DISKUSSIONSSCHRIFTEN
AUS DEM
INSTITUT FÜR FINANZWISSENSCHAFT
DER
UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG
Nr. 63/2001
Sport and the Welfare State
in Germany*
Gunther H. Engelhardt/
Klaus Heinemann
* The present paper is an extended version of the German contribution to the third meeting of the Club of
Cologne’s Working Group “Transformation of the Welfare State and New Orientations of Sport”, held at
Cassino, Italy, March 22 - 24, 2001. The revised, abbreviated, and collected papers, written by national
teams from Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Spain, will be published in a volume on
“Sport and Welfare Policies in Different European Countries”, ed. by Klaus Heinemann, professor at the Institute of Sociology, Hamburg University, and chairman of the working group, by the Hoffmann Verlag,
Schorndorf in 2001/02.
CONTENTS
Page
1. INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN SPORT AND THE WELFARE STATE IN GERMANY – ISSUE
AND OUTLINE OF THE PAPER ................................................................................................... 3
1.1 Financial and functional interrelations between sport and the welfare state.......... 4
1.2 Changes in society and implications for the welfare state and sport ....................... 8
2. COMMON ROOTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WELFARE STATE
AND SPORT IN GERMANY – HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ................................................... 10
2.1 The welfare state.............................................................................................................. 10
2.1.1 “It began in Berlin”................................................................................................ 10
2.1.2 The socioeconomic situation at the outset of the “Industrial Revolution” ......... 11
2.1.3 “Sticks and Carrots”– Bismarck’s anti-socialist and social legislation
as basis of the classical German welfare state model .......................................... 13
2.1.4 Major organizational building blocks and developments today .......................... 19
2.2 Sports ................................................................................................................................ 26
2.2.1 The origin................................................................................................................. 26
2.2.2 The political misuse in the Third Reich ................................................................. 28
2.2.3 The current organization of sport .......................................................................... 29
2.2.4 The relationship between organized sport and the state ...................................... 31
2.3 Sports and the welfare state – Policy patterns in comparative perspective ........... 36
3. STATE RESPONSIBILITIES FOR SPORT IN GERMANY TODAY ............................................... 39
3.1 The Federal Government’s spheres of responsibility ................................................ 39
3.2 Governmental sports policy on the Länder level ........................................................ 39
3.3 Sports support on the community level ....................................................................... 40
4. TRENDS IN SOCIETAL TRANSITION AS A COMMON BASIS AND CHALLENGE FOR
TRANSFORMING THE WELFARE STATE AND SPORT .............................................................. 41
4.1 The shortage of time ....................................................................................................... 44
4.2 Time policy and time sovereignty ................................................................................. 45
4.3 Narrowing time horizons of individual life economies .............................................. 46
5. CHANGES IN THE WELFARE STATE AS CHALLENGES FOR SPORT ....................................... 49
5.1 The traditional welfare state and its aftermath: Its crisis as challenge
and chance for basic reform .......................................................................................... 49
5.2. Welfare state crisis – Implications for sport? ............................................................. 51
5.2.1 Funding crisis and sport ......................................................................................... 51
5.2.2 Confidence crisis and sport .................................................................................... 52
5.2.3 Rationality crisis and sport..................................................................................... 55
6.ANNEX………………………………………………………………………………………………61
6.1. References ......................................................................................................................... 61
6.2. Diskussionsschriften aus dem IFW (List of previous Titles) .................................... 65
–2–
1. INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN SPORT AND THE WELFARE STATE IN GERMANY
– ISSUE AND OUTLINE OF THE PAPER
In Germany interconnections between sport and the welfare state are by no means obvious.
For the main supporting pillars of sport remain voluntary associations such as some 83,000
clubs with about 23 million members, i.e. roughly 25% of the populace. Despite the fact that in
the last decade the sport clubs have met increasingly fierce competition by commercial suppliers of sports and leisure time activities, the clubs have nevertheless been able to maintain their
outstanding supply position in the field of organized sport. Sports clubs still hold a position
close to a monopoly in competitive sports. They do so especially with respect to the supply of
team-sports.
Thus organized sport in Germany has always been and still is a civic movement, in its selfimage as well as by the ruling principles of government sports policy, adhering to the idea of
enhancing the interests of its members. The autonomy of sport vis-à-vis the state and the willingness to defend it against government interventions are the core political principles of the
“Deutsche Sportbund (DSB) – German Sport Federation” as the federal umbrella association
of organized sport over here), basically also acknowledged by all federal and state government
authorities. German sports policies are therefore based on the principle of autonomy of organized sport; establishing and maintaining its independence and self-responsibility as fundamental
guidelines of sports policy in the Federal Republic of Germany. The sports organizations are
thus genuinely responsible for deciding on their own as to what tasks they want to fulfill and
how to do so. Said principles of sports politics in Germany are a direct offspring from genuine
civil rights as basic constitutional principles. According to said principles, individual interests
may be pursued and rights executed in free, autonomous civic organizations (articles 2 and 9 of
the “Grundgesetz – Basic Law” as the written Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany). This not only obliges state authorities, but can also be derived from governments’
pledge and obligation to guarantee those rights. As a corollary to that, the willingness of the
members of society to claim and internalize such rights as their own is taken for granted and
serves as implicit legitimization for the autonomy of organized sport in the sense of its freedom
from government tutelage.1
Possibly for that reason “sport” is simply not mentioned as being a public task in the German Basic Law at all. Consequently, there are no specific laws concerning sports affairs – neither on the national or federal level, nor on the level of individual states, counties or communities, and there is no such thing as a specific club law either. The only legal position for clubs is
derived from a few decisive regulations concerning “Gesellschaften bürgerlichen Rechts
(GbR) – associations of civil law” in the “Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) – German Code of
Civil Law”.
How, then, can interconnections between sports and the welfare state be said to exist, despite the fact that the autonomy of organized sports is secured from both sides? In what ways
1
As an explicit example to demonstrate this quest for autonomy, one of the first political decisions that Willy
Weyer carried through as newly elected President of the “Deutsche Sportbund (DSB) – German Sports Federation” in 1979 was that the DSB be excluded from the government’s “institutional support”. Public funds,
he successfully argued, should “merely” be made available for “project-financing”. The thought behind this
was that as the DSB was no longer supported as an institution. That way it was no longer, as a whole, subject to government budget regulations nor to budget control by the federal government either. The DSB thus
hoped for greater autonomy in regulating its own affairs. And even though it not only desired, but also was
vitally dependent on government support, it did not want the state to interfere with the way in which the
DSB intended to fulfill its tasks.
–3–
can tendencies toward a “crisis of the welfare state”2, as have been observed or at least alleged
to develop in Germany as in other Western industrial states over the past decades, still have a
backlash effect on sport? Under what circumstances will such tendencies lead to fundamental
changes in its basic financial system and organizational structure, affecting the relationships
with other competing or cooperating suppliers of sports activities and even its self-image
proper? Such connecting lines may be and have to be elaborated by analyzing in which form
sport and the welfare state are tied together, where and to what extent the objectives and institutional arrangements of sport and welfare state system overlap in Germany. Only on such a
basis can it be discussed whether changes in the objectives and policy guidelines, in the financial situation, and in the institutional arrangements of the German welfare state can be expected
to affect sport as well could thus become a serious challenge for it.
1.1 Financial and functional interrelations between sport and the welfare state
The protagonists of the welfare state, as we may assume by simplifying a little, follow a
double objective: On the one hand, they aim for what reasons and motives ever at providing a
basic social (i.e. financial) safeguard for every individual citizen. On the other hand, they intend
to establish minimum standards for equal living conditions for all citizens. The welfare state
thus bears the flags of both equity in distribution and equality in access to life opportunities.
That way it not only guarantees a basic provision of material goods for everyone, but also sees
to it that all citizens have at least the opportunity to take part in the social and cultural life of
society, according to their abilities. Accordingly, education, art, and sport – if you will: cultural
policies altogether – as an umbrella for all that also belong on the list of tasks of the modern
welfare state.
Equal access to education, art, and sport as a civil right, education, art, and “sport for all”
are thus popular demands, if not the populist slogan, expressing said principle. Correspondingly, “sport for all” is not only the programmatic objective of organized sport in Germany. It
is also the basic principle of (welfare) state support of sport. Sport is thus drawn into an overlapping government responsibility for welfare and public health, youth care and education, of
Gesellschaftspolitik as a general policy approach for societal integration. However, this dual
objective of the welfare state – the quest for equity in distribution and equality in the opportunity of access – also reflects the fundamental conflict in the prevailing institutional arrangements of the German welfare system. The principle of equal access(ability) on the one hand
aims at the self-realization of an individual’s own interests, opportunities, abilities, and
chances. It genuinely addresses his or her own capability and efforts to earn his or her own
living and thus in principle exempts the state from any claims made. The principle of equity on
the other hand demands for an equal distribution of income, wealth, and power to be ensured
by public welfare schemes, including state activities for redistribution. It thus refers to the relationship between individuals and their regulation by state interference.
There can be little doubt that in the course of welfare state evolution in Germany, the scales
have turned from regarding welfare policies solely as safety provisions against unforeseen risks
in life toward securing justice in distribution. State responsibility for the provision of a minimum level of physical well-being and financial security of its citizens has turned into something
like an unalienable right to be claimed by everybody. And this has had the effect that the state
has increasingly and successfully claimed an all-encompassing responsibility and competence
for social policy legislation. Officials claim and defend their roles as omniscient and benevolent
dictators in the pursuit of the common interest and general welfare all people. Even though
individual welfare does belong to the core values of our society, the term has become so daz2
Cf., e.g., Eisenstadt/Ahimeir (1985) esp. for Germany: Herder-Dorneich (1982).
–4–
zling, ambiguous, and ultimately meaningless that everyone can and does interpret it according
to his or her own personal views, hopes, and claims for a better and more meaningful life. As a
consequence, flourishing political rhetoric has developed, where every interest group is eager
to claim for its own clientele as extensive a share in the big cake of government welfare policy
as possible. Competing for votes, all political parties have up to now propagated welfare reforms predominantly in the direction of raising rather than reducing the transfer volume at the
expense of increasing financial burdens of the public at large. Limits and deficits of the welfare
state, if recognized at all, have exclusively been seen with the eyes of parochial convictions and
self-interest.
As a major consequence, the institutional arrangements of the German welfare system have
become increasingly complex. Thus virtually nobody is capable of overlooking the system of
welfare state transfer-payments at large, not to mention the effects it has. This is true not only
for the objectives officially pursued, but also and above all with resect to the economic performance as the genuine basis upon which no matter what welfare system must gain its
strength and sustainability. It is therefore as typical as it is dismaying that an official expert
committee, which was instituted by and working for the federal ministry of labor and welfare a
few years ago in order to establish efficiency standards and to analyze the (re-)distributive effects of the major government programs, abandoned its errand after many frustrating efforts
and without presenting convincing results. It had not been possible to make out which of the
155 different kinds of welfare entitlements, provided by some by 35 different government suppliers, ultimately had come up with a net benefit and which ones required additional payments.
The devastating conclusion to be drawn from such futile evaluation efforts is this: The welfare
state machinery for redistribution runs without reliable control over results and success.
Similar propositions are to be assumed with regard to the program “sport for all”. That program, however, is by no means exclusive to Germany. As early as 1976 a European conference
of sports ministers summoned the member countries in a European charter with the intention to
specify and implement conditions that might enable the entire population – regardless of sex,
occupation, and income – to regularly take part in sports activities. “Sport for all” is thus, at
least intentionally, part of welfare politics in all European countries. Following this general
goal of “sport for all”, two fundamental principles govern the development of sport in the Federal Republic of Germany:
First, each citizen must have the opportunity to participate in sports, that is in a sports facility
− within easy commuting distance;
− at a cost within his or her financial capabilities;
− congruent with his or her temporal, social, and family situation, and
− in accordance with his or her interests and abilities.
Second, the government provides the necessary financial support, thereby providing access
to sports activities at equal conditions for all. Private investments in the construction of sports
grounds and clubs fuelled by market forces alone cannot achieve these aims. A return on private investment requires high admission fees that would make sports unachievable for anyone.
In Germany, the realization of such principles has to cope with at least two particularities, if
not predicaments:
(1) The state supports organized sport with considerable financial funds. In that context, not
only the annual 7 billion DM (deutsche marks) project subsidies, plus annual 3.3 billion staffcosts for sports teachers at the various public schools have to be taken into consideration3 as
3
Weber (1995).
–5–
well. For government support is not limited to these financial grants. In addition, there is much
more extensive, if indirect, state support sport benefits from as a whole. This includes:
− Tax privileges due to the public benefit status of sport clubs and unions. This leads to most
of the clubs not having to pay any taxes. This in itself gives the clubs an enormous advantage in competing with commercial suppliers that are highly taxed. Furthermore, donors can
deduct their donation from their tax base and thus reduce their income tax liability to up to a
half, depending on he marginal rate of the individual taxpayer. This in turn means that up to
50% of a donation is paid by the public in form of revenue losses. It is therefore not surprising that donations are among the most favorite means of club-financing;
− Free or low-priced utilization of public sports grounds by the sports clubs. In 1960 the
“Deutsche Olympische Gesellschaft – German Olympic Society” passed a so-called
“Golden Plan for Health, Play, and Relaxation”, in which indexes for the overall outfit of
sports facilities within communities of various size had been laid down. For the past 40
years, this plan has been recognized as a more or less official guideline for communal sport
policies. As a result, in West Germany a host of high quality sports grounds have been made
available during that time period. It is true, the existing figures may not be reliable on an
overall scale. Yet, some 15 years after the passing of this plan 14,700 sports grounds,
15,900 gymnasiums, 3,000 indoor swimming-pools, 2,400 outdoor swimming-pools, and
31,000 children's playgrounds had been built. These are also available for little or no costs
to organized sport.4 In 1991, i.e. shortly after the reunification of Germany, a corresponding
“Golden Plan East” was put into effect in the five new Länder;
− Employment of persons doing civil service and temporary work in the field of sport, especially in those areas that fulfill social services, such as sport for the disabled, sport for the
elderly, coronal sport, and sport for behaviorally and psychomotorly handicapped children;
− Revenue sharing in gambling and lottery systems. It is of considerable importance for the
financial provisions of sport organizations that the lotteries must earmark 25% of their proceeds for purposes of common interest, of which the sport organizations in turn get half.5 .
Put differently, with respect to their financial basis, sport organizations quite extensively depend on the gambling passions of the population.
− Direct financial support to sports clubs in order to pay for coaches, instructors, and youth
leaders.
− Services for sport with special tasks such as sport for disabled people, children with abnormal social conduct, and hyperactive children.
The state generally supports only voluntary sports organized in sports clubs. Sports clubs
are widely regarded not only as the ideal suppliers of sport, but also as the purveyors of various cultural, political, educational, and social functions. Because of the state’s tremendous
support of sports, an adult member of a sports club on average only pays 14 German Marks
per month. In comparison, an adult member of a commercial sport enterprise would pay up to
five times as much. Support gives sports organizations a competitive advantage over commercial enterprises and has consequential negative effects on the labor market. In the past fifteen
years, a significant number of commercial sports enterprises (fitness centers, bodybuilding studios, sport schools, etc.), as for-profit organizations, have set up business in Germany. Gov4
5
The value of this subsidy is hard to estimate. The following figures may serve as initial clues: 69% of clubs
in the old federal counties, 89% in the new counties depend on communal sports grounds - and to the
greater extent their use is free or at user fees far lower than the running cost.
The values could not be presented more precisely here, as the design of games of chances and the distribution of the intake is every county's own affair, which means that the regulations differ from county to
county.
–6–
ernmental support is granted exclusively to the benefit of not-for-profit sports clubs and organizations, which distorts the competition between commercial enterprises and sports clubs6.
Taken together, public grants to sport provide substantial material support, consisting of financial as well government aid in kind, given by all levels of government, both local, state and
federal, including subsidies by so-called Parafisci (para-government organizations – PGOs) to
support the clubs’ activities7.. In other words: By means of extensive government support, both
financial and in kind, the public concern does not only refer to equal access to sport facilities,
but also to equity in distribution by means of gratuitous or subsidized sport facilities as transfer
payments in kind.
Yet, as has been emphasized before, the substantive design of sport, even in its subsidized
form, remains in the genuine responsibility of the sport organizations proper. Government responsibilities with respect to sport are confined to financial support to the established sport
organizations. Thus financial support of and the making available of sports facilities, predominantly provided on the local level, are thus the only means that the government has at its disposal in the way of a sports policy that concerns organized sport.
(2) All this is no longer just the attempt to ensure an equality in accessibility and distribution
in sport, and similarly in education and the arts. It is rather that sport is included in government
welfare politics with the expectations, values, and purposes associated with it, thus justifying
government support to the extent that the ruling majorities feel that sport can and should contribute towards securing welfare aims. At least sports officials themselves keep stressing this
point as a justification for ongoing government grants. Likewise, managing boards of sport
clubs keep making a stereotype reference to the manifold societal functions that sport (supposedly) fulfills.
As early as 1966 the Charter of German Sport states: “Sport fulfills many biological, pedagogical and social functions ... Sport and physical exercise are good for health, support personality. They are indispensable factors of education, offering ... effective help for communal
life, enabling a meaningful and pleasant utilization of the newly gained leisure time.”
Ever since, the manifold functions that sport may fulfill and that thus make its ongoing government support imperative, have been picked up in almost all welcoming addresses at major
sports events, in every declaration of principles by sport organizations on whatever level, and
in many sports publications. According to the thesis of sport meriting government support,
because it can make important contributions within the framework of government health policy, youth care, the politics of social integration, and even for political socialization in democratically led clubs, sport has directly been involved in policies securing government welfare
objectives. And in its 4th Sport Report of 1978 the government of the Federal Republic explicitly acknowledged that function by defining its sports policy accordingly. On page 10 it says
literally: “Government sports policy is, in an extensive sense, social politics. It is closely related
to health-, education, and youth policies. Government support is no mere act of kindness. It is
rather, according to the respective budgetary conditions, a task of the public hand that goes
without saying within the framework of life provisions.”
6
7
. Dietrich/ Heinemann/ Schubert (1990).
This is true despite prevailing difficulties to realistically estimate the extent of state support on the various
government levels, including that of reliably answering the question what advantages for the club this support brings with it and to what extent the membership fees can be subsidized with it. Thus average membership fee in such a club being at roughly DM 14.50, which would cost around DM 80 at a similar, professional supplier, is not entirely due to state support, but also to voluntary engagement of the members and a
high number of passive members, who pay their membership fee and are accounted for by state subsidy, but
don’t use the club’s capacities (For details cf. Heinemann/Schubert (1995).
–7–
The two pillars of governmental sports policy in Germany are autonomy of organized sport,
and sports policies of the state as overarching societal policies. Generally, this means that the
shaping of sports, except in schools and sport sciences that lie in the hands of the Länder (Federal States), is principally a matter for organized sport itself. The governmental sports policy is
one of financial support. In principle, financial aid remains the government’s most important
means of influence on sports policy.
Taken together, the arguments outlined before can be summarized as follows: A first major
overlap between sport and welfare policies in Germany can be said to have emerged from a
functional coincidence between the two in that equal access(ability) to sporting activities in the
sense of “sport for all” is instrumental also for most if not all prevailing welfare state objectives.
1.2 Changes in society and implications for the welfare state and sport
A second major coincidence is emerging from the fact that the welfare state – inevitably if
still hesitantly – must adapt to basic societal changes to be observed in the Federal Republic of
Germany as in other (post-) industrial states. These changes will probably affect organized
sport as follows:
Given the fact of close financial and institutional interrelationships between sports and welfare policies, as outlined before, the imminent efforts toward rebuilding the welfare state will in
turn force organized sport to take adaptive measures to changing welfare measures of its own.
In addition and possibly more fundamentally, the changes in society that put pressure on the
welfare state might similarly affect sport. Such prospective interconnections between sport and
the welfare state must therefore be analyzed in two different ways:
(1) A first set of questions is the following: Which economic, political, and societal changes
and, connected to this, which new problematic situations have put pressure on the welfare
state? What are the causes for increasingly undermining the substantive, i.e. particularly financial, basis of the classical Bismarckian welfare state model, as it has evolved in Germany since
the late 19th century?
First, if still tentative answers to that set of questions may be the following: The still prevailing etatist derivative of the traditional Bismarckian welfare system in Germany has become
too rigid with respect to its funding, as well as to its standardized supply patterns, its bureaucratic and hierarchical governance structures. It therefore fails to meet the emerging demands
for flexible adjustment to transition processes from the traditional industrial to the emerging
information or knowledge society. As a result, conventional welfare schemes with their petrified size and structural supply patterns as well as institutional decision arrangements are being
superimposed on rapidly changing economic and societal interrelations. In that context, unlike
Bismarck’s, the present German government appears no longer as the anticipator and forerunner of fundamental societal change. Instead of defining, shaping, and supporting the framework
and opportunities for new forms of living, performed by the people in this society, it rather
limps behind the recent developments in society. To demonstrate this phenomenon, a brief look
at the current old age pension scheme may suffice here:
Up to now, the basic German pension scheme builds on a specific concept of an individual
income biography of people living as members in a family model, which is becoming increasingly obsolete. On the assumption of a long, continuous working life, in which the benefits of
an old age insurance coverage are to be accumulated, it neglects the predicaments of contemporary labor markets. In addition, it is based on an increasingly outdated family model. According to that model the husband is the main, if not the only, income recipient in a full-time
and life-long labor contract. His wife is primarily in charge of the household and the family,
responsible for raising the children and caring for the elderly. In principle, the German model of
–8–
the welfare state thus centers on a system of family-oriented transfer-payments. As a result, a
family's welfare depends on what is caused by the rigidity of the system: job security, level of
contractual income, and social security contributions. Those in full-time employment will naturally fight in defense of that system, even if that diminishes the chances of employment for their
dependent relatives.
The following data may serve to shed some light on the aggregate effects: In Germany, 64%
of the population of 16 to 64 year-olds are employed; the unemployment rate of that age group
amounting to 10.3%. By comparison, the respective numbers for the Netherlands are 69% and
4%. The decisive reason for the difference presumably is that in the Netherlands 68% of the
women and 18% of the men in the labor force are part-time employees, while in Germany the
respective figures are 36% for women and 5% for men. The tendency toward relatively higher
part-time employment in the Netherlands than in Germany may to a considerable extent be
explained by the fact that pensions in the Netherlands are tax funded; therefore part-time employment is less severely sanctioned by prospective pension losses in the Netherlands than in
Germany.
The essence of the example just mentioned is that the preconditions under which a classical
welfare system as the German one works satisfactorily have undergone fundamental changes.
This is especially true for the conditions of family-oriented transfer-payments. Full-time employment throughout the entire working life can no longer be taken for granted. Women plan
their careers just as men do; the wish for continuous employment prevails over family planning.
The family household, founded on formal wedding and marriage ceremonies and certificates,
based on a rigid assignment of roles for men and women within it, has become but one of different alternative modes of people’s organizing their life economy these days. Consequently,
the individual life styles and the traditional organization of welfare no longer coincide.
Despite still prevalent conservative tendencies toward defending the achievements and
privileges of the traditional welfare state, there is a growing public awareness in Germany these
days that the conventional social insurance and transfer schemes are facing a fundamental crisis. They do so not only with respect to their funding, but also and particularly in terms of
their being based on outdated societal structures and on rigid corporatist consensus-building
regimes. As it looks, the welfare system in Germany, too, is in a slow but irrevocable process
of transition, not only in its financial framework, but more fundamentally also in its ideology,
the modes of providing its services, and its governance structures.
Such changes in the welfare state must affect sport – directly so, to the extent and level to
which sport and its functions and organization are linked to welfare politics. On the one hand
this can result in complementary changes in the system of organized sport itself. On the other
hand, state authorities may be tempted to increasingly try and oblige sport organizations to
take over new responsibilities for solving emerging problems in a quickly changing modern
society. Correspondingly, the main question to be dealt with in the subsequent parts of this
paper will be, in what ways and to what extent such changes in society and thus changes in the
welfare state might, directly or indirectly, become a challenge for sport itself.
