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Sport Business Centre public seminar considers value of strategic thinking

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This post was contributed by Nick Eisen, Business Engagement Reporter, Birkbeck School of Business, Economics and Informatics

Image courtesy of Andy Watson-Smith under CC via Flickr.com

Sport can play an important role in the UK’s health and prosperity. To fulfil that role the many different elements of UK sport must find a strategy around which to unite – and through which to engage individuals and organisations at all levels, local, national and international.

This message emerged in a public seminar organised by the Sport Business Centre in Birkbeck’s School of Business, Economics and Informatics.

Entitled public Affairs in Sport and Business: How to Influence the Influencers, the seminar took place on Monday 26 October at the British Medical Association (BMA) in Tavistock Square.

The evening was a forum for panellists and audience, including prominent representatives from various sports, to debate a subject given added urgency by the impending government spending review on 25 November, when cuts in many areas are likely, emphasising the challenge the sports community faces in communicating and gaining support to enable the contributions sports can make to society.

The event also demonstrated the Sport Business Centre’s role as a hub and meeting point for academics, students, industry professionals, members of the public and others, where they can discuss and develop ideas, initiatives and ongoing working relationships.

On the panel were:

What is public affairs?

The session began with a definition of terms (from Ben Andersen-Tuffnell). Public affairs were seen as the management of an organisation’s interaction with stakeholders, particularly regarding reputation or policy goals, which can set a tone for debates that may decide legislation the organisation must navigate if it is to prosper.

An effective public affairs strategy requires careful planning: identifying stakeholders, many of which may have conflicting interests, from local and regional to national and international levels; considering the influences upon and of each stakeholder (the loudest voices are not always the most influential); and tailoring bottom-up and top-down approaches to suit different circumstances and communicate the message.

That message has to be well prepared for different audiences, succinct, with clear aims and vision, and based on evidence. In turn, the process of communication has to be similarly well-planned and responsive to circumstances.

Tactics versus strategy

When the seminar considered this outline in terms of sport, the sector was seen to have prioritised tactics over strategy, short-term survival over long-term goals, one possible reason being the comparative difficulty in measuring the return on investment of a public affairs strategy with a 20 or 30-year view, the benefits of which might be easier to acknowledge than to quantify.

In pursuit of that longer-term view, an observation from the floor found support for the idea that sport could look to the House of Lords, recognised as a valuable source of expertise and experience (such as that of Paralympic Champion Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson or of Olympic Champion and Ambassador, Olympic Legacy, Lord Sebastian Coe), where the status of members has allowed debates to take longer-term perspectives and to offer more space for alternative views, less wedded to party politics and the short-term funding cycles of governments and the House of Commons.

Baroness Grey-Thompson and Lord Coe are just two of UK sport’s powerful supporters; and the seminar noted the sector’s considerable assets, in the form of celebrated, popular events and individuals, to help promote an overall strategy – even more important now, with fundamental change to sports funding expected after November’s government review and with the Rio Olympics in 2016.

To implement such a strategic goal the need was to emphasise the value of sport in promoting physical, emotional, intellectual, social, environmental and economic wellbeing via widespread participation in activities that could help provide positive alternatives to antisocial behaviour and nurture happier, healthier individuals. The positive profile of elite sport could be used to help increase such participation. The emphasis was therefore on top-level sporting excellence as a means to an end rather than end in itself.

Looking beyond the DCMS

Given that vision of sport as contributing to various aspects of health, the sector could focus on its relevance to many different areas apart from the obvious ones, and on establishing relationships with government departments other than the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), important though that is. The Department of Education is one of those other departments, with 80% of Sports Leaders UK’s remit focusing on working with schools and colleges, including helping young people use sport to develop leadership skills that can then be applied in work and other areas.

Another cited example was the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as the sports-related concept of active travel such as walking or cycling could be jointly promoted as reducing pollution from cars or buses and benefiting the environment as well as individuals’ health; and that link between appropriate sporting activity and health immediately suggests joint initiatives with the Department of Health and the NHS.

In terms of specific schemes, the role of Manchester City and its Etihad Campus project in regenerating a large area of Manchester was cited (by Dominic Goggins) as another example of sport’s wider social role. The regeneration is in turn set to reward the football club, with new links to local organisations and even China, following the inclusion of the campus on the Chinese itinerary for the country’s recent state visit.

