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Nike, social responsibility, and the hidden abode ofproductionCarol A. Stabile aa Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh,Pittsburgh, PA, 15260Published online: 18 May 2009.

To cite this article: Carol A. Stabile (2000): Nike, social responsibility, and the hidden abode of production, Critical Studies inMedia Communication, 17:2, 186-204

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Critical Studies in Media CommunicationVol. 17, No. 2, June 2000, pp. 186-204

Nike, Social Responsibility, and theHidden Abode of Production

Carol A. Stabile

\^\-Nike Corporation irrefutably has created wealth for its owners and shareholders, butits rhetoric of social responsibility—its self-presentation of the corporation as a now globalcitizen—constitutes a more dubious claim. Nike is not alone in engaging in such marketingpractices, but the corporation has long been in the vanguard of innovations in bothproduction and marketing and therefore offers an instructive case study of howmultinational corporations produce and manage their public images. This essay looks atthe conditions that have made this particular self-presentation possible for U.S. consumers.

Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratifiedby cooked meat eaten with a knife and forkis a different hunger from that which boltsdown raw meat with the aid of hand, nailand tooth. Production thus produces notonly the object but also the manner ofconsumption, not only objectively but alsosubjectively. Production thus creates theconsumer. (Marx, 1973, p. 92)

In June 1996, responding to journal-ist Bob Herbert's scathing critique

of Nike's promotional rhetoric of so-cial responsibility (1996b, p. A19),Chairman and CEO Philip Knight reit-erated Nike's alleged commitment tohumanity. Nike, he avowed, has long"been concerned with developing safeand healthy work environments wher-ever it has worked with contractors inemerging market societies," it provides

Carol A. Stabile is an Associate Professor in theDepartment of Communication at the Univer-sity of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Sheacknowledges the helpful feedback provided byLisa Frank, Allen Larson, Nagesh Rao, Mat-thew Reichek, and Mark Ungeron earlier draftsof this essay.

"free meals, housing and health careand transportation subsidies," and "wedo our best to insure that labor abusesdo not occur." In a concluding flour-ish, Knight wrote, "add to this the200,000 people employed by our con-tractors at the factory level and youhave a company that began in mybasement and today creates wealthwhere none existed before" (p. A18).

Nike irrefutably has created wealthfor its owners and shareholders (whenthe corporation went public in 1980,for example, at least six of its sharehold-ers became multimillionaires), but itsrhetoric of social responsibility-its self-presentation of the corporation as anow global citizen-constitutes a moredubious claim. Of course, Nike is notalone in engaging in such marketingdiscourse, but the corporation has longbeen in the vanguard of innovations inboth, production and marketing andtherefore offers an instructive case studyof how multinational corporations pro-duce and manage their public images.In terms of communication research,this essay proceeds from the assump-

Copyright 2000, National Communication Association

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tion that analyses of Nike's advertisingand public relations campaigns andthe ideologies therein expressed offerlittle in the way of critical insight. In-deed, the success of the rhetoric ofsocial responsibility depends on themanagement of visible contradictionsand controversies, and the mainte-nance of a number of invisible contra-dictions and controversies. The follow-ing analysis moves from the level ofthe visible to the invisible in an attemptto understand how the terms "corpora-tion" and "social responsibility" havebeen knit together within the media.and to illuminate the issues and con-flicts thereby rendered invisible.

Sneaker WarsWhat too many people who live in otherplaces don't understand is that there's apart of America where a Big Mac is acelebration.... Most of the people in thisstore, their lives are shit; their homes in theprojects are shit-and it's not like they don'tknow it. There's no drop-in center aroundhere anymore, and no local place to gothat they can think of as their own. So theycome to my store. They buy these shoesjust like other kinds of Americans buyfancy cars and new suits. It's all abouttrying to find some status in the world-Steven Roth, Owner, Essex House of Fash-ion, Newark, NJ. (in Katz, 1994, p. 271)

One of the first high-profile contro-versies Nike encountered involved anassociation that emerged betweensneakers and the media's representa-tions of inner-city violence. These"sneaker wars" had their origins-ironi-cally enough-in competition betweenNike and Reebok over market share.In 1991, Nike and Reebok went head-to-head in a television advertising cam-paign known as "the sneaker wars."1

Spending at least $130 million each,their dueling commercials featured

NBA players who implied that theirrespective brand of sneakers gave thema competitive edge. Nike's own edgeover Reebok (by January 1992, Nikehad 40 percent of the market, whileReebok had only 16 percent) and theincreased visibility of its Air Jordanseventually provoked a public relationscrisis when the sneaker wars mergedwith news coverage of inner-city vio-lence (Rifkin, 1992, p. 10).

A spate of publicity in 1989 sug-gested that children were killing eachother over athletic shoes and, in 1990,Sports Illustrated reported that inner-city youths were committing homi-cides specifically for Air Jordans. InAugust 1991, economic and racial ten-sions turned violent in the CrownHeights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Inthe months that followed the turmoil, asignificant amount of print media cov-erage was devoted to the looting of astore in Crown Heights called SneakerKing, owned by a Korean family. Thebrand name "Nike" featured promi-nently in the coverage (Barron, 1991,p. 3; Faison, 1991, p. 25). In March1992, a fifteen-year old in Philadelphiareportedly was killed during the theftof his Air Jordans; in April 1992, SouthCentral LA erupted, with looting andbrand name sneakers again splashedacross pages and screens; and in July1992, KP Original Sporting Goods inHarlem was robbed. According to theNew York Times, in Harlem "10,000pairs of Nike, Reebok and other high-priced sneakers" were stolen in a"frenzy of looting and violence" thatwas "explained by two words: 'greedand sneakers'" (Fritsch, 1992, p. 25).The suburbs also became implicated inapparently sneaker-motivated crimi-nal behavior. Fairfield, Connecticut'sFirst Selectman, Jacquelyn C. Durrelldescribed "situations in town where

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youngsters not only had their bicyclesstolen but their sneakers—their Mi-chael Jordan Air Pumps—right offthem" (Lomuscio, 1991, p. 1).

