The grobal in the sporting glocal

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Abstract
This article provides a counterpoint to analyses of contemporary sport culture that falsely polarize the global and the local, in a manner that tends to privilege, and indeed romanticize, expressions of the sporting local. Rather than treating them as mutually exclusive categories, this discussion seeks to further the understanding of the constitutive interdependence linking the (sporting) global and the (sporting) local. In looking to further the understanding of the contemporary sporting landscape, we offer an alternative approach that reinscribes the influence of the global in shaping structures, practices, and experiences of the sporting local. The processual and empirical continuum through which we conceptualize globalization is bounded by grobalization (the imperialistic ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations, and the like and their desire, indeed need, to impose themselves on various geographic areas) and glocalization (the interpenetration of the global and the local, resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas): the grobal and the glocal. We discuss four sport scenarios, and illustrate the manner in which they exhibit – in varying inflections and to varying intensities – the necessary, but never guaranteed, interpenetrative relationship between the grobal and the glocal. This is achieved by both problematizing the very possibility of the sporting local within conditions of intensive and extensive globalization (leading to the concept of the glocal), and simultaneously explicating the importance of the global (through the concept of the grobal) to the structure and experience of everyday sport cultures.

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