Globalizing Sport

Barbara Keys offers a major study of the political and cultural ramifications of international sports competitions in the decades before World War II. She examines the transformations of events like the Olympic Games and the World Cup from relatively small-scale events to the globally popular events.

Sport is enjoyed by millions of people across the world, and both watching and playing sport constitutes a major part of modern leisure time. But sport is also a huge worldwide industry. In Globalizing Sport, George Sage invites readers to explore a deeper understanding of the global dynamics of sport - not only competitions but of the big businesses of money, media coverage, athletic apparel and more. He shows how phenomena such as migration, labour, commerce and politics affect the athletes and the fans, continually reshaping the business and experience of sport. Globalizing Sport puts sport in its political, economic and social context, revealing its connections with businesses, countries, media outlets and education systems.

In this impressive book, Barbara Keys offers the first major study of the political and cultural ramifications of international sports competitions in the decades before World War II. Focusing on the United States, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, she examines the transformation of events like the Olympic Games and the World Cup from relatively small-scale events to the expensive, political, globally popular extravaganzas familiar to us today.

Sport is enjoyed by millions of people across the world, and both watching and playing sport constitutes a major part of modern leisure time. But sport is also a huge worldwide industry. In Globalizing Sport, George Sage invites readers to explore a deeper understanding of the global dynamics of sport - not only competitions but of the big businesses of money, media coverage, athletic apparel and more. He shows how phenomena such as migration, labour, commerce and politics affect the athletes and the fans, continually reshaping the business and experience of sport. Globalizing Sport puts sport in its political, economic and social context, revealing its connections with businesses, countries, media outlets and education systems.

"This book anatomizes the connections between sport and culture. It argues that although sport is obviously a source of pleasure, it is also part of the government of everyday life. The creation of a sporting calendar, movements of rational recreation and the development of physical education in the public sector are read as ways of disciplining and shaping urban-industrial populations." "Although the book utilizes methods and traditions from sociology, political science and communication studies, it is the first text to argue that culture is the focal point for understanding sport. Authoritative and accessible, it will be required reading for students of sport studies, sociology and cultural studies."--Jacket.

Globalization is effecting a close convergence of sport and foreign policy. In order to respond to novel social, political, cultural and economic pressures, states are increasingly turning to sport as a foreign policy instrument; and they cannot ignore the corresponding influence that global sport has on their core interests. This book is devoted to exploring this relationship in detail. Although any examination of sport and foreign policy inevitably focuses on issues related to both politics and international relations, the primary intention here is to consider the dimensions associated with foreign policy. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

The globalizing influence of professional sports Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global—and globalizing—sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

Explores the relationship between sport and national identities within the context of globalization in the modern era.

From neighborhood coalitions organizing against the building of a sport facility for professional sports teams subsidized by public funds, to global campaigns for equity for women in sport, to worldwide bans of apartheid regimes, sites and levels of protest, resistance and activism have been present throughout the history of sport. Contentious forms of collective actions are now ever more present in various forms at the local, the national and the global levels. Sport and Social Movements: From the Local to the Global is the first book-length treatment of the way social movements have intersected and continue to intersect with sport. It traces the history of various social movements associated with labour, women, peace, the environment and rights (civil, racial, disability and sexual), and their relationship to sport and sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games. Based on research conducted by a multinational team of authors that draws on theories of social movements and new social movements, the book includes a valuable chronology of social movements, illustrations of key episodes in the development of the relationships between sport and different social movements and an agenda for future research and scholarship. Written in a clear and comprehensive style it is suitable for all levels of higher education, researchers and the general reader who want to know more about the role that sport has played in the development of social movements and campaigns for social justice.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. How has globalization impacted on sports media? What are the economic ramifications? And what is the future of sports media? In order to answer these questions, this book investigates the constituents, dimensions and implications of the flows of media sport from the Global West to the Global East, and in the reverse direction. At an historical moment when the relative stability of the Western media sport order is under challenge, it analyses a range of key structures, practices and issues whose ramifications extend far beyond the fields of play and national contexts in which sport events take place. The book will appraise and analyse the state of sports television, rise of new sports media, emergence of hybrid sport cultural forms, eruption of sport-related political controversies, scandals and power struggles, mutations of forms of global sport fandom, and projections of the future of global media sport. In bringing together the latest research from across a number of disciplines, this book offers an exciting contribution to the emerging field of global sports media.