ABSTRACT
The appearance in 1996 of the third and final volume of the official centennial history
of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was a watershed marker of the organization’s new, if somewhat grudging willingness to have its own composition
and internal memory publicly inspected. [1] Subsequently, the scandal surrounding the Salt Lake City bid process and the consequent Olympic reform effort greatly accelerated this development, creating a much broader public awareness of the
structure and functioning of the IOC. [2] A new emphasis on administrative efficiency and transparency under the ensuing Jacques Rogge regime has extended a
self-proclaimed ‘world’s best practices’ style of management outward from the IOC itself to relations with Olympic bid and organizing committees and a wide variety of
other stakeholders. [3] On the scholarly front, as led by the work of Olympic policy expert Jean-Loup Chappelet, an insightful professional scholarship on this new IOC
governance has now appeared. [4] A number of IOC insider memoirs have also indicated (albeit in a more tendentious fashion) that these new managerial styles and
practices were already being forwarded in the commercial marketing and broadcast
rights arenas, though in a fashion generally less visible to public scrutiny because of corporate contractual secrecy. [5] One thing that did become only too apparent
within IOC corridors and in public discussions of these external Olympic commercial relations was the appearance of the transnational marketing language of ‘brand’,
‘brand value’, and ‘brand management’ during this period. The underlying purpose of this paper is to remind us of how patterns of
organizational discourse are sensitive indicators of changing institutional arrangements and shifting power relations among stakeholders. As a very broad scholarly
literature has long since demonstrated, organizational discursive routines are powerful modes of social control as well. To properly get at them requires an ethnography of speaking, that is, the recording and analysis of speech in its lived
context. Interpretation of published or unpublished documents alone, even a properly semiotic analysis, can never get at the full range of meanings apparent only
in the social contexts of speaking. [6] In this paper, I present a partial ethnography of ‘legacy’ speech in Olympic circles today, that is, of talk about what the Olympic
Games bring and leave behind. I analyse its contribution to the continued penetration of managerial rationality into Olympic affairs, through what I describe
as the magical properties of legacy discourse in attaining in a very short time a crossfunctional, cross-contextual, transnational hegemony denied even to Olympic brand
speech in its heyday.
