Corporatising Sport, Gender and Development: postcolonial IR feminisms, transnational private governance and global corporate social engagement

Abstract

The ‘Girl Effect’ is a growing but understudied movement that assumes girls are catalysts capable of bringing social and economic change for their families, communities and countries. The evolving discourse associated with this movement holds profound implications for development programmes that focus on girls and use sport and physical activity to promote gender equality, challenge gender norms, and teach confidence and leadership skills. Increasingly sport, gender and development (sgd) interventions are funded and implemented by multinational corporations (mncs) as part of the mounting portfolio of corporate social responsibility (csr) initiatives in international development. Drawing on postcolonial feminist ir theory and recent literature on transnational private governance, this article considers how an mnc headquartered in the global North that funds a sgd programme informed by the ‘Girl Eeffect’ movement in the Two-Thirds World is implicated in the postcolonial contexts in which it operates. Qualitative research methods were used, including interviews with mnc csr staff members. The findings reveal three themes that speak to the colonial residue within corporate-funded sgd interventions: the power of brand authority; the importance of ‘authentic’ subaltern stories; and the politics of the ‘global’ sisterhood enmeshed in saving ‘distant’ others. The implications of these findings for sgd are discussed in terms of postcolonial feminist approaches to studying sport for development and peace more broadly.

Notes

I would like to express gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, and Third World Quarterly guest editors Simon C Darnell and David Black for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Dr Karen Mundy for her guidance and expertise in the areas of csr, global governance, and international development. Funding for this project was provided by the Lupina Foundation at the Munk School of Global Affairs (University of Toronto), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc).

1 Exceptions to this include M Giardina, ‘One day, one goal? puma, corporate philanthropy and the cultural politics of brand “Africa”’, Sport in Society, 13(1), 2010, pp 130–142; and R Levermore, ‘csr for development through sport: examining its potential and limitations’, Third World Quarterly, 31(2), 2010, pp 223–241.

2 In September 2006 the United Nations released a final report on the ‘achievements’ of the International Year of Sport and Physical Education which was in 2005. While mostly applauding the various entities (ie governments, ngos, mncs, etc) for elevating the profile of the ‘sport for development and peace’ movement throughout the UN theme year, the report concluded that more was to be done—particularly by the private sector—in order to build on the momentum and gain legitimacy behind this new movement: The UN requested that ‘Private sector sports companies and sport industry organizations are encouraged to take a lead role in Sport for Development and Peace … They are requested to address social and environmental impacts of operations and across supply chains; support and invest in sport-based development activities; bolster partnerships and inform the public about the values of sport’. United Nations, ‘Sport for development and peace: the way forward’, Report of the Secretary General, 2006, pp 1–21.

3 Z Bhanji, ‘Transnational corporations in education: filling the governance gap through new social norms and market multilateralism?’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 6(1), 2008, pp 55–73; P Newell & J Frynas, ‘Beyond csr? Business, poverty and social justice: an introduction’, Third World Quarterly, 28(4), 2007, pp 669–681; M Prieto-Carrón, P Lund-Thomsen, A Chan, A Muro & C Bhushan ,’Critical perspectives of csr and development: what we know, what we don't know, and what we need to know’, International Affairs, 82(5), 2006, pp 977–987; and A Mukherjee Reed & D Reed , ‘Partnerships for development: four models of business involvement’, Journal of Business Ethics, 90, 2009, pp 3–37.

4 VS Peterson & AS Runyan, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010; and G Steiner-Khamsi, ‘Donor logic in the era of Gates, Buffett, and Soros’, Current Issues in Comparative Education, 10, 2008, pp 10–15.

5 See J Cameron. & A Haanstra, ‘Development made sexy: how it happened and what it means’, Third World Quarterly, 29(8), 2008, pp 1475–1489; and S Ponte, LA Richey & M Baab, ‘Bono's Product (red) initiative: corporate social responsibility that solves the problems of “distant others”’, Third World Quarterly, 30(2), 2009, pp 301–317 for further discussions on the involvement of celebrities in development aid.

6 A Roy, ‘In her name: the gender order of global poverty management’, in AL Cazebas, E Reese & M Waller (eds), The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression and Women's Poverty, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007, pp 28–40; and Ö Sensoy & E Marshall, ‘Missionary girl power: saving the “Third World” one girl at a time’, Gender and Education, 22(3), 2010, pp 295–311.

7 UN Foundation, ‘The Girl Fund’, at http://www.unfoundation.org/donate/the-girl-fund.html, accessed 1 June 2010.

8 L Hayhurst, M MacNeill & W Frisby, ‘A postcolonial feminist approach to gender, development and Edusport’, in B Houlihan & M Green (eds), Handbook of Sport Development, London: Routledge, 2011, pp 353–367; and Roy, ‘In her name’. Following Esteva and Prakash, I will use the terms ‘One-Third World’ (to refer to the global North) and ‘Two-Thirds World’ (to refer to the global South). These terms represent the social minorities and majorities in both the North and South, while attempting to remove ideological and geographical binaries as found in other terms (eg North/South). See E Gustavo & MS Prakash, Grassroots Post-modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, London: Zed Books, 1998.

