Speaker
Description
Since its introduction by Roland Robertson’s seminal work in 1992, the concept of glocalisation has been widely adopted and discussed across a variety of disciplines including the sociology of sport. In their conceptual paper, Giulianotti and Robertson (2012) identified mega-events – along with sports, business and identity – as one of the four key fields of inquiry into glocalisation within sport studies. While a few scholars such as Brannagan and Giulianotti (2015) and Giulianotti et al. (2015) referred to the concept in their studies of sports mega-events, the application has yet been fully explored to date. Sports mega-events offer a strategic site to analyse forms and flows of both globalisation and localisation through various processes, representations and interactions. As such, the paper examines the utility of glocalisation as a central theoretical framework to investigate the scope and intricacy of glocality manifested through sports mega-events. In doing so, it outlines key aspects, institutions and processes for conceptualising glocalisation of sports mega-events and identifies the future research directions. This includes the linkage of glocalisation with cosmopolitan nationalism – a framework that captures interactions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and more broadly the global and the local.
