Sport and Globalisation: Homogenization and Differentiation

Abstract

Sport and Globalisation: Homogenization and DifferentiationThe development of the worldwide market has motivated long-ranging consequences, not only at the level of growing economic interdependencies, but also in the globalization of cultures and lifestyles. At any of these dimensions, sport plays a role and contributes in its own particular way to globalization. Transnational organizations, worldwide events, transnational communities and transnational structures organised around the central theme of Sport provide good evidence of that phenomenon. However, the way these dimensions interrelate at a time of unorganised capitalism is based on disjuncture. Following this thesis, Appadurai (1996) has proposed an elementary scheme for the analysis of the disjuncture between the several dimensions of globalization, suggesting the notion of landscapes to underline the fluid and irregular shape of the capital flow, pertaining to both communications and lifestyles. By emphasising that globalization is intensively perceived according to, and influenced by the historical, linguistic and political contexts of the intervening players, the author deliberately focuses on the imagined worlds that help us construct those landscapes. In this paper, we will retrieve some of those theoretical leads and analyse three types of landscape in the leisure and sports contexts, in an attempt to demonstrate how their interrelation is one of disjuncture, where some dimensions promote sports homogenization while others push towards increasing differentiation. We will analyse the mediascapes (Sport as global spectacle), the technoscapes (the role of the new media and velocity in the creation of decontextualised global cognitive maps), and the ideoscapes (the role of images and the aesthetisation of the leisure sports experiences)