9 M Murphy, personal communication, 16 February 2011.

10 Hayhurst et al, ‘A postcolonial approach to sport, gender and development’.

11 M Saavedra, ‘Dillemmas and opportunities in gender and sport-in-development’, in R Levermore & A Beacom (eds), Sport and International Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp 124–155.

12 Interviewees from the mnc were concerned about having their identities and organisation's name revealed. For this reason, all participants and organisational identities included in this paper will remain anonymous.

13 Levermore, ‘csr for development through sport’, p 236.

14 FR Khan, R Westwood & DM Boje, ‘“I feel like a foreign agent”: NGOs and corporate social responsibility interventions into third world child labor', Human Relations, 7, pp 1–22.

15 UN, ‘Sport for development and peace’.

16 L Hayhurst, ‘The power to shape policy: charting sport for development policy discourses’, International Journal of Sport Policy, 1(2), 2009, pp 203–227.

17 Saavedra, ‘Dilemmas and opportunities in gender and sport-in-development’.

18 Ibid. Levermore's research identifies 16 csr for development initiatives that use sport, three of which specifically focus explicitly on gender, although almost all these programmes touch on gender issues. Levermore, ‘csr for development through sport’. Because of a lack of information, it is difficult to identify the number of sgd initiatives that are part of mnc's csr platforms at this point in time.

19 S Forde, Playing by Their Rules: Coastal Teenage Girls in Kenya on Life, Love and Football, Kifli: Moving the Goalposts, 2008; and T Kay, ‘Developing through sport: evidencing sport impacts on young people’, Sport in Society, 12(9), 2009, pp 1177–1191.

20 Forde, Playing by Their Rules, p 125.

21 Saavedra, ‘Dilemmas and opportunities in gender and sport-in-development’.

22 Sensoy & Marshall, ‘Missionary girl power’.

23 R Eyben, ‘International aid's choice of Copenhagen over Beijing’, Third World Quarterly, 27, 2006, pp 95–608. For example, sgd programmes such as ‘3 Sisters Adventure Trekking’ in Nepal focus on employing girls and women as trekkers for foreign tourists. The ngo equips local women with ecotourism skills so that they are able to find successful opportunities in that sector. Although a wonderful opportunity to make significant income (up to [euro]100 a month), the argument is that such programmes don't address the more structural gender inequalities these women face on a day-to-day basis.

24 D Black, ‘The ambiguities of development: implications for development through sport’, Sport in Society, 13(1), 2010, pp 121–129. Nederveen Pieterse suggests that the market meltdown of 2008 signifies the ‘end of neoliberalism’ and a shift to Keynesianism. He argues further (p 209) that ‘the long-drawn-out critiques of western economic, ideological and cultural hegemonies are gradually becoming superfluous. The major target of criticism of the previous period has become a background issue, still pertinent, but on the back burner. With American capitalism unravelling, who needs a critiquing of American ideologies?’. However, as I attempt to demonstrate through this paper, neoliberal tendencies in development (eg ngoisation, mncs as hegemons, investing in girls and women to improve a nation's economic performance, etc) are certainly current trends in development that should remain on the research agenda. See JN Pieterse, Development Theory, Los Angeles: Sage, 2010.

25 Levermore, ‘csr for development through sport’, p 236.

26 J Allouche & P Larouche, ‘The relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance: a survey’, in J Allouche (ed), Corporate Social Responsibility, New York: Palgrave, 2006, pp 3–41.

27 LMC Hayhurst & B Kidd, ‘Corporate social responsibility, sport and development’, in M Li, E Macintosh & G Bravo (eds), International Sport Management, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2011, pp 345–357.

28 M Friedman, cited in DJ Wood & RE Jones, ‘Research in corporate social performance: what have we learned?’, in DF Burlingame and DR Young (eds), Corporate Philanthropy at the Crossroads, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp 41–86.

29 Kidd & Hayhurst, ‘Corporate social responsibility, sport development and human rights’.

30 S King, Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

31 S King, ‘Marketing generosity: Avon's women's health programs and new trends in global community relations’, International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship, 3(3), 2001, pp 267–290.

32 Bhanji,‘Transnational corporations in education’, p 55.

33 B Heron, Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender, and the Helping Imperative, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007, p 148.

34 Ibid, p 7. It is important to point out that Heron's arguments pertaining to white women development workers in the Two-Thirds World are conclusions based on her own case study of gender and development. As such, her contentions simply reveal tendencies rather than defining development agents per se.

35 King, Pink Ribbons Inc; and Michael J Polonsky & Greg Wood, ‘Can the overcommercialization of cause-related marketing harm society?’, Journal of Macromarketing, 21, 2001, pp 8–22.

