How elite sport helps to foster and maintain a neoliberal culture: The ‘branding’ of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

This article explores the role that elite sport has played in the State Government of Victoria’s (Australia) neoliberal agenda of creating an environment conducive to commercial activity. Adopting an urban entrepreneurial approach of selling the ‘city’ as an attractive place for cross-border investment, the state government has strategically invested public funds into major sporting events in Melbourne. Four specific sporting events were examined: i) construction and redevelopments of ‘Melbourne Park’ to host the Australian Open Tennis Championships; ii) hosting the 2006 Commonwealth Games; iii) acquisition of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix and continued political, corporate and media support for the event; and iv) construction of an urban football stadium. Newspaper reports and parliament transcripts between 1984 and 2014 were collected to highlight issues of contest in the ‘sport city’ in conjunction with a thematic analysis of interviews with influential cultural producers of the ‘sport city’ – most notably state premiers, members of parliament, CEOs of public sports trusts and newspaper journalists. Findings illustrate that the Victorian state has successively re-regulated a neoliberal urban entrepreneurial strategy, often preventing dissident groups from resisting neoliberal activities, and that in Melbourne sport operates as ‘cultural glue’ to establish the logic of neoliberalism in an embodied sense.

Existential advertising in late modernity: Meaningful work in higher education advertisements

“…These city-based and urban campuses position themselves as sites where a kind of lifestyle can be lived, and meaningful lives and work may be sought. This advertising strategy is consistent with studies of advertising and governance within other industries in Melbourne (see John and McDonald, 2019; Dingle and O’Hanlon, 2009; Homan, 2014), which focus on the post-industrial revival of Melbourne and its suburbs as lifestyle hubs for creative, white-collar and service-industry workers.…”

“…What possibilities exist within university advertisements to govern the student-customer? As is discussed in the analysis, such questions will also draw on studies of governmental tactics that have implications for university advertising, such as the branding of Melbourne, Australia as a commercial and cultural centre, receptive to private investment in culture, sport and education (John and McDonald, 2019).…”

Blending Martial Arts and Yoga for Health: From the Last Samurai to the First Odaka Yoga Warrior

“…In fact, "[t]o become an Odaka Yoga warrior means to become adaptable, flexible and fully integrated, " or in other words, "a complete fluid and transformative body-mind entity." This depiction of the Odaka Yoga Warrior-as much as its elective affinities with challenges, growth and empowerment-I argue, substantially adheres to the normative biopolitical injunction of self-care, flexibility and self-responsibility that characterizes contemporary neoliberal societies across social domains, such as higher education, sport and the labor market (e.g., Andrews and Silk, 2012;Bélanger and Edwards, 2013;González-Calvo and Arias-Carballa, 2018;John and McDonald, 2020). Understood in this light, the Odaka Yoga Warrior is-thanks to her self-control, self-mastery, and constant work of self-cultivation-able to fruitfully merge the central tenets of the medicalized and subtle body models within a unified therapeutic framework of fluid self-care and self-actualization.…”

Potemkin neoliberalism: developing Volgograd through the 2018 Men’s World Cup in Russia

“…The point here is to underscore the degree of state involvement -at all levels, federal, regional, and municipal -in the management and production of the 2018 World Cup. Understanding this mega-event as a centralized state project, conceived in the capital and managed down the power vertical into the regions and host cities, troubles the traditional academic conceptualization of mega-events as simply another example of globalized neoliberal restructuring, wherein subnational scales take precedence over the receding nation state (Hall 2006;John and McDonald 2019). There were discrepancies, however, between the ideal functioning of the power vertical, and how things actually played out during the preparations.…”

“…Unlike many other global mega-events, the 2018 Men's World Cup in Russia was largely a project initiated and managed by the central state. This contradicts a common way of understanding mega-events, that is, as processes of globalized neoliberalism that rescale cities and states to promote urban regions over national economies (Brenner 2004;Hall 2006;John and McDonald 2019;Miller 2012). Though it is in danger of being misused as a catch-all term, I use neoliberalism here to describe a series of concrete projects (with concomitant economic, political, and cultural dimensions) marked by the retreat of Fordist-Keynesian models of distribution and the ascendance of market rationalities of competition and entrepreneurship (Brenner and Theodore 2002;Harvey 2007;Hilgers 2011;Wacquant 2010).…”