Download e-book for kindle: Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games (Routledge by Jules Boykoff

The Olympic video games became the world’s maximum media and advertising event—a international party of outstanding athletics gilded with company money. large firms vie for organization with the "Olympic photo" within the wish of gaining a global advertising viewers of billions.

In this provocative serious examine of the modern Olympics, Jules Boykoff argues that the video games became an immense deliberate financial system designed to protect the wealthy from chance whereas offering them with a spectacle to treasure. putting political economic system on the middle of the research, and drawing on interdisciplinary study in sociology, politics, geography, historical past, and economics, Boykoff develops an leading edge conception of "celebration capitalism", the manipulation of nation actors as companions that drives us in the direction of public–private partnerships within which the general public will pay and the personal gains. He argues that the Athens video games in 2004 marked the total emergence of occasion capitalism, with London 2012 representing its indispensable expression, characterised through a nation of exception, unfettered commercialism, repression of dissent, questionable sustainability claims, and the complicity of the mainstream media.

Controversial, hard, and forthright, this ebook opens up a desirable new road for realizing the modern Olympics within the context of worldwide capitalist society. it's crucial studying for anyone with an curiosity within the Olympic video games, the connection among game and society, or worldwide politics and tradition.