As the sneakers at issue became asso-ciated with the Nike brand (as inevita-bly they would given Nike's promi-nence in the market and its use ofAfrican-American spokespersons), thecorporation was confronted with botha problem and the opportunity forsome free, albeit dual-edged, publicity.As Katz notes, "Magic had accrued tothe most carefully made shoes, and thisperception was clearly the result of a •hundred intricate cultural signals-many of which had indeed been manu-factured as a way to manipulate theshape of popular desire" (1994, p. 269).The problem Nike subsequently con-fronted had two main aspects. On onehand, the sneaker wars threatened tobecome a critique of the very consum-erist desires Nike had so successfullymanipulated. Had Nike been too suc-cessful in manipulating "popular de-sire"; so successful, in fact, that thosewithout the wherewithal to purchasethe shoes were willing to resort to vio-lence to acquire a pair? From the per-spective of an advertising-supportedmedia industry, this line of questioningis especially dangerous since it threat-ens to cast doubt on the very practicesthat generate vast profits. Teen-agers,for example, currently spend $57 bil-lion of their own money and $36 bil-lion of their families' money each year(Conover, 1998, p. 13). Over the pastforty years, communication researchhas invested enormous resources inanalyzing the effects of media violenceon viewers, while scant critical atten-tion has been devoted to the effects ofadvertising's ability to stimulate de-sires for products and lifestyles outsideviewers' economic grasp and related

increases not in violence per se but incrimes like burglary and theft.2 Sincethe articulation of sneakers and greedfollowed on the heels of the highlyvisible "sneaker wars" advertising cam-paign, the possibility that Nike's aggres-sive marketing campaign could havespurred such greed wasn't much of astretch. Given the pervasiveness of me-dia effects theory in popular culture, ifchildren were killing one another oversneakers, blaming the media and Nike'sadvertising practices might not be farbehind.3

On the other hand, since Nike's adsrely in large part on the positivism ofthe contrast between the disciplinedAfrican-American bodies it uses to sellproducts and the criminalized African-American bodies that abound in themedia, when die contrast threatened todissolve, the issue had to be carefullymanaged. If Nike sneakers becamelinked to gangs and inner-city vio-lence-if the magic that had accrued tothem became tainted-consumptionmight be affected, particularly if subur-banites feared that their Nike-shod chil-dren were at risk.4

Understanding the problem as a po-tential moral panic, Nike launched acrisis management campaign.5 In 1992,Nike ran a number of antiracist ads bySpike Lee, and in November of tiiatyear, Nike and Michael Jordan jointlydonated $200,000 to Chicago PublicSchools. By 1993, Nike was a key sup-porter of "midnight basketball pro-grams," and in 1994, during the inten-sified coverage of crime that heraldedClinton's Crime Bill, Nike formallylaunched PLAY (Participate in thelives of America's Youth). With pro-motional moves that cost them verylittle in the end (one need only com-pare the $130 million dollars Nikespent on advertising during the sneaker

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wars with the corporation's paltry dona-tion of $100,000 to Chicago schools),Nike managed not only to publicize acommitment to social responsibility,but to suggest that the corporation waspart of the solution rather than part ofthe problem.

PLAY in particular enabled Nike torestore its veneer of social responsibil-ity by implying that the solution toinner city deterioration was throughthe discipline of sport and its promiseof upward mobility. In so doing, theprogram relied on a logic of inferentialracism:

There's a crisis in America right now. Kids'sports and fitness programs are being axedfrom schools and the country's playgroundsaren't safe anymore. Access to play shouldbe a kid's inalienable right. Nike wants tolead the charge to guarantee that theserights to America's children are preserved.(In Cole, 1996, pp. 7-8)

Framed in this way, the crisis locatesthe problem as reductions in spendingto athletic programs thus implying thatthe central problem in inner-cityschools is that poor children do nothave access to the formal discipline ofathletics. Despite the references to"America" and "America's children,"the crisis clearly emanates from theinner-city, where crime runs rampantand "playgrounds aren't safe any-more." Without sports programs, inner-city youths have no hope for the fu-ture. As one PLAY ad puts it, "If youcouldn't dream of touchdowns, whatwould you dream?" The underminingof educational curricula in inner-cityschools through federal and state reduc-tions does not generate the same kindof marketing opportunities or moraloutrage—a fact that underscores the self-interested nature of the campaign, aswell as its inferential racism. This is aracist common sense that prioritizes (at

least rhetorically) athletic programs forAfrican-American children while sys-tematically and simultaneously attack-ing and eroding economic and educa-tional programs. Moreover, behind thehumanitarian guise of PLAY, Nike'sperniciously exploitative recruitmentpractices among inner-city youth re-main concealed.6

The emphasis on "play" further re-lies on the deeply sedimented racistbelief that African-Americans are"naturally" inclined to an excess ofenergy and that they require appropri-ate, socially-sanctioned outlets for such"natural" behavior. Historically, a simi-lar paternalism has been extended tovarious poor and working-class ethnicand racial groups (the Irish, Italians,Chinese), whose participation in eitherunofficial or illegal economies was saidto illustrate their biological proclivitytoward criminal or excessive behav-iors.7 However, where "gang" activityin the case of these immigrant groupsoccasionally led to upward mobilityand assimilation, racism in illegal (aswell as legal) economies has preventedsuch mobility for African-Americans.8

