Maurice Roche

Mega-events and urban policy

Abstract The paper argues that the search for explanation should guide mega-event research. The influence of planning, political, and urban contextual processes and factors on mega-event production is illustrated through a discussion of comparative event research and a case study of Sheffields Universiade 1991. This research indicates the important influence of contextual societal change, urban leadership, and nonrational planning in event production processes. These factors are important for understanding both event causation and also the potentially rational character of event policymaking. The strengths and limitations of ‘planning’ and ‘political’ approaches to understanding events are considered. A relevant research agenda is briefly outlined.

Mega-Events and Micro-Modernization : on the Sociology of the New Urban Tourism

This paper focuses on one aspect of this field, namely the staging of cultural or sporting mega-events. Social science interest in mega-events tends to be dominated by economic impact studies. This paper attempts to go beyond a narrow economistic approach and explores the wider socio-economic impacts of mega-events. It also suggests that we need to take account of a range of contexts (from macro-level post-industrial/post-national shifts to micro level urban politics and tourism strategy formation), if we are to develop a sociologically adequate understanding of touristic mega-events and their contemporary social significance. The paper throughout takes the opportunity presented by mega-event analysis to discuss some of the main issues involved in developing a structural sociological and political economic account of tourism events and policies. The focus of the paper on income, employment and economic modernisation impacts means that the cultural impacts of urban tourism are not dealt with in any detail. However the paper concludes by briefly considering : a) tourism as a cultural phenomenon (indeed as one of the archetypal forms of the « post-modern » culture of modernity) and thus; b) the need for the sociology of tourism to attempt to comprehend tourismss various different dimensions (i.e. economic, political and cultural). It is suggested that dialectical forms of conceptualisation will be needed in addition to empirical studies if the sociology of tourism is to respond adequately to the challenge of its subject matter

Putting the London 2012 Olympics into perspective: the challenge of understanding mega-events

The idea that the Olympics should leave hosts with a ‘legacy’ has become an increasingly important theme in Olympic and public discourse since the turn of the millennium. This is partly because of the Olympic corruption crisis in 1998/99 and the change of guard in International Olympic Committee (IOC) leadership in 2001, and the need from this time to re-energise the worldwide movement around a reassertion of principles. ‘Olympic legacy’ refers most obviously to the venues and facilities required by the Games and subsequently available for use by host cities (Moragas et al., 2003). However, in my view we need more expansive and sociological concepts of Olympic legacy. These should at least include the impact of the event on public sport participation in the host country. In addition, they should include, among other things, the cultural legacies of people’s collective memories both national and international. Most people in Britain and also around the world will not be able to attend the Games in London in 2012. But many will nonetheless participate and ‘see’ it by watching it on television, and on this basis they are likely to remember some of the Games’ sport highlights or newsworthy events. This media aspect is important culturally and sociologically in constructing the event as being both of potential personal significance to people and also as an historical and cultural reality. In my view it should be recognised as a significant element of any research agenda relating to London 2012 and its legacy. In this contribution I would like to offer a wider perspective on events like London 2012 by reference to the analysis of ‘mega-events’ and what we can call ‘the mega-event phenomenon’ (Roche, 2000, chs 1, 8; Horne & Manzenreiter, 2006; Close et al., 2008). The main social scientific and academic questions I will focus 21st Century Society Vol. 3, No. 3, 285–290, November 2008

On the Political Sociology of the Lifeworld: A Review of John O'Neill's Five Bodies

