ABSTRACT
Introduction As Salazar notes in his introduction, mega-events are a seasonal sector of the economy marked by a transient workforce. Unlike our previous work on sports mega-events, and that of others recently (e.g. see Horne & Manzenreiter, 2006; Rojek, 2013; Gruneau & Horne, 2016), this chapter focuses on the mobility of labour behind the production of sports mega-events. By this, we mean to include both those who work on bidding to host events and those who actually build the infrastructure for them. Arguably, it is only the men’s football World Cup and the Olympic Summer Games that truly deserve to be referred to as sports megaevents (Horne & Manzenreiter, 2006). Yet it is obvious that these supernovas of contemporary place-making strategy share the same production logic as an everincreasing pool of international sport competitions, despite their undisputable differences in value, reach and weight. 1
All those sports events that involve the multimedia production of a spectacle for on-site visitors and television, newspapers and Internet audiences similarly rely on the massive mobilisation of labour needed in the first place to provide the necessary infrastructure and later to organise and manage the event proper. We do not claim that sports mega-events have been the single cause behind the tremendous changes by which labour has been institutionalised and regulated since the prime time of the social welfare state. However, we do want to argue that sports mega-events can be shown to have provided specific locations and occasions for the reconfiguration of national, international and transnational labour processes and practices into a new formation. By virtue of this function, we must consider sports mega-events as ‘Trojan horses’ of neo-liberal policies and consumerist ideologies that impact upon new forms of social division and stratification, both within production and consumption spheres. The widening of social inequalities, the marginalisation of the poor and the exclusion of the new precariat have emerged stepwise as acute transformations of societies since the neo-liberal shifts induced by Thatcherism and Reagonomics in the 1980s. As the principal agents of sports mega-events – that is the international sport federations – their corporate partners and the professional class of event organisers are virtually identical across all events of global reach, we argue that an analysis of the production of the
spectacle makes the relationships between sports mega-events and the structures of transnational capitalism more visible (Manzenreiter, 2015).