In essence, PLAY's "RevolutionaryManifesto" depends upon a very tradi-tional belief that sport and athletic pro-grams provide the disciplinary struc-ture that poor children are said to lack.Since the family is seldom understood,much less represented, as the eco-nomic unit that it is, sport as surrogatefamily is detached from economics. Inplace of the economic stability thatmight effect actual change in their lives,children have an "inalienable right" to"positive, energetic actions chargedwith fun and free motion." Appar-ently, poor children do not need food,health care, shelter, clothing, or accessto a decent public education—they needan "active life, sport and the pursuit of

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fun."9 Indeed, these children are saidto have "choices" insofar as inner-cityyouths can "choose" the immediategratification of the drug trade—an occu-pation that (despite the risk of beingarrested or shot) yields a great deal ofcash—or they can "choose" the morearduous and culturally heroic path toriches provided by athletics.

In establishing life "choices" in away abstracted from material contexts,PLAY takes advantage of existing me-dia discourses and policy debates aboutyouths, poverty, and crime. Typically,such discourses seek to minimize, oreven ignore, reference to the economiccircumstances in which poor childrenand their families struggle to get by. AsWilliam Adler observes in his land-mark study of the Chambers familyand their crack cocaine empire in De-troit,

Slam-bang stories and statistics outragepeople, but for the wrong reasons. Crack isa scourge; its carnage, its devastation offamily and neighborhood life have beendocumented thoroughly. But just as moststories about homelessness fail to mentionthat the federal government slashed hous-ing subsidies, the raft of drug stories com-pletely ignores why crack distribution isfor so many a rational career choice. Thereoften is no content to the stories; it is as ifcrack fell from the sky. (1995, p. 5)

For example, in one New York Timesarticle, despite its informant's insis-tence that he began dealing drugs be-cause his mother's welfare check couldnot support him and his three youngersisters, a day in his life is structuredaround the following priorities:

On a spring morning four years ago in adeadend neighborhood in Chicago, it wasJovan Rogers's turn to sell a little bag ofcrack that, added to the bags that he fig-ured were sure to follow, could buy himgym shoes and girlfriends and maybe keep

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the electric company from turning off thelights at his mother's apartment again.(Wilkerson, 1994, p. Al, emphasis added)

Jovan's life is structured around an in-fantilized urge for commodities—withhis responsibility to his mother addedonly as an afterthought and contin-gent, it is implied, on whether his ill-gotten funds hold out. Despite thevoices that threaten to disrupt suchrepresentations of inner-city life—"hesays he would be happy to find a jobpaying $6 or $7 an hour. But so far, hesaid, no one but the drug dealers seemwilling to hire him" (Wilkerson, 1994,p. A13);" 'There are no j o b s . . . What'sMilton going to do to survive?' "(Purdy, p. A10); " 'I prefer having ajob to being out in the streets', he said,'getting harassed by cops, getting shotat by [the Latin] Kings '" (Nieves, p.Al 1). The realities of economic immis-eration are pushed by the narrativestructure into the background, wherethey recede and fade from view.10

In addition to its elision of economicissues, PLAY's emphasis on "play" fur-ther exploits a deep vein of mediaracism. Media coverage of poor, Afri-can-American neighborhoods gener-ally represents inhabitants as havingtoo much leisure or too much unstruc-tured time on their hands, while therhetoric of drug lords and welfarequeens denotes a feudal economy inwhich actual class relations are thor-oughly inverted. The camera obscuraof such representational practices sug-gests that the majority of welfare recipi-ents are black and that they do nothingall day but consume crack, alcohol,and junk food, all the while hangingout on the streets and neglecting theirchildren. In an interesting contrast-and one that reflects the class interestsof the media-capitalists like Nike'sPhilip Knight are represented as up-

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standing citizens and workaholics, whocan barely fit a television interviewinto their hectic schedules. Of this con-trast, Adler perceptively points out,

Just as Wall Street's inside traders cannotbe written off as greedy aberrants, neithercan the Chambers brothers be dismissedas aberrant ghetto capitalists—each tooktheir cue from the wider society. They didnot reject mainstream values; rather theyembraced them in the only way they could.In yearning and looking and groping for away out, the Chamberses did what mostAmericans would have said was the rightthing to do had they not sold drugs: theystrove for financial success. Indeed, theirstory should frighten not because it showswhat made them different, but rather whatmade them so common, (p. 7)

Similarly, if we scratch the surface ofNike's veneer a bit, we can see how thecodes of conduct so valued by corpo-rate culture are displaced onto groupsof people who haven't the economicmeans to pursue them legally but arenevertheless held responsible for thegenesis of such codes and desires.11

"There is no Finish Line":Nike's Pitch to theConsumerist Caste

Of course, corporations are not par-ticularly concerned about the casual-ties of consumerist ideologies since theirattention is focused on a more lucra-tive group of consumers. For mediaindustries, audiences are commoditiesthat are sold or delivered to advertis-ers. Because the content of televisionprogramming and print media articlesis produced, distributed, and exhibitedfor the audience as a commodity, asitcom, soap opera, or news broadcastmust attract the appropriate demo-graphic, those consumers to whom thecontent of advertising is oriented, inorder to succeed. Advertisements that

run during particular television pro-grams or in the specialized domain ofmagazines, reveal much about the in-come level and consumption habits ofthe target audience for whom that pro-gram is intended, as does advertisingin the more obviously specializedmagazine industry. One need only con-trast the products advertised in Ebony,for example, with those advertised inNewsweek, or commercials broadcastduring ER with those broadcast duringdaytime soap operas, to understandthis point.

