Conclusion: The event stakeholder network

A global sport event is a meeting place for a range of different sectors and organisations, who either contribute or at least show an interest in gaining from the event. The previous sections on the globalisation of sport events have emphasised the event owners, media and hosts as the events’ central stakeholders, highlighting the increasing professionalism as a trait which will be integrated in my later analyses. For now, as an overview of this introduction to the global event and as a basis for fulfilling the thesis’ first objective, I conclude this introduction to the global sport event with a model for these stakeholders’

relations beginning with a description of what I mean by “stakeholder”.

Traditionally “stakeholders” are entities, which are vital for the event in question, have something at stake (money, reputation, etc.), and would often be divided into primary and secondary stakeholders depending who should benefit from an event’s values first (Freeman, 2008, pp. 41–42, 2010, fig. 1.2; Friedman et al., 2004, p. 174).³⁴ This is related to the stakeholder theory’s normative aim, namely to analyse “how business works at its best, and how it could work”. This means considering the “stockholders” as well as the stakeholders. The theory should “show how a business could be managed to take full account of its effects on and responsibilities towards stakeholders” (Freeman, 2010, p.

9).

Regarding sport events, previous studies based on a stakeholder approach have revealed a complexity in their stakeholder composition; which in my view renders the stakeholder approach described above insufficient (Parent, 2008; e.g. Parent & Chappelet, 2017). A host municipality for instance has a clear stake in the form of subsidies it provides, whereas the press has little at stake but a huge interest. Other event research has noticed this need for nuances too (Ferrand & Skirstad, 2015, pp. 67–68), and consequently my stakeholder model integrates all the organisations into one network, sorted according to

34 Private individuals are not per definition excluded from being stakeholders. It is possible that a private person has something at stake in an event, although at least in this project this is rarely the case.

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their social and organisational commitment and including stakeholders with both high and low levels of commitment (see Figure 3). Organisational commitment describes the stakeholder’s involvement in the risk management and ensuring of a sound running of the event’s planning and organisation, while social commitment goes beyond an obliga-tion to uphold sound event organisaobliga-tion. A stakeholder with a high social commitment is concerned with the event’s impact on the stakeholder’s community, e.g. the citizens or the members of an NGB.

Stakeholders with a high commitment on both scales are “engaged stakeholders” and will be the focus of this thesis. According to the research behind the model, the group typi-cally includes public authorities at the local, regional and national levels, local and na-tional sport organisations, and local sponsors. These highly engaged members often ini-tiate the bid in the first place by forming so-called “booster coalitions”. Here, they also agree (at least publicly) on a common goal and drive the process forward (D. Black, 2014, p. 16; Hiller, 2000, p. 450). Such coalitions have access to an existing bureaucracy and other resources, which makes them rather effective and professional – a necessity in the current event market (cf. above and Hayes & Karamichas, 2012c, p. 22). They access these resources through its members, and a contribution of resources might be a requirement for membership. These coalitions are efficient but not transparent, at least not until they include the public authorities, who are answerable to the public (Hiller, 2000, p. 440; cf.

Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006, pt. 1).³⁵ In theory, the inclusion of members represent-ing and answerable to the public would help coalitions reach the ultimate position for an engaged stakeholder, namely to make an argument which equals “the general interest”

(Horne, 2012, p. 38). However, as they are made up of various stakeholders, members often seek a broad appeal by promising several different outcomes instead (Wenner &

35 E.g. the IOC has only recently (October 2017) loosened their demand for a financial guarantee from the applicant’s government before considering an application, which hitherto had made public involvement a requirement regardless of the size of the public sector and its general relation to the sport (Livingstone, 2017).

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Billings, 2017, p. 23). These promises might be made to peers of the engaged stakehold-ers or the three additional stakeholder types with which the model operates, namely the

“allied”, “militant” and “passive” stakeholders.

Allied stakeholders have only a high organisational commitment. Typical examples would be media rights holders and event owners. Their primary source of influence is organisa-tional power based on contracts and ownership. Obviously, they also have a general so-cial commitment, but I do not see that the management of these interests depend as directly on the social outcomes of a specific event as it would be the case for the NGB or the host city. The international sport federation/owner has responsibility for managing the interests of its peers (the national member organisations), but I presume it handles these interests during several events. For the event owner, in contrast to the local host, an event is not an out-of-the-ordinary experience and their peers will not follow its pro-gress closely to ensure a specific outcome for them.

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Militant stakeholders have a high social commitment, which often shows itself in their strong opinions about how the event ought to be organised, for example out of concerns for the local environment or a general opposition to capitalism (cf. the grassroots and city-based NOlympics movements protesting against specific editions of the Olympics, particularly on a local level but also against the Olympics more generally (Robertson, 2019)). However, they have no direct say in the organisation of the event.

Finally, although the passive stakeholders make per default no forms of commitment to the event, other stakeholder groups might mobilise them. Here, it is relevant to deter-mine whether the media is making the public active by spurring enthusiasm or decreasing

Weak Organisational commitment High

Weak Social commitment High

Figure 3: An ideal typical sorting of sport event stakeholders according to their social and organisational commitment to the event.

Figure based on Ferrand & Skirstad (2015) and Girard & Sobczak (2012).

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it by applying a negative perspective (Hiller, 1998, p. 49; Schnitzer, Scheiber, et al., 2017, pp. 887, 898). Protests against the Olympics also show how agents from civil society can work successfully against an event as for instance in the case of the protests against the Munich bid for the Winter Games in 2022. These protests managed to seriously challenge the usual event logic that sport events per default are good experiences for a city (Könecke et al., 2016, pp. 22–23). Combined with the IOC’s demands for public support, this could indicate a future role for the public as an active stakeholder (IOC, 2017a, pp.

9–11). So far, public engagement has predominantly expressed itself as a preventative force and it remains to be seen if the public can also engage in a positive way and achieve a high organisational commitment. Parts of the public could for instance be involved through local sport organisations (Enjolras, 2003, pp. 7–8; Storm & Brandt, 2008, p. 135).

Stakeholders in international sport events are locally and globally active on their own, but they come together around the event. This section has provided an overview of the global trends and a model for the event stakeholders which I will return to in my empirical chap-ters following the overview of the local trends in chapter 5. Regarding the analysis, it is relevant to include two final remarks about the stakeholder theory. Firstly, the empirical chapters will also discuss the importance of the individuals which the stakeholder theory does not consider. Secondly, while the stakeholder theory emphasises the relevance of taking a stakeholder approach, it is more of a “framework” than a theory (Freeman, 2010, pp. 63–64). For the analysis of the stakeholders’ interactions I have other theories which are presented in chapter 3.³⁶ Prior to that, the next section elaborates on the object of interest for all the stakeholders: the event.

36 Some of these theories in their setup resemble various approaches previously described within stake-holder analysis (Bryson, 2004). However, I found it advantageous to use the theories described in chapter 3 as my only theoretical foundation as they provided both this approach and starting points for discussing the interpretation of these relations.

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