the sociology of 'Team GB'

After three days at Glastonbury a few years ago, I decided that hygiene was a capitalist conspiracy and that tie-dye was a reasonable sartorial option. It can happen to anyone. By the same token, now is not the time for a sober analysis of what is going on with the London Olympics. Serotonin levels need a chance to flatten out again before anything very intelligent can be said. But I'm too curious about this whole 'Team GB' phenomenon not to hazard some theoretical guesses.

At present, Britain sits third in the Olympics medals table, behind the USA and China, with 16 gold medals, and politicians and pundits feverishly speculating about what this means for British politics and society. What, everyone wants to know, do all these medals say about Britain? What, precisely, are the British up to, when they find themselves third behind two huge global superpowers? And how about the ethnicity of our winners? What does that say about Britain?

The most obvious answer is "nothing at all". The great conjuring trick of the Olympics is to connect the behaviour of a few hundred fitness freaks with nationalist iconography and imagined community. The hosts are granted even greater freedom to conjure, with the opening ceremony and benign celebrities framing everything that comes after. Hence Danny Boyle's portrayal of the industrial revolution is somehow of a piece with the fact that Jessica Ennis is mixed-race, thanks to coincidences of Olympic time and space. It's been done thrillingly, although magnification of scale has always been one of the greatest political conjuring tricks.

But maybe there is more of a connection here. Maybe there is something which connects 'Britain' and 'Team GB', beyond the sheer numbing force of Union Jack repetition. What can we plausibly say about the sociology here? How to interpret this sporting oddity?

Interpreting Team GB requires us to go back to the mid-1990s, when Britain was led by the first Prime Minister to care deeply about sport, John Major. Major introduced the National Lottery in 1994, which later funded various elite athletics programmes. Then in 1996 Britain suffered the apparent ignominy of winning just a single gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics, leading to drastic improvement measures focused on elite performance. From that low-point, everything began to change, such that by 2008, Team GB came fourth in the medals table, hitting the target set for it by UK Sport's 'UK Performance System'.

As with any management target, the only thing to do after it has been hit is to raise it, so the target for 2012 was to win even more medals. In November last year, the Chief Executive of UK Sport said:

We will be top four in the medal table at the [2012] Olympics and second at the Paralympics, and we'll win more medals across more sports. In 2011 we've had a more successful year than the year prior to Beijing. I can be confident because of where we are and what the current performances indicate.

Iain Hacking's book, The Taming of Chance, is a history of statistics, but the title might equally refer to British elite sports management.  

Of course one can - and should - ignore the infrastructure of elite sports management when enjoying characters such as Bradley Wiggins and Mo Farah. It is far better to believe that the metaphysical hand of 'Britain' lies behind the heroism of both, and not the physical hand of money, 'governance' and 'leadership'. It's only after a play is over that the audience should start to reflect on the quality of the lighting, acting and set design. But, in the calm before the next storm of British medals, let's at least admit that it makes more sense to attribute agency to, well, governing agencies, than it does to some ghostly apparition known as 'Britain'. And before we all slap ourselves too hard on the back for the fact that GB is now beating China and USA for 'per capita medals', lets also remind ourselves that if we divide our medal haul by our rate of GDP growth, we do better still (around infinity, by my calculations...). National sports policy was, after all, invented by the Soviet Union in an effort to further distract from the growing chasm separating communist from capitalist wealth creation. Under George Osborne's watchful eye, Team GB inherits that mantle.

Three questions follow from this analysis, which may point towards something sociologically significant. Firstly, if we can turn around elite sports in the space of 15 years using business management techniques, why can't we manage our businesses better? Time and again, Britain confronts a curiosity: we have a far better record in applying private sector management techniques beyond the business world, than we do in applying them within the business world.

This has been seen principally in the public sector. In its enthusiasm for British innovations such as the world wide web, Danny Boyle's ceremony ommitted some of the most significant of the past thirty years: privatisation, new public management and PFI. We are quite brilliant when it comes to making non-businesses more business-like. We are far less good when it comes to making actual businessess succeed (which has quite a bit to do with out old friends in the City of London). Britain has performed magnificently at injecting a business mentality into the highest echelons of cycling, athletics and, in non-Olympian fields, cricket. This may indeed tell us something about who 'we' are.

