Unravelling legacy: a triadic actor-network theory approach to understanding the outcomes of mega events

Abstract

Mega events have recently attracted the attention of social scientists due to their important role for festival capitalism, urban regeneration and political propaganda. Their planning stage often produces elaborate strategies for maximising the benefits before, during and after the actual event, which has given rise to interdisciplinary studies of event legacy and leveraging. This paper aims to advance ongoing debates on the outcomes of sports mega events by bringing together the literatures on mega event legacy, leveraging and actor-network theory. Drawing on a case study on the usage of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the main legacy of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the paper develops a novel conceptual framework for researching the multi-scalar outcomes of mega events and locating respective studies within the resulting wider research agenda. The proposed concept extends Preuss' (2007) legacy cube in two ways by visualising its five research dimensions in the legacy rings and using three rather than two sub-dimensions per ring, thereby replacing the restrictive dyads of dualistic thinking through more comprehensive but still manageable triads of triadic thought (Jöns, 2006).

Estimating the Perceived Socio-Economic Impacts of Hosting Large-Scale Sport Tourism Events

“…On the other hand, hosting mega sport events like the Olympics and other international sport championships has become quite disputable (Giampiccoli et al 2015;Getz and Page 2016;Müller 2017). While large international events are certainly more attractive to international attendees and media than small-scale events, they also generate more visible and invisible negative effects which are, according to Dawson and Jöns (2018), often neglected when planning the legacy of an event. The negative impacts of both small-and large-scale sport events have recently received growing attention and are frequently studied together with positive ones (e.g., Ahmed 2017; Caiazza and Audretsch 2015; Gaudette et al 2017;Kim and Walker 2012;Kim et al 2015;Konstantaki and Wickens 2010;Meurer and Lins 2018;Ntloko and Swart 2008;Njoroge et al 2017;Lesjak et al 2014;Ritchie et al 2009;Zhou and Ap 2009).…”

Overtourism and Medium Scale Sporting Events Organisations—the Perception of Negative Externalities by Host Residents

“…In most cases, negative (Table 1) legacies are often neglected when planning and evaluating an event [77]. Sporting events could also produce excessive spending, increased taxes and higher costs of living for residents [25,78,79].…”

Boundary-crossing academic mobilities in glocal knowledge economies: new research agendas based on triadic thought

“…In the grand narratives of social theory, dynamic hybrids bridge the gap/s between "the world" and "words about the world"-or between matter and form-, a divide Latour (1999b, 193) called "the modernist settlement", in which "objects were housed within nature and subjects within society." ii The notion of a trinity of actants has been discussed in different empirical contexts, such as changing geographies of Hungarian banking (Jöns 2001), the nature, geographies, and outcomes of transnational academic mobility in different disciplines and research practices (Jöns 2003(Jöns , 2006(Jöns , 2007, performer dance training (Camilleri 2015), robotic technologies (Del Casino 2016), and mega-event legacy theory (Dawson and Jöns 2017). In the context of boundary-crossing academic mobilities, the concept suggests three broader research perspectives, namely (1) the agency, movement, and interaction of people and other dynamic hybrids; (2) their ideas, imaginations, and emotions; and, as Gunter and Raghuram (2017) stress in this special issue, (3) the wide range of materialities that constitute research, teaching, and learning (Table 1).…”

“…In the following, I build on the convincing critique by geographer Russell King (2002, 89) of "the old dichotomies of migration study"-such as mobility/migration, internal/international, and temporary/permanent-to develop the twofold argument that there is a need for more multidimensional and collective theorizations of academic mobilities and migration, and that such theorizations could be enriched by replacing some of the restrictive dyads of dualistic thinking through more diverse but still manageable triads of triadic thought. In other words, I aim to illustrate how attempts to compare the empirical findings of a proliferating number of empirical case studies on academic mobilities-to understand the studies' respective viewpoints, discuss their context-specific intellectual contributions, and sketch new research agendas-could benefit from using three rather than two conceptual categories-or triads rather than dyads-because triadic thought accounts for a greater variety of increasingly complex research perspectives, while still providing manageable and comprehensible conceptual orderings (Jöns 2006;Dawson and Jöns 2017).…”