Corporatism: Sport Sector Opportunities and Benefits

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Corporatism was a remarkable feature of sport in the 1960s-1970s. At the heart of ‘old’ corporatist, arrangements were the licensed professions. Provided they undertake to discipline their own miscreants and meet certain public needs for the provision of a service, the professions have been free to, or in many cases have been given statutory authority to, organize their recruitment, training, fees, and practices. Contrast the USA, where, though once more state-regulated than in Australia, they nowadays barely escape subordination to market forces. Contrast France or Japan, where the state has always kept a tight rein on recruitment and training. Professional regulation has always been concerned with the relation between domestic service producers and domestic service consumers. It has had nothing to do with attempts to mobilize the economy for international competition. When, more recently, the professions have been called upon to participate in this latter task, there have been great difficulties.

Main body

In 1960 sport in Australia stood at the crossroads. To go forward to a new era with new structures and increasing public finance, or stand off and continue to walk the same road of those who gave sport to the world, reflected in the true amateur ethos that forms the very basis of fairplay and enjoyment through activity-this was the essence of the question. Once again sport was faced with the social context in which it was practiced and it was on this basis that the next steps were taken. Most football clubs have had (1) a fairly well-developed ability to recognize collective goods which cannot be achieved by private action; but (2) a tendency to mistrust the central state which manifests itself in: (a) a preference for local control when those public goods can only be achieved by public power (for example, policing or much of education); (b) a preference for non-state action as a means of achieving public goods wherever possible. This was political soil in which corporatist arrangements of a certain kind could flourish extensively; but which would not nourish arrangements of another kind. Able to flourish were passive, unambitious means of regulating affairs so that conventionally, often implicitly, recognized public interests would be served and protected from market forces by cozy, often essentially medieval practices, offering sometimes obscure forms of self-discipline. Important to such a procedure was the ‘gentlemanly’ code of public affairs, resting on implicit understandings and trust among a social life linked by networks of family, friendship, and club. Indeed, there may often be room for doubt as to exactly how ‘public’ the public interests ostensibly served by such practices really were, but the claim was often made. To the extent that all this had an aristocratic and in particular monarchical base, it was a world in which the interests of some families were almost regarded as constituting the public interest, since they were its guardians (Baker, p. 44).

If it is only lately, as international competition intensifies, that the Australian have come to use organized interests for purposes of public policy in the way that some of the late developers (like Germany or Scandinavia) have long since become accustomed to doing, there has nevertheless been no rejection of the idea that such interests should participate in political activity, as was long the case in France. It has been more like US pluralism, but with an elaborate, informal, and implicit code of self-restraint that has limited lobbying activity, has tended to aggregate interests to form, in contrast with the USA, a relatively small number of non-competing organizations. The USA lacked the ‘gentlemanly’ social life that long blunted and channelled unrestrained individualism in the nineteenth century’s other major liberal society (Boyle, p. 98).

The integration of organized labor into old corporatism was of course very tricky, as workers were not gentlemen. However, if admitted gradually and starting with the most highly skilled, their representatives could at least become cadet gentlemen. And this is precisely what they did, as any number of works on the conduct and deportment of late trade unions have told (Tomlinson 87). The licensed professions have always been distinctive here, since their statute-based self-regulation includes preparation for and admission to occupations that have managed to convince governments, clients, and the public that they have some special importance. The public services are also distinctive in that, by maintaining a particular occupation as a public service, governments have declared it, and presumably therefore the quality of its practitioners, to be of public concern (Rowe, p. 54).

Being a teen football star was becoming a ticket to national fame. The big colleges built huge stadiums to hold the thousands who attended their games, and smaller schools tried to do the same, sometimes with disastrous financial consequences if they did not produce winning teams. The need to recruit winning players grew from this period in the history of the sport. Sports in which more young people themselves could participate, such as tennis and golf, rose dramatically in popularity during the decade. Australians demanded and got more golf courses, tennis courts, and swimming pools than ever before, and they used them to remain slim, fit, and tanned-a look that was becoming more fashionable as participatory sports became more available (Murray and Phillips, p. 54).

The extent of government interest in occupational training may thus stand as an indicator of how far government perceives a national economic mobilization task–a characteristic likely to lead to corporatist mechanisms of the new kind. Early in the 1970s the pace of corporatist change quickened; it is notable that the timing of this and nearly all preceding changes was not related to a change of government. The problems of the labor market–incomes, inflation, restrictive practices-remained high on the list of issues generating these developments, and attempts at tripartite incomes policies, both statutory and voluntary, were the most striking instances of corporatist policy style (Harriss, p. 73).