As a commodity, the audience is aquantity, but it is a quantity with par-ticular qualitative features. As Ben Bag-dikian puts it, the "iron rule of advertis-ing-supported media" is that "It is lessimportant that people buy your publi-cation (or listen to your program) thanthat they be 'the right kind' of people"(1992, p. 109). A case in point of thisiron rule is the contemporary predica-ment of the conservative magazineReader's Digest. Although the magazineboasts a circulation of 28 million world-wide and publishes 48 editions in 19languages, it recently posted a loss of$114 million for the fiscal third quarterof 1996. The problem now confrontingthe publishers involves the median ageof its readers (forty-seven) and the eco-nomic imperative to attract a more"valuable" demographic, "like fami-lies with parents under the age of 50who have children at home and house-holds with incomes of $75,000 ormore" (Pogrebin, 1996, p. C8).12

The homogeneity of media contentproduced for such a "consumeristcaste" (Meehan, 1993, p. 210) has sig-nificance for how we understand thecontent of both programming and ad-vertising. The pleasures and experien-tial frameworks of those outside of, ormarginal within, the consumerist caste,

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are, as Eileen Meehan puts it, "eco-nomically irrelevant" (p. 210) and al-though the form of advertising's ad-dress is a seemingly universal "you," inreality, the ideology of that address isboth economically and racially spe-cific, although it may serve to makethose outside the consumerist caste de-sire commodities beyond their eco-nomic reach.

The "success" of Nike's ads andproducts has depended on the corpora-tion's ability to reach a target audienceof middle-class consumers through ap-peals to the values and belief systemsof that audience. This does not meanthat audiences who do not fit this demo-graphic profile are untouched by Nike'sadvertising campaigns in particular orthe commodity fetishism it promotesin general. It does mean, however, thatNike pitches its ads not to some fictivemass audience, but to those consumersmost likely to be able to buy theirproducts.

The specificity of Nike's address tothis consumerist caste (not to mentionthe specificity of its product line) isevident in its television ads from thelate 1970s when the corporation wasgaining ascendancy. Capitalizing on therunning fad among the demographicknown as baby boomers, the early adsincorporated certain watered-down ide-als from the 1960s with the countercul-ture now firmly articulated to a par-ticular consumer life style. Theseadvertisements repeatedly featuredwhite men, loping through sylvan land-scapes-sneaker-clad versions of Tho-reau's rugged woodsman-while thevoice-over equated the individualismof the runner with the individualizedcraftsmanship and technology of thenascent Nike corporation. Another adestablished Nike's now familiar rheto-ric of revolution. Set to the strains of

the 7572 Overture, Nike proclaimed a"revolution" in running-shoe technol-ogy, with the corporation positioned inthe "vanguard" of such revolutionarychange. The corporation's later use ofthe Beatle's "Revolution" in 1987 andGil Scott Heron's "The Revolution WillNot be Televised" in 1995 testify to thecontinued success of this countercul-tural theme. As Katz observes, "some-how Just Do It' managed to evokecountless previously impeded visionsof personal responsibility. The phraseentered popular discourse like someconsumer-age variation on the old revo-lutionary interrogative, 'What is to bedone?'" (1994, p. 146). These earlyadvertisements contain a reasonablystraightforward address. Representingitself as a small entrepreneurial ven-ture long after it had become a multi-million dollar enterprise, Nike initiallyappealed to white male consumers onthe basis of its craftsmanship, commit-ment to excellence, and social respon-sibility—all attractive characteristics toits audience. Its outdoor, naturally litscenes and narrative focus on individu-als spoke to the experiential frame-work of white, middle-class consumersfor whom fitness was an increasinglyimportant leisure activity.

Such a niche market of runners hadits economic limitations, however, andin 1977, Nike executives discerned ashift in their consumers from "runninggeeks" to "yuppies"—an "emergingconsumer [who] was shallow and hadlittle sense of history" (Strasser & Beck-lund, 1991, p. 268). Nike had beendiversifying its product line for sometime: tennis shoes were introduced in1972, the move into basketball shoesbegan in late 1974, the "SenoritaCortez" women's running shoe wasintroduced in 1976, and a clothing linein 1979. When the corporation went

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public in 1980, Nike began its aggres-sive advertising campaign. In 1982,Nike hired Chiat/Day, die firm thatwent on to produce Nike's city cam-paigns as well as many of its successfultelevision commercials.

As Amy Hribar and Cheryl Colepoint out, Nike achieved its most wide-spread publicity through basketball(1995, p. 349) and its marketing ofAfrican-American celebrities like Mi-chael Jordan and Spike Lee. This strat-egy has allowed Nike to capitalize oncutting-edge fashions that originate ininner-cities and among urban minori-ties. Advertising industry experts claimthat this emphasis on "inner-city chic"permits advertisers to "jazz up theirsales pitches" (Tyson, 1996, p. 8) or, asin the case of ad agency DDBNeedham's hiring of Spike Lee in 1996,to revitalize a company's "stodgy, lilywhite image" (Hirschfield, 1997, p. 36).Experts also assert that advertisers'growing emphasis on city fashion re-flects the importance of the "urbanmarket," which Ken Smikle, publisherof Target Market News, says "has be-come one of those phrases that can beused comfortably by those who don'twant to say black or African-Ameri-can" (Tyson, p. 8). Advertisers alsoadmit that they use the term "urbanmarket" so as not to alienate whiteconsumers by openly casting a trendor product as African-American or His-panic.

