Mega-events and social change

Spectacle, legacy and public culture

Maurice Roche

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526117106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The spectacle of major cultural and sporting events can preoccupy modern societies. This book is concerned with contemporary mega-events, like the Olympics and Expos. Using a sociological perspective Roche argues that mega-events reflect the major social changes which now influence our societies, particularly in the West, and that these amount to a new 'second phase' of the modernization process. Changes are particularly visible in the media, urban and global locational aspects of mega-events. Thus he suggests that contemporary mega-events, both in their achievements and their vulnerabilities, reflect, in the media sphere, the rise of the internet; in the urban sphere, de-industrialisation and the growing ecological crisis; and in the global sphere, the relative decline of the West and the rise of China and other 'emerging' countries.

1
Mega-events and macro-social change

In the Introduction we observed that in recent times, and certainly since the turn of the century, mega-events have been changing in notable ways from the way they were in the mid- and late twentieth century. This book aims to look into these important new trends, to document them in a range of cases and also to explore their contexts and motivations particularly in relation to deeper vectors of social change. In the Introduction we noted three main changes in particular. Firstly, as with so many aspects of contemporary culture and society, sport mega-events in particular, notably the Olympics, have become not only media events but also digital media events. As such they have increasingly been experienced by publics using a repertoire of new as well as old media, that is internet-enabled tablets and mobile phones as well as old twentieth-century media like radio and television. Secondly, contemporary mega-events are increasingly pursued and staged by cities with an explicit interest in their potential to have long-term positive effects or legacies. Unlike those of most twentieth-century mega-events, these long-term effects are not only the subjects of explicit aspiration and planning, but also they invariably give a priority to green legacies relating to ecological sustainability and the promotion of the relevance of the natural world for life in cities. Thirdly, contemporary mega-events are increasingly being staged outside of their traditional nineteenth-century and twentieth-century locations in the West (particularly Europe and North America). There has been what appears to be a permanent global shift in mega-event locations in which the ‘Global South’ (particularly Africa and South America) and the East (particularly the Middle East and the Far East) now share the hosting of mega-events with the West.

These three changes in contemporary-era mega-events as compared with those of preceding eras are illustrated in the various case studies which make up the body of this book. However to begin with, in this chapter, it is first necessary to set the scene for later discussions with some observations about relevant aspects of late twentieth-century and contemporary social change. The book aims to take a generally sociological and socio-historical approach to the understanding of mega-events which interprets them as being, among other things, performances which reflect (and refract) more general forces and vectors of macro-social change, and which as such are often accredited with some power to influence or catalyse wider social changes, particularly in their host cities.

This chapter, then, firstly aims to introduce and outline a sociological framework of ideas and terms of reference for exploring these deeper and broader contexts of social change relevant to the understanding of contemporary mega-events. This is addressed in the first section of the chapter. Secondly, it aims to initially indicate how this analysis of social change generally applies to the three changes in mega-events we are concerned with. This discussion is developed in the remaining three sections of the chapter which are concerned with issues connected with media change (second section), urban change (third section) and global change (fourth section). Each of these three sections introduces framework ideas and themes in the analysis of relevant aspects of contemporary mega-events which are then taken further in the more detailed discussions in the corresponding chapter in the three main arts of the book.

Contextualising mega-events: western modernisation

To understand mega-events sociologically and socio-historically we need to outline a provisional understanding of the general social contexts in the West (Europe and North America) within which they were created, in which they have become institutionalised, which they can be interpreted to reflect and symbolise, and in which they are currently changing both in the West and in the wider world. Any such understanding needs to involve a conception both of the long-term processes of modernisation which have shaped Western society since at least the nineteenth century and also of the distinctive features of modernisation and social change in the contemporary late modern period both in the West and in the wider world order. Such issues of macro-social structure and change are inevitably complex matters which, equally inevitably, require some simplification if they are to be made manageable for the purposes of understanding the deep social contexts of mega-events.