36 M Bailey, Marketing to Moms: Getting Your Share of the Trillion-Dollar Market, Ithaca, NY: Prima Lifestyles Press, 2002; and Sabrina Neeley & Tim Coffey, ‘Understanding the “four-eyed, four-legged” consumer: a segmentation analysis of US Moms’, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 15, 2007, pp 251–261.

37 LHM Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West, New York: Palgrave, 2002; and C McEwan, Postcolonialism and Development, London: Routledge, 2009.

38 AM Agathangelou & LHM Ling, ‘Power, borders, security, wealth: lessons of violence and desire from September 11’, International Studies Quarterly, 48, 2004, pp 517–538; and Peterson & Runyan, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium.

39 Agathangelou & Ling, ‘Power, borders, security, wealth’.

40 JL Himmelstein, Looking Good and Doing Good: Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Power, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

41 See S Banerjee, ‘Corporate social responsibility: the good, the bad and the ugly’, Critical Sociology, 34(1), 2008, pp 51–79; and T Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics, London: Duke University Press, 2007.

42 Khan et al, ‘I feel like a foreign agent’.

43 Ibid, p 18.

44 Newell & Frynas, ‘Beyond csr?’; and J Sharp, ‘Corporate social responsibility and development: an anthropological perspective’, Development Southern Africa, 23(2), 2006, pp 213–222.

45 U Idemudia,‘Conceptualising the csr and development debate: bridging existing analytical gaps’, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 29, 2008, pp 9–110.

46 J Ferguson & A Gupta, ‘Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality’, American Ethnologist, 29, 2002, pp 981–1002. Ferguson and Gupta's work builds on the work of Foucault's ‘governmentality’, which begins with the idea that ‘power relations have been progressively governmentalized … elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions. M Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in JD Faubion (ed), Michael Foucault: Power, New York: New Press, 2000, p 220.

47 CA Cutler, ‘The legitimacy of private transnational governance: experts and transnational market for force’, Socio-Economic Review, 8, pp 157–185; and TJ Biersteker & RB Hall, ‘Private authority as global governance’, in TJ Biersteker & RB Hall (eds), The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, London: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp 203–223.

48 Cutler, ‘The legitimacy of private transnational governance’; and J Smith, Social Movements for Global Democracy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

49 Ibid.

50 N Rose & P Miller, ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’, British Journal of Sociology, 46, 1992, pp 173–205.

51 Ibid, p 175.

52 Rose & Miller, ‘Political power beyond the state’.

53 Ibid, p 175.

54 For the larger dissertation, 33 interviews were conducted with staff from mnc, an international ngo and Southern ngo.

55 At the time of writing it was not known exactly what portion or percentage of mnc's funding goes from the international ngo directly into Southern ngo's funding, but from interviews it was revealed that the majority of this financial support goes to sgd projects (as opposed to, for example, supporting the overhead costs of the international ngo).

56 As required by the University of Toronto's Ethics Review Board, the names of these positions have been slightly altered in order to protect the identities of the research participants.

57 JW Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Traditions, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998.

58 Li, The Will to Improve; and L McDermott, ‘A governmental analysis of children “at risk” in a world of physical inactivity and obesity epidemics’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 24, 2007, pp 302–324.

59 Ibid, p 308.

60 Note that this project is distinct from the sgd project in Uganda. It is a separate sgd programme that mnc funded.

61 S Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2004.

62 McDermott, ‘A governmental analysis of children “at risk”‘, pp 308–309.

63 Ibid, p 309.

64 Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights.

65 King, Pink Ribbons Inc, p 482.

66 DM Boje & FR Khan, ‘Story-branding by empire entrepreneurs: Nike, child labour, and Pakistan's soccer ball industry’, Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, 22, 2009, pp 9–24.

67 The bottom of the pyramid model suggests that those residing in extreme poverty (four billion low-income consumers outside mainstream markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’) can be a ‘market’ in themselves that can be served with low-cost goods and services. See CK Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2005.

68 Giardina, ‘One day, one goal’; and Ponte et al, ‘Bono's Product (red) initiative’.

69 CT Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, London: Duke University Press, 2003; and Peterson & Runyan, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium.

70 Li, The Will to Improve.

71 L Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others’, American Anthropologist, 104, 2002, pp 788–789.

72 SC Darnell, ‘Sport for development and peace and the issue of inequality’, paper presented at the Canadian Political Science Association Conference, Montreal, Quebec, 2010.

73 Khan et al., ‘I feel like a foreign agent’, p 16.

74 See GS Cannella. & L Miller, ‘Constructing corporatist science: reconstituting the soul of American higher education’, Cultural Studies ↔Critical Methodologies, 8(1), 2008, p 26.

75 Abu-Lughod. ‘Do Muslim women really need saving?’, p 789.

76 J Sundberg, ‘Reconfiguring North–South solidarity: critical reflections on experiences of transnational resistance’, Antipode, 39(1), pp 144–196.