The Olympic Games Explained represents a comprehensive introduction to the central themes and background of the modern Games. This includes a consideration of ancient games, the modern revival at the end of the 19th Century and the progressive development of the Games throughout the 20th Century. The text considers a range of topics including: - The Ancient Olympics - The Media and the Olympics - Olympic Marketing and Sponsorship This Multidisciplinary text will seek to incorporate the theme of Olympism into other subject areas such as geography, history, art, media and business studies and...

An awesome festival of sporting excellence and competition, the Olympic Games have now evolved into a major international event with great cultural, political, economic and social importance.

The Olympic Games Explained is an introductory guide to the history and meaning of the four-yearly phenomenon that is the modern Olympic Games. The book provides a comprehensive overview of 'Olympism' from its Ancient Greek origins through the beginnings of the International Olympic Committee to the global Olympic Movement in the twenty-first century.

Each chapter offers a range of study...

This is the first book to address the link between culture and sport management. The aim is to demonstrate that culture profoundly affects how we research, teach and practice sport management. The book engages with the concept of culture both as an abstract analytical category and specific beliefs and practices. It recognizes that a single best way of managing does not exist; that the applicability of management theories may stop at national boundaries; and that fundamental cultural values act as a strong determinant to managerial ideology and practice. Culture makes the study of sport...

This is the definitive, officially-licensed account of the world's greatest sporting mega-event. It tells the complete story of the 2012 Games from inception, through the successful bidding process and the planning and preparation phase, to delivery, aftermath and legacy.

Modern Olympism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a philosophy of social reform that sought to use sport for the betterment of the world. It drew on a number of intellectual and material sources, including the ancient Greek heritage, philosophical ideas of Enlightenment, the English educational system, and the emerging spirit of industrial capitalism and internationalism. It is an eclectic and non-systematic body of knowledge, and has always been a controversial project. Indeed, in the words of its founder, Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), Olympism is an 'unfinished symphony'....

The book highlights 'new perspectives' on volunteerism in sport, covering frameworks, methods, context and variables on several levels from community sport clubs to international events. In analysing the processes of control within voluntary sport clubs, a new theoretical framework - critical realism (CR) - challenges how we think about theory and how scientific inquiry should proceed. Further themes raised are: Should sports clubs be viewed as a crossing between a traditional volunteer culture dominated by collective solidarity, and a modern volunteer culture focused on the individual...