(2) In this context, it is important to recognize and analyze additional, if more indirect and
long term, tendencies of transition and adjustment in the relationships between the welfare and
sports systems. In the sociology of sport it has almost become a commonplace to state that the
subsystem of sport and its regime are based upon and develop from the very way, in which
sport is embedded in the society of which it is a part. The terms subsystem and regime in that
context comprise various aspects. They include the type of sporting activities, the design of the
rules of sport, its forms of organization, the relationship between sport, the state and the economy, the sport technologies that are employed accordingly, the purposes and ideologies attributed to sport etc. The opposite is equally true, namely, that the specific sporting modes that
–9–
have developed within a society have repercussions of their own on other societal subsystems
and regimes, e.g., the family, the economy, politics, leisure time, work, the dynamics of technological development, behavioral patterns and attitudes etc. Thus if far-reaching societal
changes are to be expected, which in themselves could force the welfare state to a change its
course and direction of development, it is then equally probable that sport will be affected by
these very changes itself, irrespective of which reorientation welfare policies are heading for.
This may briefly be illustrated by extending on the previous example: Traditionally, women
took up work of which the time rhythm was difficult to anticipate, allowing for but little leeway in the disposition of time. Leaving such jobs to their wives meant that the husbands in the
family “got their backs free” for other activities, gaining greater sovereignty over their own
leisure time, enabling them to regularly and actively take part in sports and/or honorary engagement in the voluntary sector. This intra-familiar division of labor is now increasingly being
replaced by equal rights and duties for both partners and be it solely on grounds of rising – if
only part-time – employment of women, formerly busy exclusively as housewives. That way
the requirements for sport and club work are changing as well.
In order to understand the challenges that both the welfare state and organized sport are
faced with in Germany, and in order to display the emerging changes the common roots of
either and the basic principles of their organization need be elaborated in greater detail. For
that matter, we will first try and discern the historical emergence and development of both
welfare state and sports organizations in Germany (2). For this appears to be the most convincing basis for explaining the specific mix and distribution of responsibilities for sports in the
present German federal system of government as well (3). To the extent that emerging trends
in societal development affect and pose new challenges for traditional welfare and sports policies, some such trends, epitomized as evolving new societal regimes of time management, will
be highlighted (4). The final section of the paper will then try and describe the prospective fundamental changes in the traditional German welfare state settings and policies and their probable impact on sport (5).
2. COMMON ROOTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WELFARE STATE AND SPORT
IN GERMANY –
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
2.1 The welfare state
2.1.1 “It began in Berlin”
“... es begann in Berlin ... – it began in Berlin”8 – was the title of an exhibition on the German social history, organized by the Federal Department of Labor and Social Affairs in the
context of the 750th anniversary celebrations of and in Berlin in 1987. And indeed, this headline is perhaps the best shorthand formula for the historical genesis of the German welfare
state. For it symbolically depicts two of its major roots. One lay in the devastating social side
effects of the industrial revolution, culminating in the big and dramatically fast growing cities
such as Berlin in the mid and late 19th century in Germany (2.1.2). The other one originated in
the political struggle between bottom-up and top down social reform movements, brought to
an – however preliminary – “happy end” by a kind of “sticks and carrots” policy of the Bismarck administration. The sticks were those (in)famous “Sozialistengesetze – anti-socialist
laws”. The carrots consisted of the equally renowned “Sozial(versicherungs)gesetze – social
(insurance) laws”, passed by the German Reichstag also in Berlin (2.1.3). On the basis of a
8
BMAS (1987).
– 10 –
brief summary of both strands of history, the major organizational building blocks and developments of the typical German welfare state model are then to be summarized (2.1.4).
2.1.2 The socioeconomic situation at the outset of the “Industrial Revolution”
It is true that anything close to a general theory of social and economic evolution is still
lacking9. One of the core propositions of social theorizing in that respect is, however, that
technological inventions, by way of adaptation leading toward fundamental innovation in the
societal production, circulation and/or distribution processes, play a similarly decisive role as
genetic mutation and selection in biological evolution. The mid-1800s may serve as a case in
point, not in the sense of a methodologically sound confirmation, but surely as a dramatic illustration, of that proposition. For there can be little doubt that at the outset of the so-called
industrial revolution, there has been a massive occurrence of breath-taking inventions and innovations. All of them were conducive to the rise of mass production and all its corollaries –
most spectacular among them perhaps the steam engine in combination with the utilization of
the belt drive and the mechanical clock. They enabled large-scale assembly line production,
labor management, and new organization devices. By no means negligible was in that context:
The idea of putting steam engines on rails substantially contributed to a productivity-enhancing
explosion in factor and product mobility, inducing efficiency gains by increasingly fiercer competition on emerging and fast growing trans-regional or even -national markets.10 Those inventions in combination with a breakthrough in their technological utilization enabled and facilitated the installation of mass production lines in huge plants no longer dependent on immediately disposable natural energy sources like wind or water and their geographical presence. The
choice of location for new plants could therefore follow other criteria. Such criteria were the
availability of favorable transport facilities both for bringing up and carrying away raw materials and other input goods and services, including energy such as coal. Most important of all
were the availability of unskilled and therefore cheap labor, as well as the existence of or
closeness to prospective sales markets for the mass products produced.
For these and related reasons the already existing cities like Berlin in Germany became the
favorite locations not only for immediate consumer goods, but also for heavy industry such as
steel production and processing, engine building etc. Once founded, the new plants in or at the
outskirts of the cities immediately attracted masses of workers. They readily offered their unskilled labor for jobs at the assembly lines of those new mass production plants, because that
either terminated their unemployment or was by far better paid than any other job in the crafts,
small business or – worst of all – agricultural sectors of the economy.
All this triggered what in dramatically short a period led to an explosion of city growth, new
industrial districts, living quarters for workers pouring into the cities from decaying rural areas,
causing an outright exodus there, mushrooming to the surface over night, so to speak. The
corresponding mass immigration into the cities led to a fast growing proletariat of industrial
wage earners who, possessing neither capital nor means of production other than their (unskilled) labor force, had to sell their services by all means and under literally any condition in
order to make their living. They made up what K. Marx was to call the “industrial reserve
9
10
To our understanding, this can justly be alleged despite such outstanding contributions as delivered by
North (1990), who for this and related attempts to describe and explain nationally diverging paths of economic development was even awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 1993, and, almost equally renowned
for that, Olson (1982).
It is, in our view, not by accident that economists from Great Britain developed the economic theories of
(international) competition and free trade. For Britain was by far the economically most progressive nation
for the time being that could hope to reap the bulk of benefits from free trade that the British economists
postulated for efficiency reasons. For an illuminating discussion on that issue cf. Watrin (1967), pp. 3 ff.
– 11 –
army”, hinting at several strands of socially extremely depressing and for that matter highly
explosive social developments in the emerging industrial society in Germany.
As the term “reserve army” indicates, the new working class consisted – like an army – of
many people, who stood in “reserve”, ready and eager to step in, should they be needed in case
of too many casualties in the main army. That way and as long as fresh privates continued to be
drafted from unceasing immigration waves pouring into the cities, they constantly reproduced
if not increased that reserve army to the effect, that the conditions for those in work could not
improve. As a matter of fact, working conditions even deteriorated to a degree that an unskilled worker ran into rising difficulties to make his own living. For people like him it was
close to impossible to nourish his spouse and kinship or build up reserves to live on in case of
disease, accident, and invalidity and after retirement from the active working life.
The exodus of the most vigorous, daring and mostly younger people from the rural areas
into the cities, resulted in a disruption of the traditional family structures. As a rule, a traditional rural family comprised three generations of people, not necessarily all related to one another All typical welfare services were provided in kind and within that extended family. Rapidly increasing mass transportation facilities at least within metropolitan regions11 could not
stop or reverse but rather accelerated the land flight and the dissolution of the rural family and
class structures in its wake.
Decaying family structures and their implicit function of non-monetary social security provision were by no means counterbalanced by the emergence of respective new structures in the
industrial cities, tailor-made for, or at least reasonably adjusted to, the new living and working
conditions there. Quite on the contrary: The very fact of said reserve army’s success in continuously deteriorating the unskilled workers’ living conditions in town, prevented them from
supporting their family members and induced those having initially stayed out of town to move
in as well.
The dwelling and living conditions the newcomers met in the vast blocks of “Mietskasernen
– rental barracks” literally translated – within steadily expanding slum districts around the city
center of Berlin turned devastating. They gave rise to new rhetoric such as “Zille-Milliöh”12,
still popular in our days. Even more devastating for building up new family structures and stable social relations was the fact that – in order to make their living – all members, including
children from the age of 8-10 onwards, of the hardly established “Kleinfamilie – small family”
had to look for their own job opportunities. They found them at best, but not as the rule, under
regular labor contracts in one of the neighboring plants. A regular labor contract, however,
meant working hours of up to 17 hours daily. It meant standing at the assembly lines executing
ever repeating and in itself meaningless or even stupid manual grips or performances at rapid
speed without regular breaks for recovery and no protective measures against accidents in extremely noisy and dusty fabrication halls.
Quite often as a relief and escape from such working conditions women preferred to make
easier and faster money by turning to prostitution, children more often than not to begging, or
stealing, if not street mugging and burglary. Disastrous hygienic and heating conditions in the
rental housing blocks and the tiny, dark, damp and overcrowded flats inside, as well as in the
11
12
The first regular railroad link in Germany was opened between the Prussian cities of Berlin and Potsdam in
1838, the respective rail network extending to some 4,200 km by 1850.
Slang expression in Berlin dialect, translated as “Zille’s milieu”. Heinrich Zille, born 1858, somewhat like
Charles Dickens in the UK, was a socially engaged author, but (unlike D.) above all painter, draftsman and
later also photographer who became famous for realistically and thereby most critically depicting the
dwelling, living “milieu” of the lower class people in Berlin; cf. E.g., the still best-selling new edition of his
major works such as “Hurengespräche– whore(house) chats”(1981) or “300 Berliner Bilder – 300 pictures
from Berlin” (1982).
– 12 –
streets led to mass occurrences of pneumonia, tuberculosis and venereal diseases. Frequent
epidemics of cholera, typhoid fever or small pocks, proved even more dangerous for the public
at large.
Taken together, the early phases of the so-called industrial revolution in Germany may be
characterized as a period of time where extremely diverging strands of development overlapped and considerably also clashed. On the one hand, due to dramatic scientific and technological discoveries, booming new industrial structures seemingly arose out of nothing. They
came into being without organically – and incrementally – building on and further developing
the old economic and social structures. Instead, the old structures collapsed. The new ones did
help a few pioneering businesses and their leaders to become incredibly successful and rich. For
a good many people the newly arising industrial centers promised new opportunities, but also
brought incalculable risks. For the masses of a new industrial caste, called proletariat, they
meant utter misery with no real escape option: They had no choice but to emigrate or go into
the new industrial centers, for elsewhere their chances to survive came close to zero.
All this created a peculiar and increasingly explosive mix that might well have wiped away
the prospects of a new era before it had had a chance to gain momentum. It was in the context
of such ambivalent developments that the then new and now traditional welfare state came into
being. In economic terms, its creation can be considered as a reaction to, or even offer for
compensation payments for, the social misery of the masses. Such payments were granted by
the representatives of those who hoped or were convinced to gain to those who apparently
seemed to loose, but were considered to have or gain the power to spoil the game for everyone, including the prospective winners.
2.1.3 “Sticks and Carrots”– Bismarck’s anti-socialist and social legislation
as basis of the classical German welfare state model
The all but dramatic social and economic developments in the wake of the industrial revolution in Germany, as briefly depicted in the preceding paragraph, found their parallels or rather:
were accompanied by, and closely intertwined with, by no means less tumultuous political happenings. If only in the broadest brush strokes, these should be included here. For it is the peculiar mix of both that has led to the specific German version of the welfare state.
It is true: Some of its core building blocks reach back way beyond the turmoil of the industrial revolution and the genesis of Bismarck’s German Reich. In his brief but excellent paper on
the “Evolution of the Welfare State” D. J. Snower ” recently stated this as follows: “With the
advent of the European Enlightenment, the state took over some of the welfare activities previously performed by religious institutions. In 1530 German towns were given the legal obligation to care for the poor, in 1794 Prussian states became responsible to provide food and
housing to those in need, and in 1810 a Prussian law gave the masters the obligation to make
medical services available to their servants. … Since these safety nets had many holes and were
hung very close to the floor, the real burden of cushioning people against economic adversity
fell on the communities to which they belonged: their family, friends, and fellow villagers. The
large-scale transfer of welfare services from the voluntary charitable activities did not take
place until well into the Industrial Revolution.”13
One might complement and thereby qualify this quotation by saying: (1) Neither did the
churches’ engagement as key suppliers of welfare services come to an end by the state getting
involved into “… some of the welfare activities”. (2) Nor is the term “… communities to which
they belonged” to be confined to “… their family, friends and fellow villagers”.
13
Snower (2000), pp. 35 - 52, 36.
– 13 –
Ad (1): As in our days, new economic, societal and political developments tend to bring
about innovative institutional arrangements. The churches had to and did react to broad-based
secularization trends in the wake of ideologies and policies, subsumed under the label “European Enlightenment” in the preceding quotation. They did so by establishing new dependencies
outside the endangered mother organization, and/or by outsourcing/contracting out of formerly
self-made input goods and services to put it in modern (public) management terms.14 Thus the
foundation of special welfare organizations outside the traditional church administration proper
has become the nucleus and up to our days provided the key members of the “Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der freien Wohlfahrtspflege – Federal cooperative task force for voluntary welfare”. This Arbeitsgemeinschaft in its own right has remained the core private (NGO-) part in
the present German pluralistic, if corporatist, welfare system apart from its para-fiscal (PGO-)
social insurance branch.
Ad (2): Reference to the “… family, friends, an fellow villagers” with respect to “… the real
burden of cushioning people against economic adversity” surely is a central clue in the context
of care for the disabled – once again: not only then but also today. For it implicitly contains the
Subsidiaritätsprinzip – principle of subsidiarity”, which still is – or has become again – the
encompassing regulatory device for assigning responsibilities to, and cooperating within assigned responsibilities and among, different social policy actors. In its original formulation of
the Social Encyclical “Quadragesimo Anno (nos. 78 f.)15, this principle has a twofold connotation. In its negative version it denies the transferal of responsibilities bottom-up, if the lower
level is up to or has comparative advantages in taking care of a certain task. In its positive version it demands support, but predominantly as help for self-help to lower by higher level decision units, before shifting responsibilities upwards. In this context, too, then the terms need
careful consideration: “Community” does in this sense and in accordance with the principle of
subsidiarity in fact and primarily refer to the relatively closest community of cohabitants – family, friends, (co-) inhabitants of a village or municipality. But already in that connotation, it also
applies to (co-) members of a private club or association (in- or outside the local churches) as
functional – task-specific rather than regionally defined – federations to use the respective
technical term of the economics of fiscal federalism. In fact, to the extent that social and economic circumstances and developments such as those labeled “Industrial Revolution” disrupted
those close kin- or friendship oriented communities, the relatively larger and more anonymous
regional or functional federations, still outside state agencies proper16, might, ought to, and did
take over.
14
15
16
Backhaus-Maul/Olk (1994), pp. 99 – 134.
Cf. Baumgartner (1997), p 35 f., for the subsequent differentiation between a positive and a negative connotation of “subsidiarity” cf. ibid.; for a more extensive discussion of the principle of subsidiarity cf., e.g.,
Riklin/Batliner (1994).
Interestingly, in German public law the “Gemeinden und Gemeindeverbände (Landkreise, Regional- und
Landschaftsverbände – communities in the sense of localities and municipalities and their community associations – counties, regional planning cooperatives between “kreisfreien Städten – central cities not being
part of a more encompassing county or government district” and their surrounding counties and/or municipalities) do not qualify as “state” entities, even though membership (and local tax liabilities) on the part of
their citizens is mandatory. On the other hand, organizations of the voluntary sector such as private clubs,
but also their and other (welfare) associations and even the two major German (“almost” state) churches of
the Lutheran Protestants and the Roman Catholics are considered as non-governmental (NGOs) and thus
private rather than para-fiscal or -government organizations (PGOs). This is the case despite the fact that
they enjoy considerable financial grants-in-aid and/or tax privileges; the church tax as a surtax on the individual income tax is levied by the states’ internal revenue service. For an encompassing overview of concepts and experiences in public service delivery by PGOs in various European countries, including Germany, cf. Hood/Schuppert (1988).
– 14 –
It is precisely in this context that the overall political, in combination with the breath-taking
economic and social, development in the period of time before, during, and just after the constitution of the Bismarck Reich should be taken into consideration. For it may help explain the
peculiar mix of institutional arrangements and policy measures taken that came to be molded
into the typical German welfare state concept. The broad brush strokes, announced at the outset, may even be given the names of outstanding events as labels, symbolizing particular
strands of development, conducive for specific institutional arrangements in our recent welfare
state setting. Some such labels are
– the victorious “Befreiungskriege – liberation wars” against the Napoleon regime, the
“Stein-Hardenbergschen Verwaltungsreformen – public administration reforms” in Prussia,
and the Frankfurt “Paulskirchen-(National-)Versammlung – national assembly in St. Paul’s
church” as symbols for a (largely bourgeois and enlightened feudal) movement in favor of
emancipation from absolute monarchy and autocratic state tutelage;
– the “Wiener Kongress – Vienna Congress” and the “Ausbürgerungs- und Sozialistengesetze
– banishment and anti-socialist laws” as landmarks for feudal backlash, restoration, and
suppression of (both bourgeois and proletarian) liberation efforts;
– the “Kommunistische Manifest – Communist Manifesto”, the founding of the “Verein für
Socialpolitik – club for social policy” and its “Kathedersozialismus – lectern socialism” as
expression of diverging socialist movements against the newly developing capitalist system
and its anti-social (side-) effects, and last but not least
– the political constitution of the “Bismarck Reich” and its famous “Kaiserliche Botschaft –
Imperial message / speech of the throne” of November 17, 1881, heralding and highlighting
the German imperial regime’s policy of complementing its repressive anti-socialist laws by a
top-down welfare reform in the form of a comprehensive system of mandatory social insurance schemes.
By highlighting the major elements of the German way toward welfare state in form of the
preceding key historical events we neither intend nor want to imply that there is a definite analytical, not to mention mono-causal, interconnection. It is, however, most plausible to assume
that, e.g., the first in combination with the second set of events and their economic, social, and
political determinants can claim a considerable explanatory power. They do so for the emergence of the essentially subsidiary distribution of responsibilities for the various components of
“Sozialhilfe – social aid for the disabled” in favor of the both regional and functional federations (communities, voluntary welfare associations).
The Stein-Hardenberg reforms of the Prussian public administration, implemented toward
the end and just after the Napoleon liberation wars, maybe taken as cases in point. Among
other aims they explicitly, if perhaps more by the former than by the latter, were intended to
establish autonomous local entities of self-responsibility and governance within the newly
emerging administrative structures of post-war Prussia. On the background of the already
mentioned tradition of Prussian towns and states being legally obliged to care for the poor,
assigning the political competence for welfare services provision to the local level appears as
an obvious strategy for claiming and creating autonomy over local affairs.
By the same token, getting engaged in inconspicuous and seemingly apolitical activities such
as the founding and running of sports and welfare clubs and associations served similar purposes, if any outright political engagement was met by utter mistrust and repression of the ruling feudal elite. This was increasingly the case, when the proletarian masses began to revolt
against their miserable living conditions in the big cities in more and more ardent protests and
violent street riots. Marx and Engels’ so-called “Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus – scientific
socialism”, highlighted in the Communist Manifesto, provided the ideological basis for revolutionary upheaval against the new capitalist system. Their doctrine was keenly opposed by what
– 15 –
the communists defied as mere “Kathedersozialismus – lectern socialism”: To organize their
opposition and enhance their social engagement, mostly academic economists had founded the
“Verein für Socialpolitik – club for social policy”, still the professional economic association in
the German-speaking countries today. Their core objective was to generate scholarly advice
and public support for the idea of reconciliation between the quest for productive dynamism of
capitalism and the claim for (re-)distributive equity of socialism. In that respect they were not
only anti-revolutionary, but also anti-authoritarian. Private clubs and voluntary (welfare) associations in such a perspective gained yet another quality, as allies or pluralist bulwark against
proletarian revolution, but also as under-cover agents for democratic self-determination and
social reform.
The amalgamation of the second and third sets of symbolic events, inherent therein, may be
demonstrated particularly well by briefly referring to Adolph Wagner’s famous “Gesetz der
wachsenden Staatstätigkeit”– law of increasing state activity”17. Wagner, Germany’s most
renowned public economist of the Bismarck era and co-founder of the Verein für Socialpolitik,
mentioned before, was in ardent opposition to Karl Marx’s theoretical argumentation. He nevertheless considered himself as a convinced Prussian State socialist. As such he did, of course,
not belong to the inner circle of economic advisers to the conservative Bismarck administration18. His doctrines can nevertheless be counted as theoretical foundations of the emerging
welfare state, to be implemented in its basic principles by that very administration. In elaboration of his “law”, Wagner did not bluntly speak of a rise in the state activities as such. Instead,
he spoke of “… a rise in the aggregate of all mandatory collective or public, in particular of the
state and communal at the expense of the remaining voluntary collective and private activities
… (which) for the public economy (is) … to be formulated as a law of increasing financial demands of state and the (public) self-governing corporations”19.
There can be little doubt that Wagner, in that respect much like Marx, understood his theoretical reasoning more as normative support for his political mission rather than as a positive
and detached scholarly proposition about likely developments in state activities and their prospective determinants. Unlike Marx, however, he was deeply concerned about reconciling the
tremendous productivity gains to be achieved by the capitalist regime of industrial mass production in a modern market economy on the one hand and its obvious failures in providing
equitable living conditions for the working masses on the other. The driving forces behind his
so-called “law” can easily be identified as his plea for strategic decisions by an astute central
(state socialist) government, complementing and in the long run hopefully substituting the so
far dominating “repressive” by more “preventive” state policies. For that matter, the prevailing
“Rechts- und Machtzweck – law and order orientation” should in his view be cushioned or at
best replaced by a “Cultur- und Wohlfahrtszweck – culture (education) and welfare orientation”, the respective public expenditure programs exerting, of course, much more fiscal stress
on the respective budgets. As a pronounced state socialist, Wagner’s belief and trust in the
capacity of de-central and voluntary cultural (educational) as well as welfare policy programs
to provide encompassing (nation-wide) and equitable solutions sufficient to socially and politically stabilize the young German Reich and its new economic order were, arguably, rather
17
18
19
Wagner (1893), pp. 894 f.; for a more detailed discussion along the lines presented in the text cf. Engelhardt (1996 b), pp. 34 – 107, esp. 44 f.
For details of Wagner’s role in the Bismarckian welfare state policies cf. Kirchgässner (1990), pp. 71 – 104.
In literal (authors’) translation of Wagner, op. cit., p. 894, where he speaks of a “… Zunahme der gesammten zwangsgemeinwirthschaftlichen oder ‘öffentlichen’, besonders aber der staatlichen und communalen auf
Kosten der übrigen gemein- und privatwirthschaftlichen Thätigkeit … (die; G.H.E., K.H.) für die Finanzwirthschaft als Gesetz des wachsenden Finanzbedarfs des Staates und der Selbstverwaltungskörper zu
formulieren (sei; G.H.E., K.H.).
– 16 –
faint. Not only for that reason, but also as an additional and most powerful tool for revenue
raising and income redistribution for and on the national government level, he was in favor of
progressive income taxation. In addition, regional and functional federations were to be created. To the extent that they were to retain or achieve the crucial task of culture and welfare
services provision, they should be run as para- rather than non-governmental organizations
(PGOs instead of NGOs) with compulsory membership and (earmarked) contribution or tax
liabilities.
Wagner’ political creed notwithstanding, it is astounding to what extent such arguments
have influenced the official position of the Bismarck administration. Possibly and vice versa,
they reflected the conviction of a broad political spectrum with the exception of revolutionary
Marxists, who preferred to rally forces for an overthrow of the capitalist system altogether. To
show this and thereby also the amalgamation of determinants behind the third and forth sets of
symbolic events mentioned before, reference to the famous “Kaiserliche Botschaft” is in order.