State of play

While Etihad showed what could be achieved, it was also seen to exemplify the prominence of individual projects compared with an absence of an overall sports strategy, with projects existing in “silos” rather as part of a coordinated whole. Individual groups might have strategies, but not sport as one sector.

The seminar debated that, in this respect, sport differed from the arts, to which it looks by way of comparison, because sports bodies have not had to combine their efforts before, (funding changes are likely to alter this), and because it has only become professional recently, relative to sectors such as the arts.

So if there was a national sports strategy, what might it look like? The seminar debated that the strategic goal could be to help make Britain the most physically active nation in the world by 2020-2025. In this, members of the panel noted that the Sport and Recreation Alliance, the umbrella body for the national governing bodies of sport, might be able to play a more strategic role.

However, the feeling was that to embark on this would require a shift towards strategic thinking that may have started but still has a long way to go, that this start has come too late to be effective in the coming spending review, and that political support for such a strategy is currently low.

The UK’s gap between sporting vision and implementation was seen as significant and there was an observed need to learn from missed opportunities. In this context, while London 2012 was seen to show what coordination across many groups over a clear strategy could achieve, that success was partial.

For example, could the 500,000 people who had signed up in 2005 as volunteers for London 2012 have been given more training and involvement in sport in those seven years pre-2012, especially given UK sport’s reliance on volunteers?

Also related to 2012, an audience member remarked that the Olympic pool in Stratford was expensive to use and largely empty, with a school having to fundraise to pay for slots, rather than gaining central support and encouragement to use the pool.

Opportunities and challenges

The panellists’ presentations and subsequent question-and-answer session moved at a rapid pace, covering a great deal of ground in the allotted time and providing an initial platform for thought-provoking ideas.

The fact that the distinguished headquarters of the BMA was the venue for this Sport Business Centre event reflected the role of sport in promoting health and the grounds for cooperation between different bodies in promoting sport.

Overall, there was a sense that Britain’s sporting achievements offer inspiring opportunities to promote public health, and that the country faces considerable challenges in creating an environment to grasp those opportunities.

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Why Should Britain keep its Human Rights Act?

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This post was contributed by Devin Frank Law (LLM) graduate. Devin attended Bianca Jagger’s speech at the School of Law’s annual Patrick McAuslan Lecture on Friday, November 6  

Bianca Jagger

Bianca Jagger

We all see the signs in the tube, listen to the debates in the evening news and read the contrasting opinions in the Daily Mail and The Guardian.

Should David Cameron’s majority government scrap the Human Rights Act? Should they lead us out of the Convention of Europe? Should the UK exit the European Union?

On Friday 6 November 2015 long-time human rights activist and the Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador Bianca Jagger spoke at Birkbeck to give an enlightened and informative perspective on the UK’s current human rights debate.

While Bianca’s talk did indeed have the emotion, humour and flair one might expect from a human rights rockstar (figuratively speaking) — her talk was also a well-researched and academically sound historical analysis of how Britain developed its long standing and legally robust human rights tradition.

From Magna Carta to migrant crisis

Bianca began her talk by reminding us that Britain was not always a democracy governed by the rule of law. For most of its existence England had a Monarch who answered neither to Parliament nor the people and governed with absolute authority. In the year 1215 this began to change when King John bound himself to the Magna Carta; however, and as Bianca persuasively argued, the principles emanating out of the Magna Carta took 800 years to root themselves in law culminating with the 1998 Act of Parliament — the Human Rights Act.

We were also reminded throughout Bianca’s talk that 730 years after the Magna Carta the people of Europe endured the worst abuse of authority and government power in the continent’s history. In the context of the current debate – should the UK leave the council of Europe – Bianca reminded us that following the horrors of the Second World War, the general consensus of ‘never again’ UK authorities led the way in drafting and establishing the 1950 European Convention of Human Rights.

In the context of the current migration crisis Bianca did state that 65 years after the ratification of the European convention of Human Rights, it’s odd and indeed counterintuitive that in the midst of yet another humanitarian catastrophe, British Politicians are looking to reduce and take away the rights of the people.

One might argue that British politicians are simply looking for political ways to reduce their moral, ethical and legal responsibilities; however, and through her talk, Bianca argued that ‘our’ human rights are the result of hard fought battles and elements of British Society that we the people must defend.