Secondly, why, therefore, has public sector reform not succeeded to a greater extent? If we can overhaul athletics in 15 years (and cricket in under a decade), to make it truly world class, why not the same for public services? The answer probably lies in the way that sport already possesses certain character traits of the business world. In particular, sport is a form of organisation in which it is perfectly legitimate to dump the losers, and focus only on likely winners. As any strategy consultant knows, the art of competitiveness is to invest heavily in areas where one has some advantage and is likely to win. Supporting winners is partly about abandoning losers, or at least governing them in ways that are most supportive of future winners. In this respect, sport resembles the business world in important ways that the public sector does not. Applying private sector management techniques to sport is therefore a more natural fit than applying them to the NHS.

Thirdly, why has England failed to achieve similar things in the sport it cares most about, namely football. When Germany fielded a terrible team at Euro 2000, the sporting authorities responded just as Britain's did after Atlanta 1996, revamping the infrastructure from top to bottom, in the interests of elite success, producing the magnificent team of 2010 and 2012. Why can't England do this? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that English football is already too internal to capitalism. What we specialise in, as a nation, is taking private sector management techniques, and exporting them into areas which are amenable to a logic of competitiveness, but which are largely uncomodified. While individual Premiership football teams might be improved by strength of managerial character, no managerial innovation can transform the entire culture of John Terry, Adidas, Ashley Cole and Sky Sports. This world already has its own powerful norms of performance evaluation, dominated by money, power and ego, to an extent that no 'Leadership Performance System' can make any inroads into. Unlike the comparatively innocent worlds of cycling or cricket, it is pre-commodified.

So, yes, Team GB tells us something about who we are. We are not good at business, and we may not actually be very good at sport. But we have some extraordinary gift for applying management philosophy, to new fields, so long as those fields a) treat inequality as a good thing (i.e. they are competitive) and b) do not reduce that inequality purely to money. The Olympics fits very neatly into that space. And if you want another example of an institution being brilliantly reinvented through business management, and which also celebrates uncommodified inequality, consider the other great British zero-to-hero story of the past 15 years: the Royal Family.

Update: this interesting BBC article on Team GB funding and strategy confirms much of the above.

Comments

[pete]

If the Olympics is a really about management technique, can we use the eventual winner to determine whether America or China has the best management system?

As to why we can't turn around a business in fifteen years, well, the "generation time" in sport is much shorter; after fifteen years a ten year old will be approaching the the peak of their athletic powers (cf twenty-five year old Andy Murray). But in business, you're looking at—what?—forty years to reach the top.

[Ian C]

Agree with all this, but the point that we are excellent at applying business techniques to non-business activities needs a significant qualification. We are definitely world leaders in insisting on doing this, and persuading elites that it makes sense, but the results are mixed, to put it mildly. As someone who once inherited a botched PFI contract to oversee (and is there any other kind?), I suspect that a lot of the transfer of business philosophy has made parts of the public and voluntary sector less successful and more liable to the kinds of dysfunction you see in the UK private sector.

[The Golden Silence]

The reference to the Soviet Union's sporting ideology appears apposite, it's just been diluted and updated for our "post-ideological" society... This PR behemoth is about stemming the flight from the Union of the celtic nations (Murray and the Welsh guys playing football), relegating economic misery and foreign policy inadequacy (Syria) to the section after (!) the sports news, and encouraging property-based speculation in London (because we all know how well that worked the last time).

Let's not forget this system of "picking winners" has been funded by State monies - whether it was as infrastructural investment, (re-)direction of lottery funds or public broadcasting's support of the endeavour in the attraction of sponsorship to individuals and teams. Go, Team Sky! Go, Team GB.

If someone had the ludicrous idea of dedicating that amount of money, labour and commitment to public services, or even industrial policy, that would be interesting. Not least because I'm sure we have enough performance systems, league tables and the like to start apportioning medals...

[Will Davies]

In answer to Pete, there is some sort of analogy here, in that Chinese competitiveness is still based in surplus quantity of labour, whereas (at least the rhetoric says) US competitiveness is about quality/training.

Amusingly, this blog post has been widely tweeted... in Australia. In 2008, they accused GB of only succeeding in the 'sitting down sports'. Now they can add sociology as grist to the mill!

[Alex]

1st PM to care deeply about sport?

Clement Attlee, cricket obsessive. Or Ted Heath, who actually competed in serious sport while in office, paying his own way?* Countless Tories, horses and blasting grouse out of the sky.