Nike's move into basketball also co-incided with a boom in the marketingof multicultural texts across the media,especially in the area of book publish-ing. The boom in multicultural imageshad specific ideological effects insofaras it helped to maintain the illusionthat consumption reflected or was iden-tical to political practice. First, multicul-tural images appeared to provide an

antidote to the media's reliance onovertly racist stereotypes as well as analternative to the criminalized imagesof African-Americans that proliferateon the nightly news. By providing"positive" images, or role models, cor-porations (including the media) couldrepresent themselves as being sociallyresponsible to people of color and linkthis to the products being sold. Theconsumerist caste could participate ina feeling of social responsibility by con-suming multicultural images that pro-vided a simulacrum of racial integra-tion. The representation of a very fewsuccessful African-Americans furtherreinforced Nike's trademark of indi-vidual and individualized excellence,thereby denying the obstacles that insti-tutionalized racism places in the pathsof African-Americans (indeed, to ac-knowledge the existence of this wouldbe to contradict its very slogan—'JustDo It").

As Hazel Carby (1992) points out inregard to the consumption of multicul-tural texts in university classrooms, rep-resentations of African-Americans havecome to stand in for the actual pres-ence (and advancement) of people ofcolor thus giving white Americans thecomforting illusion of inhabiting acolor-blind society. Certainly, this wasa convenient fiction for white Ameri-cans to consume along with their Nikes,since it denied the material realities ofracist oppression and material segrega-tion in the United States. Recent adver-tisements featuring golfer Tiger Woods,in which individuals state "I am TigerWoods," as a procession of people ofvarying races, ages, and genders flashacross the screen, offer a vivid illustra-tion of Nike's assertions about the mo-bility of identity. Nike's use of aproto-feminist pitch offers an instructivecontrast to this multiculturalism. As

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image of girl after girl moves across thescreen, their voices intone: "If you letme play sports, I will have more self-confidence. If you let me play sports, Iwill be more likely to leave a man whobeats me. If you let me play sports, Iwill be less likely to get pregnant be-fore I want to." Here, it is revealingthat while Nike can refer to domesticviolence and other gender issues to sellits sneakers, it does not refer to statis-tics on racist oppression. After all, Nikewas selling sneakers to female mem-bers of the consumerist caste—to detailthe effects of racism threatened to dis-rupt the ideological framework of theentire consumerist caste.

Framed within the poles of "posi-tive" and "negative" role models,Nike's use of African-American men inits ad campaigns relied upon what Stu-art Hall has described as a logic ofinferential racism, a logic with a lengthyhistory and one that is all too fre-quently invisible to white consumers(1990, p. 13). Where sport for whiteathletes is equated with leisure (how-ever competitive), sport has more grav-ity when connected to African-Ameri-cans. After all, in a white supremacistculture, professional sport provides oneof the few entry-points into the HoratioAlger myth for African-Americans,with the traditional entertainment in-dustry being another. And basketball,more than any other sport, has beeninextricably articulated to urban spacesand African-American athletes. Thusbasketball, in a white imaginary, con-firms that the American Dream iswithin the grasp of African-Americans,if only they would pull themselves upby their Nike laces and "Just Do It."The implication of such narrativesis that African-American possess bod-ily capital rather than the entrepreneur-ial cunning of an Andrew Carnegie

or Ted Turner. Their impulsiveness,or excess energy, must find an appro-priate physical outlet-it must be dis-ciplined-or else it runs the risk ofturning into senseless, undisciplinedviolence. Even "successful" African-Americans are represented as beingdogged by this problem as the mediaattention to Michael Jordan's gam-bling illustrates.13

Although Nike has long cultivated"bad boy" endorsers for their prod-ucts, the "bad boy" image functionsquite differently for white athletes likeIlie Nastase and John McEnroe. In thecase of African-American spokesper-sons, crime implicitly and explicitlyhaunts Nike's commodification of Afri-can-American athletes. Again, these adstake their meaning from and must besituated within a constant flow of televi-sion images that largely serve to crimi-nalize African-Americans and demon-ize inner-city communities. Nike'sgrainy black-and-white images of bas-ketball courts stand in stark reliefagainst nightly local and network cov-erage of urban carnage; the disciplinedchoreography of the court and athleticculture posed as the alternative to theruthless anarchy of the streets, whileorganized sports offer an antidote todie criminal behavior of gangs. Giventhe levels of segregation diat exist inthe United States, many white Ameri-cans (and certainly a large percentageof the consumerist caste) have their per-ception of people of color structuredaround such mass-mediated poles.

Consumption and Its CasualtiesThe racial specificity of the consum-

erist caste is also evident in die case ofa largely invisible consumer boycott ofNike products, staged by those mar-ginal to or within the consumerist caste.Publicly, Nike has found it useful to

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allow their commodification of African-American athletes to imply a commit-ment to African-American consumers.In keeping with this, Strasser and Beck-lund offer the following description ofNike's move into basketball:

Basketball was a city sport, partly becausecourts were available and free. Canvasconverse shoes were almost a requireduniform for inner-city kids. The day Knightput basketball shoes into the new Nikeline, he crossed over into his first marketthat had a black target consumer. Oregonwas as white as states came, and distancerunning had always been a white sportexcept for the small but growing numberof world-class African runners. Blue Rib-bon [soon to be renamed Nike] didn't havemany, if any, black employees, and knewlittle about the black consumer, (p. 224)

But far from signaling a shift in productmarketing, or a desire to "target" Afri-can-American consumers, the use ofimages of African-Americans to sellcommodities was an advertising strat-egy that was structurally intertwinedwith the successful television market-ing of the NBA. As it turned out, "blackconsumers," who constitute only aslight percentage of the consumeristcaste, were less than important to Nike.