A weak UK Human Rights Act

Bianca JaggerThe underlining message and golden thread of Bianca’s talk was that human rights belong to the people and are there to protect the people. Everyday otherwise normal people rely on their human rights in housing and employment tribunals, in cases against their local councils and in situations where individual police officers attempt to overstep their authority. An important example is the relationship between our democratic duties as citizens and our right to protest when we feel that our political representatives have led us astray.

In closing this blog, I will attempt to leave you with a rather simplistic observation. Bianca’s argument is that we need our human rights and any attempt to weaken our legal rights is an attack on the society we have spent 800 years building.

However, I would point out the Britain’s Human Right’s legal framework is already weak. Compared to other similar countries, Germany or Canada for example, the UK’s Human Right’s Act is incapable of declaring a government decision or policy unconstitutional. If Parliament is truly intent on ignoring human rights, they can.

Perhaps than, what should be taken from Bianca’s talk and this simple observation is that it is as important now as ever before to not only defend the human rights that we do have, but to continue to build a society based on the rule of law and the individual rights of citizens i.e the battle has been hard fought but there is still work to be done.

The message should therefore be that instead of taking three steps backwards and abolishing the Human Rights Act, we should be taking five steps forward and not only protecting the Human Rights Act but actively working to strengthen it so as to ensure that our rights are truly and genuinely protected.

View the Patrick McAuslan lecture 2015 below:

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John McDonnell in conversation

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This post was contributed by Dr Ben Worthy of Birkbeck’s Department of Politics. It was first posted on the 10 Gower Street blog on Friday, November 6. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell spoke at an event at Birkbeck on Thursday, November 5.

John McDonnell MP

John McDonnell MP

John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor and former Birkbeck student spoke to staff and students at an event organised by the politics department. He was questioned by Joni Lovenduski over gender representation and came out in support of legislative quotas for women and job shares, though he challenged the ‘19th century’ idea that the top Shadow Cabinet jobs such as Foreign secretary were still the most important. He acknowledged that the Parliamentary Labour party was not wholly in favour of its new leadership but promised that the party would remain a broad church and democratic, with space for dissent and different views. The new activists who had joined since September, he hoped, would radicalise the party.

In answering to Dermot Hodson’s questioning on political economy issues, he discusses the U-turn over George Osborne’s Fiscal Charter in terms of the time pressures of taking office and the urgency of repositioning Labour as the party of anti-austerity in spite of short-term costs to economic credibility. In answer to Hodson’s question about the EU referendum, McDonnell said that Labour would be entering the Brexit debate on its own terms, including through cooperation with other parties on the European left. When asked by Ben Worthy inspirational figures he name checked, unsurprisingly, the great 1940s Labour reformer Clement Attlee but, less expectedly, the artful balancer of the 1960s and 1970s Harold Wilson. He was less convinced when Alex Colas asked him for his most admired Conservative leader. He argued that, amid the political ‘insurgencies’ of Left and Right the rules of political leadership had now changed.

There were then searching crowd-sourced audience questions on a whole range of topics, from whether Labour could build a winning electoral coalition to dealing with rebels, press regulation and sacrificing principles for power. He argued that a winning coalition did exist among the majority of anti-conservative voters if the message was right, but felt the first round of elections in Scotland, London and local government in May 2016 may be tough. Party rebels [which McDonnell and Corbyn used to be] would face a barrage of ‘tea and sympathy’ and the public would be reached not through the mainstream press but on the stump and through social media. He suggested more change was coming, supporting a PR elected House of Lords of the regions and initiatives around national savings bank and a series of gender based policy reviews.

John McDonnell was an MSc student at Birkbeck between 1978 and 1981 under the great Bernard Crick, before entering politics and becoming Deputy Leader of the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone and standing for Parliament in 1997. Studying politics at Birkbeck had given him a rounded, deeper understanding of politics and, he said, a fear of essay deadlines.

To hear more listen to the podcast here

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Gender Equality in Entrepreneurship Policy: Looking to the Future

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This post was contributed by members of the Transforming Institutions by Gendering contents and Gaining Equality in Research (TRIGGER) team – a research project in Birkbeck’s Department of Management – following a workshop which they led at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Ireland on Thursday, October 22

Women at conference (pic credit: Ignite New Zealand under CC via Flickr.com)

Women at conference (pic credit: Ignite New Zealand under CC via Flickr.com)

The international panel at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DKIT), Ireland, was asked to reflect on the differences in the challenges that women entrepreneurs face compared to their male counterparts. Their responses would then shape their views as to whether the panel thought that different policies are needed to support them.

