of moral governance and progressive change.
The Olympic Games, with its distinctive ethos and reach, offers a valuable opportunity for those able to mobilise it as a platform for their own purposes. This paper focuses on how global social justice groups are pursuing this goal. It is argued that the types of protest utilising the Olympic platform change over time and reflect distinct historical phases of the Games. Contemporary anti-Olympic and Olympic watchdog campaigns are characterised by contestation over the prioritising of corporate interests, so contribute to wider critiques of globalising capitalism. The Play Fair campaign for the rights of workers making official Olympic merchandise and supplies exemplifies this, as it mobilises the Olympic platform to question and influence working practices within transnational supply chains. A case study of the campaign is presented, drawing on documentary analysis, interviews and participant observations undertaken since the launch of PlayFair 2012 in February 2010. It was found that by targeting London 2012 corporate discourses of ‘ethics’ and ‘sustainability’ in its campaign to ensure a ‘sweat free’ Olympics, Play Fair connects the production of major sporting events to wider issues of global inequality, poverty and structural problems in transnational labour markets.
This article investigates the Beijing Olympics as an event that incited people in the contemporary international community to talk about ‘human rights’, and to engage in the discursive proliferation of human rights. China experienced three waves of this discursive proliferation of human rights in 2008: firstly, through anger at foreigners over Tibet and the torch relay; secondly, in grief after the Sichuan earthquake, and thirdly, in pride at the successful games. Certain conceptions of human rights were brought to the fore during these three periods of time. This article aims to study the competing discourses over human rights among different political forces, such as international human rights groups, pro-Tibetan Independence groups, and the Chinese government. All of them speak, or appear to be speaking, of one and the same thing: the ‘human rights’. Things being said in turn underpin the production of particular conceptions of ‘human rights’.
In 1984, the Los Angeles Olympics rewrote the formula for staging the global sports spectacle. On the eve of the Olympic Games Gruneau could "argue that the Los Angeles Games are in no way a significant departure from practices established in earlier Olympics," and that they "are best understood as a more fully developed expression of the incorporation of sporting practices into the ever-expanding marketplace of international capitalism" (Gruneau 1984, 2). Two decades on, though, it had become clearer that the Los Angeles (LA) Games occupies a pivotal place in the history of the modern sports event, transforming the worldwide perception of their political and economic potential and, consequently, their international profile. After the 1980 Moscow Games, evaluated by Robert Edelman in chapter 9 of this book, the Olympics was in severe crisis, and it took the radical, ruthless, and ambitious vision of the new IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, combined with LA's model for the staging of the Games, to restore credibility to the Olympics as a desirable modern cultural product to which cities and nations would continue to be drawn. Within a little over a decade of the LA Olympics, the United States would host both the men's football (soccer) World Cup finals (1994) and the Summer Olympics (Atlanta, 1996). Just ten years after the LA Olympics, Los Angeles staged the final of the most commercially successful World Cup ever, in the very same venue as the 1984 Olympic football final. For 1984, the organizers used the same stadium as had been used for the 1932 Olympics, claiming both financial prudence and a historical pedigree. Comparing and contrasting the conditions of the staging of the 1932 and 1984 events provides a basis for the analysis of fundamental shifts in the cultural and political meanings and significance of the international sports event.