Literally quoted, Bismarck declared and announced in the Emperor’s name:
“We William, by the mercy of God German Emperor, King of Prussia etc., declare and let it
be known … This February We once already had Our conviction declared in public that the
salvation from the social damages cannot exclusively be pursued by way of repressing social
democratic riots, but equally by way of positively enhancing the welfare of the workers. ...In
this sense the allied governments will take off by presenting a revised draft of a law on the insurance of the workers against accidents in their plants for subsequent parliamentary deliberation. Supplementary to that a draft aiming at unifying the various organizational settings for
a commercial health insurance scheme will be forwarded. But also those who for reasons of
their age or disability become unemployable have a legitimate claim against society to receive
a higher degree of welfare than could have been granted to them so far. To find adequate ways
and means for that is a difficult, but also one of the highest priority tasks within any commonwealth, based on the moral foundations of Christian life in our population. The closer involvement of the real roots of our people’s powers and the amalgamation of the latter into corporate
cooperatives under state protection and state grants in aid will, as We hope, enable us to fulfill
tasks the state alone could not cope with...”20
As is striking off hand, here as in Wagner’s and in many other contemporary publications,
the dichotomy of “repressive’ versus “preventive” or, more positively formulated, welfare “enhancing” policy measures is repeated right at the outset. What is meant by the term “sticks and
carrots” becomes obvious, too. It is even stressed by the scarcely concealed threat “ … that the
salvation from the social damages cannot exclusively be pursued by way of repressing social
democratic (sic!) riots”, implying in other words that it will be done also, continued in future,
and even if performed by political groups giving their activities a “democratic” label.
What is equally striking is the explicit declaration of a legitimate claim against society for
higher welfare than before by those who for reasons of age or disability become unemployable. In this rhetoric it appears to be no more and no less than a governmental commitment to
take political action and declare state responsibility for a welfare entitlement program benefiting the disabled, up to then depending on voluntary community activity (in regional as well as
functional terms). Most interesting in this context is therefore the reference to subsidiary activities by corporate cooperatives under state protection and a respective grants-in-aid program. Such a notion sounds striking for several reasons and particularly also for our recent
problem context. For one, it contains the idea of (to be organized) help for private (also and
particularly, by reference to “… moral foundations of Christian life in our population”, for
Christian) self-help groups and their voluntary welfare associations as potential “corporate
20
Source: BMAS (1987), p. 59 (authors’ translation and italics).
– 17 –
cooperatives”. Second, by combining the promises of state protection and state aid for such
corporations it pronounces offers for mutually beneficial cooperation in corporatist publicprivate partnership relations with the tacit threat that only organizations complying with the
government expectations will enjoy long-term stable and mutually beneficial relations. Last but
not least, because explicitly pronounced, and probably even decisive for the choice of the respective institutional arrangement here as elsewhere is the hope of the Bismarck administration
to thus be able and “… fulfill tasks the state alone could not cope with.”
This latter argument is most probably also the main reason for the fact that the Bismarck
administration was the first and for a while the only national government to introduce the core
social security services such as for accident, health care and old age as mandatory paragovernmental insurance schemes. The foundation of the Bismarck Reich, as should be recalled
in this context was only possible after the defeat of France as its major opponent in the war of
1870/71 and as the minor solution, i.e. under the exclusion of Austria. This made Prussia the
absolutely dominant power first within the Norddeutscher Bund – North German confederation” and then the German Reich as its legal successor.
The common interest and thus the public goods aspects on the federal level of the new
Reich for all member states was confined to the creation of a unified territory for large scale
economic activities on a common market. For some it may also have been the protection of
those activities against foreign competition, and possibly also in safeguarding them by building
and maintaining a stronger military power than Prussia could have done on her own. Beyond
that, the smaller Länder, suspicious of Prussia’s dominating role within the new federation, but
also Prussia herself were reluctant to yield too much of their former state sovereignty to the
new Reich’s federal government. This was clearly mirrored in the federal revenue system:
Aside from some minor tariff and customs receipts plus some joint excise and special consumption taxes, the Reich was practically without revenue sources of its own. To finance its
budget, so-called Matrikularbeiträge, a kind of membership fees or contributions, had to be
granted by the Länder, the Reich becoming their “Kostgänger – boarder”.
In reaction to that, national legislation began to pass laws, issue regulations and establish
standards, the financial burden of which was to be borne by other levels of government and,
more importantly, by newly created para-government organizations. As nation-wide functional
federations for special purposes they were entitled to recruit a mandatory membership and received revenue raising responsibilities of their own. The establishment of a comprehensive social security system by way of mandatory insurance schemes for accident and health care, as
well as old age pensions for workers and employees, as announced in the Kaiserliche
Botschaft and subsequently introduced by the Bismarck administration, were cases in point for
such a strategy. In all these cases, by mere legislative (federal) act a social security system,
enforcing solidarity between employers and employees, i.e. mandating membership and shared
insurance premium payments, were established, costing the Reich “not a penny”.
The economic rationale for such a strategy can be argued as follows: Employers and employees by way of labor contracts form producers’ coalitions for mutual benefit. Yet, the accompanying risks of getting sick, disabled, old etc., in the absence of an insurance rest with the
employees alone. The employers, facing no problems in replacing, particularly unskilled, labor
in those days, had no incentive, the employees, due to extremely low wage rates, no financial
capacity to insure against those risks privately and on a voluntary basis. The resulting costs of
the non-insurance case, however, had to be borne in parts privately (i.e. individually by the
employees), but partly also collectively by society at large and in form of all the detrimental
consequences, hinted at before. Mandatory insurance schemes financed by said production
coalition can thus be interpreted as an internalization device of such nation-wide external effects and their respective social costs.
– 18 –
2.1.4 Major organizational building blocks and developments today
Astounding as it may sound, it is nevertheless obvious: Most elements of, and arguments for
or against, the traditional German welfare state still prevail in the political discussion today.
For our intended analysis of the interrelations between sports and the welfare state it is therefore possible to refer to and base the subsequent presentations on the preceding ones. By the
same token, we can be extremely brief on summarizing those major building blocks of today’s
welfare state services that do not appear to have an immediate bearing for the subject and instead concentrate on those that do.
Recent and still ongoing debates on economic globalization and on rising competitive disadvantages of the “Standort ‘Deutschland’ – production site ‘Germany’” keep pointing to exorbitantly high side costs of labor. Consequently, they call for fundamental reforms in more or
less all sub-sectors of the comprehensive German welfare system and in particular in its various
social insurance branches. They do so, because social insurance premiums are indeed decisive,
if not the only calculable, components of the so-called “Lohnnebenkosten – side costs to the
cost of labor”. Another reason for the ongoing discussions on reform issues and alternatives in
the insurance sector of our recent welfare state “service industry” is the fact of an almost ubiquitous built-in dynamism toward expenditure progression with subsequent demands for premium and/or public subsidy adjustment. In essence though, only a minority of the reform proposals raised takes issue with the traditional building blocks of the respective insurance
schemes. Besides and even if they do, implications for the core question of this paper, asking
for relevant interrelations between the societal subsystems of sport and welfare policy-making,
occur at best indirectly.
Take for instance the insurance against accidents at work as the second oldest branch of our
social insurance system, introduced in 1885. It is, by the way, the only one among the classical
social security schemes, where the premiums are exclusively paid by the employers rather than
shared by them and their employees. It is easily conceivable here that not only safety and precautionary measures with respect to the machinery and equipment provided by the employer,
but also the concentration and bodily fitness in general on the side of the employee influence
the risk of accidents at the work place. Yet, no meaningful discussion on the possible role of
sport or complementary fitness activities and their adequate institutional arrangements in that
context seems to take or have taken place so far.
Much the same is true for the health and old age / disability insurance schemes as the oldest
and third oldest and still most important branches of social insurance in Germany, introduced in
1883 and 1889, respectively. Despite many changes in the regulatory details, more or less
identical patterns as compared to the original device still prevail. They consist of a legally prescribed mandatory community of labor contract partners as a firm’s employer and employee.
These have to share, viz. usually split evenly, the insurance premiums to be withheld from the
employee’s salary and transferred to a public insurance corporation as contract partner of the
respective employee. Those contracts vary greatly depending on the individual, professional,
and or job status of the insured, his or her more or less prescribed – occasionally also left to his
choice – insurance partner, family status and a multiplicity of other detailed regulations contained in the respective contracts.
In the case of health insurance, for instance, fierce debates are under way these days. They
focus on issues such as the socially acceptable cost sharing ratios, economically efficient choice
opportunities for the insured, and a host of other regulations, by which the ongoing explosion
of health expenditures and the corresponding premium payments might be stopped. The old
age pension and disability insurance schemes have in their major parts been transformed from
the original idea of a mandatory capital savings and insurance concept proper into a huge redistribution machinery of transfer entitlements between generations. Their key problems lie in
– 19 –
demographic factors such as declining birth rates and – not the least due to an impressive technical progress in medical care – seminally increasing life expectancies of the aged.
In either sub-category of the traditional social security system it would be fascinating, but is
beyond the reach of our discussion in this paper, to analyze potential and real interrelations
between the respective “insurance” branches and the sport system. Such a discussion might
also lead us closer to the core problems of our topic. It may do so in the sense that policy
choices available today − e.g. the acknowledgement of certain precautionary, preventive, and/
or rehabilitative measures as health expenditures − could transform sport activities and alternative organizational devices for their practice into measures and service providers for the welfare system. This could be done in either of its sub-branches of the health-, old age/disability,
and/or even the care insurance. Conversely, insurance premium adjustments to differential
health or casualty risks could be introduced. The relative discrimination of their providers or
enablers, going along with it, might well exert (dis-)incentive effects on, and thus provide governance potentials for, those activities that sport analysts and policy makers might or should be
interested in.
The latter aspects, taking into account the supply side of service provision, appear to become particularly relevant in the case of the two youngest social security insurance branches,
namely the unemployment insurance, introduced in 1927, and the disability care insurance,
legally established as late as 1994/95.
As to the unemployment insurance, an interesting evolutionary pattern can be observed,
which may once again be typical for the specific German way toward the welfare state21. At the
outset of modern industrial working relations, the risk of unemployment was considered as any
other personal mishap. If acknowledged as an issue of collective welfare concern at all, it was
so on the lowest level of local cohabitation within the family, among friends and local villagers.
To the extent that it became a matter of, and could be utilized for, labor conflicts, emerging
local labor unions started to offer unemployment compensation schemes to their membership.
Such schemes, becoming both a source of selective incentives for recruiting new union members and – by temporarily shortening labor supply – a potential weapon in the fight for higher
nominal wages, soon lead to countervailing offers by local industries and their forthcoming
employers’ associations. The imminent tendency toward bilateral monopoly and persevering
imbalance in the emerging industrial labor market soon led to reactions by astute municipal
governments. Especially in large industrial cities local public, if still voluntary, unemployment
insurance schemes were developed, enticing both labor and employers’ unions and their members to join in. This resulted in increasing regional distortions of the labor market, which in
turn stirred legislative action on the Federal government level. Thus, in 1927 compulsory unemployment insurance in combination with a state monopoly over job mediation for industrial
labor was introduced. Legally based on a “Reichs- bzw. Bundesgesetz – imperial or federal
act”, respectively, its financial basis is like that of the other social insurance schemes. It is cofinanced by (50 - 50) premium sharing between employer and employee, who in turn is entitled
to receive unemployment compensation in case of temporary joblessness. The employee’s premium share is deducted from his or her salary by the employer and passed on to a federal labor
agency, originally called “Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung,
– Imperial corporation for employment mediation and unemployment insurance”. Governed by
a board of high-ranking union, employers’ association, and federal government officials, it is a
federal para-government organization (PGO), situated in Nuremberg. Day-to-day operations of
21
For an encompassing institutional economic study of unemployment compensation and job mediation
schemes as examples for the evolution of public tasks in the emerging German welfare state cf. Rosenfeld
(1996).
– 20 –
that organization, now called “Bundesanstalt für Arbeit – federal agency of labor”, are run by
state and local “Arbeitsämter – labor (branch) offices”. This holds for both the unemployment
insurance and job mediation business. After the abolition of the state monopoly over job mediation a few years ago, the latter, however, is increasingly being done in close cooperation
with local public welfare administrations. Additional partners of the respective joint venture
efforts include private, both for profit and non-profit, consulting firms, assessment and training-on-the-job centers as well as other voluntary welfare organizations, self-help groups, and
citizen initiatives.
Before turning to these public-public and public-private partnership arrangements, making
up the typical German mix of a pluralistic and corporate welfare system, let us briefly touch
upon the “Pflegeversicherung – disabled care insurance”. For it may be considered as taking
over similar supplementary functions with respect to the accident and health insurance
branches as the “Sozialhilfe – social aid” concept, to be discussed afterwards, has come to
fulfill vis-à-vis the unemployment insurance and job mediation business. Interestingly, similar
tendencies toward policy intermeshing and public-public-private alliances building in service
provision have developed and are still developing here as well. This gives rise to the proposition that common causal factors might work in the same direction of a gradual, if fundamental,
reform of the present welfare state in Germany as in other European countries.
Introduced in 1994/95 as the fifth pillar of the social insurance system, the care insurance
may be taken for a belated, if typically German, reaction to the success of other welfare state
policies, namely those of the general health and accident insurance schemes. Medical progress,
not the least financed by large-scale social security coverage of health and accident hazards,
has lead to a dramatic rise in life expectancy of all, but most dramatically, of the older and oldest age groups over the past decades. As a consequence, the risk and frequency of people in
need of disability care beyond that during periods of acute illness and medical therapy has risen
dramatically as well. Mass employment, increasingly also of women, in combination with rising
wealth and life standard aspirations, has led to a deterioration of the situation. The process of
economic growth and industrial development brought about life patterns and family structures,
including decreasing birth and increasing divorce rates, less and less conducive for taking care
of the elderly and disabled, formerly the core domain of the family proper.
As a consequence, tremendous fiscal stress accumulated in other social security budgets,
first of all and particularly in those of the health insurance. For given the up to then blurred, if
not inseparable legal delimitation between health and disability care, extensive incentives for
individual actors both on the demand and the supply side of the health care system prevailed to
(re-)define and transform the latter as/into the former. The collective outcome of such externalization strategies was what might be called an “expanding belts”22 syndrome in hospital care
as a major source for a corresponding inflation of health insurance premiums.
To the extent that those strategies were discovered and eventually abated, the issue and financing load was shifted from the health insurance into the “Sozialhilfe – social aid” branch of
the social security system. For it was and increasingly became above all a poverty issue on behalf of those mostly elderly disabled people, who or whose relatives could neither care for
them(selves) nor buy exceedingly expensive commercial care services. The social aid system
itself, however, due to increasing long-term and structural mass unemployment, got under rising fiscal stress itself. The introduction of the disability care insurance after almost 20 years of
22
This term was introduced by H. C. Wallich back in the sixties in a still ongoing discussion on under- versus
oversupply of public goods supply in a mass democratic political decision making setting. For summaries of
that discussion cf. Phelps (1965), and in application to trends in welfare state crisis and reform Engelhardt
(1996 b), pp. 34-107, esp. 53 ff.
– 21 –
extensive discussion23 can therefore be considered as the last attempt to cope with the problems of a late industrial society by the conventional means of the traditional German welfare
state. At the same time, however, it contains elements of insurance-based subsidies to individual self- and mutual help activities beyond those of the corporate voluntary sector organizations, thus enhancing and actively supporting first steps on the way from the welfare state toward a civic welfare society.
In its key elements, the care insurance is closely linked with the health insurance, the major
problems existing in delimitating care versus health service arrangements anyway. The financial
institutions, too, are similar to those of the other social insurance branches and in particular
again with those of the health insurance, the respective public or private corporations responsible for the latter also taking care of the former and only providing partial instead of complete
cost compensation. The usual premium sharing between employee and employer is maintained
as well. In the light of ongoing discussions on the detrimental effects of exploding welfare expenditures and thus unproductive side costs of labor for the “Standort Deutschland – production site Germany”, however, a collective compensation scheme of the employers’ premium
share was introduced. “Buß- und Bettag – day of repentance and prayer”, a former church
holiday, was transformed into an ordinary workday without additional wage compensation.
What is new and more interesting in our context, is not only and not even primarily the legal
differentiation of acknowledged service demands into three “Pflegestufen – care levels”,
granting various monthly compensation payments to the entitled recipients. In addition to that,
a variety of service providers, including individual family members, were admitted. They became entitled to mutually substitute and/or complement one another according to specific care
contracts within a framework of administrative regulations, publicly supervised and coordinated by local “Sozialstationen – social aid centers”, as far as home rather than hospitalized
care provision was concerned. It is here and in that context that policy intermeshing between
different welfare programs and cooperation between different carrier organizations between
the (local) public and the private corporate, but also non-organized voluntary or even informal
sectors is being shaped. Not only are more and more formerly (local) public aid centers being
turned over to (semi-) private governance by one or joint ventures of several of the “big six”
established “Freie Wohlfahrtsverbände – voluntary welfare corporations” mentioned earlier
and to be dealt with again next. In addition, newly founded, both for profit and nonprofit care
organizations as well as non- – or at best loosely – organized self- and mutual help groups,
including individuals as caring family members, can offer their services and compete for care
contracts within the regulatory framework of the care insurance.
The emergence of new coordinating or catalyst devices for welfare services provision within
or without the (local) public sector can nowadays best be studied in the context of “Sozialhilfe
– social aid” proper. As we recall from our brief historical outline in the preceding sections of
this paper, it is at the same time the oldest section of the social security system in Germany and
the most pervasive and encompassing one at that. The reasons for that appear almost selfevident given the ubiquity of poverty in the pre-industrial, but in the sense of extreme income
and wealth differentials in the industrial society as well.
The transition from agrarian and pre-industrial to industrial production patterns led to the
collapse of the traditional welfare-in-kind provision systems as offered by local and – as a rule
non-anonymous – networks of church, family, kin- or friendship communities. Early reactions
to that on the side of state authorities consisted of giving the towns the legal obligation to care
for the poor. The churches in turn started to found welfare organizations of their own. Due to
overall secularization tendencies and corresponding risks of expropriation in the wake of mili23
For a detailed presentation and policy (network) analysis of that process cf. Pihan (1996).
– 22 –
tant “Enlightenment” ideologies the new welfare organizations were not established in the
confines of the churches proper, but given the status of “Freie Wohlfahrtsverbände – free and
independent welfare associations”.
During the politically turbulent and almost pre-Revolutionary times under an utterly
authoritarian regime in the interlude between the Vienna Congress and the founding of the
Bismarck Reich, outright political engagement and be it for social appeasement and charity
purposes was an extremely risky endeavor. If undertaken at all, it was clad in the organizational gown of private clubs and voluntary societal associations. Immediately after the founding
of the German national state, the Bismarck administration, as pronounced in the “Kaiserliche
Botschaft – imperial message” proper, for preventive reasons felt obliged to accept responsibility for broad-based welfare policies on the one hand, but had no funds of its own to finance
them on the other. As in the case of the social insurance schemes, it initiated the “provision”
and reserved the “governance” of welfare services by and to national legislation, but delegated
the “production”24 of the respective services to others. The resulting policy mix as also proposed in the imperial message was a strategic alliance between (local) government authorities
as lowest level state agents, so to speak, and voluntary welfare organizations as private nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
The intricate network established then is still functional today and provides the backbone of
what has become the typical corporate structure of German welfare pluralism: The legal basis
is the “Bundessozialhilfegesetz – federal act on social aid” as book 9 of the so-called “Sozialgesetzbuch – code of social law”. The core services provided to those entitled consist of
transfers in cash as “Hilfe zum Lebensunterhalt – aid for (basic) living expenses” and “Hilfe in
besonderen Lebenslagen – aid in specific emergency situations”. What in this context is again
more interesting than the (legal) demand or entitlement side of the coin, is the supply side of
service provision. As mentioned before, according to the principle of subsidiarity, the prime
responsibility for subsidizing the needy is with the immediate family, the community of friends
and other private voluntary organizations, before local public welfare administrations (have to)
step in. As a result, this part of the welfare system has from its very outset been construed as a
mandatory alliance between private (both individual and collective) and public actors. Legally,
service production and provision is defined as a so-called “pflichtige Selbstverwaltungsaufgabe
– mandatory task of self-administration” of the local government units (“Landkreise (Gemeindeverbände), kreisfreie Städte – counties, independent municipalities”). Within those legal
confines, however, these units act as legal agents of subsidiarity, so to speak. It is both in their
legal obligation and financial self-interest to find someone to whom they can shift the obligation of service provision in kind and/or monetary transfer payment liability. In case the immediate (vertically related) family members are able but unwilling to pay, the local authorities act as
recipient agents and claimant in lawsuits at the “Sozialgericht – welfare court”. If the sodefined family is unable to pay the addressee for welfare claims next to it are local welfare organizations, which according to their statutes are liable to step in.
It is in this context that the corporate public-private partnership between local welfare administrations and voluntary welfare associations has its genuine field of activities. A host of
such organizations has evolved since Bismarck’s times, nowadays forming an outright hierarchical system of its own, with six major roof organizations such as the
24
For a differentiation of public task performance issues between “provision”, “production”, and “governance”
aspects cf. A.C.I.R. (1987). For a recent application to issues of competence distribution for the so-called
public services of general (economic) interest between local, regional, national, and EU government levels
cf. Engelhardt (1999), p. 67-114.
– 23 –
(1) “Caritasverband – charity association” as an offspring of and close ally to the Roman
Catholic Church;
(2) “Diakonisches Werk – deacon service” as its Lutheran protestant counterpart;
(3) “Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden – central welfare center of the Jewish people” functioning as spokesman of and aid to Jewish minorities in Germany;
(4) “Deutsches Rotes Kreuz – German Red Cross, as the German section of the international
medical aid organization, originally founded to take care of the wounded and prisoners of
war;
(5) “Arbeiterwohlfahrt – workers’ welfare (association)” as historical offspring of the socalled “Arbeitervereine – workers’ clubs” of the Bismarck times;
(6) Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband – welfare association on parity terms” as the only more
or less purely civic or non-ideological welfare organization.
Common features of these voluntary welfare associations, their specific religious or ideological orientation notwithstanding, are their regionally (nation-wide) and functionally (all
welfare services) encompassing realm of activities. Organized in and coordinated by the “Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der freien Wohlfahrtspflege – Federal task force for voluntary welfare
service provision”, they are by statute obliged to cover a comprehensive set of welfare services. By doing so, they have to provide those services – be they in cash or kind – themselves
rather than just grant support to others. That very structure and self-obligation distinguishes
them from other regionally restricted and only supportive organizations. It has, on the one
hand, essentially established their character and position as key (private) actors of the corporate system of welfare provision in Germany. On the other hand, the chronic shortage of means
for self-funding makes them particularly prone for cooperation with other welfare organizations and public agencies25.
For much the same reason, the corporate welfare organizations play a somewhat ambivalent
role in the recent reform discussions. Due to their pivotal position, they act as intermediaries
between both private individuals (family members), informal self- and mutual help groups, and
their own member collectivities (NGOs) on the one hand, public agencies on the various local,
state, and federal government levels on the other. In this function they may well be considered
as catalysts, if not the core driving and regeneration forces, of the traditional welfare services
and organizational mix in Germany. Yet, due to that very strategic position in their long-term
alliance building with the existing (para-) governmental welfare bureaucracies, they have also
become what might be called the prolonged arm of state authority in the traditional welfare
system. In order to preserve that privileged position, they have strong incentives to stick to and
maintain the conventional, highly professionalized and bureaucratized modes of production,
increasingly becoming the object of criticism these days. For in that respect, they may well tend
to function as retarding elements, if not a bulwark against further pluralization, competition,
and a stronger civic engagement in future welfare state and societal transformation issues.
Claims in favor of more progressive approaches toward fundamental welfare and societal
reform gain momentum in almost all policy fields of the modern welfare state these days, in
Germany as elsewhere in the industrialized countries worldwide. In Germany some protagonists such as the sociologist Ulrich Beck go as far as to connect the issues at stake with the
25
According to their own reports, about one third of their funding stems from public grants in aid, another
from reimbursements for services delivered to other organizations and the last third from membership fees,
donations etc. For details and the argument of their for that reason strategic role as intermediaries between
state and private welfare providers in Germany cf. Schmidt (1996), pp. 226 ff.