The question of race and target audi-ence for television programming, how-ever, should be approached with somecaution since the main issue is classand not race. In addition, the indus-try's understanding of a target audi-ence is based not on objective realities,but on executives' and researchers' per-ceptions about the values and beliefsystems of the audience they most wantto reach. As the president of 20th Cen-tury Fox Television, which producestelevision shows, candidly put it, "Idon't think that anyone's crying out forintegrated shows.... By pursuing ad-vertisers and demographics rather than

a mass audience, the networks havedeclared they don't need blacks in theiraudience" (Sterngold, 1998, p. A12).In this respect, the cable industry isoften contrasted positively with net-work television, although it is seldomacknowledged that cable's niche mar-keting is underwritten by the fact thatits viewers must pay a fee for serviceand are therefore considered more de-mographically attractive.

Evidence abounds that illustratesNike's overall lack of interest in Afri-can-American consumers, althoughone example will suffice here. In Au-gust 1990, Operation PUSH (PeopleUnited to Serve Humanity), a ChicagoCivil Rights organization founded byJesse Jackson in 1971, launched a boy-cott of Nike products. Organized byPUSH'S new director, Reverend Ty-rone Crider, the boycott responded towhat PUSH described as Nike's "zero"policy. Although purchases by African-Americans, according to Crider, ac-counted for 30 percent of Nike's $2.23billion annual sales, "zero African-Americans hold executive-level posi-tions; zero African-American-ownednewspapers, magazines, radio and tele-vision stations carry Nike advertise-ments, and zero African-American pro-fessional service providers havecontracts or do business with Nike"(Woodard, 1990, p. 17). The gist ofPUSH'S critique was clear: Nike waspleased to use a few successful African-Americans to sell its products, but whenit came to materially supportingmiddle-class African-Americans by giv-ing them a piece of their business, thepicture was quite different.

On August 17, 1990, Nike presidentRichard Donahue, and Chairman andCEO Philip Knight made a two-pronged response to PUSH. Nike im-mediately undermined PUSH's cred-

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ibility by suggesting that the boycotthad been instigated by its major com-petitor, Reebok. In a profoundly con-tradictory move, they then observedthat African-Americans constituted amere ten percent of their consumers(thereby implying that in the largerscheme of things, they were an unim-portant minority), but in the samebreath cited the company's "aggres-sive minority recruiting effort" and its"exemplary" record on the use of "mi-nority spokespeople" such as San An-tonio Spurs' David Robinson, MichaelJordan, Spike Lee, and Bo Jackson.Donahue and Knight refused to an-swer questions from the press aboutNike's statistics on African-Americanemployment instead speaking only interms of "minorities" (Strasser & Beck-lund, p. 658). In response, Crider con-ceded that Nike did promote "positiveBlack role models," but argued that theboycott was "not about four or fiveAfrican-Americans. It's about 30 mil-lion African-Americans" (PUSH HoldsFirst Meeting with Nike, 1990, p. 27).

Prior to the Nike boycott, PUSHhad staged successful boycotts againstthe Adolph Coors Company andBurger King, forcing both companiesto make minor concessions to middle-class African-Americans (Coors in-vested some of their profits in African-American communities, while BurgerKing added African-American franchi-sees). But despite the support of JesseJackson, Maxine Waters, the NationalCouncil of Negro Women, and sup-port at the grassroots level, the Nikeboycott not only failed, but almost de-stroyed PUSH itself. In January 1991,six months after announcing the Nikeboycott, PUSH reported a deficit ofseveral hundred thousand dollars, laidoff its entire staff, and in March, Rever-

end Crider resigned (Wilkerson, 1991,p. 12).

The boycott received no coverage inthe mainstream media, although it wascovered by African-American mediathat received no advertising dollarsfrom Nike.14 The New York Times, forinstance, never mentioned the boy-cott while it was active but coveredPUSH's demise in detail. Claimingthat the "public relations failure" ofthe Nike boycott hurt PUSH enor-mously because the "protest never ap-peared to catch on" (Wilkerson, 1991,,p. 12), it added that "Several promi-nent blacks opposed the boycott, whichwas widely perceived as a failure whenNike officials refused to negotiate withPUSH" (A Troubled Operation PUSHStruggles to Focus its Mission, 1991,

P-14).There are a number of interesting

contradictions between mainstreammedia coverage and coverage in Afri-can-American print media. Jet, whichdevoted a substantial amount of cover-age to the Nike boycott, as well asPUSH's other activities, never men-tioned dissent among African-Ameri-cans over the boycott. Jet also reportedthat Nike officials had met at least twicewith PUSH representatives, which con-tradicts the New York Timers assertionthat Nike had refused to negotiate. Inaddition, Black Enterprise claimed thatNike in fact had made concessions toPUSH: they agreed to name a minorityto Nike's board of directors within oneyear and one minority vice presidentwithin two.