In general, one can discern increasing government involvement as problems were articulated and demands for action grew. There was also increasing demand for participation by affected interests, and attempts by government to respond to these by incorporating them; and, in some areas, a problem of unmanageability emerged as secular economic decline coincided with a global crisis (Ian Andrews, p. 49). Government’s room for maneuver was being reduced, and as it became increasingly dependent on organized groups to assist it in the task of maintaining order it became correspondingly difficult to mobilize those groups for constructive action. In a still sharply divided society, no government succeeded for long in winning support for concerted action based on deeply held perceptions of a shared national interest. Incomes policies crumbled as much under the strain of inter-union rivalries as because they could not reconcile the divide between wage-earner and profit-taker. Training boards degenerated into arenas in which individual firms could fight for larger grants and smaller levies; and unions could fight to the death to defend the principle that skill qualification should depend on the number of years spent in apprenticeship, not the ability to pass tests. Sport is a part of the social order of society and politics is very much about ‘social order’; the way in which we wish to live and organize our affairs. The question, therefore, is not whether or not politics should be involved in sport but rather ‘how’ politics should be involved. Until the 1960s central government played little or no part in sport; by the mid-eighties there were those who believed it played too large a part and that, in effect, sport had become an instrument of government’s foreign policy (Moore, p. 38).

During the sixties the coverage of international and national sports events increased dramatically in quantity and quality as media technology advanced and this continues today with satellite coverage of sport through new and existing channels. With television now in virtually every home, sports programs and events were watched by an increasing number of people. Voices were heard calling for a new look at the structure of Australian sport, many having seen and witnessed developments in other countries. The concept of physical recreation had gained ground; the belief that sport had a larger role to play in society was debated, and underlying it all the thoughts that Government should be in some way more involved were entering the minds of sports administrators (Moore, p. 32). For the national governing bodies of sport the results were to enhance their capability to develop, expand and compete with the new challenges now seen in the international arena. For the public at large there was to be, for the first time, a formal recognition that society had a responsibility to provide opportunities for the community to participate in sport and physical recreation.

There was much that was arbitrary and random about this set of institutions. It must be remembered that corporatist regulation is one of three options for the governance of a sector. The other two are: (1) direct government regulation without interest representation and (2) reliance on market forces, caveat emptor, backed up by various forms of legal redress in the event of flagrant malpractice. There is nothing predetermined about government’s choice between direct and intermediary regulation. Industrial safety was carried on through the former mechanism; since then it has been run through a corporatist body (Gran, p. 65). The weights and measures inspectorate is a non-corporatist departmental responsibility; but the grading of eggs is supervised by an agency containing producer representatives. Trying to discern a rationale for the particular pattern is as quixotic a task as producing a theory of why some occupations become professions and others do not. Any approach that starts from assumptions about basic or important functions without a strong alloy of ideas about political convenience, historical accident, being in the right place at the right time, and power plays will not take us far (Jackson and Andrews, p. 82).

Thus those corporate bodies that included trade unions were more likely to be downgraded than those (like the professional bodies, agricultural boards, and City institutions) that did not. Corporatist arrangements in manufacturing (like the NEDC) were more likely to be diminished than those in other areas of life And if a corporatist or quasi-corporatist form provided a means for increasing business influence, there would be no qualms about using it. Given that an institution was likely to be acceptable on these three grounds, this administration has, like its various predecessors in the post-war period, made use of corporatist forms when these provide a useful adjunct to its own authority. The rejection of labor as a major corporate partner is an important breach with a fairly lengthy tradition, but the general uneasiness over ‘new corporatist’ arrangements alongside complete tolerance of ‘old corporatist’ forms marks a return to the old Australian pattern (Cashman 28). Regulation: as well as representing members’ interests the organization also regulates members’ demands and has the ability to ‘deliver’ the membership, ensuring compliance with agreements reached with government. Implicit in this may be the existence of some form of sanction, pressure, or control to ensure compliance. Intermediation: the representative organization has a monopoly or at least privileged position in negotiation and consultation (Gran, p. 61).

Despite this activity there was, especially in the governing bodies of sport, considerable disquiet that nothing was being done to help in the international field as the opportunities for vital international competition were increasing rapidly as air travel became cheaper and more abundant (Cashman, p. 22). Traditional sport continued to attract considerable attention but other recreational affairs were not standing still. The enormous growth of outdoor activities, whilst welcomed generally, brought its own special problems. On the organizational front sports associations at regional and county level recognized the value of banding together in some common forum; they were not only able to elect their representatives to serve on Councils but were able to speak and act authoritatively for sport (Baker, p. 38).

There is therefore no overall evidence of a rejection of the corporatist approach, with government seeking to co-opt the powers of associations of interests as supplements to its own authority in difficult areas. The position of the professions is possibly changing, as the government comes increasingly to see them as sources of rigidity in labor utilization, but at the time of writing the practical effect has been limited to some minor arrangements, while a more radical attack on the autonomy, monopoly, and organization of the Bar is being heavily negotiated. One new corporatist initiative is so important that it demands special attention. This is the establishment of a new, statutorily based system of self-regulation for the financial institutions. As his account shows, this is a good example of the replacement of ‘old corporatist’ arrangements by something much more explicit and purposive. And the new structure, though it has been officially dubbed ‘deregulation’, in fact constitutes a pure case of an elaborate corporatist arrangement, with self-regulatory agencies being granted a legal license to police their sector according to agreed rules (Moore, p. 77). The old structure of a fragmented, highly autonomous set of professional bodies that he describes is another classic example of old corporatism, criticized for not being concerned with national economic tasks. While the government has rejected 1970s policies for mobilizing the economy, especially the manufacturing economy, through representative organizations, it has pursued a mobilization for this task of education and training institutions (Baker, p. 38).

