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This article addresses the relation between `mega-events' and time in modern society. `Mega-events', or international cultural and sport events such as the Olympic Games and World's Fairs, have an `extra-ordinary' status by virtue of their very large scale and their periodicity. Mega-event genres have had an enduring mass popularity in modernity since their creation in the late 19th century and continue to do so in a period of globalization. Drawing on recent analysis of mega-events the article suggests that this popularity derives from the significant positive and adaptive roles they continue to play in relation to the interpersonal and public structuring of time.

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In Mega-Events and Modernity (2000) 1 I reviewed the history, politics and sociology of the two great popular cultural mega-event genres at the heart of 19th and 20th century international public culture, namely Worlds Fairs or Expos and Olympic Games. The genres were analysed in relation to the growth of national and global dimensions of cultural organization in modernity. This chapter provides an opportunity to reflect on the themes and interests in that study. In particular it allows for some reflections on the relevance of 'modernity' understood as 'globalization' for mega-events, a theme which was undeveloped in the book. In order to explore the Olympic sport mega-event as a significant case of globalization, the chapter focuses on its mediated and mediaevent aspects.

The concept of citizenship -the nature of the citizen status and role, its rights, duties, and powers, and the nature of the community of citizens -is much used but little analyzed in social policy analysis. And, outside of political philosophy, it is surprisingly little used or analyzed in social theory in general. Some of the reasons for the relative neglect may have to do with the assumptions that ground the enterprise of political sociology and that render it, unlike "political economy," merely a department of sociology rather than a general version of social theory. These assumptions tend to hold that political phenomena like states, citizens, and their activities are dependent variables that can be understood and explained by reference to deeper historical and social forces. In the classic tradition of the social theory, social changes in the mode of production (Marx), in the rationalization process (Weber), and in the development of the division of labor (Durkheim) have all been used to explain political phenomena. Sociology's underlying suspicion of eighteenth century "bourgeois" individualism and contractarian political philosophy tends to be carried over against the notion of the citizen that may be assumed to embody them. Thus political sociology tends, when examining the political phenomena of citizen's actions, struggles and movements, to reveal their impotence, dependency, and in any case their ignorance, in respect of the powers of such phenomena as the state's bureaucracy, the ruling groups and elites, dominant and mystifying ideologies, and ultimately socioeconomic forces.Howeve;, the political action of citizens can be analyzed as having greater potential rationality and power than such accounts display. And both citizens and states can be treated analytically as having considerable and arguably increasing relative autonomy from economic forces. In this discussion of citizenship this relative autonomy of citizenship and its context will be as much a focus as their relative dependency on socioeco- Theory and Society 16:363-399 (1987) 9 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht -Printed in the Netherlands