Alcohol Sponsorship and New Zealand Regional Rugby Unions: Crisis Point or Business as Usual?
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Alcohol Sponsorship and New Zealand Regional Rugby Unions: Crisis Point or Business as Usual? Sarah Gee 1 & Rachel Batty 2 & Patti Millar 1 Received: 9 July 2020 / Accepted: 7 October 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Alcohol sponsorship of sport in New Zealand, especially rugby, has a long history, but in recent times government-resourced reviews together with public health agencies, activists, and academics have proposed a ban of alcohol sponsorship of sport to help reduce alcoholrelated harm. Responses to a proposed ban from a number of diverse sectors, including the alcohol industry and sport organizations, have ranged from ambiguous to resistant. Yet, the conditions for implementing a ban are poorly understood and there has been no change to state-regulated sponsorship policy to date. These widely publicized debates serve as a hotbed for discussions with provincial rugby union managers to consider the economic risks as well as the social connections between rugby clubs and cultural and civic life. In this paper, we address important new questions that query how the alcohol sponsorship debate plays out at a micro-level and the extent to which regional rugby unions may constitute a special case in terms of resistance to and the potential effects of regulation. The discussion expands the debate by drawing attention to the perceived positive effects of alcohol sponsorship as an enabler for addressing other social issues at a micro-level. Keywords Regional sport organizations . Sport sponsorship . Alcohol . Regulation .
Gender
1 Introduction and National Alcohol Sponsorship Policy Context
“…corporations condition leisure forms and practice. The mechanisms by which this is achieved extend well beyond designing and marketing leisure commodities
* Sarah Gee [email protected]
1
Department of Kinesiology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada
2
School of Sport, Exercise, and Nutrition, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
Gee et al.
and services. Advertising, sponsorship and lobbying state officials and political parties are all part of the commercial leisure panoply.” (Rojek 2010, p.35) Sport and alcohol are two highly commodified and globally popular leisure pursuits, although their relationship is paradoxical. Rightly or wrongly, alcohol is widely regarded as an everyday product (cf. Babor et al. 2010; Wenner and Jackson 2009), as a leisure commodity (Rojek 2010) with links to forms of leisure such as home brewing (Duarte Alonso et al. 2018), beer appreciation (Thurnell-Read 2016), and beer tourism (Bujdosó and Szűcs 2012), and advertising often portrays alcohol consumption as a normal, requisite leisure practice (e.g., Rowe and Gilmour 2009). From a public health perspective alcohol is an unhealthy product, and consuming harmful quantities of alcohol can have detrimental health and social consequences for the drinker, the people around the drinker, and society at large (World Health Organization 2014). In his book, The Labour of Leisure, Chris Rojek (2010) argues that t
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