– 24 –
question for “the future of work and democracy”26 in general. Although it is neither possible
nor necessary to present that line of fundamental reasoning in detail here, it should be mentioned, that the discussion worldwide does indeed include crosswalk considerations as to a
general reorientation of how to provide public goods and services in a pluralist post-industrial
society. Cases in point, to name but two of the most conspicuous ones on the local government
level, are
(1) the US public administration reform movement stirred by Osborne/Gaebler’s bestseller
“Reinventing Government”, its subtitle “How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming
the Public Sector”27 underlining also the thrust of …
(2) the German “Neue Steuerungsmodelle28 – new governance concepts”, aiming at no less
than at a fundamental “Umdenken im Rathaus29 – Rethinking (in) city hall” with “Ergebnissteuerung, Wettbewerb, Qualitätspolitik – outcome orientation, competition, quality
management” indicating the aspiration for new “Entwicklungspfade des öffentlichen Sektors in Europa– paths of development of the public sector in Europe”. 30
All these reform approaches were initiated and brought on their way by (in the US sense)
liberal or social democratic grass roots movements and/or local governments. Thus the suspicion, raised by the somewhat catchy book titles quoted before, namely that public goods and
services provision is to be handed over to profit oriented entrepreneurs, is hardly justified. Osborne/Gaebler do in fact talk about the “entrepreneurial spirit” in the sense of stirring innovative strategies, but not of entrepreneurs as capitalist asset owners or managers taking over. The
same is meant by the plea for “rethinking (in) city hall”, introducing “outcome orientation,
competition, quality management” to move the public sector towards new “paths of development … in Europe”. What is intended by all those approaches is perhaps expressed even better
by a publication, edited by the coordinator of an international survey research network, dealing
with issues of and therefore titled “Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation: Creative Strategies
for Turbulent Times”31. For indeed, unprecedented fiscal stress is threatening the budgets of
most cities in the industrialized world. Managing it without losing one’s capacity for creativeness and innovation has in that context become of paramount importance for urban actors both
inside and outside local public administrations proper. As empirical studies show, however,
experiences are not as dismal as one might have expected. Quite on the contrary, what says a
German proverb: “Not macht erfinderisch – neediness stirs creativeness” appears to have surprisingly often come true.32
It is within such a scenario that the topic of welfare services reform, particularly in the
overlap of local employment and welfare policy-making, in Germany in the recent past and
prospective future has gained and will gain additional momentum. For there can be little doubt
that the prevailing institutional arrangements of the traditional welfare state have been the key
factors for producing tremendous fiscal stress on the local budgets. This is true in particular for
those of unemployment compensation, job mediation, and social aid. But it is also true that
stirring innovative strategies such as new “‘symbiotic arrangements’ in … (urban) government
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Beck (2000). In that book, key arguments for strengthening civic engagement beyond that of and within the
established third sector organizations are forwarded among others by Klages (pp. 151 ff.), Heintze/Strünck,
(pp. 171 ff.), and in particular by Keupp/Kraus/Strauss (pp. 217 ff.).
Osborne/Gaebler (1993).
KGSt (1991).
Reichard (1995).
Naschold (1995).
Clark (1994).
Mouritzen (1992).
– 25 –
– third-sector interaction”33 have above all developed in these policy fields. One may therefore
hope that the conventional modes of cooperation within the traditional corporate policy making machinery will be adjusted, if not complemented or even substituted by new and more
open, pluralistic, and flexible forms of public-public and public-private partnership concepts.
Hopefully, new institutional arrangements for including, e.g., “co-production”34 activities of
those receiving welfare services and/or civic honorary engagement in interaction scenarios for
providing meaningful activities outside the traditional (first and second) labor markets will
evolve in that process. To the extent that this happens, it will have a direct bearing on the interrelations between sports and the emerging new welfare state and/or society settings as well.
We shall return to that after first dealing with the German sports system in particular.
2.2 Sports
2.2.1 The origin
In order to grasp the special qualities of sport in Germany and in order better why one still
speaks of a “German sport- and gymnastics movement”, one should start by analyzing the social- and cultural roots of the specific club character in Germany. Without being able to go into
the details here35, the following aspects appear relevant in this context:
The development of gymnastics (Turnen) – the German variant of sport at its roots – and
the coming into existence of clubs were closely linked. Thus some comments on gymnastics
must first be made. Gymnastics in its original meaning is not at all linked with comparing performance in a competition, as is the case with English notion of sport. “Die Deutsche Turnkunst – the German Art of Gymnastics”, one of the pioneering works, published by Jahn/Eiselen in 1816, puts it that way: Gymnastics is all about health and development of the body,
getting tough by gaining strength and skill, developing astuteness of the mind and courage in
dangerous situations. But simultaneously and of equal importance, it delivers intellectual and
moral education. The term “Turnen – gymnastics” was a neologism intended as a reminder of
the old character of tournaments, commemorating and to some extent propagating the preindustrial, if not medieval, i.e. chivalrous ways of living and patterns of identification. The addressees were not exclusively the middle class, but the entire German people, who were thus to
be encouraged to rediscover the original values making up the German national character. The
idea of “Turnverein – gymnastics club” was thus deeply involved in the ideology of helping
create a feeling of national identity in Germany in the wake of the liberation wars against the
Napoleon regime; gymnastics was meant and hoped to contribute to that in the following
ways36:
(1) The gymnastics club as a community of shared basic values and convictions. In the
1840s the idea had emerged to describe people joining and regularly meeting in a group of
gymnasts as a “club”, which was not restricted to jointly doing gymnastics and providing the
respective resources for its members. The self-image of gymnastics clubs was rather directed
33
34
35
36
For details cf. Engelhardt (1996 a).
The concept of “co-production”, in the context of (local) public goods and services supply, was to our
knowledge first introduced by Whitaker (1980), pp. 240-246. What is meant by that term becomes immediately obvious in the context of (e.g. medical) consulting activities: If a patient needs a doctor, because he
feels sick, the doctor will not be able to help him, if the patient does not give correct answers to the doctor’s
diagnostic questions, nor if he refuses to take the prescribed medicine. In that sense, both doctor and patient
“co-produce” the good of “restoring the patient’s health”. For a transfer to the context of local public goods
provision in general cf. Ostrom/Bish/Ostrom (1988), pp. 104 f.; for a utilization in the context of publicprivate partnerships cf. Engelhardt (1998), pp. 153-233, esp. pp. 204 f.
For those cf. Heinemann/Schubert (1999).
For details cf. Cachay (1988).
– 26 –
towards creating consciousness and responsibility for a specific set of common values, the cultivation of a national conviction and a feeling of community, friendship and sociability.
(2) Identity-providing function of the clubs. Clubs were supposed to cushion the consequences of rapid industrialization and modernization and to facilitate the adjustment to new
working and living conditions. They were meant to serve and frequently also accepted by their
members as a new “home for the time being”, especially for the many people that came pouring
into the towns from the rural areas. The process of radical change from the traditional agrarian
to a modern industrial society was accompanied by extreme social and regional mobility. It
created fundamentally different life styles and social relationships at the expense of a total loss
of the traditional patterns for explaining the sense of life. Daily activities being now split up in
seemingly disconnected and meaningless contexts of social life, the newly emerging clubs
aimed at creating and remained a framework for long-term and encompassing social groupformation. Their key concern was to build a new communal environment and thus help overcome fundamental identity crises of the new immigrants to the urban centers. In a time of high
regional and social mobility, of rapid social change, of a compulsion to adapt to unprecedented
urban and industrial working conditions, the quest and hope for a homely “Gegenwelt – counter-world” to the cold and anonymous world of the upcoming industrial era − was at the core
of the newly emerging club movement in those times.
(3) The multifunctional, yet apolitical character of the clubs. After the victorious wars of
liberation against the Napoleon regime, the gymnastics movement experienced an unprecedented upswing. Besides the fraternities, it was the most important part of a national revolutionary movement. But the victory in the wars of liberation was also and above all the victory
of the European aristocracy over the French revolution, and thus as early as around 1820 any
sort of gym activities were prohibited throughout Germany37. With a short interruption in the
year of the unsuccessful bourgeois revolution in 1848, the gymnastics movement joined the
middle-class and its clubs in their flight into the apolitical world, compelled to do so by the
prevailing societal circumstances under a rather authoritarian aristocratic reign. To the extent
that outright political activities of the middle-class remained illegal, the quest for participation
in societal affairs, and winning support for one’s own bourgeois interests had to be pursued in
the form of politically unsuspicious singing, educational, and gymnastics activities and their
organization within civic clubs and associations.
Taken together, the German gymnastics and sports movement can thus be said to have
originated as part of a national movement, rallying forces and urging the various German
states’ governments to fight for national freedom against Napoleon. Later on that movement
was enhanced and carried on by a specific German patriotism, constantly gaining influence and
– immediately after the wars of liberation – developing thrust toward a unified Germany. Yet,
when the immediate target of reaching a unified German national state was missed, its protagonists withdrew into privacy, as did all other clubs and bourgeois movements. The political
energy and debate toward the national end stepped into the background, if not went underground, not the least enforced by authoritarian government measures such as strict censorship
and outright prosecution. As a consequence something like an outright German club culture –
not just of sports clubs – developed, given to a life style and way of thinking in which smallness and simplicity, tranquillity and idyllic self-contemplation prevailed. The German “Michel”
became the symbolic counterpart to the ardent “Marianne” of France or the brave soldier
“Shvejk” of Bohemia, characterizing the typical German as an honest, innocent, and yet also a
little dumb and dozy, day-dreaming and – above all – thoroughly apolitical fellow.
37
Hamburg is one of the few exceptions, which makes the “Hamburger Turnerschaft” of 1816 the oldest still
operative German gymnastics club today.
– 27 –
At the turn of the 19/20th centuries there was a remarkable increase in the membership of
existing and a founding boom of new clubs. Their self-understanding as a community of people
with shared convictions and values provided an enormous impetus to the clubs movement and
their aims and purposes in imperial Germany before World War I. The common values and
beliefs were increasingly transformed in diverse activities. Gymnastics clubs were no longer
just gym clubs, but developed into multifunctional leisure time, cultural, and citizen associations. Membership and voluntary engagement in clubs reached far beyond the mere interest in
gymnastics, but included lecturing and educational activities as well as neighborhood festivities
to attract new members and gain additional support, social engagement, community sense and
bourgeois solidarity. It was this kind of civic, if non-political, culture that kept developing and
persisted throughout the Weimar Republic.
A major reason for the persistence of the club movement in those times may have been that
it helped to cushion off the worst social detriments of the great inflation in the mid twenties
and the world economic crisis in the late twenties and beginning thirties of the 20th century.
This was true at least for those lucky enough to have become club members before the turmoil
of those catastrophic events. Being introverted and, as it were, a-political, it was, however, not
sensitive and strong enough to recognize and actively fight the increasing radicalization of the
unemployed masses, which eventually lead to the collapse of the faltering democratic structures of the Weimar Republic and their substitution by the Third Reich.
2.2.2 The political misuse in the Third Reich
A decisive new impetus for today’s sports movement, its self-understanding and -organization, however, arose from the evil experiences people had made by a permeating political
misuse of sport, including the Olympic idea. The misuse of idealistic feelings attached to it particularly on the part of the young generation of active sportsmen and women, by the Third
Reich was by no means restricted to the Nazi party organizations but exercised by all official
government authorities. The all-encompassing objective of the Nazi sport organization was to
shape people’s common self-understanding and conscience in the sense of a national-socialist
collective spirit or Weltanschauung. Soon after taking power, the Nazis dissolved the existing
diversity of confessional, ethnic, and professional (particularly workers’) sport clubs and associations and forced them into Gleichschaltung by means of a unitary national sport organization, called “Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen – national socialist gymnastics and sports union”. All positions within that new unitary umbrella organization as well
as in the former clubs as its sub-entities were occupied top-down, according to a new
“Führerprinzip – leadership principle” rather than by election of the membership, the sport
organizations as well as their subordinate clubs thus loosing any democratic legitimization,
whatsoever. Instead, they were transformed into basic cells of mass indoctrination and became
basic tools for enhancing the labor force and military manpower of the German people and
particularly its youngest generation.
Top sport was misused as an instrument to help the new regime to establish and strengthen
its international reputation. The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, in particular, served the national socialist leadership as a highly welcome forum to spread trust in the national socialist
state throughout the world. It thus helped to distract the international community from noticing and/or taking too seriously the already beginning expansionist war-preparations.38 It is only
and essentially on the background of such experiences with total submission of sport under a
fascist sports policy, a totalitarian political instrumentalization of sport between 1933 and
38
For details cf. Bernett (1971), (1992), and Langenfeld (1988).
– 28 –
1945, that the postwar German sports policy, pursued since the founding of the FRG in 1949,
can be explained.
2.2.3
The current organization of sport
After World War II, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany granted clubs and
associations organizational autonomy, thus allowing the fundamental principles of independence and self-responsibility. Germany has no federal Ministry of Sport that is authorized to
control and regulate sports and sports policy. This did not occur by chance, but is the result of
a strict separation of governmental sports policy from the autonomous and self-governing
“Deutscher Sportbund (DSB) – German Sports Federation” and its member organizations. The
principles, underlying German sports policy, arise from the constitutional maxim that the individual’s interests and rights are to be exercised and supported in free and autonomous organizations.
The DSB was founded in 1950 as an umbrella organization for the German gymnastics and
sports movement. It was founded in order to co-ordinate common efforts in sport, to represent
the mutual interest of its member organizations vis-à-vis the government and the general public, and to deal with problems of national and international importance existing beyond the
confines of a single discipline. Areas considered significant include the increasing importance
of sports in a leisure society; the relationship between sport and the federal government; the
creation of new programs in “sport for all”, recreational sport, and top-level sport; the building, and organization respectively, of multiple sport facilities, play, and recreation activities.39
Sport in Germany is organized on the basis that sportsmen and sportswomen voluntarily become members of a club with the intention of realizing their sporting ambitions. This is the
legal basis for all sports organizations, including the sports associations and the DSB. These
organizations can only represent these interests. The sports organization must exclude political
functions and not be used to push political aims such as proving the efficiency of a political
system, sanctioning violations of the Law of Nations, or guaranteeing peace.
The sports person, regardless of discipline, is embedded in the self-administration of sports
clubs in two ways: (1) the so-called “Stadtsportbünde – the urban/regional confederations”,
and (2) the “Landessportbünde – states’ sport confederations”. In addition, the sports person
belongs to the sports federation representing the sports discipline they practice.
The Landessportbünde have similar responsibilities as the German sports federation. However, their responsibilities are restricted and include representing the interests of the sport clubs
on the Länder level; promoting the training and financial support of instructors, youth leaders,
managers, and administrators, and building sports facilities, supporting cultural programs, providing insurance, and so on.
The sports federations, which were founded or re-established after 1949, are responsible for
the rules and regulations of their respective sports discipline. They represent the discipline internationally via the DSB and the “Nationale Olympische Komitee (NOK) – National Olympic
Committee”. They organize German championships and choose the teams for international
competitions. They are responsible for developing elite athletes and technical training and for
defining and monitoring the rules in the discipline. The sports federations have national training
centers and national coaches hired by the DSB. Its members are
− the sixteen sports confederations of the Länder;
− the fifty-four branch sports federations, including the German Football Federation, the
German Wrestling Federation, and the German Tennis Federation;
39
Gieseler (1988), p. 36..
– 29 –
− the twelve sports federations with special responsibilities, including the “Allgemeiner
Deutscher Hochschulsportverband (ADH) – General Students Sport Association”, the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Postsportvereine – Association of Sports Clubs of the Federal Postal
Services”, and the “Deutsche Jugendkraft – German Youth Power”;
− The six federations of science and education, including the “Deutsche Vereinigung für
Sportwissenschaft (DVS) – German Association of Sport Science”, the “Deutscher Sportlehrerverband (DSLV) – German Association of Physical Education Teachers” and the
“Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW) – German Union of Education and Science”;
− the two supporting federations – the “Deutsche Olympische Gesellschaft (DOG) – German
Olympic Society” and the “Deutsche Sportgesellschaft (DSG) – German Sports Association”. The objectives of the DOG are to support sports in the Federal Republic of Germany
and to promote and further Olympic ideals. The DSG is divided into departments with responsibilities for elite sport, sport-for-all, women and sport, sport youth and sport science,
and health and sport education.
All competitive sports and sport-for-all activities are organized and run under the auspices
of the German Sports Federation (DSB), i.e. there are no independent organizations of competitive sport or sport-for-all in Germany. Consequently, different organizational structures
have developed to support competitive sports and sport-for-all programs, and conflicts arise as
these separate organizations compete for funds under the DSB.
Organized sport is structured according to the constitution of the state with respect to decision-making ability, budget, and relations between local and federal organizations. However,
sport has no superseding legitimization and thus may not misuse its power to influence public
policy. In this respect, it remains undisputed that the DSB represent the interests of sports
policy, sports in schools, and non-organized sportsmen and sportswomen. In so doing, the
DSB is bound to maintain a neutral stance in party politics.
In order to evaluate governmental sports policy, we have to keep in mind that all sports
clubs and associations are under the umbrella of the DSB. The organizations’ fragmentation,
which prevailed prior to the Third Reich, no longer exists. The DSB represents a unitary sports
movement. This implies the following:
(1) All participants in organized sport are represented under their common roof of the DSB,
irrespective of their social status, their professional or occupational position, and their belonging to various confessions or ethnic groups.
(2) The DSB thus claims to be the one and only representative and spokesman for the whole
of sport, i.e. to be responsible for both leisure and popular sports, for competitive and top
sports. Beyond that, it claims responsibility for the support of school sports and the development of sport sciences. The rationale for the DFB asserting a monopoly position as the
sole agent of sports in society40 may surely be and is being regarded by the DFB itself as a
precautionary prerequisite for protecting sport against any renewed attempt toward (totalitarian?) take-over by politics. But as will have to be discussed in detail later, it may also
turn out as a major obstacle to flexible adjustment of organized sport to new societal developments.
(3) The DSB and its member organizations regard their respective activities as being beneficial
to the public at large. In its statute it explicitly says: “The DSB exclusively and directly
40
As is documented by an increasing environmental engagement of the DFB, this claim even includes the
assumption of responsibility for detrimental effects of sports activities, performed by people outside of existing member clubs of the DFB.
– 30 –
pursues purposes that are of benefit to the public.” This is for sure an essential prerequisite, prescribed by the existing tax laws in Germany, for qualifying for the massive tax
privileges sport clubs and associations enjoy as any organization awarded the status of
“Gemeinnützigkeit” that is of providing collectively beneficial and in that sense public
goods and services. But it may to a considerable extent also explain the DSB’s prevailing
monopoly claim for overall responsibility in defining and pursuing sports affairs beneficial
for the public at large.
(4) Up to now, organized sport and the DSB as its official representative have enjoyed a monopoly position in a dual sense, i.e. not only as spokesman of the interests of all sport visà-vis the state authorities, but also as de facto the only supplier of sport41,. Apart from the
schools, sport clubs have been and to a large extent still are the only provider of opportunities for doing sports. More often than not they use the former’s facilities (gym halls, soccer and/ or athletics fields) as in kind subsidies in addition to those received in terms of
monetary transfers and the money value of the tax privileges mentioned before. The quest
for defending said monopoly positions and privileges, accompanied by them, is therefore
another, if not the most decisive determining factor for explaining the rigidities in sports
welfare interrelations. This is true despite observable tendencies of the traditional state
welfare programs heading into crisis, therefore cutting back on their subsidization
schemes, both in monetary terms and in kind, expecting if not presupposing or demanding
adaptive strategies by organized sport as well.
2.2.4 The relationship between organized sport and the state
Germany is a federal state composed of sixteen Länder as member states. Ten “old” ones
(among them Bavaria, Hess and North Rhine-Westphalia as so-called territorial states, Bremen
and Hamburg as city-states) constituted the original Federal Republic of Germany before reunification. Six “new” Länder (among them Brandenburg, Saxony, and Turingia as territorial,
Berlin as city-states) joined after the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic. A member state holds definite and supreme power of its own and as such is not subordinate to the
federation. Thus, the Länder are responsible for all areas, except for those that are stated in the
constitution as the responsibility of the feral government. The “Grundgesetz – Basic Law” as
Germany’s constitution describes and restricts the duties of the federation, the Länder, and
their communities, including intergovernmental relations among all levels of government. It
defines the sovereignty of the Länder in cultural matters, including education (schools and universities), research, and sport. Each of the federal states has its own parliament and government and is in charge of framing policy, especially for security, economic development, the
education system, and social as well as cultural affairs, once again including sports.
Sports clubs and federations in the Federal Republic of Germany act as autonomous units.
Governmental support is aimed at furthering the self-reliance of these autonomous units. According to the federal structure of the Federal Republic of Germany, the federal government,
the Länder, and communities are the primary agents of public sports administration. Responsibilities at the various levels are distributed by constitutional regulation. The delimitation of
responsibilities to promote sport is determined in a pragmatic manner after consultation with
relevant bodies within the autonomous sports administration system.
41
Only in the past decade has there been a noteworthy amount of commercial sport suppliers in Germany, and
even they have not been able to develop into serious competitors for the sports clubs. So up to now it is almost exclusively the sports clubs that benefit from government subsidies, causing serious biases in competition between commercial suppliers and sports clubs.
– 31 –
Evidently then, in sport analogous structures and outright institutional overlapping prevail
as in other fields of welfare policy and the para- or non-governmental organizations (PGOs,
NGOs) in particular the so-called “(freie) Wohlfahrtsverbände – free or voluntary welfare associations” operating there. Generally speaking, there seems to be reason for the assumption
that corporatism as the over-arching governance scheme, effective here as there, may be causing (almost) identical problems of flexible adjustment in times of fundamental change or transition. Corporatism in that sense symbolizes a kind of interlocking of the state and the clubs by
means of an “integration and functional representation of unions in the sphere of government”.42 Clubs take over government tasks, thus gaining a quasi-public character and in return
for their public task performance receiving government support. Corporate structures emerge,
when in the process of expanding welfare state aspirations, majority parties and their governments feel inclined to satisfy increasing demands, be it by government guarantees and securities
or outright subsidies to trailing businesses, be it by transfer payments to underprivileged or
needy citizen groups. They do so in order to meet the rising claims of their clientele, constantly
raising the level of government intervention in economic and societal affairs 43. A favorite
strategy in that context is what was called “a functional interweaving of government and nongovernment organizations, overlapping the classical division of powers”.44
The non- or para-governmental organizations (NGOs or PGOs) partly relieve government
from public task performance by taking over some of the administrative functions involved,
such as information, communication, consulting on and/or implementation of welfare programs
for the client or often even membership groups of said organizations. In doing so they utilize
comparative information advantages, closer social relationships as inputs in kind in welfare
transactions and the like. To the extent that synergy in welfare provision relations is to be expected, this may not only relieve government agencies from administrative burdens, but also
enhance effectiveness (closeness to real demands) and efficiency (cost reduction) of transfer
payments in cash or kind. The reverse side of the medal is, of course, a growing mutual dependency, adherence to established cooperative partnerships and routine implementation
strategies, i.e. reluctance to change and administrative inflexibility.
The analogy to sport is clearly at hand: Sport organizations such as clubs, their associations
and unions, frequently run by (semi-) professional functionaries, take over public tasks. Those
tasks would otherwise have to be fulfilled by others – partly by state agencies, but possibly also
by alternative non-governmental initiatives such as citizen self- or mutual help initiatives. Corporatism thus provides for specific institutional arrangements. Their temporary outcome is the
result of a societal bargaining process with respect to state versus self-governance. The two
sides of the barter are (1) the provision of legal securities and financial grants, offered by the
state authorities, and (2) the taking over of public tasks at promised or prescribed standards by
private actors. Such actors may be para-, quasi or non-governmental organizations (Quangos)
or even private clubs and their roof associations operating in “Eigenverantwortung – selfresponsibility” and “treuhänderische Selbstverwaltung – fiduciary self-administration”.