I take it you're defining sport as "sports I care about"? Or "sport excluding the posh ones, and cricket even though it's not necessarily posh outside Lord's but it's sort of tory-y except for Attlee but then he achieved stuff and therefore wasn't a proper socialist, QED"?

[Dave]

I think related to English football's failure is the issue of coaching; you take a standard empiricist approach which scorns the very notion of coaching education and add in the poisonous short-termist politics of the game (which arise out of managerialism; all the actors are relentlessly focussed on private goals, not sports-wide concerns).

In germany, the clubs came together with the national association to deliver the reforms which have subsequently borne fruit. They didn't see their interests as opposed, but complimentary. Not so here, where the larger clubs have consistently been focussed on their own goals and seen them as mutually exclusive to something called 'the national interest'.

It helps that in Germany, clubs are essentially mutuals, and enforced as such, whereas here, they have always been private fiefdoms which increasingly saw their self-interest from the 1980s onwards in light of neo-liberal canards (as opposed to previous decades of self-interest, which was essentially feudal enjoyment of property by lords).

In Germany too, there's a stronger approach to regulation (because the clubs have not managed to neuter the governing body) and comfort with theory. In England, the team manager of a club in the Premier League must have the UEFA Pro licence. In Germany, that extends to every member of the coaching staff down to the third tier of football. UEFA A and B licences are required for working at amateur and junior clubs respectively; here such are 'aspirations'.

[Will Davies]

Interesting, Dave. One curiosity is that sufficient money and oligarchic desire *does* seem capable of turning around a Premiership club, albeit by changing all of the players along the way. Whereas sufficient money and desire does not seem capable of turning around the England team. Fabio Capello's appointment and pay-packet was basically an attempt to ape the success of Chelsea/Mourinho (and now Man City/Mancini), though I think Capello was paid *even more*. But the strategy failed miserably.

Obviously Capello couldn't simply upgrade the squad, but then the quality of the individual players was supposedly not a problem circa 2008.

[Dave]

The causes of England's failures are long debated, and in many respect work as a Rorschach test for what one feels are problems anyway (lack of desire / too much money / decline in national affect / too many foreigners etc).

What is clear is that England doesn't suffer from the lack of resources to tackle this issue should it wish to do so; in other words, this is a failure of politics, not economics. It's also clear that there is a stunning failure for the bigger clubs to conceive of having any role in creating conditions for the national team to succeed. Partly that's unsurprising; most of the owners of top clubs owe national allegiance - if at all - to someone other than England.

But the problem long predates that, and is more related to the longstanding split between the Football League and the FA, where the latter saw the former as cannibalising its resources.

Money can be deployed at club level, because the club has primacy; it employs the players and pays their salaries and none need the national body to help (unlike most sub Premiership rugby clubs, and most county cricket clubs). It's no surprise to me that the only time English football has progressed in the modern era on its own efforts, it did so at a time when clubs were still in an economic funk, and players couldn't achieve glory through club football due to the European ban.

[Account Deleted]

England's ranking in football is an accurate reflection of its resources. Last 8 in Europe and last 16 in the world are a fair return. We unreasonably expect more because of historical conceit and the relative over-performance of our domestic clubs in Europe (largely a money factor).

Germany have more resources (i.e. quantum of decent players) so normally do a bit better. This is thrown into greater relief by their domestic clubs relative underperformance. Spain are benefiting from a golden generation (this does happen, and largely by chance) and the relative contrast of historic underperformance. Like France before them, they will fade back to roughly England's level in a decade.

Team GB have done relatively well at the Olympics because the sports are biased so heavily towards areas we indulge/invest in, such as rowing, cycling, dancing horses etc. If the sports chosen were only those played by a majority of the world's population, and the number of medals reflected the scale of participation, then GB would probably be around 16th in the table.

Team GB's 3rd position (at the mo') tells us more about the sociology of the Olympics than it does about Britain.

[Will Davies]

I know what you mean, but it's ironic that you use the expression 'England's ranking', given this new absurdity.

This chunk from the BBC article I link to is significant, in view of your comment:

"We have identified four sports where there is virtually no chance that anyone from a poor country can win a medal - equestrian, sailing, cycling and swimming," says Prof Forrest.

He points to a study suggesting there is one swimming pool for every six million people in Ethiopia.

Wrestling, judo, weightlifting and gymnastics, he says, tend to be the best sports for developing nations.