The diversity and lack of precision of existing definitions of corporatist interest mediation, and indeed of alternatives such as ‘pressure group politics’, is readily apparent. In part this is symptomatic of social and political theory in general. It also reflects the fact that different contributions to the corporatist literature have looked at different subject-matter, at different scales, from differing perspectives, and for different purposes. It is possible, however, to derive from the literature a number of ‘defining characteristics’ of corporatist interest mediation. These are drawn from those contributions to the debate which have something to say about interest mediation per se, at a general level, rather than focusing on economic interests, or producer groups (Moore, p. 48). Together these characteristics imply a composite, ‘ideal-typical’ model of corporatist interest mediation. They represent a set of defining characteristics which could be used more generally to examine relations between government and a wide range of organized interests. To the extent that these various criteria can be identified in practice, the relations being examined can be said to be more or less ‘corporatist’ in character. These were councils of representatives of the local authority and the local sports clubs. Such local groups prospered in many areas and withered in others, often to reappear after an interval. They articulated the aspirations of the local communities by creating a lobby for facilities, running coaching courses, inter-town competitions, festivals of sport, sports personality of the year contests and generally attempting to do the work of the Sports Council.

This was the market the new facilities were to tap, along with those who had had their appetites whetted by something other than the traditional sports in schools. Squash, badminton, basketball, volleyball, judo and dance were all to benefit from plans for facility development that were to emerge towards the end of the 1960s, as was swimming with the massive swimming pool building program now envisaged. Sports requiring playing pitches were soon to be played on the first generation of artificial, so-called all-weather (a misnomer if ever there was) pitches. The fabric of sport in Australia is made up of many strands and sport is essentially a voluntary movement (Moore, p. 41). There has always been, and there still is, a school of thought that seeks some supreme body vested with all the power and influence exercised by the main sports bodies which would be responsible for directing sport in Australia. With participation in sport as the raison d’être of the Sports Council it saw its task initially as doing what it could to assist elite sport at international level and, at the same time, beginning the slow task of strengthening the administration and coaching structure of the national governing bodies of sport; building the base and strengthening the edifice.. Membership is effectively complete and, with a number of specific exceptions related primarily to the former interest rate cartel, has been historically stable. Informal consultation between government and individual building society personnel does take place on a recurring though essentially irregular basis. Ministers on occasion will consult chairmen or senior executives of the largest societies. Government also, for example, consulted representatives from the smaller societies over the new legislation. An intermediary body on the one hand integrates and represents members’ interests; on the other, it regulates and delivers the membership in return for privileges and benefits granted by government–in return for public status or admission into the process of government, to the exclusion of others, the whole process operating within a stable institutional structure. A number of the key definitional characteristics of corporatist intermediation set out earlier are encapsulated in the notion of reciprocity and the relationship between representation and regulation (Rowe, p. 87).

Conclusion

In sum, corporatism in sport creates new opportunities and benefits for individual sportsmen and teams. That set the pattern for the seventies, thus certain popular trends were seen although at that time little data was available. Outdoor sport grew considerably, while the demand for more indoor facilities for sport grew faster still, fuelled by the widening of the physical education syllabuses in schools as gymnasia and the new sports halls gave greater choice of activity. Spectator sports, such as football and cricket continued to decline in watching popularity; this decline taking its origin from the 1950s. Whether those who no longer watched had begun to play, or whether the changing social pattern of society took them into other activities, is not known as no records exist.

Works Cited

Baker &. A. Todd Boyd (eds) Out of Bounds: Sports, media and the politics of identity. Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1997
Boyle, R. Power Play: Sport, the media and popular culture Harlow:Longman, 2000
Cashman, R. Packer Cricket’ in David Headon, Joy Hooton & Donald Horne (eds) The Abundant Culture: Meaning & Significance in Everyday Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995.
Gran, P. Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History. Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Jackson, S. J., Andrews, D. L. Sport, Culture and Advertising: Identities, Commodities and the Politics of Representation. Routledge, 2004.
Moore, ‘A. Super League and the Decline of Working Class Culture’ Overland, 149, 1997
Ian Andrews, ‘From a Club to a Corporate Game: The Changing Face of Australian Football 1960-1999’ in J A Mangan & John Nauright, Sport in Australian Society Past and Present. London: Frank Cass, 2000.
Harriss, I. ‘Packer Cricket and Postmodernism’ in David Rowe and Geoff Lawrence, Sport and Leisure: Trends in Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.
Murray G. Phillips & Brett Hutchins, ‘From Independence to a Reconstituted Hegemony: Regby League and Television in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, 58, 1998, 134-147.
Rowe, ‘D. The Sports Industry: Playing for Pay’ in Popular Cultures: rock music, sport and the politics of pleasure. London: Sage, 1995
Tomlinson, A. The Game’s Up: Essays in the Cultural Analysis of sport. Leisure and popular culture. Aldershot: Algate, 1999.

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Corporatism: Sport Sector Opportunities and Benefits

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