International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Booth D (2011) Olympic city bidding: An exegesis of power. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. DOI:10.1177/1012690211408844. First published May 19, 2011.

In this article I analyse the bidding process to host the olympics as a complex set of power relationships between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and candidate cities. My analysis looks at both macro-political conditions and relationships and the micro-motives and psychological predilections of IOC members and the principals of candidate cities. Unlike traditional political studies that largely infer the goals and ambitions of individual members from the IOC’s collective interests, my approach considers the psychological basis of these interactions on its own terms. This interpretation loosely follows an interactive model of power and influence developed by Bertram Raven and grounded in political psychology. Importantly, the bidding process for olympic hosting rights provides insights into the omnipresent nature of power and its different forms that operate across macro- and micro-levels of society.

Global sport governing bodies proclaim lofty ideals and espouse generic principles that set high moral standards for themselves and others. None more so than two of the world’s largest, most influential, and most high profile sporting organizations, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Behind the façades of principled rhetoric is often something quite different. Focusing on some of the most powerful figures who have walked the corridors of power in the IOC and FIFA, using the methods of investigative journalism, this article investigates the gap between principle and practice in corporate sport. It concludes by arguing that a lack of transparency and accountability in these global sport governing bodies goes hand in glove with a propensity for corruption. It further urges sports academics to take a much more critical approach to the task of researching and investigating power relations in world sport.

This study examines the relationship between sport, globalization and national identity. Specifically, the article focuses on how Team New Zealand’s 2003 America’s Cup campaign represents and reproduces the concept of corporate nationalism. Located within a critical cultural studies perspective the analysis uses a multi-method approach including textual and contextual analysis and semi-structured interviews with key media cultural intermediaries to examine a unique global-local nexus involving the ‘Family of five’ sponsors whose elective affinity set about to unite the New Zealand nation. The findings reveal that: a) both local and multinational corporations (MNCs) use sport as a vehicle through which to articulate their brands with national identity as part of a process of localization; b) the promotional culture of major sporting events such as the America’s Cup provides a platform for MNCs to (re)present, (re)produce and (re)construct national identity; and c) despite their strategic attempts to appropriate national icons and themes multinational corporations face resistance and national identity remains a contested domain.

This article provides a critical discourse analysis of Scottish newspaper reports relating to football and ‘sectarianism’ in Scotland. It claims that there is a powerful and longstanding ideological ‘framing’ of sectarianism in sections of the Scottish press that is latently power-laden. This discourse attempts to construct and reaffirm a unified non-sectarian core identity that ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ Scots (should) share in opposition to a set of sectarian ‘others’. The various connotations attached to sectarian and sectarianism, together with their use in particular ways that reflect an ideological hegemony, are illustrated. Much of the press treatment of sectarianism is shown to lack sensitivity to the historical, hierarchical and relational aspects of religious, political and ethnic identities in Scotland.

In light of a growing trend by which Northern Irish-born footballers opt to pledge their sporting allegiance to the Republic of Ireland, the issue of player eligibility has become the subject of much public and political debate across the island of Ireland. In seeking to shed light on this controversial topic, this article examines the myriad factors which are negotiated by northern nationalist footballers when faced with the choice of which ‘nation’ to which they belong. Based on extracts from a series of interviews with northern nationalist players, the study situates their lived experiences within the broader socio-political landscape of Northern Ireland, highlighting a range of factors from the perceived culpability of the Irish Football Association (IFA) to sporting pragmatism on the part of the players. The research is theoretically grounded in the writings of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, in particular by utilizing their respective interpretations of the socio-psychological concept of habitus in an attempt to understand the interplay between the relatively superficial and potentially temporary nature of sporting identity and a more deeply ingrained sense of national or political identification.

To examine sport fandom in Australia, a convenience sample of 163 university students (62% males, 38% females, M = 21.3) attending a large, multi-sector institution located in a western suburb of Melbourne voluntarily completed a 25-item questionnaire survey which included the Sport Fandom Questionnaire (Wann, 2002) and the Sport Spectator Identification Scale (Wann and Branscombe, 1993). Descriptive and inferential statistics revealed that males chose ‘friends’ as their most influential sport fan socialization agent while females ranked friends, parents and school about the same. Male socialization agents were very important for both sexes with ‘father’ chosen most influential. Males scored higher on every measure of sport fandom behavior including attending sports events, watching sports on television, listening to sports on the radio, engaging in a sports conversation with others, and accessing sport information via the Internet. Australian Football League teams were chosen ‘favorite team’ by 81 percent of the total sample; selection was unrelated to the respondent’s sex. Compared with similar data obtained from US, Norwegian and Greek university student samples, these Australian students were judged greater sport consumers and more heavily identified with the sport fan role and a favorite team.

The experiences of female sports fans have been largely marginalized in academic research. This article aims to bring women’s experiences as sports fans to the fore. It also explores assumptions of homogeneity which seem to underlie much research on male and female fans. This has perhaps led to a gendered binary whereby female sports fans are often depicted as ‘new consumer’ fans and are perceived as ‘inauthentic’ in their support. Drawing on Glaser and Strauss’s (2008) ‘grounded theory’ approach, 51 semi-structured interviews were conducted with female football fans in the East Midlands city of Leicester in England. This article focuses on two themes which emerged from this research: women, football and a sense of place; and women and stadium modernization. These findings begin to explore some of the complexities of female fan attachment and emphasize the need to examine the diversity of women’s experiences as sports fans. I propose that future research on sports fandom would benefit from a greater sensitivity to heterogeneity in both men’s and women’s experiences.

This article examines the re-negotiation of sex-based boundaries within the context of transgender/transsexual inclusion in North American lesbian softball leagues. Semi-structured interviews with transgender participants combined with participant observation have been undertaken. We focus on the ‘climate’ (Hall and Sandler, 1982) for transgender participation in lesbian softball leagues that have adopted radical (non sex-binary-based) transinclusive policies. The majority of our research participants report positive experiences of inclusion and our own observations inform us that trans participation has already changed the faces of these leagues to the extent that lesbian identity is being queered: it is shifting away, at least to some degree, from assumed biological commonality to cultural affinity. Positive experiences, however, were more uniformly reported by transgender women than by transmen. A number of transmen, while reporting experiences of inclusion, expressed both personal ambivalence about participating in lesbian sporting and non-sporting spaces and a desire for fuller inclusion in the form of sensitivity and awareness concerning the use of gendered pronouns and categorical invocations. Our study documents cultural processes of sex boundary re-negotiation. As such it builds on previous scholarship (Travers, 2006) that suggests that lesbian softball leagues with non-sex-binary based transinclusive policies may offer a model for queering mainstream sporting spaces away from the socially constructed categories of the two sex system.