Thus Table 1.1 provides a schematic representation of a range of social changes associated with modernisation processes particularly in Western societies from the mid-nineteenth century through to the present. The schema in this Table makes the conventional sociological assumption that, from a theoretical point of view, social systems can be analysed as being composed of at least three relatively autonomous dimensions, namely the economic, the political and the cultural (the domains respectively of capital, work and exchange; power and authority; and meanings, values and communication). And it adds the dimensions of technology, as the domain of equipment, material power and capability, used to reproduce humans’ embodied existence, and to make and remake environments and to interact with nature in so doing. In order to understand social change it suggests that particular types of social dynamics and transformative capabilities are historically found in the social fields created by the combination of at least two dimensions, namely techno-economic, political economic, cultural economic and political-cultural fields, and also in an ideological aspect of the technology dimension which can be referred to as the civilisational worldview concerning the relationship of humans with nature.¹

Table 1.1 Western modernisation, nineteenth to twenty-first century: a schematic representation of long-term macro-social change

Key societal dimensions and dynamics	‘Primary-phase’ modernisation 1850–1970	‘Secondary-phase’ modernisation 1970 to present
Techno-economic	Industrialisation	Post-industrialism
	Industrial capitalism; mechanisation, electrification and factory production; intensified marketisation and exploitation of domestic mass labour, of colonial resources and of nature	Science- and technology-based capitalism (via digital age internet, automation and robotics etc.); service, information and knowledge-based industries; worldwide mass transport and telecoms infrastructures
Political-economic	Nation-state-building	Globalisation
	National industrial capitalist economies; internationalism via competitive empires; state taxation and the building of warfare states and welfare states	Global capitalism, with complex international economic interdependencies and inequalities; rise of neoliberal ideology; world regionality; weak global governance; ‘glocal’ adaptations and local protectionist reactions
Cultural-economic	Mass culture	De-massified culture
	Mass marketing and mass consumption; mass communications via succession of old media (publishing, press, radio, television); mass sport and mass tourism	Co-existence of mass with individualised consumption, and of old with new (digital age) media; rising awareness of importance of cultural industries (e.g. marketing, media, sport, tourism etc.)
Political-cultural	Nationalist identities and public culture	Cosmopolitan identities and public culture
	Official ethno-national monoculturalism and legitimated xenophobia; colonial and Imperial ideologies and practices; rise of public cultural institutions (e.g. museums etc.); rise of mass state-based primary and secondary schooling and cultural reproduction	Human rights and individualism; postcolonialism and post-imperialism; de facto multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism and varieties of localist/anti-global reactions to this; growth of adapted ‘quasi-public’ cultural institutions and cultural policy (regulation of cultural economy etc.); rise of mass tertiary education (cultural production and reproduction)
‘Civilisational’ worldview (humanity–Nature relationship)	Mastery over nature	Conservation of nature
	Dominance of economic (and related) progress ideologies; unsustainable over-exploitation of natural environments and resources by combinations of main primary-phase modernisation dynamics (above)	Crisis-driven rise of green and conservationist (‘neo-progress’) ideologies; belated public recognition of humanity's ecological limits and conditions; weak attempts to promote sustainable economy and society nationally and internationally

The political economic field and also, relatedly, the techno-economic field have periodically played leading roles in major social change, notably, given the centrality of the development of capitalism to Western and later global society, in the era of modernisation. This is argued for both by (uncritical) (neo-) liberal economic modernisation and development theory and also by critical political-economy perspectives both in general terms and also in the special area of the analysis of mega-events. However the schema presented here does not require that these dynamics must always be seen to have this primacy, intellectual strategies which risk over-simplificati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Globalizing Sport Studies series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mega-events and macro-social change
• I Mega-events and media change
• II Mega-events, legacy and urban change
• III Mega-events and global change in East and West
• References
• Index