John O’Neill’s eloquent discourse on human embodiment as a theme for a political sociology, initiated in the collection of papers that formed Sociology ns n Skirt Trade in 1972 is taken further in a more developed and connected manner in his recent work Five Bodies: The Hiininti Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). He presents a substantial case for seeing the fact of human embodiment as carrying a much more central and strategic significance for the social and human sciences than tends to be traditionally accorded to it. It is hard not to sympathize with his implied critique of the largely disembodied versions of humanity to be encountered in the subject-matter, epistemological foundations, and ethical concerns of much modern political science, economics and sociology. It is hard not to sympathize also with O’Neill’s humanism and his sense that modem Western civilization is at, or is rapidly approaching, a crisis in its conceptions of the nature of life and humanity. The humanism informs both his sociology of the body and his political judgements. However, my enduring feeling in reading Five Bodies is that in principle such a moral and philosophical humanism would be difficult to support exclusively through an analysis of embodiment and that in any case embodiment is not explored fully enough here to provide that support. Before moving to some particular points of criticism, a further general comment is in order. A contemporary humanism seems to me to need to construct and to draw from a different and more relevant conceptual repertoire than that of the classical sociology-informed critical sociology which O’Neill tends to employ throughout this book. The need for a radical renewal of the pictures of modem society and its prospects bequeathed by Marx, Weber and Durkheim is surely evident in contemporary history. Whether under capitalist or socialist auspices the society that classical sociology stood on, drew on and described is being transformed and requires a new social theory. The industrial economy, the national polity, the local cognitive, symbolic and moral community, the politics of poverty, social progress and economic growth-the key elements in classical sociology’s explicit topic and in its implicit resource are all in process of transformation. The post-industrial economy, the multi-national polity, the global cognitive, symbolic and moral community, the politics of affluence, of life, life-quality and life-conditions conservation, and of the limits and costs of growth all call for a radical rethinking of social theory, its conceptual repertoire and its values. In spite ofaiming to address himselfto contemporary crises and to the terrain of the emerging life-based politics, that is to people as embodied actors, O’Neill seems to me to fail to take the full measure of the structural changes currently causing these crises and impinging on this terrain. O’Neill’s interest in the phenomenological tradition might have inspired

Lived Time and Clockwork Culture: Elliot Jaques and the Study of Time in the Human Sciences

Considering how important our understanding of time is in everyday experience, and thereby how potentially important it is for the social and human sciences, it is recurrently surprising how little the topic has been studied and discussed. In his recent work, The Forrri of Tirile Elliot Jaques has made a significant contribution to such study. He argues, in general correctly I believe, that the notion of time lies at the very foundation of the human and social sciences, bearing heavily on the definition of their subject-matter, their principles of understanding and explanation, and their appropriate methods of observation and measurement. His study is thus a welcome one if for no other reason than that it provides both an opportunity and an incentive for a renewal of scholarly awareness of this foundational concept and problem, and for a renewal of debate and discussion about its character and implications for research. This judgement stands in spite of the criticisms of Jaques’s work I will offer later. We must begin with an outline of his analysis of ‘the form of time’. As is appropriate to the richness of the experience and concept of time, Jaques’s discussion trawls in broad and deep waters, ranging from the philosophy of time, to cognitive psychology in general, to the psychology of lived time and of action, to the epistemology of the human sciences and to fundamental problems of method, measurement and quantification in the human sciences and to much else besides. The work as a whole develops an argument, a rationale and a paradigm for the use of quantitative time measurement, which I will call ‘clocktime’, as a viable, insightful and ultimately indispensable strategy in the human sciences in general and in psychology, social psychology and related disciplines in particular. Of course clocktime measurement of behaviour is nothing new. The novelty of Jaques’s argument lies in his conception of the inherently temporally organized nature of the entities to be measured, the main ones of which he calls ‘episodes’ and ‘time-frames’. These consist of sequences of purposive goal-oriented activity and individuals’ time-horizons within which they occur. The apparent utility of this paradigm for empirical research is exemplified in his discussion of a number of studies of such things as responsibility, capability and cognitive growth, mainly drawn from the realm of employment and work. To a certain extent this analysis, of what phenomenological writers would perhaps have called ‘lived time’, in terms of episodes and time frames, stands on its own feet irrespective of the philosophical, epistemological and methodological context with which Jaques surrounds it. However a word

Time and the Critique of Anthropology

This book consists of a (sometimes loosely) connected set of essays on the uses and abuses of certain versions of time-language and time-conceptualization in anthropology’s constitution of its subject-matter, the Other, both in the past and currently. Topics covered from this perspective include the pre-history and early history of the discipline, from natural history to evolutionary approaches (chap. 1); American cultural anthropology and French structuralism or cultural

Book Reviews : The Use of Official Statistics in Sociology. BARRY HINDESS. London: Macmillan, I973. Pp. 63 £0.75

as well as the pre-theoretical problems we mentioned before-constitute only a small part of An Introduction to the Study of Man and we expect them to do no more. At least, however, something more than the traditional wisdom (up-dated, of course) is to be found in Young’s book and it is for this reason that it is to be recommended, first and foremost as one of the best source-books available in human biology, and also as one whose style (consistently pleasing) and frequent sensitivity make it rather unique.