• topic on flint youth and the globalizing sports industry is fascinating
• In addition to globalization and sports literature, you can also include
  • a dicussion on the deindustrialization in North American cities
    • and the consequences on employment opportunities,
    • especially among young African american males (see William Wilson on The Truely Disadvantaged),
  • also on the integration of global labor market (Andrew Ross at NYU has written a lot on precarious work conditions)
• focus on the topic of the global spread of sports (and sports professionals)
• http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal

Scaling Sport: A Globalizing Industry with Local Impact

Introduction

Globalization studies regularly include discussions regarding scale but fail to provide sufficient analysis of the individual identity when describing social movements.  When individuals or small groups are discussed in international political economy journals, the research is often limited to “transnational corporate executives, globalizing bureaucrats, politicians and professionals, or consumerists elites” (Sklair, 1997).

“Globalization has helped to reinvigorate or newly invent a host of substate localisms as well as a diverse array of transborder solidarities” (Scholte, 1996).

Scholte (1996) explained that in America during the 1960′s, “nationhood was the locus of group identity and solidarity that invariably prevailed ‘when the chips were down’.”  She argues that “the nationality principle did generally rank above, and override, alternative potential frameworks of collective association, e.g. the smaller scale locality, larger-scale region, religious faith, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age and so on.”

Why Scale?

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Why Not Identity?

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Why Identity?

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Social Character Steers Individual Direction

Social character was modeled by Stephenson (1988) to follow three distinct trajectories.  The models allows researchers to give thought to the direction of the individual when analyzing social movements.  In the case of Flint, the movement is from an industrial economy to a service economy.  Therefore, it is possible to use Stephenson’s social character directional model to explain the social process from the perspective of the individual.

Stephenson describes three social character trajectories that can exist as the individual’s mindset: (i) tradition-direction; (ii) other-direction; and (iii) inner-direction.

“Tradition-direction is a dependency on conformity to tradition, by both institutions and individuals of a society.” (Stephenson, 1988)

“Other-direction is a type of social character which apparently supports the ‘new middle class in the United States.  Its quality is a certain sensitivity to one’s peers; its characteristic is the impermanence and fluctuating nature of the new American’s goals rather than his internalized values” (Stephenson, 1988).  Other-direction fits the needs of an affluent society.

Inner-direction is “dependent upon inner beliefs, upon early internalizations which fix the person’s character.  [It] puts emphasis upon the strength of character needed by Western men to break away from feudal and traditional ties… and has brought about sharp segregations into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.”  (Stephenson, 1988)

Media/Frames

A study conducted by Aday (2006) explained the effect of media framesetting in a sample group.  He discovered that individual’s perceptions of crime in their local communities did not necessary stem from precise witness of such events.  In the study, people did not actually read stories about U.S. crime or crime in their community.  “Rather, they read stories about local crime in another community geographically and culturally distant from their own and yet still found crime to be a particularly salient problem facing the nation and their city.”  Aday concluded those results showed another strong example of the first-level agenda-setting power of the mass media.

“Frames have to do with work, and fantasy chains have to do with play.” (Wenner, 1989; Stephenson, 1988)

more stuff i’m not using

Industrialization has long been understood as one of the most prominent indicators of growth for developing countries (Wong & Yip, 1999).  Limiting the unit of analysis to a country immediately forms the perspective of the research.  Brenner (1998) offered a thorough approach to rescaling through an in-depth look at post-Fordist forms of global industrialization that exist in global cities.

Non-global locations, like Haiti, often hold a dependence on aid.  Even so, Haiti has created a development strategy that seeks to “design an economic development plan which satisfies the renewed poverty reduction imperative but which is not at variance with processes of globalization and neoliberal market rules

A refined measure of general growth is economic growth, which has been shown to be stimulated by export growth (Xu, 1998).