Either side hopes to reap benefits from that barter. Clubs and unions can be expected to
provide the respective goods and services in ways that are closer to the preferences of their
members. By utilizing honorary and voluntary engagements of some such members or donors,
the goods and services at hand can be expected to be less expensive and ultimately also less
prone to professional, if not bureaucratic routine than those provided by government officials.
That way government can expect to better comply with the wish of the people and still main42
43
44
Heinze (1981), p. 83.
Nautz (1985).
Alemann/Heinze (1992), p. 45.
– 32 –
tain sufficient control over a reasonable utilization of tax revenues devoted to sport and related
welfare issues. For their part, the state authorities expect an implementation of the envisaged
sport and / or welfare activities according to more or less precisely defined standards. If they
fail to be met, clubs and unions may face considerable sanctions such as cuts in, or even the
cancellation of, public grants altogether45. Such corporate interconnections are indicated in
fig. 1 (p. 34). They are to a certain extent institutionalized personally and organizationally
– e.g. by means of advisory and supervisory bodies staffed by representatives of either side.
Thus representatives of the unions (e.g. of the DSB) are sent as delegates into the supervisory
committees of government authorities (e.g. the federal institute for sport sciences). Institutional interconnections may consist of coordinating bodies such as the conference of sports
ministers or the German sports conference. They may also take the form of “Lenkung mit dem
goldenen Zügel – governance by the golden rein”, i.e. state financial aid to sport organizations
on the club or union level.
The essentially corporatist structure of the domestic German welfare constitution, institutionalizing a close cooperation of PGOs, NGOs and political parties sharing important public
functions, also originates in the late Bismarck era, as outlined before. The Bismarck administration both explicitly and implicitly encouraged the emergence of strong unions and associations to take an active part in shaping the basic, and hopefully stable, structures of the then
virgin industrialist society. In that process, they inevitably achieve responsibility for essentially
political tasks. During that era national lobbying organizations such as the “Zentralverband
deutscher Industrieller – central association of German industrialists”, the “Bund der Schwerindustrie – union of heavy industry”, or the “Hansabund der exportorientierten Leichtindustrie – Hanseatic league of export-oriented light industries” came into being. So did, on the
other hand, the labor unions. According to Bismarck’s conservative notion, the unions were
supposed to remain independent of the emerging political parties. To some extent, they were
even expected to become their countervailing powers in their efforts to improve the economic
situation of the workers. This was not to be achieved by means of revolution à la Marx and
Engels, but rather by striving for better living and working conditions for the workers in a
capitalistic economy. Apart from that and above all, a great number of business and consumer
cooperatives as well as self- and mutual help organizations of workers small businessmen, artisans, craftsmen, and farmers emerged. More often than not this happened by way of joint ventures for gaining sufficient equity and credit financing of new middleclass enterprises. Thus
cooperatives and mutuals such as the Raiffeisen- and Schulze-Delitsch-Genossenschaften were
founded in rural and suburban areas. For these areas were economically not yet interesting
enough for the emerging commercial and savings banks and without such organizations would
have been left to cut-throat lending practices and usury by exploiting private creditors. Interestingly, it was in those times that the basic ideology of a genuine cooperation principle between partial interest groups and state authorities came into being. According to that ideology,
all societal problems were to be solved in a sphere of mutual respect and consensus building,
all challenges to be met by joint ventures. Even today, the rhetoric and public appeal of socalled “Runde Tische – round tables” and “Bündnis für Arbeit – consensus-oriented long term
labor pacts” continue to reflect this perennial quest for societal harmony and consensusbuilding in Germany.
45
A case in point is the pressure exerted on sport clubs and unions by the state authorities to successfully cope
with doping-affairs and the tendency to make the support of high performance sportsmen and women dependent on the respective success achieved in international top sports events, to be taken as an indicator for
increasing the donor state’s international reputation.
– 33 –
In a summarizing attempt to identify the basic building blocks of both the welfare and the
sports systems in Germany, the following aspects would probably have to be included:
(1) The paramount weight of para- and non-governmental organizations (PGOs and NGOs) as
(semi-) private associations or unions (Wohlfahrtsverbände – welfare unions, but also the
DSB) and their strong, if not (quasi-)monopolistic position as suppliers of (semi-) public
and private goods and services with respect to both welfare and sports;
(2) the encompassing support, both financial and in kind, granted both directly and indirectly
(as e.g. tax privileges) to these union activities as core policy measures of the current
welfare state;
(3) an essentially corporate and cooperative relationship between the state authorities and the
unions, expressing itself not only in a far reaching division of labor but also by the manifold institutionalized policy meshing in fulfilling the respective tasks, as illustrated in the
subsequent graph (fig. 1) for the sports system in Germany;
(4) the consensus model embodied therein, according to which the fundamental social and
economic tasks and challenges ought to be tackled and met in agreement among all socalled relevant groups and forces of society.
Fig. 1: The Institutionalized Network between Sport and the State
Personal Network
German Sport
Federation
Federal Institute
for
Sport Sciences
Management and Administration Academy
of Berlin
Sport and Coaches’
Academy of Cologne
National Olympic
Committee
Federal Govt.
Financial
Länder
Aid
Municipalities
German Olympic
Institute
Institutionalized Cooperation
Institutionalized Cooperation
German Association of Districts
German Association of Cities
German Sport Conference
Yet, appealing and convincing as such claims may sound a grave and up to now unsolved
problem ensues from such institutional policy meshing, particularly from the strong economic
dependence of the unions – the figures relating to sport have been reported above. The grants
– 34 –
provided by third parties – i.e. in particular government subsidies, but also revenue from economic activities – pose particular problems for a club/union, for the following reason: Independence from third parties is what essentially constitutes a club or union. Apart from democratic participation in the decision-making process within a club or union, resource provision
by its membership is the second vital instrument that members have in order to ensure the organization’s orientation toward their own interests. Only when the club is independent of third
parties, i.e. when it is largely supported but by contributions financial and in kind, including
voluntary and honorary work of its members, can the members be sure that their own interests
will govern the club as a whole. If the members were to realize that their club no longer depends on their own resources, they might withdraw their support, or threaten to leave the club
altogether, forcing it to alter its policies.
Conversely, one has to realize: Whoever gives support, wants to exert influence. External
support, governance by the “golden rein”, as this has come to be called in intergovernmental
relations particularly with respect to the growing fiscal dependence of the lower on the higher
levels of governments, diminishes the member’ influence and can pose a threat to the club's
autonomy. Here as there, financing from without reduces the discretion of the dependent to
develop relationships with their environment on their own accord. And it also hampers the
genuine (sport) system to determine its own social and functional order as well as organic
evolution. This may happen to the extent that even the genuine resources of the membership
can no longer be used according their own and self-determined priorities. For every so often
proposals to do so will be confronted with the inescapable and majority-winning argument: “If
we insist in doing this or that, which admittedly would be the best for us, we would lose so and
so many funds from the external source; so we’d better do what they want us to.”
At this point, however, sports clubs and unions, the DSB in particular, are in a specific, one
may call it almost idiosyncratic, situation of their own: As they claim to be and are publicly
acknowledged as representatives of the whole of sport, they do not merely act on behalf of the
interests, expressed by the members organized within the DSB. Instead, they can argue from a
point of general or public interest in that respect. If and to the extent that organizations purport
to act as agents not only of their own membership, but for the public at large, the situation
becomes even more complicated. As soon as they demand government subsidies for that reason, the caucus of the organizations’ members can in their own parochial perspectives simply
be too shortsighted and thus be wrong. This is why the state officials as democratically instituted representatives of the general public may claim a legitimate right to have their say on the
issue at hand. This refers in particular on the utilization of the resources levied from the taxpayers at large and not only from those doing sports that are then being transformed into government grants to sports.
In order minimize the impression of such influences, functionaries of organized sport as of
other welfare organizations like to resort to normative concepts such as the principle of subsidiarity. Said principle was first propagated by the official social doctrine of the Catholic
Church46, in Germany particularly popularized by Oswald Nell-Breuning, a renowned Jesuit
priest and professor of economics and social policy sciences. According to this principle, a
46
Based on the Natural Law Doctrine of Thomas Aquinas and his disciples, according to which society as a
whole should not cancel and take over the tasks of its parts but only complement and support them, it was
officially declared as a kind of bottom-up principle of welfare task performance by Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclica “Rerum Novarum” in 1908. According to § 2 of the “Bundessozialhilfegesetz – Federal Law on Social Aid ” of 1961, it is also the overriding principle of the current system of social aid transfers to the
needy, to be paid by the local government level despite its federal law basis. However, The counties and
communities are only obliged to pay, if neither the prospective recipients, their direct relatives nor private
groups and/or welfare organizations can – in that order – be made responsible.
– 35 –
specific public task should remain in the responsibility of the relatively smallest decision unit
and on the relatively lowest decision level that can perform that task satisfactorily and does not
interfere with the task performance of other, not necessarily but particularly higher level decision units. The rationale for that is that the agents of a smaller unit – such as a sports club – are
closer to its individual members. That way they not only have better information on their objective living conditions, but will also be in a better position to perceive, and act in, their own
interests and self-responsibility than a higher entity would. For whenever information and interests are perceived and administered by third parties, the danger of filtering and warping
arises.47
Taken together, the argumentation along such lines boils down to the proposition that the
state should give support where the organization has insufficient resources of its own to adequately perform in the public interest. But it should do nothing that would interfere with the
self-determination of and autonomous decision-making by the membership toward a free development within the clubs’ and unions’ movement. Seen in this perspective, the principle of
subsidiarity can also be understood as a barrier against the ubiquitous state responsibility for
and programming of all societal affairs, against the omnipresence of government intervention
and bureaucratic governance of a genuinely civic society.
In that sense, corporatism and the principle of subsidiarity may tend to be contradictory, if
not mutually exclusive, concepts of governance on a rather fundamental level altogether. In the
latter case, private self-help and voluntary organizations have gained importance for the provision of public goods and services to the extent that state authorities have transferred the respective responsibility to them. To the extent they receive public funding, yet have to submit to
public controls with their entire realm of activities, as long as these are considered publicly
relevant, they also lose control over their own business. In the former case, the competency
and responsibility for deciding, if an activity is to be pursued and how, remains within the organizations outside the state authorities. The state subsidizes them for their mere existence and
in recognition of their specific autonomy without gaining control over their specific activities.
In practice there are, of course, no clear-cut division lines between the two concepts. In the
case of sport, in order to claim financial support on the basis of a corporate partnership and yet
ward off government influence, the relationship between sport and the state has been given the
rather ambiguous label “subsidiary partnership” by sports officials. By using such a label, they
tend to imply that within its corporate relationship with state authorities organized sport has
become the elongated arm of government welfare politics. Without allowing government to
interfere with the specific form of welfare production, its support is claimed and acknowledged
as being or remaining of undisputed, if subsidiary, importance.
2.3 Sports and the welfare state – policy patterns in comparative perspective
Summarizing and comparing the general structural and developmental patterns of the traditional German welfare state and sports systems, one would arrive at something like the subsequent, if of course over-simplifying, synopsis (fig. 2, p. 37):
(1) Given the almost (pre-) revolutionary situation at the outset and genesis of the German
welfare state in the mid- to late 19th century it is no wonder that there was a strong bias
toward state provision and regulation. Such a regime was induced though not funded by a
conservatively and rather autocratic federal government level. And it in particular applied
on the core social insurance schemes, aimed at establishing so-called “Zwangssolidargemeinschaften – coercive communities of solidarity” as functional federations of the producers (owners of labor and capital alike). It was also applied, if to a lesser extent, to the
47
Nell-Breuning (1969), p. 1137.
– 36 –
supplementary subsystems of “Sozialhilfe – social aid or welfare services”. True, with respect to their production and provision, the respective goods and services are left to the
subsidiary responsibility of private self- or mutual help activities, of still private “freie
Wohlfahrtsverbände – voluntary welfare associations” and – if public at all – to the responsibility of the local government level. The legal claims or entitlement and thus the demand side of all those arrangements for prospective recipients, however, is regulated in
abundant detail by federal law, i.e. the “Bundessozialhilfegesetz – federal act on social
aid”. In contrast to that, sports, to the extent that it is considered to have relevant welfare
implications, as is the case for the pursuit of the “sports for all” objective, no legal base for
public support of the supply side, nor for any recipients’ claim or entitlement exists.
Fig. 2:
Comparative aspects
Welfare state system
Sport system
(1) Pervasiveness of state
regulation / legal
claims and entitlement system
• Abundant state regulations
• No legal base for state support
• Legal entitlements of individual recipients to social insurance and welfare payments
• No individual entitlements to sport
facilities
(2) Relative importance
of state vs. NGO and
voluntary sector activities
• Para-governmental social insurance schemes for old age,
health and care, accident and
unemployment
• Core responsibility of the voluntary
sector (sports clubs, their branch and
regional associations, DSB)
• Important role of voluntary
sector organizations besides the
local government level for
welfare transfers in cash or
kind
(3) Inter-organizational
(fiscal) relations between state and voluntary sectors
• Strong position of the freie
Wohlfahrtsverbände (voluntary
welfare associations) and selfor mutual help groups
• Corporatist interrelations between state and voluntary organizations
• Subsidization of and tax privileges for the latter
(4) Organizational
modes of task
performance
• Dominance of professional,
bureaucratic, and densely
regulated service provision in
public administrations
• Predominantly local public
administration with voluntary
and laymen’s service provision
• Highly non-transparent competence structures between
public administrations and voluntary organizations
(5) Goal orientation and
relationships
• Multiple and often contradictory objectives
• Elementary responsibilities for
school sports by staff of public institutions of (higher) learning (public schools, colleges etc.)
• Autonomy of sport organizations
over government tutelage
• subsidiary interrelationships
with federal, state, and local
authorities in particular with respect
to public financial support
• Prevalence of grants in kind with
respect to the gratuitous public provision of sports grounds, gyms etc.
• Prevalence of voluntary and – by and
large – honorary engagement of
laymen as club and/or association
officers acting as autonomous functionaries
• Relatively clear-cut competence
structures within and between the
different club and association levels
• “Sports for all” as unilateral goal
relevant for welfare
(2) Given the almost (pre-) revolutionary situation at the outset and genesis of the German
welfare state in the mid- to late 19th century it is no wonder that there was a strong bias
toward state provision and regulation. Such a regime was induced though not funded by a
– 37 –
conservatively and rather autocratic federal government level. And it in particular applied
on the core social insurance schemes, aimed at establishing so-called “Zwangssolidargemeinschaften – coercive communities of solidarity” as functional federations of the producers (owners of labor and capital alike). It was also applied, if to a lesser extent, to the
supplementary subsystems of “Sozialhilfe – social aid or welfare services”. True, with respect to their production and provision, the respective goods and services are left to the
subsidiary responsibility of private self- or mutual help activities, of still private “freie
Wohlfahrtsverbände – voluntary welfare associations” and – if public at all – to the responsibility of the local government level. The legal claims or entitlement and thus the demand side of all those arrangements for prospective recipients, however, is regulated in
abundant detail by federal law, i.e. the “Bundessozialhilfegesetz – federal act on social
aid”. In contrast to that, sports, to the extent that it is considered to have relevant welfare
implications, as is the case for the pursuit of the “sports for all” objective, no legal base for
public support of the supply side, nor for any recipients’ claim or entitlement exists.
(3) Correspondingly, welfare state activities proper are either organized as para-government
social insurance corporations or assigned to the local government level as “pflichtige
Selbstverwaltungsaufaben – mandatory tasks of self-administration”. With increasing
long-term and structural unemployment, uncovered by the respective branch of the social
insurance, and exploding welfare transfer burdens on the local budgets, the voluntary sector has gained growing importance for the provision of welfare, including job (re-) training
and mediation services, both in cash and kind. The core responsibility for sport has always
been and remains with private clubs, their branch and regional associations and the DSB as
their common roof organization on the federal level, all being pure voluntary sector organizations. Rudimentary public responsibilities exist in the form of school and college /
university sports and, of course, sports studies within educational organizations.
(4) Due to the development over time of responsibilities for welfare state services, the voluntary welfare associations have gained core importance in policy formation and implementation, in the course of which strong corporatist interrelations between government, voluntary sector organizations, including private self- and mutual help initiatives, have developed. Service provision in (predominantly local) public-private partnership is accompanied
by institutionalized remuneration/subsidization schemes and/or tax privileges. Sport organizations, in that their engagement in welfare state objectives is reduced to “sports for
all“ and thus predominantly leisure time activities have retained far-reaching autonomy
over government tutelage. Public and at best subsidiary grants to private sponsorship are
therefore rarely given as financial aid, but rather as gratuitous or low-priced provision of
public sport grounds, gyms etc. in pursuit of the “sports for all” objective.
(5) The key social security services with respect to the insurance and other public administration activities are provided on highly regulated and thus professionally specialized and bureaucratized standards. Welfare programs implemented on public-private partnership basis
between local government and third sector organizations, including self- and mutual help
initiatives, are characterized by cooperation between public administration and laymen’s
service provision, intermeshing and lacking transparency of competence structures being
more the rule than the exception. Sport organizations on the other hand usually have simpler and more clear-cut competence and power structures, both within and between the
various organizational layers of clubs, branch and regional associations, and the DSB.
Voluntary and – by and large – honorary engagement of laymen and -women as club / association officers acting as elected but during their term autonomous functionaries of their
respective organizations. On the higher levels professional managers as heads of executive
offices or secretariats support the elected officers.
– 38 –
(6) Given the multiplicity of (para-) government agencies, non-governmental organizations,
and private initiatives, all working in different and often overlapping, policy arenas of the
modern welfare state, it goes without saying that the “objective function” of such a conglomerate of actors cannot be taken as well defined. Its indeterminacy and diversity may
even be considered as the outcome of strategies concealing contradictory means-ends relationships. This might hold for all means and ends pursued by sport organizations as well.
The one and only goal, relevant in our welfare state context, namely the “sports for all”
objective, however, appears ways more unilateral, if not also more concise, to the effect
that countervailing strategies by some or all actors become more easily obvious.
3. STATE RESPONSIBILITIES FOR SPORT IN GERMANY TODAY
3.1 The Federal Government’s spheres of responsibility
Germany’s constitution does not explicitly assign the federal government the ability to support sports. According to Article 30 of the German constitution which defines the spheres of
jurisdiction, culture and by this also sport lies in the realm of the Länder. Only if the matter
exceeds the concerns of a single Land does the federal government level get involved. In regard to sport, the federal government is chiefly responsible for those tasks that are of central
importance to the Federal Republic of Germany and that cannot be accomplished simply by any
one of the seventeen Länder. The federation represents the entire nation in sport, especially
elite sport. It also
– represents the state at sport events such as the Olympic Games and World and European
Championships;
– pursues foreign relations by the development assistance of sport in Third World countries;
– supports non-public central organizations that are of importance to the entire federal territory such as the DSB, NOC, and special associations.
3.2 Governmental sports policy on the Länder level
In accordance with the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (Article 30), most
aspects of sport are the sole responsibility of the Länder. In Germany, the Länder hold supremacy in cultural affairs, and sport is understood to be a part of culture. Sport is in the hands
of the Länder, especially sports at school and sports in general. Financial support is granted via
community budgets for constructing sports and leisure sites, the salaries of trainers and
coaches, and work by associations in youth education. The Länder’s two foremost tasks are
sports at schools, including the education of teachers at universities, and research in the field of
sports sciences at universities. The Länder support top-level sports in a number of ways, yet
their priority is to promote recreational sports both within and outside the sports federations.
Responsibility for sports is assigned to various state ministries. In general, the Ministry of Education is responsible for sports in schools and universities, including promoting sports, building
sports facilities, and supporting federations. However, a few Länder designate the responsibility for school and recreational sports to various other ministries. A major responsibility of the
Länder is to promote sports facility construction at the community and club level. The Länder
not only provide financial support, but also offer counseling services in planning and construction of sports, game, and recreational facilities. Furthermore, the Länder support elite athletes;
construct and maintain regional training and instruction centers for the sport federations; subsidize payment of instructors and administrators. In addition, the Länder hold regular training
and in-service education of instructors and support projects for young club members.
– 39 –
3.3 Sports support on the community level
On the district and community levels, the support of sport is directed mainly toward sportfor-all and recreational sports. Cities and communities are involved in building and maintaining
local sports and recreational facilities as well as youth centers, and in helping to maintain facilities of private sports clubs. In many cases, the sports clubs have free access to and use of public sports fields, gymnasiums, and swimming pools. City and community sports offices are responsible for the administration, maintenance, and renovation of community sports facilities. In
Germany, sports – especially leisure and sports by the general public – are publicly supported,
and this support is mainly provided by way of constructing and maintaining sports grounds at
schools and sports clubs.
In 1960 the German Olympic Society passed a so-called Golden Plan that set a target for
sports grounds for communities of different sizes. These targets were an appeal to responsible
authorities within the Federal Republic of Germany to remedy deficiencies in recreational,
playing, and sports facilities. By addressing the problem of inadequate facilities, the German
Olympic Society recommended a proposed construction plan costing 6.3 billion German
marks. The low cost to the clubs is the chief basis for the realization of sports-for-all. Most
clubs are able to provide their sports programs with monthly membership rates of only 10 to
15 German marks. Another advantage of this model is its extremely high utilization rate, since
schools as well as sports clubs use these sites. However, the federation does not fully support
ongoing maintenance costs. In recent fiscal years, more and more of the burden fell on the
communities, with the result that already some sports grounds, especially indoor swimming
pools, have been closed.
Different bodies co-ordinate the interests of the communities, the Länder, the federal government, and the private sports organizations:
– Districts, cities, and communities have joined forces in national associations such as the
“Deutscher Landkreistag – German Association of Districts”, the “Deutscher Städtetag –
German Association of Cities”, and the “Deutscher Städte- und Gemeindebund – German
Association of Cities and Communities” in order to promote and represent the autonomous
system of communal administration.
– Community associations have played an important role in the development of sports. Their
recommendations regarding the promotion and construction of recreational, play, and sports
facilities on regional and district levels have emerged as a central element of communal
sports development.
– The “Deutsche Sportkonferenz (DSK) – German Sport Conference” was created in 1970. It
comprises twelve members from the private sector and twelve members from the public
sector, including the Länder and community levels, and the political parties represented in
Parliament. As such, it is an instrument of co-operation of governmental bodies and political
parties in sports. It serves to co-ordinate developmental and promotional activities at all
levels.
These financial and institutional interrelations, including specific state responsibilities for the
development of sport, have far-reaching consequences. It destroys the fundamental principle of
sport policy, i.e. the independence and autonomy of sports organizations. Interrelations and
declarations of intent by the partners involved – governmental sports policy and the autonomous sports organizations – are presented according to the jurisdictional rules and regulations
in Germany. But often reality looks totally different. Relations between the state and organized
sport are not without conflict. Moreover, a tension exists between the sociopolitical aims of
the state and the interests of organized sports. What the state gives to sports appears, less and
less, to promote self-help in sports. The state rather pursues and carries out its own intents by
– 40 –
means of personnel as well as of financial grant policies. Sport, especially elite sport, is more
and more dependent on the state. Through the state’s financial support elite sport has almost
become a state-operated system. The state increasingly tries to gain influence and manipulate
sport according to its own wants.
To a growing extent the state directs sports to assume tasks such as health maintenance,
integration of minorities, caring for youth, and social re-integration. The principle of subsidiarity, in this sense, is undermined and manipulated in favor of establishing priority for general
societal tasks. This is also demonstrated by the fact that support is linked to ever more precisely defined purposes, and sports organizations are increasingly deprived of non-earmarked
financial means. In general, German sports associations and organizations are greatly dependent on the support and aid of the federal government, the Länder, and the municipalities.48
German sport has not only become dependent on public support. In addition, sports organizations have increasingly become agents of state policy and interest, thereby running the risk of
loosing their autonomy in running their business proper.