Professor Colette Henry, a member of the TRIGGER team and Head of Department of Business at DKIT introduced the panel. Professor Helen Lawton Smith – as the Birkbeck lead of the TRIGGER project – chaired the session, and began by asking the panellists to share their own perspectives and experiences of women’s enterprise policy. The panel brought together perspectives from both research and practice.

The panellists were:

  • Ms Sarita Johnston, Enterprise Ireland
  • Professor Barbara Orser, University of Ottawa, Canada
  • Professor Bill O’Gorman, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland
  • Professor Lene Foss, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway
  • Ms Roseann Kelly, Women in Business Northern Ireland

Structural and contextual challenges

In response to the question of the different challenges faced by men and women entrepreneurs, Lene Foss suggested that women face both structural and contextual challenges. Roseann Kelly identified these as a difference in the kinds of networks they have as well as the existence of fewer role models. Lene Foss further highlighted the dual role that women play as both mothers and entrepreneurs, as well as national differences in women’s propensity to become entrepreneurs. In Norway for example, immigrant women are more likely to be entrepreneurs than Norwegian women.

On the question of whether support for improved networking opportunities for women was an appropriate policy response, Bill O’Gorman cited his recent experiences of women’s attitudes towards women-only networks. He gave an example from his own work where his team at Waterford had set up three networks in Ireland and Wales: male only, mixed and female only. Surprisingly, while women initially were reluctant to join women only-networks because they realised that gender diversity is important and a women-only network would segregate them from men, the women-only network appeared to perform best. While the other two networks folded, the women-only one continued and still exists.

Sarita Johnson, Manager of Female Entrepreneurship for Enterprise Ireland, cited research that has led to Enterprise Ireland to support women-only programmes including networks. This demonstrated that the challenges facing women entrepreneurs are different, specifically with regard to attitude towards risk-taking and raising finance. For example, Enterprise Ireland invests in 100 high potential start-ups (HPSUs) per year. The specific targeting of women has meant that the number of women entrepreneurs in this category being awarded grants has risen from 7% to 18%. She also found that women-only networks tend to perform best – for example, in raising export sales.

Need for better understanding of gender differences

Dundalk Institute of Technology (pic credit banlon1964 under CC via Flickr.com)

Dundalk Institute of Technology (pic credit banlon1964 under CC via Flickr.com)

Barbara Orser highlighted that it is not just social capital that contributes to women only-networks performing better – it is also technology adoption and financial capital. There needs to be better understanding of gender differences, for example, with regard to levels of confidence, in order to develop better policy. Three aspects were identified as important: women’s social circles; social capital in the form of information gathering networks, and fear of failure.

Roseann Kelly suggested that women are sometimes reluctant to benefit from women-only initiatives and prefer not to be labelled as ‘women entrepreneurs.’ This is a marketing issue – exemplar women are there by right and should celebrate their success. They should play by their own rules and not those set by men. Moreover, women should not have the equivalent of ‘old boys’ networks, because women are better at inclusivity than men.

When the Panel were asked how a hypothetical one million euros might be best spent to support women’s entrepreneurship, Sarita Johnston from Enterprise Ireland said that a programme which would give financial support to women entrepreneurs would offer the quickest and most tangible benefits. Blended support in the form of networking, accelerator programmes and role models is the best approach for supporting start-ups. Access to capital pulls through the development of other skills. Bill O’Gorman thought the money being spent on Ireland’s action plan for jobs is effective, and an emphasis on female entrepreneurship would yield benefits.

Roseann Kelly pointed out that Women in Business Northern Ireland has no public funding for enterprise support and has to be self-sustaining. Public funding would give a boost to their programmes. Barbara Orser suggested that public monies in Canada could be spent on encouraging more women to become entrepreneurs. A specific population that might benefit from funding is women university students; these are under-represented in Ireland’s women entrepreneurs.

Impacting on the entrepreneurial culture

The challenge for the TRIGGER team at Birkbeck is to build on the insights gained from academics’ and practitioners’ experiences to make an impact on the entrepreneurial culture within the college. This means encouraging more female students, as well as professional and academic staff, to share the lessons of the differences in challenges they face with other communities. This panel event shows that there is much to be gained by sharing perspectives from within different institutional and national contexts.

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