In contrast to the public relationsmaneuvers that followed the sneakerwars, the PUSH boycott was quietlyand easily managed, a point that rein-forces the comparative powerlessnessof even middle-class African-Ameri-can consumers within the consumerist

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caste. The boycott subjected PUSH toa great deal of public scrutiny at thehands of a powerful, multinational cor-poration during a period in which theorganization was experiencing a seriesof transitions in both leadership andorientation and when contributionsfrom its middle-class base had droppedsignificantly. In the end, the boycottwas unsuccessful—not, as the main-stream media would have it-becauseAfrican-Americans did not agree withit (in fact, Michael Jordan himself toldJet that he understood and supportedPUSH concerns), but because die boy-cott did not jeopardize Nike's sales orpublic image (indeed, to affect eitherthe boycott would have needed wide-spread publicity and support from theconsumerist caste). Although Nike ad-vertises extensively in women's maga-zines, to this day, it does not run ads inAfrican-American magazines ]ike Jet orEbony, nor does it run ads during televi-sion programming that attracts a largelyAfrican-American audience.15

"Dirty, Dangerous, andDifficult:" Nike and theMode of Production16

As problematic as it is to make claimsabout the universality of Nike's adver-tising appeal and its "mass" audience,an analysis (not to mention politicalpractice) that remains at the level ofadvertising and consumption serves toobscure yet another, even more invis-ible, contradiction.17 For nowhere isthe distinction between the consumer-ist caste and those outside it as visibleas it is from the standpoint of produc-tion, a standpoint that is, understand-ably enough, invisible from the per-spective of consumption promoted bythe media.

In terms of production, Nike's corpo-rate origins can be traced back to 1963,

when founder Philip Knight struck adeal with a Japanese firm, OnitsukaCompany, Ltd., to be the West Coastdistributor for Tiger track shoes, aknock-off of the German-made Adidasbrand that then dominated the market.Blue Ribbon Sports, as the companywas originally named, was among thefirst to take advantage of Asian-pro-duced, inexpensive imitations of brand-name footwear. Knight's capitalist acu-men cannot be overestimated: in 1960,only four percent of shoes sold in theU.S. were imported; by 1969, 32 per-cent were imports (Strasser & Beck-lund, p. 185)—an increase that was tohave disastrous consequences for thesmall New England towns that werethen the centers of domestic shoe pro-duction. By 1984, imports had risen to11 percent of the U.S. shoe market (p.559).™

Concerned about relying solely onJapanese manufacturing and in searchof ever cheaper labor, Blue Ribbonopened its first factory in Korea in1976.19 In 1979, during the first year ofChina's "economic adjustment" (at atime when monthly wages there were$30), Nike, whose name had officiallychanged in 1978, opened its first fac-tory in mainland China. At the YueYuen factory, ninety-percent of work-ers are women who "must obey a longlist of rules concerning fraternizationwith men and curfews" (Katz, 1994,pp. 179-80). By 1980, 90 percent ofNike's production took place in Koreaand Taiwan. Presently, more than athird of Nike products are produced inIndonesia, but with an increase in mini-mum wage to $2.20 a day in that coun-try (after almost four years of laborstruggles), Nike moved into Vietnam,where the daily wage is a meager $1.50(Herbert, 1996a, p. A19).

In the United States, Nike operated

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a factory in Saco, Maine, from 1978 to1984 and in Exeter, New Hampshire,from 1972 to 1984. At the time, theseUnited States-based factories (which ac-counted for only a tiny percentage oftotal production) were a safeguard forthe corporation. On one hand, theygave the company a place to developdesigns with relative security and estab-lish a new model in the marketplacebefore mass-producing it abroad. Onthe other hand, given serious concernsabout protectionist legislation in theshoe manufacturing industry, UnitedStates-based factories were a form ofinsurance. If protectionist legislationbecame a reality, Nike's U.S. factoriesmaintained a domestic manufacturingbase. Nike had already experiencedsuch a problem: In 1974, U.S. Cus-toms had levied additional import du-ties on Blue Ribbon Sports shoes un-der the American Selling Price statute(ASP). The resulting litigation was notsettled until 1980, when the proposedback payment was reduced from $16to $9 million, and the ASP method ofcomputing duty was rejected.20

Currently, Nike operates a high-techdistribution center in Memphis, Ten-nessee, where between 60 and 225 tem-porary workers with no job securityand no health benefits are employedon ajust-in-time basis. Nike has contin-ued to refuse to release its African-American employment figures, refer-ring instead to "minority" employees,200 of whom are employed in theMemphis facility and a number ofwhom are Vietnamese manual labor-ers in Beaverton, Oregon, engaged inthe production of Nike's Air-Soles(Strasser & Becklund, p. 658).

Readers of business newspapers andjournals, as well as corporate literature,will be familiar with this brief history:like the majority of successful corpora-

tions, Nike has pursued cheap laborsources in countries like Indonesiawhere "friendly" governments are will-ing to guarantee cheap labor usingwhatever means necessary. In Indone-sia, for example, daily wages were setbelow the official minimum wage (anofficial wage the government had setbelow the poverty line in order to at-tract and maintain "footloose" corpora-tions like Nike) and workers who struckfor higher wages were fired.21 Coun-tries like the Philippines and Thailand,either unwilling or unable to guaranteesuch conditions, were deemed "cultur-ally challenging" and received little orno business from Nike (Katz, p. 172).

With increasing frequency, Nike'sproduction practices have erupted intothe mainstream media causing a flurryof public relations activity. The firstmajor eruption occurred on July 2nd,1993, when CBS's Street Stories ran asegment that explored the contradic-tion between "a one-hundred dollarpair of sneakers and a worker makingthose sneakers being paid a dollar-fiftya day" (In Katz, p. 187), a contradic-tion that again emerged in late May of1996, when, according to the media,consumers were dismayed to learn thattheir $130.00 Air Jordans (producedfor $30.00 in Indonesia) had been madeby poorly paid Indonesian workers, aswell as sweatshop workers in New YorkCity. Nike's response to such exposesexemplifies the central contradictiontherein revealed. On one hand, Nikehas defended its labor practices, claim-ing that the $1.50 paid to Indonesianworkers was not really $1.50, but 3,000rupiah and that, in any case, it wassubstantially more than the wages madeby local farmers (Katz, p. 190).22 Whenconfronted with the fact that the mini-mum wage in Indonesia had been setbelow the poverty line, Nike retreated,

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asserting that it was not their job todictate just wages. As Katz puts it,"Only when foreign labor issues comeup can a Nike manager be heard tosay, 'We're not good enough to changethat system'" (pp. 191-2).