In general, it can be said that changes in the resource structure become incompatible with
other characteristic variables of the club, which are connected to the traditional concept of
financing. This leads to a change in objectives and products. It favors a service orientation of
clubs toward their membership and increases the tendency toward oligarchy and professionalization within the clubs’ leadership. Professionalization implies an increase in subject matter
requirements as well as a wage increase for employees, which in turn leads toward increased
bureaucracy within the club structure and promotes the distinction between the objectives of
the organization and the motives of the members. Where such tendencies surpass a certain
level, further changes in the resource structure will occur. At the end of this development a
type of organization may emerge, which is in exact opposition to the “ideal type” of a voluntary organization. For such a type of organization the following variables appear to be mutually
supportive: attachment of organizational objectives to the interests of its members; dependence
on the resources of the members; democratic decision structures; goal orientation and grouping
of members; high willingness to co-operate; unpaid co-operative work and group character;
mutual stabilization and cohesion. Conversely, the opposite variables seem to be mutually supportive as well. Since the completion of tasks is no longer bound by the availability of resources from members, the association or rather the managing committee has more flexibility
with respect to ways of fulfilling these tasks. The dependence on the skills and competencies of
the members and on their willingness to sacrifice time or money to the association is much
weaker. Services can also be acquired from the market, not just the members. This independence of the members and their willingness to perform services also strengthen the influence of
the managing committee49.
4. TRENDS IN SOCIETAL TRANSITION AS A COMMON BASIS AND CHALLENGE
FOR TRANSFORMING THE WELFARE STATE AND SPORT
We must now turn to look at those societal changes and specify those changing life conditions of the individual within the society of the Federal Republic of Germany which the welfare
state must face and which may challenge sport as well. For this might enable us, as we had
argued, to recognize common driving forces for transforming both the welfare state and the
sports systems, helping them to adjust to and cope with the demands of a future post-industrial
or knowledge society.
48
49
Diegel (1988), p. 68.
Heinemann/Horch (1991).
– 41 –
At first sight, this may appear to be an easy venture, as we cannot complain of a lack in
timely diagnoses50. Globalization, individualization, transition to greater flexibility, civil society, the second or even third modern age, reflexive modernity, post-modern society, postindustrial society, risk society, event society and many others are catchwords used loosely and
often thoughtlessly in many discussions and publications. It almost looks as if everything has
already been written and said; and all that is needed seems to be found by systematically referring to findings one can make in libraries.
Despite all those observations, one also tends to gain the impression that this almost inflationary tide of terminology and slogans rather serves to conceal our helplessness. We cannot
deny that we are desperately at loss when attempting to offer a reliable trend diagnosis, and in
particular, when designing clear future scenarios and blueprints for action. For it is those that
ultimately matter and are in demand.
We observe and study societal change, but we cannot estimate in which direction it will develop. Living conditions continuously alter, but it is not predictable how fundamental the
modifications involved will be. Societal revolutions do not frequently happen. Changes usually
occur incrementally, creeping by slowly, often imperceptibly. Traditional and new living patterns overlap. So do different concepts of societal orders. Newly developing life styles emerge
as fringe phenomena and often are discredited as short-lived fashion. While hoping to continue
to live on, according to our traditional patterns and philosophies, we remain at best shortsighted with respect to fundamental societal change, if we discern it at all.
It is quite possible that we are in a similar situation as people who lived in the first half of
the last century. Nowadays we can trace, identify, and evaluate the depth of change brought
about by the new industrial era, sweeping away the old agrarian order, radically changing family structures, the mutual relationship of the sexes, of parents and children, the layers of social
stratification, of economic and political influence and power. But the people at that time did
not know what was changing. Even less did they know what lay ahead or was to expect – the
term “industrial revolution” was coined around the turn of the 19th and 20th century, when
most of what was meant by that term was already over.
In our days we have no idea in which direction the explosion of knowledge, occurring in
most of the natural sciences such as bio-chemistry and medicine, physics and engineering, but
also in combination with humanities such as management and communication techniques and
the new media, will take us. Factory work is changing fundamentally. Micro-electronic technologies and new communication media are dissolving the traditional infrastructures and relationships we are accustomed to both in professional and in private life, enabling and creating
new ones everywhere. But once again, we can hardly assess or predict which path of evolution
they will induce.
Will work in computer networks allow for more home labor, will possibly even demographic trends be reversed thereby? Do new discoveries in genetics and new ways of artificial
insemination revolutionize the relationship between the sexes? What will tomorrow's business
firms look like? Will gigantic conglomerates of companies, operating on a worldwide scale,
determine the lives of their employees in their intra-organizational networks – virtual countries
so to speak – or will small networks of firms develop, virtual companies as adaptive teams,
joining forces only for the time spent on common projects? Globalization is considered as a
great challenge, rendering the classic model of the welfare state obsolete. But does globalization not also support an often rather aggressive and dynamic development of regional and local
50
Among the most popular of them are recently, e.g., Beck (2000), or Heuser (2000); particularly with respect
to the future of the welfare state cf. among others: Hauser (2000), or Dettling (1995), all with extensive
bibliographies.
– 42 –
environments? To what extent does the erosion of national societies and their power of integration, caused by globalization, bring about and strengthen the retreat to local cultures? Time
diagnoses point to the alleged trend toward increased individualization, marked by greater individual freedoms at the expense of loosening traditional ties. But in how far and to what extent does this increase dependency of the individual on government institutions, especially on
the welfare state, as a trade-off effect of the emerging and globally interwoven labor and financial markets? To what extent are new freedoms accompanied by new restrictions? The equal
rights and social equity movement, claiming equal opportunities for men and women, members
of different ethnic groups and social classes, is constantly gaining influence. But is it not also
the case that – to the extent that this happens – a new sensitivity with respect to inequality
gains momentum, too?
All these are questions to which there are no ready answers as of yet. There is no such thing
as facts free from interpretation, nor unquestioned explanations. As we do not know what will
happen, we do not have an appropriate term for new societal patterns, nor do we have an adequate notion of them.
The consequence of all that can only be: For the time being and a long time to come there
will be no dominant societal system any more. Instead, permanent and seemingly disruptive
change and disjointed overlapping between unstable subsystems will prevail51. We should
therefore be prepared to live with redundancy, i.e. take precaution and set aside resources for
coping with situations that are unpredictable as of yet. The extent, to which the horizon of feasibility and increasing opportunities is widening, is at the same time the extent, to which the
horizon of safe expectations and concrete planning possibilities is shrinking. The more opportunities arise, the more difficult it becomes to reach a common understanding, as to how we
would like to live in the future.
The predicaments of lacking predictability may be illustrated by the following example:
Whoever in the beginning of the eighties could have foreseen the far-reaching changes that
occurred in the field of sport throughout the subsequent two decades, i.e. – to name but the
most conspicuous ones – the increasing commercialization and professionalization of sport, the
power of the mass media, the differentiation between various modes of doing sports, the increasing importance of commercial sports suppliers, the growing sensitivity regarding ecological pollution, caused by sport activities? The few people, who did venture to develop such future sport scenarios, were at best disregarded as unworldly scholars or – even worse – denounced as whimsical daydreamers.
What is feasible and possibly also needed therefore is not an all-encompassing blueprint for
shaping the future society at large, putting the entire world into the small box of scholarly
model-building and speculation, so to speak. Instead, bits and pieces of observed problems and
strategic efforts of solving them by imaginative actors in practice can and should be collected,
to be analyzed, in order to eventually assemble the mosaic – or complement the puzzle – of
transition from the industrial to the information or “knowledge society” (Drucker). It is in that
context of collecting tesserae for the mosaic of the emerging post-modern society that possibly
and hopefully some valuable insight on the imminent challenges of our present society in transition for transforming both the welfare state and sport systems may thus be won.
Some such tesserae, we would like to refer to and concentrate on in this paper. In our view
particularly relevant for the role of sport in a future welfare society will be the time perspective: As a well-known social historian once argued and substantiated by empirical evidence, the
fundamental technological impetus that eventually led to the industrial revolution had not so
much been the invention of the steam engine nor that of the mechanical loom. It had rather
51
For a prominent elaboration of such a view cf. Drucker (1968) and (1994), pp. 53 – 64.
– 43 –
been the development of the mechanical clock in the 14th century and its dissipation all over
Europe in the 18th century, accompanied by the broad-based introduction of a standardized
calendar. In fact, the socioeconomic and technological progress bringing about the modern
societies of our time might tentatively be associated with the exponential increase in precision
by which time could be measured to the exact seconds and milliseconds. By means of a clock
and a calendar, it becomes possible to center life around a rigid daily schedule in relation to
natural events such as day and night or seasonal rhythms. It thus becomes possible to regard
time as a scarce resource, to plan the disposition of it rationally and set prices to it. It also enables economic agents to make long-term, even life, plans. Evidently, without the possibility of
exact measurements of time, many brands of modern sport would be equally impossible.
This being the case, it does not appear too far fetched to look for interconnections between
the societal changes and the new problems we are facing as changes in accordance with modern man’s dealings with time, the changes in the awareness and control of time. For it may well
be that societal changes and individual life styles adjusting to them can be traced by ascertaining changes in the perception and disposal of time, becoming dominant patterns of life economy in our post-modern societies.
4.1 The shortage of time
It is one of the characteristics of modern society that on the one hand we have increasingly
more leisure time. But on the other hand we are continuously running out of time. Work-free
time is increasing, as the following data illustrate. At the turn of the century the annual working hours amounted to some 2000, decreasing to some 1300 hours at present. In addition,
modern technology helps us save a lot of time in everyday life. Especially here, technologies
consist predominantly of timesaving devices. The shortage of time is a consequence of the
many alternative options of how to spend one’s time that individuals have at their disposal
these days. Deciding for one of these options implies relinquishing the many others, and this
very fact evokes the awareness of a shortage of time. The number of alternatives for utilizing
one’s time, especially during leisure time, has increased dramatically. This is due to the simultaneous growth of possible leisure-time activities – in short: We have less and less time for
more and more potential activities. We must make more and more choices and make more and
more sacrifices in time. This has at least two consequences for sport:
(1) Sport is being faced with growing competition by new choices in leisure time organization
these days. Sport is becoming more expensive, not in monetary terms, but due to increasing
time restrictions. And economic logic teaches us that demand decrease, when the price of a
commodity rises. As in fact Opaschowski52 found out, interest in sport activities has diminished distinctively, if measured in the percentage of affirmative answers to a respective
question asked in a leisure-time survey research study from 24% to 36% between 1987 and
1994.
(2) As time constantly becomes scarcer and thus more expensive, indicators of social habits
and manners within society such as friendliness, altruism, and voluntarism tend to wither as
well.53 For transforming such attitudes into action is time- consuming, and time, as we argued, is becoming an increasingly scarce and expensive resource that might more productively (and profitably?) be used for alternative opportunities. In other words: The scarcer
time becomes the more expensive, relatively speaking, the gratuitous allocation of time in
sociability, solidarity, and altruism will turn out to be. The shortage of time also tends to
promote egoism and to weaken basic moral principles of modern societies: Friendliness and
52
53
Opaschowski (1994).
Cf. the argument and empirical evidence Hirsch (1980).
– 44 –
tolerance, altruism and preparedness for mutual help turn into public goods that lie in everyone’s interest; but fewer and fewer people are prepared to offer these goods gratuitously.
Collective self- and mutual help, friendliness and tolerance, altruism and human contacts are
more and more in demand, yet are found to become increasingly scarce.
This may be one reason for growing complaints and public concern about a general erosion
of solidarity and, incidentally, also of people’s readiness for voluntary and honorary action54..
But surely, it is also the welfare state in its professional and bureaucratic patterns of welfare
production and provision that are to blame in this context. For if the welfare state increasingly
grants help and services exclusively on a professional and legal entitlement basis, solidarity in
voluntary self- and mutual help efforts within primary communities such as citizen and neighborhood initiatives, private clubs and cooperatives, and even in family relationships55, is gradually crowded out, if often unintentionally or even unconsciously56. These developments do not
automatically lead to de-solidarization; they rather put solidarity onto a new basis, from which
it can no longer be demanded or called upon unquestioned; it becomes an increasingly voluntary act of individual citizens that welfare initiatives and organizations must continuously court
and cultivate.
4.2 Time policy and time sovereignty
Rigid time schedules have for a long time regulated our lives. In the industrial era the
rhythm of our lives was tied to a strict societal order of the day, with more or less fixed working hours and a derivative residual time, left over of the day after work, an equally fixed
working week and weekend, a working year and holidays. A rigid daily timetable had the decisive advantage that everyone had time or no time at the same time, so to speak. There were
great chances of being able to spend time together and also to jointly make use of the manifold
options that were being offered in rigid, sometimes even socially standardized periods of time.
A time policy, prescribed by increasing demands for flexibility in the economy, dissolved
this order of time; previously laid down, routine patterns for structuring people’s time budgets
lost their binding power and became obsolete. The individual worker and/or employee has
continuously less leeway in deciding over and planning the amount and time allocation of his or
her leisure activities. The order of life tends to no longer take place in time, but rather due to
time, i.e. under increasing adjustment stress to time restrictions.
A shortening of working hours thus does not necessarily lead to more disposable time. It
does not for example, if the additional free time is not accompanied by a corresponding availability or disposability of said time. The same is true, if it is not compatible with the time patterns offered by the suppliers of aspired leisure opportunities or of those whom one would like
to spend one’s leisure time with. A good many employees, e.g. in service industries such as
hotels or restaurants may have a sufficient amount of disposable time. But this time is “allocated” to them in incremental and disparate patchwork bits and pieces or only available at
54
55
56
Cf. the findings in Heinemann/Schubert (1994).
Rising numbers of law suits initiated by local welfare departments against parents or grown-up children,
refusing to support one another, may serve as cases in point for that argument. For as we remember: According to the German “Sozialhilfegesetz – social aid law”, public welfare programs only step in, if direct
relatives and/or other voluntary private collectives cannot be made responsible for delivering the respective
aid.
The somewhat qualifying and cautioning rhetoric in the above text has been chosen deliberately in order to
indicate a growing concern of professional social workers against voluntary citizen engagement. Officially
this is justified by the latter’s allegedly lacking professional expertise, the tacit reason of the former’s fear of
competition if not loss of jobs notwithstanding. For an abundant discussion on that issue cf., e.g., Hanesch
(1995), passim.
– 45 –
times that offer but few opportunities for attractive and meaningful leisure activities. The reverse side of the coin, called flexibilization of working times, is not restricted to their extending
into weekends. In addition, it goes along with an overall increasing demand for stand-by availability of the workers and/or employees preventing them from any stable, not to mention longterm disposal of time commitment for their own private purposes.
In this context reference can be made to various studies. As a case in point for the farreaching consequences, the introduction of fully flexible working hours at VW in Wolfsburg has
been extensively studied57. To name but the most conspicuous ones, major problems in adequately organizing public transport were reported. They led to a considerable rise in private
(automobile) transport. People had to cut back on times spent together with their partners and/
or friends. Losing time for family and social life led to a remarkable increase in divorce and
suicide rates. Pubs were reported to have lost their regular customers, theaters and concert
halls their season-ticket holders, sport clubs their members. Overall winners were the commercial sport and leisure time suppliers.
The off-hand logic of such a development is obvious: Time policy such as the flexibilization
schemes mentioned before is leading to an increase in the demand for informal and loose forms
of sport and leisure activities, demanding little or no a priori planning and preparation on the
side of customers instead of club members. For clearly, the major reason for the success of
commercial sport suppliers lies on their comparative advantage over clubs with respect to their
differential demands on coordination needs and adaptability to the individual sportsmen’s and women’s short-term time budgets.
Generally speaking, it looks as if to the extent that people’s sovereignty of time is decreasing, tendencies towards individual modes of consumption in general and of leisure time activities in particular are increasing. Sports activities are gaining momentum that require less coordination with the time budgets of others, i.e. that can be performed individually. Suppliers of
sports activities are being preferred that do not offer their services at fixed schedules. Therefore commercial suppliers get the better on clubs and their long-term membership, because
they do not depend on voluntary and honorary engagement of people, who are exposed to
similar time restrictions as those they are to serve.
4.3 Narrowing time horizons of individual life economies
For a long time in the past and up to the present it has been taken for granted that one’s life
had to be planned, or at least has been considered as proceeding in long-term, quasipredetermined biographic patterns. This was true for one’s professional career as well as for
family life planning. “Life economies” centered on the poles of professional career and family
planning. Nowadays, there is no such thing as a generally applicable biographic pattern any
more. Long-term life plans, including the decision for a professional qualification and promotion as well as for founding a family of one’s own for which to provide lifelong security and a
safe haven for one’s own old age after retirement, are now hardly imaginable any more. Planning one’s future professional and family life has turned out to be much more provisional and
reversible these days.
Symptomatic for this as well as for similar developments is the specific “career” that the
term “fun” has experienced itself in the course of the past few years. Its identification as an
almost natural or at least self-understood part of all our activities has never been an expression
of actual experience, but rather of social commitment in Germany. The German word “Beruf”,
literally translated as vocation or profession in the original Latin sense, may serve as a symbolic acronym for what is meant here. Nobody in the conventional German society could pos57
Cf. for an overview Promberger et al. (1997).
– 46 –
sibly have “outed” him- or herself to the extent of admitting that one’s performed profession,
measured by one’s real aspirations, had been but a lousy job in order to provide one’s subsistence. “Having fun” these days appears to be an end in itself, at least no longer “naturally” embodied in one’s life economy, no matter if career- or family-oriented. Having an “ends” character of its own, it appears no longer as future-oriented. What we understand by the “sense
of…” or a “meaningful life” these days, is rather directed at “feeling happy here and now”.58
To the extent that this turns out as a valid interpretation of the Zeitgeist, it will have some farreaching implications in at least three different respects:
(1) The problem of private relationships: The family household, legally founded on the
marriage certificate, documenting matrimony of the spouses, and economically based on a
fixed and rather rigid allocation of roles to husbands and wives, has become but one of several
patterns of individual life-planning and cohabitation; it nowadays competes with different other
and equally accepted forms of (family-like) living concepts59:, among others with that of
– younger singles, who deliberately decided on living alone, but especially also older single
women who did not find, or lost their partner, or got a divorce, all without getting remarried and still with a relatively high life expectancy;
– adult males and females, having a steady partner, but both of them living in a separate
household;
– steady relationships between two partners, but without a marriage certificate, often also
with children these days;
– temporary relationships as so-called “Lebensabschnittspartnerschaften – life section partnerships”, where explicitly or implicitly one or both partners consent on their wanting to live
together for part of, but not necessarily their whole life;
– groups of – predominantly younger – people often in rather loose and unstable relationships,
sharing a common apartment or house;
– so-called “Wochenendehen – weekend matrimony”, i.e. married partners who, due to their
jobs, (have to) live at long distances from one another meeting on weekends at best;
– bi- or multi-personal groups of people, living in stable marriage-like (often homosexual)
relationships;
– bi- or multi-personal groups of people, living in stable intercultural relationships but for
religious and/or legal reasons prefer not to marry under the German marital law.
For all these different models of living one’s life alone or in more or less permanent partnerships the bourgeois concept of family life has never been or is no longer the one and only blueprint for a decent conduct of life. As a matter of fact, the spouses-centered bourgeois family
concept is still the dominant one in Germany. As such, it is considered to deserve and is
granted the particular protection by the legal constitution proper (Art. 6 of the Basic Law).
This is so despite the fact that it is itself but the result of an adjustment process to the capitalist
production mode of the industrial era and has thus but a relatively short history of its own. To
the extent that this era is declining and people, particularly in urban environments, living in
58
59
Particularly this development has also had far-reaching consequences for the demand on sport: an action
directed at achieving goals, such as the improvement in one’s performance or other causes, tends to blend
out the present, as it is constantly aimed at the future reaching of aims. This is exactly what an “expressive”
sport has no intention of. It would rather enable a gratifying experience oriented around the present that
blends out everyday life, the future, and purpose.
Cf. for an imaginative overview presentation, Beck/Beck-Gernsheim (1990). A preliminary look into weekly
newspaper such as “Die Zeit” suffices to become aware of this change as well: A few years ago, ads seeking
marriage partners dominated. Nowadays almost everyone advertising there is merely looking for partners
interested in “living together” or “looking for joint experiences”.
– 47 –
increasingly international and intercultural communities, the newly emerging if still transitory
welfare and sport systems will by necessity have to cope with a new variety of human lifestyles.
(2) The problem of continuity in job biographies: Job activities and career lives show an increasing instability; they demand for change, permanent adjustment and transition, the prevalence of hybrid organization60. Job security under these circumstances can hardly survive. For
the hybridization and volatility of (inter-) organizational relations are mirrored in individual and
interpersonal working relations as well. Lifelong professional careers are increasingly substituted by a series of disjointed and temporary jobs. These are interrupted by intermittent periods
of temporary, if not long-term or permanent unemployment, unemployment and joblessness
frequently going hand in hand. Particularly untrained and/or elderly blue and white-collar
workers increasingly creep from the status of being long-term unemployed into that of becoming unemployable. Yet, to the extent that such insecure socioeconomic situations and developments persist, growing numbers of the long-term unemployed/ unemployables try and develop new fields of self-employment. They do so not only in the economic sense of the term.
They also in create innovative activity patterns in economic, social, and cultural interchange,
and they develop new or, should we say, reinvent ancient forms of (barter) trade, cooperative
organization of community life, and by and large web-based “Bürgernetze – civic communication networks”. In the process of their emergence and evolution new job and service profiles,
including new terms for them, have become popular such as handicraft- or patchwork- and
choice biographies. Once again, it is more than obvious and needs additional scrutiny that these
new “career patterns” will thoroughly influence, if not revolutionize, both welfare production,
provision, and distribution as well as the organizational patterns of doing sports as integral
elements of a new knowledge and welfare society.
(3) The problem of the elderly: One of the greatest problems for the welfare state lies in a
long-term change of the demographic structure of society. A drastic decline in the birth rate by
(some 45% between 1960 and 1980) is accompanied by a similarly fast growing percentage of
the over-60-year-olds. As a result, the share of the under-20-year-olds is declining – from 26%
in 1982 to 21% in the year of 2000 and predictably to 17% until 2030. The respective share of
the over-60-year-olds rose from 16% in 1982 to 22% in 2000 and is expected to rise up to
33% in the year of 2030.
However, this cohort of elderly people is to be subdivided into at least two groups; in the
past, getting old often resulted in a distinct form of poverty, caused by a weakness in health
and the loss of social autonomy. Today, at least for the first group mentioned before, there is a
considerable change in the societal perception as well as in the self-image of getting or being
old. It is less frequently identified as the “Lebensabend – literally: evening – or better – dusk of
life”. Instead, popular terms like the “New Generation” or the “New Old Age”, politically even
the “Grey Panthers”, clearly indicate a completely new (self-) perception of the elderly. They
are being considered or regard themselves as a highly active group of people, who, after the
toils and grievances of a cumbersome working life, want to enjoy their newly won freedom. In
that process they develop manifold cultural and other leisure time activities – in most cases on
the basis of a solid financial basis. For one should realize in this context that by now the average age of those going into old age retirement is 59.3 years, leaving only 20% of the over-60year-olds in active employment, and that the net average income of an old age pensioner is
around DEM 2,300.
60
In modern institutional and particularly industrial economics the concept of “hybrid organization”, also
termed “symbiotic arrangements” or “strategic alliances” has become a core issue of both theoretical discussion and administrative reform. For a first overview cf. Schanze (1993), pp. 690 ff., for an application to
metropolitan employment and welfare policies cf. Engelhardt (1996 b).
– 48 –
True, this latter group may cause some problems for reshaping the supply patterns for sport
and leisure time activities of their own. The actual and most severe problems, however, arise
with the second group, those of the real old aged, mostly people beyond their eighties, often
having lost their life partners and suffering from severe health and/mental problems. It is here
that the ultimate needs for welfare and social support networks arise, and those needs are not
only, after the introduction of the “Pflegeversicherung – care insurance” not even predominantly, a funding problem, but rather a problem of (quantitatively) sufficient and (qualitatively)
adequately motivated and trained human resources. It is therefore also here that, in addition to
the new handicraft job and services profiles mentioned above, new opportunities for both professional and voluntary engagement in a future welfare society may emerge.
Most of the changes discussed before in terms of a narrowing time horizon can be expected
to have relevant implications for sport as well. To the extent that life-long planning is being
substituted by the need for continuous revisions and adjustments to changing working and living conditions, long-term sports “careers” (in the sense of specializing and permanently improving one’s skills in one kind of sport) will become an exception to the rule. In analogy to
erratic TV-watching habits, (switching or “hopping” from channel to channel being called
“zappen” in German) the arising sport and leisure activity patterns may be called “Sportzappen
– sport-hopping”: This summer season you go surfing in the Baltic sea, next season you hire a
houseboat in Ireland, the third season you enjoy mountain-biking in the Alps, then you book
three weeks with a holiday club in the Mediterranean, and so on.
