ABSTRACT
Sporting international non-governmental organisations (SINGOs) tend to have comparable characteristics to international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and in many cases the characteristics are more extreme cases than the norm. Boli and Thomas put the growth of INGOs firmly in the context of a rapid period of globalisation which gathered pace in the second half of the nineteenth century and ended abruptly in 1914. Naturally, 'rationality' and 'universalism' are not to everyone's taste and there is a huge body of writing, both academic and purely polemical, which equates INGO activity with imperialism. If the entry of the Soviet Union into the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1952 was the most important single step in the achievement of near-complete global penetration by the major SINGOs, it was to be a long time before they achieved the level of power and autonomy they were to possess in the twenty-first century.
