Michael Silk

Beyond a boundary? Sport, transnational advertising, and the reimagining of national culture.

The penetration of local cultures by the economics and imagery of global capitalism represents the latest and most sophisticated attempt by transnational corporations to command the widest possible market base and thereby accrue the benefits derived from the realization of colossal economies of scale. Rather than attempting to neuter cultural difference through a strategic global uniformity, many corporations have acknowledged that securing a profitable global presence necessitates negotiating within the language of the local. This article outlines some of the ways that sport—as a de facto cultural shorthand—has been appropriated within and through the advertising campaigns of transnational corporations as a means of contributing toward the constitution and experiencing of national cultures. As such, this article examines the role played by transnational corporations and their promotional armatures in reimagining national cultures, introduces the concept of cultural Toyotism as a means of understanding the manner in which transnational entities negotiate the global-local nexus, and explicates empirical examples of the contrasting processes whereby sport has been used as a means of constituting the nation within the advertising discourses of transnational corporate entities.

‘Bangsa Malaysia’: global sport, the city and the mediated refurbishment of local identities

The article addresses the processes involved in the international restructuration of the spatial economy and of spaces of identity. Specifically, the focus is on the ways in which powerful groups used a sporting event - the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games (Kuala Lumpur 98) - as part of an initiative to reshape and refurbish the ethnic core of Malaysian people in an attempt to attract a more mobile global capital. The paper draws from an ethnographic study of the conditions of practice at Kuala Lumpur 98. Analysis focuses on how political, economic, commercial and symbolic conditions shaped the media reproduction of the Games. Conclusions centre on the particularizing place commodification of Kuala Lumpur and the aesthetic illusion conjured up by cultural producers to mask the class, racialized, ethnic and gendered polarizations that characterize Malaysian culture.

Contingent intellectual amateurism, or, the problem with evidence-based research.

Given the amalgam of neo-liberal, neo-scientist and neo-conservative forces that frame higher education_safeguarding science and medicine at the expense of arts, humanities and the social sciences_the very existence and continuance of the sociology of sport is imperiled perhaps more than ever. In this moment, and not surprisingly, the epistemological corroborator of these forces is once again championed; there has been an aggressive push towards _science_ defined by evidence based programmes, policies and practices (EBR) as the sole and legitimate avenue for academic survival. Heralded as the _gold_ standard of academic research, and forged through university-industry-government partnerships, the evidence based research mantra emphasizes a shift towards corporate principles of efficiency, accountability and profit maximization. As such, within this paper, we discuss the creeping EBR-based epistemological orthodoxy that is seeping into the critical sociological study of sport, arguing that it threatens to neuter the political and critical potentialities of our field. We propose that pandering to EBR, compromises everything that critical sporting intellectuals strive for and believe in; it is a powerful virus of sorts that speaks against our ontological, axiological, epistemological, methodological and political approaches and offers nothing but collusion with, and explicit support for, existing regimes of power.

A Tale of Two Cities: The Social Production of Sterile Sporting Space

Through infusing a spatial imagination with social and historical perspectives, the current article excavates and theorizes the contingent relations, structure, and effects that link the sporting spaces of Memphis, their prevailing determinate forces, and social consequences. Memphis is an archetypal exemplar of a city that has recentered itself around a spectacular space of sporting consumption by exploiting the kind of urban culture that helps position the city within the global fray. Yet this veil of appearance conceals the marked gendered, class, racial, and ethnic polarizations that mark the city. To this end, this article critically investigates the physical and imagined transformations in the city that take place according to distinctly capitalist criteria—in particular, the spaces of corporatized sport production and consumption—that can be seen to be destroying the older urban fabric thereby exacerbating structural divisions and creating new lines of inequality.

Sport tourism, cityscapes and cultural politics

Through analysis of the relative power and capacity of particular groups to physically contour, carefully orchestrate, and proffer meanings about the regeneration of downtown cityspaces, we offer a critical interrogation of two poignant exemplars of cities that have responded to the spatial logic of accumulation through the creation of sport-anchored tourist bubbles. Through questioning these lascivious representations of urban life, we offer a suggestive conclusion that calls for a meaningful and productive critical sport tourism that is: anchored within the cross-currents of contemporary social analysis; operates as an element of the cultural terrain within a wider cultural politics; and that, necessarily, is interdisciplinary, addresses the most pressing social problems, and produces an oppositional and progressive politics.