The constraints of the job market exert considerable strain on, if not tear apart, continuous
partner and team relationships. The possibility of time-sharing in leisure time, i.e. the chance to
perform one’s favorite leisure time or sport activity for the time being and still being able to do
so together with one’s partner, is what counts today. And the crucial question remains if and to
what extent traditional sport clubs will be innovative enough as to develop adequate activity
profiles in that respect enabling them to successfully compete with commercial suppliers of
flexible day-to-day activity programs, tailor-made for such demands.
5. CHANGES IN THE WELFARE STATE AS CHALLENGES FOR SPORT
5.1 The traditional welfare state and its aftermath: Its crisis as challenge
and chance for basic reform
In our present view, seminal works on “The Welfare State and its Aftermath”61 look like
forerunners and prelude to a broad-based debate on not only how to analyze and evaluate, but
also how to cope with the fundamental symptoms and causes for the decline of the traditional
welfare state. Culminating in recent years, there has been a host of follow-up publications from
all strands of political as well as scholarly life62. In most of them there is an almost general consensus that the welfare state with its traditional social grants and public services programs will
not survive the fundamental changes imminent in the transition from the industrial to the
knowledge society. These changes and their prospective consequences are by no means only,
but they are also and predominantly economic problems. For what in the US environmental
policy discussion became known as the TANSTAAFL-principle – the acronym standing for the
initial letters of the truism “There Are No Such Things As A Free Lunch” – holds for welfare as
61
62
Eisenstadt/Ahimeir (1985). For similarly fundamental analyses for Germany cf., e.g., Herder-Dorneich
(1982), Koslowski et al. (1983).
To name but some of the recent summary publications by the Westdeutsche Verlag, cf., e.g., Hanesch
(1995), Schmidt (1996), Textor (1997), each with abundant bibliographies. For its eminent, if only “historical” role in this context, attempted to be reactivated in our days, cf. also the annual conference volume 1998
of the “Verein für Socialpolitik”, the German association of professional economists by Hauser (2000).
– 49 –
well. In this context, even more plastic expressions of the same truism gained popularity over
here: “You cannot feed a cow in heaven and milk it on earth.” In other words, if we wish to
build up and maintain a system of welfare grants and transfers, be they in money or kind, we
have to realize that for being able to do so, the economy as a whole must persistently produce
the value added in real terms as an equivalent to that. What is an even tougher job: An essential
part of value added at one place and by one group of people (the owners of productive resources or production factors) has to be transferred to other places and people. Bluntly spoken, it has to be redistributed from “the haves to the have-nots” with respect to productive
resource and factor ownership. And all this has to be done without abating the incentives for
future economic activity and value-added production – as food for the cow to continue to give
milk, so to speak.
It is precisely in the context of such simple economic deliberations that the capacity of the
traditional industrial state for sustained welfare provision has met serious doubts, questioning
the long-term survival of our conventional welfare policies altogether. It is true, the core
problem does not seem to lie in the real production or value-added creation side of the economy as such. Growth rates in the highest developed capitalist states, not only in the traditional
goods and services, but particularly in the new information and communication industries are
still sufficiently high. The dilemma so far insufficiently recognized, not to mention solved, is
rather that fewer and fewer people are included in its production. But according to our conventions of property rights definition and assignment, only those who are can claim an original
income as compensation payment for their share in the production process or even the residual
revenue as net value after deducing production and transaction costs.
Providing and maintaining sufficiently attractive residual claimant positions for owner entrepreneurs, managers, and shareholders alike, however, is increasingly recognized as the indispensable incentive mechanism available for maximizing welfare production and provision in a
society, albeit still irrespective of its distribution. These have to be combined with adequate
institutional arrangements fostering competition as a device for both the discovery and enhancement of innovation as well as for efficiency/effectiveness control by fellow competitors
and consumers alike. Only such a combination can be expected to direct scarce resources and
factor inputs into the production of the relatively best goods and services alternative. For
maximizing their residual incomes, competing suppliers are well advised to strive for both best
adaptability of their respective products to consumer demands (effectiveness aspect) and their
least cost production/provision (efficiency aspect). Consumers play an important part in that
game as well: By declaring their relative willingness to pay and by making their choices vis-àvis competing product alternatives, they give the all-decisive signals and thus also the crucial
incentives for priority production and provision of goods and services, as mentioned before.
Apart from a variety of possible market failures, not so relevant and thus skipped here, what
does interest in our context is an answer to the question: How do our consumers achieve the
capacity of declaring their ability to pay as expression of their preferences, if – for what reason
ever, but as initially assumed – they do not (or no longer) participate in the actual production
and provision process of said goods and services. If for that very reason they receive no productive or original income, they do become or remain dependent on “free” lunches or milk
drinks as non-reciprocal grants or derivative income transfers, don’t they?
How is the dilemma, mentioned before, to be handled. Is it possibly less a matter of economic crisis but rather a basic antagonism – unsolved as of yet, perhaps insoluble (?) under the
prevailing societal circumstances? If so, is or isn’t there an inescapable trade-off between eq-
– 50 –
uity or “equality and efficiency”63, i.e. between efficient production and just distribution? If so,
assigning welfare to and among people growing increasingly unequal with respect to their capacities of making their living and maintaining it on their own becomes the crucial issue in a
post-industrial society. Its sustainability will largely depend on our creative capabilities to
overcome this antagonism by redistributing incentives for meaningful activities of one’s own
and by that also for others rather than by reshuffling income, i.e. property rights with respect to
goods and services, produced and provided by others.64 It is possibly and hopefully in this
context that new welfare definitions and functions of sport may gain momentum as well.
5.2 Welfare state crisis – implications for sport?
5.2.1 Funding crisis and sport
For reasons discussed before, a broad based “Sparpolitik – budgetary cutback policy” has
recently gained momentum in Germany as in almost other EU member countries, covering all
fields of the public sector, but public welfare programs in particular. Sport as part of traditional
welfare policy cannot expect to be exempted and has indeed been strongly afflicted by past
budget restrictions. For several reasons there are even strong indications that it will by no
means remain immune to further, even more drastic cutback policies ahead.
Generally speaking, there are essentially three complementary strategies for the mobilization
of public funds in a traditional welfare state setting:
− Exerting political power and influence, including credible threats to withdraw support for
the governing political leadership;
− presenting performance accounts and arguments convincing the public and its body politic
in power that one’s contribution to the public goods and welfare services provision deserves
(even increased) budgetary funding, and
− on that basis giving reasonable proof of one’s own contribution meeting effectiveness (public demand) and/or efficiency (least cost) criteria better than that by others.
As it looks, sport in increasingly running into deficit on all three accounts. Sport has never
had a strong basis of influence and power of its own in Germany. Reasons for that may have
been that sport organizations unlike, e.g., trade unions, cannot take off from a broad base of
generally shared, homogeneous and stable interests, to be formulated and, if necessary, militantly defended against those of antagonistic and/or competing pressure groups. Unlike those,
despite their comparatively large membership, sport unions face difficulties in mobilizing that
membership to fight for their vested interests. For they appear politically somewhat peripheral
as compared to core economic subsistence interests such as those of labor union members,
who in addition command over much stronger threat potentials (such as strikes) than members
of sport clubs and their roof organizations. In that respect then, organized sport is closer to
consumer organizations, whose differential power is for similar reasons much weaker than that
of labor unions or employers’ associations.
The comparative advantage organized sport did have until the recent past, was its (quasi-)
monopolistic position not only in the sense of – apart from the schools – being the only supplier of opportunities for doing sports. In addition, and as argued before, the DSB could (a)
claim to be the only legitimate representative of and spokesman for the whole of sport. It could
63
64
Prominent on an early discussion of that issue cf. Okun (1975), for a more recent summary discussion in
German cf. Zimmermann (1996).
According to Snower (2000), pp. 48 ff., this is in fact the core question for the future of the welfare state for
which he sees positive answers and develops some interesting suggestions along the lines of redistributing
incentives in various fields and by different measures. This discussion would deserve further discussion also
in the context of our topic, but cannot be extended any more in this paper.
– 51 –
(b) boast of an encompassing internal hierarchy of organizational and decision-making structures. And it was (c) characterized on its various layers by manifold interpersonal and interorganizational relationships, overlapping in manifold policy-meshing activities, with their respective counterparts and allies on all levels of the German federal system. Yet, being in a monopolistic supply position and being part of a multilateral policy-making machinery does not
necessarily warrant high degrees of power and influence, when the goods and services at stake
do not rank particularly high in the overall policy arena and priority list. For those reasons,
organized sport even in the past had to largely rely on moral, ideological, and arguments of
national prestige for mobilizing public support and funding.
This genuinely weak influence will continue to diminish. Altogether the importance of the
major unions (including the welfare unions), the church, and the political parties is decreasing.
The internal ties between the organizations’ rank and file are weakening, as is the organizations’ influence on political decision-making in toto. This happens to the extent and degree that
the inter-organizational network of interest representation, in which every organization used to
hold its own well-defined and firm position, is increasingly falling apart in West Germany. In
the new Länder of East Germany it has had no chance of developing altogether as of yet. All
this is true for organized sport as well. Its influence within the political power game is also
dwindling, leaving an “open flank” for further drastic cuts in and even complete cancellations
of the public shares in funding sport.
5.2.2 Confidence crisis and sport
Similar to other welfare state institutions, organized sport can implement its programs for
declared public ends – the realization of “sport for all” – at best in rather incomplete and insufficient patchwork efforts. Rising doubts as to whether it is still the right provider of the public
goods aspects expected from sport club activities mirror a general confidence crisis vis-à-vis
the “caste” of (quasi-professional) sport functionaries and their bureaucratized decision routines. Some empirical data, derived from Weber’s survey research in the context of his study
on the economic relevance of sport65, may indicate the situation: Of those respondents, who
said they were doing sports more or less regularly, some 64% referred to informal and privately organized non-club activities such as surfing, skiing, snowboarding, mountain-biking,
sailing, swimming, and jogging. Only 18% said they were members in a sports club, 6% went
to commercial sport suppliers, and 8% used public facilities. Thus if, according to DSB statistics, some 23% of the populace are members of a club, this implies that, despite being club
members, a good many people do not take part in sporting activities there. This is confirmed
by other studies, according to which between 30% and 50% of reported club members are
passive in this sense.
Furthermore, the membership structure of sport clubs does not in the least mirror the
structure of the population. Less than 40% of club members are females against some striking
70% of those reporting to regularly use commercial sport facilities. Adolescents and young
adults continue to be over-represented in club membership. But they restrict their club activity
do doing sport pure and usually do not get involved in sport policy-making.
Generally speaking, organized sport as other cultural undertakings such as visiting theater
and concert performances is a clear-cut middle-class phenomenon. Here as there critical observers have claimed time and again that it is not the needy who are the main beneficiaries;
predominantly it is those who could afford to pay for their respective demands themselves,
who profit from public sponsoring in those fields. A justification of government subsidies becomes all the more difficult, the more the sport clubs go into the “business” of sport types that
65
Weber et al. (1995).
– 52 –
go beyond the traditional concept of competition and performance, and which are just as well if
not better provided by commercial sport suppliers.
One might conclude that findings as those reported before provide just another argument
for further cutting down on public grants for organized sport. Be it as it may, the argument
seems to reach beyond that, however. In the light of its increasing problems and symptoms of
crisis, the traditional welfare state– even if still hesitantly – tends to abandon its policy principles and institutional arrangements of task performance altogether. The conventional welfare
policies, which heavily relied on transfer payments and financial support of NGOs and PGOs,
are being altered in ways and directions indicated in the preceding section of this paper. The
reasons for that cannot only, perhaps not even predominantly, be seen in increasing efforts to
put an end to the built-in dynamics of welfare spending along the traditional grants and transfer-expenditure lines. It may be true that the financial crisis provided the final impetus, fortifier,
and accelerator for innovation in welfare provision. But hardly less, if not equally important,
seems to have been a growing discontent – on the side of the welfare state agents in government as well as on that of the addressees and recipients of the welfare goods and services provided. The catchword here is, in analogy to the market failure approach in the economics of
public goods, the so-called “organization failures” syndrome. It is surely as multifaceted as its
market counterpart and for that matter can, of course, not be discussed here in detail66. The
core argument, to be taken seriously also by sport functionaries on the clubs’ level as well as
on that of the DSB, is as follows:
The original advantage government agents had expected from delegating what in their view
was public task performance to PGOs and NGOs was clearly a reduction of transaction costs.
This was to be expected from the fact that they would only have to deal with the respective
organizations’ leadership, instead of the membership and/or other individual addressees of
government policies. That kind of fiduciary public task performance, as it came to be called,
however, promoted a new intermediary67 level of policy-making and welfare agents, gaining
discretionary and in parts even countervailing power to be exerted against both groups of
“principals”68 alike, serving the agents’ interests instead. This in combination with the imminent
trend toward professionalization and bureaucratization not only on the government side but
also on the part of the agent organizations led to growing criticism, if not an outright crisis of
confidence among the partners involved.
As far as the government side is concerned, there are as mentioned increasingly serious attempts and by now also quite a few concrete policy approaches toward “reinventing govern-
66
67
68
For a more detailed discussion cf. Heinemann (1995).
For that reason in the German public finance literature a synonymous term to that of “Parafisci – PGOs”
has been coined, namely that of “Intermediäre Finanzgewalten – intermediary fiscal authorities”, cf. e.g.,
Hermann (1936), Smekal (1969).
In the new institutional economics this problem of fiduciary task performance or delegation is discussed
under the label of “principal-agent relations”, or simply “agency theory”. The core problem is how to design
the institutional arrangements for optimal contract relations between the “principal”, in whose interest action is to be taken and the “agent” as the person asked and legitimized to act in that interest. At first sight
the principal in our context are the welfare policy makers; yet, since welfare services are to benefit the recipients, they, too, ought to be considered as “principals.” It takes little fantasy to imagine that serving two
principals, which even the Bible says you can’t do (Matth. 6, 24), will tend to produce dissatisfaction on either side. It may even lead to a crisis of confidence among the partners involved, if either or all of them get
the impression, hard as it may be verifiable on objective terms, that the agent misuses his discretion in his
own interest. For a summary discussion of agency problems and possible strategies for their solution cf.,
e.g., Pratt/Zeckhauser (1985).
– 53 –
ment”.69 All those attempts and reform policies aim at bringing more flexibility, controllability,
and responsiveness to citizen preferences and even (quasi-) market competition into formerly
rigid and hierarchical decision-making machinery. Though far from having reached its end, this
process will and has already fundamentally changed government and also welfare policies. As
far as welfare is concerned, one may perhaps exaggerate a little by concluding that most of the
innovative efforts on the government side of that policy field aim at cost-reducing and thus
efficiency targets. Effectiveness aspects in the sense of optimally adjusting welfare programs to
the preferences of the recipients as “consumers”, but increasingly also as (co-) producers and
providers, tend to remain the domain of the welfare organizations and unions.
As it looks though, some major innovations in governmental policy strategies will also influence, if not revolutionize, the demand side as well. For instance federal, state, and particularly
local government levels increasingly tend to substitute their grants and subsidies programs to
welfare organizations and unions, who in turn used to pass on their services gratuitously – as
“free lunches” so to speak – to the “entitled” consumers. They do so by replacing such programs by direct transfer as “derivative income” payments to those entitled. This opens up a
completely new ballgame of new and alternative policy measures. Such direct transfer payments may either be unconditional with respect to spending purposes and in cash. They may be
conditional and in kind, offered by way of so-called vouchers that their recipients may use as
currency in exchange for more or less specified spending purposes, which comes close to
switching from categorical to block or even matching grants as practiced in intergovernmental
fiscal relations. And last but not least they could be granted as so-called “functional transfers”
or income surrogates, i.e. payments in return to certain activities by the recipients. This latter
case would be closest to establishing (quasi-) market relations with genuine (if still derivative)
income payments. For it is not the immediate client or consumer, but public authorities that
“buy” the respective activity or service from an individual or a (self- or mutual help) group of
welfare recipients.70
Be it as it may, it is more than obvious that such strategy changes introduce a completely
new quality into welfare policy-making in that they deliberately take into account, or even aim
at inducing, adjustment reactions of the recipient rather than the intermediary level of welfare
organizations and unions. And it is equally obvious that, in admittedly different ways and to
varying degrees, they allow for consumer choices and introduce imaginativeness, variety and
even competition in welfare service production and provision among different, both public and
private, for profit and non-profit supply organizations. Welfare organizations of the traditional
type, up to now acting as quasi-autonomous, government-like bureaucratic agencies, more
often than not being able to act out of a – at least regional – monopoly position will therefore
have a hard time to survive unchanged.
69
70
As we recall, the term in quotation marks is the title of the seminal publication Osborne/Gaebler (1993).
That way they intend to attempt to stir a public discussion on “how the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming
the public sector“ (subtitle). According to Bill Clinton’s comment on the cover of the Plume paperback edition, it has become a “national bestseller … should be read by every elected official in America. This book
gives us the blueprint.”
The term “functional transfers” was to our knowledge first used in our paper on “Public Finance in the PostWelfare State – cf. Engelhardt et al. (1984). Much like the term “Lohnsubventionen – wage subsidies”, it
has not become overly popular in the policy debate on innovative welfare strategies, probably because either
term has too close a connotation to the notion of one-sided transfer payments from the (benevolent) state to
the (needy) citizen. The new rhetoric therefore prefers terms like “abgeleitetes or sekundäres Einkommen –
derivative or secondary income” for “bezahlte Bürgerarbeit – paid for citizen work”. Cf. for the recent debate in Germany, e.g., Beck (2000), pp. 416 - 446.
– 54 –
It will be absolutely crucial for our subject to observe, conduct future studies, and hopefully
also offer policy advice on such a basis. A major object of scrutiny in that context will have to
be the question, how the various government, PGO and NGO agencies, but among them and
above all the representatives of organized sport, will react and adjust to the policy changes
indicated. Ideally, the DSB as the umbrella organization of private, non-for-profit and voluntary associations should have the least problems in adapting both its internal and external
strategies. Practically, however, organized sport as a whole and the DSB in particular may be
expected to encounter extraordinary difficulties of adaptation. Due to its organizational history
and peculiar position as voluntary organization and yet also as the sole and thus monopoly
spokesman of sport vis-à-vis the general public as well as the welfare state agencies, it is in a
strategic position as catalyst for both inertia and reform. Whether it will develop the strength,
imaginativeness and flexibility, necessary to redefine the new role of sport in society, its own
position in it, and its future relationships with its member organizations, its commercial competitors, their respective membership and clientele, remains to be seen.
5.2.3 Rationality crisis and sport
The concluding remarks in the preceding subsection may have indicated what is at stake in
this context. This includes the necessity of reasserting what array of public versus private tasks
sport may claim in a future welfare – no longer state, but – society71. It also demands answers
to questions such as: Who is, feels, or ought to be legitimized to define and also to assign those
tasks to which remaining or newly emerging institutional arrangements? Which public, private
or possibly mixed public and private organizations’ settings on their basis should fulfill which
ones of them how? Failure to recognize and cope with the challenges indicated will by necessity create additional and this time possibly even lethal predicaments for organized sport, which
we chose to epitomize as “rationality” crisis (of sport) in this paper.
“Rational” choice, a key term, if not a synonym, of economic decision logic, implies defining, specifying, and ranking one’s ends to be pursued, the means, including organizational settings for applying them, at one’s disposal, and selecting the relatively best mutual fit within the
set of either. “Rationality” or “rational crisis” then includes all (partial and encompassing) decision aspects in all those dimensions. Even non-decision-making may induce, at least not abate,
such a crisis. Let us assume for instance that the welfare state authorities, in the light of recognized crisis phenomena, decide to abandon their conventional transfer and subsidy policies
altogether. If organized sport, the DSB as its still authorized and only spokesman and/or its
member clubs and associations, fail to take immediate compensatory action, the “sports for all”
movement – as sport’s key welfare policy mission – will for lack of funding be lethally paralyzed on the spot. To the extent that sport clubs owe their public recognition, if not reputation
as welfare agents, totally or even only partly to their function as (gratuitous) suppliers of
“sport for all” activities, the end of such activities would immediately annihilate that reputation.
In that case, (public) schools would remain as the only (prospective) not-for-profit supplier.
Should commercial suppliers step in to fill the gap, “sport for all” could not be said to have
died out completely as of yet. It could be considered as privatized instead – if, but only if,
willingness to pay by the visitors of private sport, leisure, and fitness centers is funded by their
own or other private donors’ revenues. What, if willingness to pay originate from direct public
welfare transfers in one of the alternative forms, indicated in the preceding subsection? Does
the term “sport for all” in its implication “equal access(ability?) for everybody” by necessity
call for gratuitous and thus public provision? In that case, sport clubs would not qualify as
71
Cf. Dettling (1995) for an extensive and differentiated discussion, accompanied by an encompassing bibliography on that issue of transition and transformation.
– 55 –
suppliers either, because they, too, are private, if voluntary and NPOs. The only reason, why
they offer “sport for all” facilities gratuitously to everyone, may well be that they receive public
funding as compensation payments.
Let us assume that
(1) such payments flow out of direct transfers to individual people as entitled welfare recipients rather than government grants or subsidies to organizations, and
(2) the compensation payment for services rendered is part of a private quid-pro-quo contract with one of the partners being a commercial, i.e. for profit, supplier.
Do such assumptions disqualify the activity set as part of a welfare program, called “sports
for all”? If the answer were “yes”, we would face considerable difficulties in identifying public
goods and (welfare) services at all. For there is hardly any such program, where partial inputs
do not include the produce of private and for profit contractual relations.72. If the answer were
“no”, we can indeed imagine “sport for all” as a public welfare program in that it grants equal
access(ability) for everyone, supplied, however, by a mixed public-private provision (not production) arrangement, in public-private partnership73: The production is done in cooperation
(“co-production”74) between a private for-profit supplier and the individual visitor of the respective sport center; as a welfare recipient that visitor is granted access by the direct transfer
payment – which might even be imagined as being provided in kind, i.e. as a voucher, allowing
for so and so many hours “sports for all” activities, no matter with what (accredited) supplier
and in what kind of (recognized) sport activity he wants to “spend” it – all other visitors can
gain access by paying the entrance and/or user fee. The implications of such blurring the division line between public and private goods and services production, provision, and – as a third,
by no means less relevant dimension – governance, are intricate.
To name but one or two such intricacies: What, if “anything goes”75 in the context of welfare production, provision, and governance in general, “sports for all” programs in particular,
are the relevant public goods characteristics and required qualities within such characteristics?
The answer is, of course, largely dependent upon the objectives pursued by “sports for all”. Is
for instance socialization of and within the membership and sporting community decisive and
72
73
74
75
Literally speaking, this even holds for such eminent public goods as defense, where arms systems are normally purchased from and monitored by private for profit and frequently even monopoly suppliers, charging
the respective monopoly prices. Likewise, no public clerk could implement public (welfare) programs, if in
order to restore his human capital input he spends part of his income in vacationing with a private for profit
travel agency.
That this new concept of public task performance, as the term indicates a typical offspring of Anglo-Saxon
pragmatism, has triggered off extensive debates and also administrative innovation measures in Germany as
well is indicated by first encompassing (conference) publications, such as by Budäus/Eichhorn (1997). The
extent to which such new concepts gain relevance even for genuinely, up to now considered almost “innate”
public task performance such as providing “Law and Order” is documented, e.g. by Pitschas/Stober (1998).
Cf. in that conference volume of a symposium at the Münster Police Academy with respect to the concept of
public- private partnership Engelhardt (1998), pp. 153 - 233. It is well imaginable that in the context of
preventive policy (not police) measures for youth care and against juvenile delinquency and their coordination by local district conferences, discussed there (pp. 222 ff.), there will arise fascinating new opportunities for innovative welfare engagements by sport clubs as well.
Cf. Ostrom/Bish/Ostrom (1988), pp. 194 f.
