Page 89 - Sport Culture and the Media

70 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

of large-scale social, economic and cultural transformations (as occurred in
Chapter 1), and also to appreciate the specific ways in which that object is
desired or can be made to be or seem desirable.
Within the history of capitalist development, the sports media are not
essential commodities: they are not vital for the maintenance of life like food,
shelter and clothing, or ‘consumer durables’ that preserve food, wash clothes
or transport whole families to work and school. Nobody has ever died as a
direct result of media sport starvation, although passionate sports fans can do
striking impressions of zombies during TV blackouts. Seen in this way, media
sports texts are not very useful goods but they are, paradoxically, highly prized.
This is so because they exist in an economic environment where, as many goods
have become easier to mass produce and standardize, only a relatively small
proportion of their total price is attributable to the cost of raw materials,
labour and manufacture. Hence, the direct production cost of a compact disc or
a dress or a child’s toy can often be measured in pence and cents rather than in
multiple pounds and dollars. Where, then, is the value added and capital
accumulated? It is, increasingly, not in the material character of objects that
can be reassuringly touched and used, but in the immaterial nature of symbolic
goods (Hall 1989; Hesmondhalgh 2002). Value in this sense lies in design,
appearance and in the capacity to connect different economic processes that
exist in a complex interdependence (Hebdige 1989). An extensive and complex
theoretical debate (that can only be addressed briefly and synoptically here)
has been conducted since the late 1980s over the meaning of this development
(see, for example, Harvey 1989; Hirst and Zeitlin 1989; Giddens 1991; Kellner
1995; Dunn 1998; Dandaneau 2001). This wide-ranging debate is over such
far-reaching and difficult questions as:
• Are current circumstances an extension of the same ‘logic’ and process of
modernity (which we might call ‘advanced’, ‘late’ or ‘high’) that brought
industrialization, liberal democracy, humanism, and so on?
• Or have we moved on to a new ‘condition’ called postmodernity in which
our social, economic, political and cultural life radically differs from its
modernist predecessor?
• Has the mass production and consumption ‘regime’ pioneered by Henry Ford
in the car industry (Fordism) changed a little (to neo-Fordism) or been
replaced by a new, more targeted, smaller-scale and flexible way of producing
and consuming goods and services (post-Fordism)?
Posing such questions requires a command of a rather daunting language in
which terms like ‘flexible specialization’ and ‘reflexive accumulation’ compete
for theoretical and conceptual supremacy. In the context of this book, it is
necessary in the first instance only to be armed with the glossary of key terms