Social Legacy of the Olympic Games from a Social Innovation Perspective

Recently, cities that bid for hosting the Olympic Games have withdrawn due to public referendums and lack of political support. Although the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) efforts to underline the importance of the Olympic legacy at a series of symposiums such as “The legacy of the Olympic Games 1984-2000” and the “Olympic Agenda of 2020”, numerous media platforms and studies have presented the negative consequences of hosting the Olympics. Compared to other legacies, the social legacy of the Olympics was relatively overlooked until recently. Although the IOC has set objectives to uphold the positive aspects of its social legacy, the development of practical strategies to address the socially-driven issues caused by hosting the Olympics still remains as a challenge to overcome. In efforts to fill this gap, the purpose of this study is to analyze the current process and evaluation system for the Olympic social legacy based on the frame of newspaper coverage, as well as discussing the strategies on how to achieve social innovation through the Olympic Games based on the SIOG model. I employed the media framing as the theoretical framework and conduct a content analysis of newspaper coverage in the U.S, The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post published between 1990 and 2016. The frame found in newspaper articles about the Olympic social legacy in the present study enabled me to investigate how the residents of the host city have experienced the social legacy of the Olympic Games and the problems behind the current process (Entman, 1993; Misener, 2012). In addition, the result of the analysis provided implications of how the Olympic social legacy needs to be planned and managed based on the SIOG model (Entman, 1993; Misener, 2012). The frames identified from the newspaper coverage revealed that there was a gap between the resident’s needs and actual provisions provided by hosting the Olympic Games. Overall, the social legacies planned by the organizers and committees did not work effectively before, during, and after the Olympic Games. In addition, By applying the social innovation framework to the social legacy of the Olympic Games, hosting the Olympic Games will provide solutions for problems focusing on needs that are unmet, which can resolve these various problems and make the integrated society sustainable.