Towards a Sociological Analysis of London 2012

Within this article, I focus on a number of productive scholarly avenues to which sociological analysis of London 2012 might want to attend. Understanding major sporting events – and thus the Olympic Games – as inextricably entangled with the media-industrial complex, I suggest London 2012 as a commodity spectacle that will emphasize gleaming aesthetics, a (sporting) city and nation collapsed into (simple) tourist images, and the presentation of a particular expression of self within the logics of the global market. In so doing, and by peeking behind the seductive, corporate-inspired veil of material and symbolic regeneration, image, strategy and legacy, we, as a field, can ask crucial questions about whose histories, whose representations and which peoples matter to, and for, the sporting spectacle.

Come Downtown & Play

Abstract The newly anointed American cities of the late capitalist moment appear preoccupied with the reconstitution of urban space. More accurately, select parcels of urban America have been reconfigured into multifaceted sport, leisure and tourism environments designed for the purpose of encouraging consumption‐oriented capital accumulation. Within this paper, the focus is a critical exploration of the ways in which tangible and intangible forms of heritage have been employed, utilized and exploited within these urban transformations. Through focus on a city emblematic of the processes that have molded downtown cores under US capitalism – Memphis – the paper points to the role of heritage in the reconfiguration of the Memphian ‘tourist bubble’. In particular, discussion centers on the often problematic selection of histories and historical elements, forms and practices within the interests of capital space and thus raises a host of localized questions about whose collective memory is being performed in the present, whose aesthetics really count and who benefits. Conclusions address how such urban space is imbued with power relations, that is, how increasingly leisure‐oriented spaces can be seen as important sites of social struggle in which dominant power relations can be constructed, contested and reproduced.

Bread, butter and gravy: An institutional approach to televised sport production

There has been a paucity of research that has examined the processes involved in the production of televised sport. Frequently, the content of texts has been used to develop arguments about the political and economic context of media production and the labour process involved in creating televised sport. Recent work, however, has maintained that the conditions of production cannot be inferred by merely scrutinizing the programme, that is to say the text. The use of text to draw conclusions about the labour process means that much of what has been written has been based upon a narrow understanding of how the images and discourses that are broadcast are actually constructed. R. Gruneau has maintained that this textual focus is inadequate in understanding the pressures and limits that structure the production of sport for television. He suggested that:

Local/global flows and altered production practices: narrative constructions at the 1995 Canada Cup of soccer.

This article argues that empirical considerations of production processes have been largely neglected in discussions of the global/local flows associated with telecasting mass-mediated sport. An ethnographically oriented analysis of the labor processes involved in televising the 1995 Canada Cup of Soccer (CCS) was conducted in order to establish the contexts, pressures, and discourses that operate at the level of production. The article focuses on how conditions created by global capitalism altered the labor processes involved in the production of the event. As a result, the crews interpretations of the CCS operated both within and through a consumer-oriented global logic.

Heracles and Greek Tragedy

Heracles was the greatest and the strangest of all the Greek heroes. A long list of superhuman acts of strength and courage stood to his name, and above all else the famous twelve labours, which began with the killing of the Nemean lion and.ended in the capture of the monstrous watchdog Cerberus in Hades. He was a great slayer of monsters, also a great civilizer, founding cities, warm springs, and (as Pindar was fond of reminding his audiences) the Olympic festival. He suffered prodigiously, and he maintained prodigious appetites, for food, drink, and women. He may have had friends, but none close (as, say, Patroclus and Achilles were close), but he did have one implacable and jealous enemy, the goddess Hera. He had two marriages: the first set of wife and children he killed in a fit of madness; the second brought about his own death. He was the son of a mortal woman, Alcmena, and the god Zeus, with Amphitryon as a second, mortal, father; and after his death (by most accounts) he became a god himself and lived on Olympus.