ABSTRACT
Writing about an Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (OCOG) has been notoriously difficult, and there is virtually no precedent in academic literature. As the introductory chapter of this volume reported, at the beginning of 2009 a concerted effort was made by the first author, on behalf of a group of UK researchers, to secure access to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) with the goal of capturing in real time the process of knowledge creation in the making of the Games. This had never been achieved before. Despite initial interest on the part of LOCOG and the fact that our request was supported by Podium – the organisation established by the UK government to serve as a link between the higher education sector in England and the Games – soon organisational and political concerns started to prevail over academic drive for knowledge development. As a result, our efforts to understand the interplay between the structure and culture of LOCOG in generating and utilizing knowledge in the process of planning and delivery of the Games were considerably limited. What follows, therefore, is based on the authors’ interactions with several key LOCOG members and information provided by John Gold, a member of the research team, who worked with two other senior LOCOG representatives.
