At Play in the Laboratory: Neoliberal Zeal and the Remaking of New Zealand Sport

‘Neoliberalism’ is frequently portrayed as a monolithic project emanating from the ‘ideological heartlands’ of the United States and the United Kingdom. However, while Thatcher, Reagan and their ilk are doubtless the figureheads of neoliberalism’s market-driven, corporate-led, individualizing logics, such ideas sometimes find more-pure, more-extreme, forms in places far from their Anglo-American origins. One such example is New Zealand, where the ‘experimental’ socio-economic reforms of the 1980s have been described by some as the most ambitious attempt anywhere at rolling back the state and constructing the free market as a social institution. In much the same way, the corporatization of sport is typically narrated as an Anglo-Americancentric tale when its most zealous acolytes are sometimes found elsewhere. In this paper, we again proffer New Zealand as case in point. In particular, we explore how the interwoven processes of sporting commercialization, celebritization, and spectacularization are actually rendered in more exaggerated form in this mythically-progressive, erstwhile ‘social laboratory.’ Taking the neoliberalization of New Zealand sport as its empirical and contextual focus, our aim in this paper is to demonstrate how, in explaining the continuation, consolidation, and normalization of neoliberal governance, developments in the ‘periphery’ may be as significant as those in the ‘core’.