This formulation was chosen in reminiscence of P. K. Feyerabend’s methodological rule of “anything goes”
in his philosophy of science; cf. Feyerabend (1970), pp. 21 f. For the recent discussion on fundamental
welfare reforms follows a similar post-modernistic approach toward pluralistic governance concepts. They
plead for “Neue Unübersichtlichkeit – new non-transparency ” and direct citizen involvement in new welfare policy designs for maximal resource activation and innovation. This reminds us indeed of the philosophy and policy of knowledge and scholarly advice debate in the late sixties and early seventies. For a summary report on that issue cf. Engelhardt (1974), pp. 68 - 93.
– 56 –
higher ranking than, e.g., the idea of fostering individual well being and fitness, in its aggregate
supporting public health objectives? Or is the opposite option to be preferred? Once again,
depending on the answer, team sport activities, so far predominantly offered in clubs, get the
better of individual fitness exercises in commercial sport, leisure, and fitness centers and vice
versa.
If all depends on the answers and possibly in most cases also on the expected effects of the
sport activities in question with respect to the objectives selected, who is to decide? Which is
to be the relevant choice and what about the role of the DSB as the monopolistic spokesman of
sport as a whole? Given the arguments with respect to an alleged confidence crisis of welfare
organizations in general, organized sport and the DSB in particular, carrying on along the lines
of traditional representation is hardly imaginable as a viable strategy for the future. This is all
too evident in the light the harsh criticism raised against the established sports nomenclature.
Key points of reproach are that various groups of society are not adequately represented.
Therefore supply gaps in “sports for all” services occur, both regionally and functionally, and
with respect of all encompassing supply pattern of relevant activities, meeting “sports for all”
criteria. The definition of, and decision on, what is being offered how, when, and where, lies in
the hand of those who have the best opportunities and also the means for utilizing the supply at
their disposal.
A possible alternative is seen in what has been called in rather abstract social science rhetoric the “pluralization of the welfare production and provision”76. Instead of one dominating or
even monopolistic provider, a multiplicity of suppliers is demanded, organized around a specific set of institutional arrangements and specializing on certain service segments. They ought
to compete in their respective activity segment, but also cooperate in complementary segments
with other public and private, for profit and nonprofit suppliers, both in the formal as well as
informal and voluntary sectors of the economy and society. Support, if granted at all, should be
provided by way of start-up or “seed money” grants rather than by a permanent flow subsidies
to the suppliers. As far as permanent support is required, it should be given directly to the addressees or recipients of the programs at stake and in the alternative forms, mentioned before.
The rationale of such strategy proposals is presented in different strands of argumentation,
not to be explicated here in detail. A main line of reasoning is supply side-oriented, so to
speak, in that synergy effects or economies of scale and scope are expected or at least hoped
for from increased organizational division of labor and cooperation. That category of reasoning
also includes the argument that the welfare state is neither longer able nor willing to provide an
all-encompassing network of welfare services in its own capacity. The decisive question of
welfare “more or less” is rather answered in terms of “more for less”77. To the extent that this
calls for continuing public production responsibility, increased and intensified rationalization
efforts deem necessary. Such efforts are to be supported by new public management concepts78, including global and output budgeting. Implicitly this presupposes quasi-contractual
relations between the administrative rank and file on the basis of precise product descriptions
and output indicators, linked to and governed by applying controlling devices, permeating the
complete production and provision process of said services.
76
77
78
For summaries of the recent discussion on the topic cf., e.g., Evers/Olk (1996).
Dettling (1995), p. 71, who in the preceding passage to that subtitle of his book affirmatively quotes Gore
(1993). Al Gore was Vice President in the Clinton Administration and as such the political spearhead of the
US ”Reinventing Government” movement. This movement also influenced the German campaign for
“Neue Steuerungsmodelle – new governance models” in the German public administration scene, launched
by the Kommunale Gemeinschaftsstelle für Verwaltungsvereinfachung; cf., e.g., KGST (1993).
For concise summary presentations of both theoretical concepts and recent practical approaches in Germany
cf. Budäus (1995); Budäus/Conrad/Schreyögg (1998).
– 57 –
Apart from such inner-administrative innovation and rationalization strategies, the main load
of, and contribution to, realizing the objective of getting more in welfare for less government
involvement is shifted to, and expected from, the non-governmental sectors of society. This
can be achieved by newly emerging (quasi-)markets in competition and/or strategic alliance
formation between commercial suppliers. But it can also be done in public-private partnership
between government agencies, traditional non-governmental welfare unions, associations and
voluntary citizen initiatives, self- and mutual help groups of the third and informal sectors of
society. What is particularly innovative with those, for that reason called demand-oriented,
welfare services, is that they try and encourage preference articulations and deliberate choice
activities, including those expressed by voting on foot, by the recipients not only as consumers,
but also as co-producers of welfare services. That way both efficiency and effectiveness aspects are hoped to be fostered. This hope rests partly on reducing monopoly rents through
suppliers’ competition in combination with consumer choices, and partly also on inducing
welfare recipients to take an active part in co-producing and providing the welfare they are to
receive according to their own preferences. In addition, external support is to be raised by voluntary and honorary work, as well as by third party contributions and donations in cash or
kind. Such support is hopefully more readily granted to NGOs and other loose citizen groups
and associations than to government or quasi-government, not to mention for-profit business,
organizations.
To the extent that at best quasi-markets will emerge, government authorities must retain
some ties or reins, if welfare services are to remain at least in parts public or mixed public and
private goods. That way their strategic governance responsibility is to be maintained, even if
the operational production and partly also provision responsibilities are shifted to other organizations and/or coordination devices. This at the core of Osborne/Gaebler’s claims for “Reinventing Government”, i.e. “Catalytic Government: Steering rather than Rowing”79. It is the
multiplicity of organizations, associations, and informal groups of a civic society that will have
to do most of the rowing, but it should be government that remains responsible for steering.
The all decisive questions of our topic in this context are once again: What role will organized sport play, what functions is it to perform in the transition and transformation processes80
from the welfare state to the welfare society? How will it meet the host of challenges incurred
both in the business of rowing (e.g. on and by its club level) as well as of steering (by its top
level representatives, in particular the DSB)?
It is true: The welfare state does increasingly abandon its all-encompassing concepts of
public welfare production. A current example is the envisaged fundamental change of the system of old age pensions. The welfare state will, indeed it must, revoke its responsibility for
“Gesellschaftspolitik – societal policy” as to be distinguished from social policy), its unsolicited status as omniscient planner and shaper of societal affairs. Broad-based entitlement programs warranting government-mediated and -secured equal access to and equality in welfare
service provision should and will be reduced. And it remains to be asked in this context, for
how long it will remain state policy to offer sport, education, and/or culture “for all”, with the
aim of securing equal access for everyone, which so far has been the primary legitimization for
79
80
Osborne/Gaebler (1993), ch. 1, pp. 25 – 48.
It appears advisable to differentiate between evolutionary processes that will happen, even if no deliberate
reform efforts are undertaken, and attempts to influence and shape those processes by planned change or innovation strategies. For that reason we suggest to use the term “transition” (from the intransitive Latin verb
transire, concluding that transition is happening anyway) for the former and “transformation” (from the
transitive verb transformare, expressing the intention of actively transforming something) for the latter. Cf.
in that context Engelhardt (1998), paper available also online under the URL: http://www.unihamburg.de/fb03-ifw/ab_polit/traf2ifw.pdf
– 58 –
government funding of sport. Stronger criteria of efficiency and performance checks will take
over in line with the introduction of “new public management strategies”, if government funding is to be maintained in specific program areas. This in itself causes particular difficulties for
organized sport. Apart from such crude statistics on the utilization of, and commitment to,
alternative sport and leisure activities as mentioned above, their real benefits and thus the success of specific policy programs are difficult to ascertain, not to mention evaluate. Ultimately,
we hardly know anything truly reliable about the effects on, the functions and the meaning of,
sport for society. All we have is some scattered empirical data on what people think the effects
and functions of sports are. And when in their view they are manifold and positive, doubts as
to the objectivity of such opinions are more than justified. The effects, and thus values, that are
often attributed to sport may be evident for the respondents of questionnaires. They may even
be based on personal experience. But they can hardly ever be systematically validated, not to
mention generalized, on objective empirical grounds.
The lack of knowledge opens the doors for speculation. The assumptions as to what values
and functions sport might have are becoming too vast in number to keep a clear view of. Some
time ago we analyzed all speeches, official statements etc. available as to what fundamental
principles, values, functions, meanings, and effects could be attributed to sport. We arrived at
some 150 different “principle, value, functions, and effects” assignments to sport, showing up
in the documents viewed. But this is but a case in point for a flourishing imagination rather
than for a distinctive sense of reality and objective truth, if that can at all be assumed in our
context.
So, when in future substantive efficiency criteria and performance indicators are required to
justify claims for public funding, organized sport will run into considerable difficulties. A possible way out of this substantive justification dilemma may be to ask for procedural strategies,
organized sport may develop and employ to react adequately and flexibly to the emerging
challenges of the welfare state in transition.
If, as assumed, the government authorities of the still existing traditional welfare state abandon their all encompassing supply responsibility, including the warranty for general and equal
access to welfare services such as culture, (higher) education, and sport “for all”, by no longer
budget funding (P)GOs that render their services gratuitously, but paying (of course much
smaller amounts of) direct transfers to entitled recipients, will organized sport have to consider
that as the end of the “... for all” ideology altogether? Or are there – which – indications for its
redefinition and adjustment to new ideologies? Will for instance the sport clubs in their observed middle class orientation have to become even more exclusive or is there a chance of
opening up for, e.g., public-private partnership relations with local youth care organizations,
designing new welfare/sport/leisure mixes? What will the prospects be, if they react to the demands of social integration of long-term unemployed/unemployables and/or foreign citizens,
working and/or living in their neighborhoods, to the new communication and coordination
challenges of the emerging civic society at large? If they retreat from public life by exclusivity
decisions of their membership, will they be able to survive as sport clubs or will they have to
merge with fancy commercial fitness and leisure clubs? If clubs want to open up or remain
open for a general public and welfare services provision, can and will they attract sufficient
membership fees, donations etc. to compensate for trailing public support? How can the public
goods characteristics of their intended welfare services, if not be measured objectively, be publicized so as to attract potent private sponsors, sufficient numbers and kinds of members and/or
cooperation partners in order to help develop and maintain sustainable strategies for future
club activities?
Such and other related questions are by no means restricted to the “rowing” level of individual club activities and innovation strategies. Even on the regionally or locally confined level
– 59 –
of a single club, communication and consultation networks, such as district conferences, round
tables, local agenda initiatives etc., will provide ample opportunities for what may even be
called bottom-up governance or “steering” activities. As should be immediately obvious, in
such a multi-faceted and pluralistic communication network there is no room for monopoly
claims of any functional policy field and/or organization whatsoever. Thus quite naturally the
intra-organizational, so far predominantly hierarchical relationship between the de-central club
and the central DSB levels is by necessity up for revision. So is the role and position of the
DSB as the spokesman for the whole of sport, and above all the monopoly position it had been
able to claim, maintain, and preserve in that respect ever since its foundation. Its former monopoly position and negotiating power, derived from it, may still prove helpful for a while in
trading, e.g., TV rights for highly esteemed professional sports competitions and performances
to the commercial benefit of organized sport as a whole. But rising inner-organizational opposition and dispute over adequate distributive shares indicate that even this is increasingly questioned from within.
The question again remains: Will the prevailing hierarchical structures within the system of
organizational sport be flexible and innovative enough to give that system a constitution better
suited to the pluralistic system of welfare production and provision, alleged to be developing?
To the extent open-minded clubs tend to be willing to join in these new and pluralistic modes
of welfare provision, enormous internal tensions will arise and eventually lead to a fundamental
reform of the system of organized sport in Germany. Otherwise, organized sport will loose its
so far publicly recognized function as general welfare supplier and become one of many rather
peripheral associations such as that of rabbit breeders, “Schreber” gardeners, or such like. Possibly, it will in that case dissolve and vanish altogether.
Admittedly, we have no ready answers to all these questions as of yet. It looks, however, as
if the “rationality” crisis allegedly existing for sport is but a reflection of a much broader and
deeper feeling of uneasiness and insecurity. It refers to unresolved issues and questions as to
what the prospects of transition from the welfare state to the welfare society really are and
what implications they have for the various fields of conventional welfare policies. A lack of
even only tentative answers is nevertheless the best incentive imaginable to continue and intensify future communication on the issue.
– 60 –
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Smekal (1969), C.: Die Finanzwirtschaft intermediärer Gruppen, Innsbruck.
Snower (2000), D. J. Evolution of the Welfare State, in: R. Hauser (ed.), Die Zukunft des Sozialstaates, Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik, vol. 271, Berlin, pp. 35 - 52.
Textor (1997) M. R. (ed.): Sozialpolitik. Aktuelle Fragen und Probleme, Opladen.
Wagner (1893), A.: Grundlegung der politischen Ökonomie, 3rd ed., Leipzig.
Watrin, (1967), C.: Ökonomische Theorien und wirtschaftspolitisches Handeln, in: H. Besters
(ed.), Theoretische und institutionelle Grundlagen der Wirtschaftspolitik. Th. Wessels zum
65. Geburtstag, Berlin, pp. 3 ff.
Weber (1995), W. et al.: Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung des Sports, Schorndorf.
Whitaker (1980), G. P.: Co-production: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery, in: Public
Administration Review, vol. 40.3, pp. 240-246.
Zille, (1981), H.: Hurengespräche, Berlin.
Zille, (1982), H.: 300 Berliner Bilder, Berlin.
Zimmermann (1996), H.: Wohlfahrtsstaat zwischen Wachstum und Verteilung. Zu einem
grundlegenden Konflikt in Hocheinkommensländern, München.
– 64 –
6.2 DISKUSSIONSSCHRIFTEN AUS DEM INSTITUT FÜR FINANWISSENSCHAFT
DER UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG
Nr.
1/1976
Nr.
2/1976
Nr.
3/1976
Nr.
Nr.
4/1976
5/1977
Nr.
6/1978
Nr.
7/1978
Nr.
8/1978
Nr.
9/1979
Nr.
10/1979
Nr.
11/1980
Nr.
12/1983
Nr.
13/1984
Nr.
14/1984
Nr.
15/1984
Nr.
16/1984
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Wissenschaftliche Beratung der Wirtschaftsund Finanzpolitik in politökonomischer Perspektive. Ein
Forschungskonzept
Cay Folkers: Zur optimalen Bestimmung staatlicher Eventualbudgets
mit Hilfe der linearen Programmierung
Volkmar G. von Obstfelder: Werden heute Reformen unterlassen, so
verursachen wir morgen höhere Ausgaben. Aspekte einer modernen
Finanzpolitik, in der gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen berücksichtigt
werden
Hans G. Nutzinger: Self-Management in the Public Sector
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Zur logischen Struktur von Bewertungssystemen für den öffentlichen Dienst
Peter Busse: Grundkonzeption der Wohngeldförderung und Vorschläge zur Reform
Dieter Schütt: Bemerkungen zu einigen Modellen zyklischen
Wachstums
Dieter Gnahs und Rainer Janneck: Das Problem des illegalen Steuerwiderstandes. Ein Versuch der Integration verschiedener
Erklärungsansätze
Uwe Sander: Variation der steuerlichen Abschreibungsmöglichkeiten
gemäß § 26 StWG als Instrument der Stabilitätspolitik
Martin Rosenfeld: Funktionale Verwaltungsreformen und das Popitzsche “Gesetz von der Anziehungskraft des übergeordneten Etats”
– Ein Forschungsdesign
Gunther H. Engelhardt: The Imperfect Political Competition in a
Representative Democracy and the Supply of Public Goods
Birger P. Priddat: Das Verhältnis von Ökonomie und Natur. Eine
erste Skizze zu einem unbekannteren Aspekt der Theoriegeschichte
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Zum Problem der Politikentflechtung und
Aufgabendezentralisierung in der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg:
Das Beispiel der Bebauungsplanung
Frank Nullmeier, Birger P. Priddat, Martin Rosenfeld, Eyüp Saltik
und Volker Schulz: Zur Geschichte des Instituts für Finanzwissenschaft und der finanzwissenschaftlichen Forschung und Lehre an der
Universität Hamburg
Werner Stark: Die protestantische Ethik und der Verfall des
Kapitalismus
Birger P. Priddat: Ist das “laisser faire”-Prinzip ein Prinzip des NichtHandelns? Über einen chinesischen Einfluß in Quenays “Despôtisme
de la Chine” auf das physiokratische Denken
– 65 –
Nr.
17/1984
Nr.
18/1984
Nr.
19/1984
Nr.
20/1985
Nr.
21/1985
Nr.
22/1985
Nr.
Nr.
23/1986
24/1987
Nr.
25/1987
Nr.
26/1987
Nr.
27/1988
Nr.
28/1988
Nr.
29/1988
Nr.
30/1989
Nr.
Nr.
31/1989
32/1990
Nr.
33/1990
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Approaches to Fiscal Decentralization in a
Metropolis: Recent Discussions on District Reform in the City State
of Hamburg
Gunther H. Engelhardt, Frank Nullmeier, Birger P. Priddat, Martin
Rosenfeld und Eberhard K. Seifert: Öffentliche Finanzen im “Post
Welfare State (PWS)”, Beitrag zur Konferenz des European Centre
for Work and Society: “The Future of the Welfare State” vom 19. 21.12.1984 in Maastricht/NL
Martin Rosenfeld: Shifts of Expenditures between Counties and Local
Units in Lower Saxony as a Result of Recent “Functional Reforms”:
A New Approach to Operationalize, Measure, and Explain Fiscal
(De-) Centralization
Gunther H. Engelhardt und Mitarbeiter: Bürgerpräferenzen und
Konsolidierungspolitik – Anregungen und Materialien für eine
finanzwissenschaftliche Projektstudieneinheit
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Programmbudgetierung und Budgetkonsolidierung
Birger P. Priddat und Martin Rosenfeld: Die Hamburger
Finanzwissenschaft in den Jahren 1933 -1945
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Bezirksreform in Hamburg?
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Finanzwissenschaftliche Ansätze zur Analyse
und Steuerung interorganisatorischer Beziehungen in der Verwaltung
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Ansätze zur Integration verwaltungs- und
finanzwissenschaftlicher Forschung und Lehre im Institut für Finanzwissenschaft
Jörn Brossmann: Der Wasserpfennig – Finanzwissenschaftliche
Überlegungen zu einem neuen umweltpolitischen Konzept
Peter Bartsch und Henning Probst: Zur Berücksichtigung von
Bedarfselementen im Länderfinanzausgleich – Ein Beitrag zur
Überwindung der Stadtstaatenproblematik
Gunther H. Engelhardt und Eberhard K. Seifert: Das gesellschaftlich
Notwendige finanzierbar machen
Martin Rosenfeld: Hat die Dezentralisierung öffentlicher Aufgabenerfüllung eine Chance? – Ein Versuch der Integration und Erweiterung vorliegender Hypothesen zum “Popitzschen Gesetz” am
Beispiel der Entwicklung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
Gunther H. Engelhardt: The Economics of Public Goods: Basic
Concepts and Institutional Perspectives for Comparative Systems
Analyses
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Imperialismus der Ökonomie?
Martin Rosenfeld: Zur finanzwissenschaftlichen Analyse der Entwicklung öffentlicher Aufgaben-Strukturen – Bericht über ein
Forschungsprojekt
Georg Tolkemitt: Einige makroökonomische Konsequenzen der
Konsumbesteuerung
– 66 –
Nr.
34/1990
Nr.
35/1990
Nr.
36/1992
Nr.
37/1995
Nr.
38/1995
Nr.
39/1996
Nr.
40/1997/8
Nr.
41/1996
Nr.
42/1996
Nr.
43/1996
Nr.
Nr.
44/1997
45/1997
Nr.
46/1997
Nr.
47/1997
Nr.
48/1997
Nr.
49/1997
Nr.
50/1998
Nr.
51/1998
Nr.
52/1998
Nr.
53/1998
Peter Bartsch und Georg Tolkemitt: A neo-classical growth model
with government activity – Some simple analytic
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Die Instrumentalthese in der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Diskussion – Ansätze einer institutionenökonomischen Reinterpretation
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Kommunale Finanzpolitik im Zeichen der
Wiedervereinigung
Gunther H. Engelhardt: “Symbiotische Arrangements” und die
Versorgungsorganisation öffentlicher Aufgabenerfüllung – Anmerkungen zur Institutionenökonomik einer biologischen Metapher mit
einigen Anwendungsbeispielen aus dem Überschneidungsfeld kommunaler Arbeitsmarkt- und Sozialpolitik
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Großstadtregionen und ihre Verwaltung:
Problemkonzentration und Katalysatoren öffentlichen Aufgabenwandels
Horst Hegmann: Spielräume unternehmerischen Handelns zwischen
Innovation und Standardisierung
Gunther H. Engelhardt: TRANSFORM – Forschungsschwerpunkte und
Kooperationsinteressen im Arbeitsbereich “Finanzpolitik” des Instituts
für Finanzwissenschaft (2. Aufl.)
Horst Hegmann: Differing World Views and Collective Action – The
Case of Research
Peter Dörsam: Politische Ökonomie Kommunaler Leasingverträge –
Eine Fallstudie
Christian Inatowitz: “Reinventing Government” – Die Thesen
Osborne/Gaeblers in institutionenökonomischer Interpretation
Horst Hegmann: Poverty, Power, and Constitutional Choice
Horst Hegmann: Ökonomische Effizienz versus universaler Gerechtigkeitsbegriff
Matthias Funk: Finanzwissenschaftliche Aspekte des Streits um die
Einführung einer Berufsarmee
Horst Hegmann: Sind Individuen der adäquate Forschungsgegenstand
der Sozialwissenschaften?
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Innere Sicherheit und Police-PrivatePartnership aus ökonomischer Sicht
Gunther H. Engelhardt: Intergovernmental (Fiscal) Relations in
Germany – A Case for “Reinventing ...”?
Erika Spiegel: Konsensfindung und Konfliktbewältigung durch neue
Formen informeller Verhandlungsführung und Bürgerbeteiligung
Horst Hegmann: Normativer Individualismus, konstitutioneller
Fortschritt und die Rolle der Kultur
Horst Hegmann: Unternehmerisches Handeln in einer sozial ausdifferenzierten Gesellschaft
Horst Hegmann: Wissenssoziologische Aspekte der Verfassungsökonomik. Das Beispiel der Nachhaltigkeitsdebatte
– 67 –
Nr.
Nr.
54/1998
55/1998
Nr.
Nr.
56/1998
57/1998
Nr.
58/1998
Nr.
59/1998
Nr.
60/1998
Nr.
61/2000
Nr.
62/2000
Nr.
63/2001
Thorsten Giersch: On Defining and Analyzing Public Goods
Thorsten Giersch: Rauch ohne Feuer? – Die Pigou-Coase Kontroverse
Horst Hegmann: Fragmentiertes Wissen und Ordnungstheorie
Gunther H. Engelhardt und Sandra Greiner: Ressourcenaktivierung
für Nachhaltigkeit: Globale Probleme – Lokale Agenda
Gunther H. Engelhardt: “Subsidiarity” and the “Principle of Fiscal
Equivalence” (Olson) in Providing Services of General (Economic)
Interest: Their Relevance for Social and Territorial Cohesion
within the European Union
Gunther H. Engelhardt, Horst Hegmann und Christoph Schweizer: Neues Steuerungsmodell und Globalbudgetierung in Hamburg
– Ergebnisse eines Projektseminars zum Thema
Christian Scheer: Beiträge zur Biographie der deutschen wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Emigration 1933 – 1945: Rudolf
Grabower, Otto Freiherr v. Mering, Theodor Plaut, Eduard
Rosenbaum, Oswald Schneider, Carl v. Tyszka
Horst Hegmann: Conventionalist Foundations for Collective
Action in a Culturally Fragmented Setting
Sonja Scheffler und Horst Hegmann: Zur Integration der Marktversagensgründe über Musgraves Mischgutkonzeption
Gunther H. Engelhardt and Klaus Heinemann: Sport and the
Welfare State in Germany
– 68 –