In the end, Nike's images merit farless attention than the realities thoseimages are designed to conceal. Nike,like corporations in general, will useany image to sell its products, provid-ing that such images can be stitchedinto a seamless narrative that poses fewcontradictions for its consumers-a nar-rative designed to guarantee the veryinvisibilities outlined above. Certainly,the marketing of social responsibilityworks mainly for those more distantfrom economic necessity—those morelikely to buy into the ideology of thecorporation as global citizen. For thosewho recognize that "positive" rolemodels do not pay the bills and thateconomic and political justice will notproceed from revarnished corporateimages, Nike's veneer of social respon-sibility is less than persuasive.

Nike's commercial image, like manysuch corporate images, absolutely de-pends on maintaining the invisibilityof real contradictions for the consumer-ist caste. For example, female consum-ers of Nike products can only findNike's ads progressive insofar as itslargely female labor force (not to men-tion its masculinist corporate culture)remains out of sight.2$ For instance,one can believe that Nike's "If you letme play sports" ad signifies a commit-ment to women's liberation and em-powerment, as long as the Vietnamesewomen who make Nike shoes, work-ing 12-hour days for a wage of between$2.10 and $2.40 a day, are kept off thescreen. Similarly, middle-class consum-ers may very well believe that Nike'suse of African-American spokesper-

sons indicates its commitment to peopleof color as long as nothing in the fieldof the media contradicts such a belief,or perhaps as long as journalists avoidmentioning that Michael Jordan's sal-ary may well be greater than the com-bined annual payroll of the six Indone-sian factories that make Nike shoes(Lipsyte, 1996, p. 2). For the consumer-ist caste, the PLAY campaign can ap-pear as a signifier for Nike's commit-ment to "social responsibility" becausethe contradiction between corporateproduction and employment practicesand chronic unemployment in African-American communities remains out-side the screen or printed page.24

To an extent, recent controversiesinvolving Kathie Lee Gifford, Wal-Mart, and Nike have made visible someof these real contradictions. The target-ing of Gifford, Wal-Mart, Nike, J.C.Penney, and the Disney Store by laboractivists like the National Labor Com-mittee, journalists like Bob Herbert,and activists like the Pittsburgh LaborAction Network for the Americas(PLANTA) is a strategic move thatworks to make visible some of the verycontradictions discussed. Their pur-pose is not to boycott Air Jordans orDisney's popular Pocahontas doll(made by Haitian workers for elevencents an hour—half of Haiti's alreadypitiful minimum wage) because such aboycott would only encourage consum-ers to buy other products likely to havebeen made under similarly exploit-ative conditions. Rather, their purposehas been to bring such relations ofproduction into consumers' range ofvision by singling out those corpora-tions who sell their products on thebasis of social responsibility, decentfamily values, and other nonsense,while at the same time engaging inlabor practices that give the lie to their

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public propaganda. In a similar spirit,campus activists throughout the coun-try have been protesting their schools'contracts with Nike. Some schools havenow adopted anti-sweatshop codes as aresult of this activism.

Yet another blow to Nike's publicimage occurred in Michael Moore's1998 documentary, The Big One, inwhich Knight agreed to be interviewedon camera. In the interview, Mooregets Knight to agree to consider build-ing a shoe factory in his hometown ofFlint, Michigan, if Moore can get localworkers to agree to work there. WhenMoore returns to Nike headquarterswith poignant footage of eager Flintworkers, Knight-at this point, visiblyuncomfortable—continues to justifyNike's overseas practices by arguingthat Americans "just don't want tomake shoes."

Just over a month after The Big Onewas released, Knight engaged in somedamage control in an address to theNational Press Club (Cushman, 1998,p. Cl). During his speech, he commit-ted Nike to raising the minimum agefor hiring new workers and to meetingU.S. health and safety standards in alloverseas factories. Nike did not, how-ever, pledge to raise wages. The sec-ond provision, on health and safetystandards, could be significant if (andthe significance of this if cannot beoveremphasized) truly independent ob-servers are admitted into the plants.Moreover, since health and safety stan-dards are only haphazardly enforcedin the U.S. these days, it seems less

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than probable that such regulations willbe enforced with any commitmentoverseas. Furthermore, Knight's refer-ence to child labor was a public rela-tions coup, as Bob Herbert was swift topoint out (Herbert, 1998, p. A27). Childlabor was not a central problem atNike's overseas plants: below subsis-tence-level wages (in China and Viet-nam, less than $2 a day; in Indonesia,less than $1 a day) and exploitative,unsafe working conditions—in which77 percent of employees suffer fromrespiratory problems—are (Greenhouse,1997, p. Al).

In spite of Nike's ongoing damagecontrol and because of the efforts ofsuch organizations and individual activ-ists, corporations like Nike, Disney,Wal-Mart, and others have been lesssuccessful in managing public relationscrises. Academics would be well ad-vised to take their cue from these ef-forts. Those who study the media andpopular culture often spend a greatdeal of time analyzing what multina-tional corporations make visible in theform of advertising and corporatepropaganda. In so doing, we only di-rect attention to what these corpora-tions want us to see. Unless our goalas critics is to contribute to their mar-ket research and to add further so-phistication to their advertising tech-niques, it might be more useful andpolitically effective for us to concen-trate on making visible those practicesand realities that are routinely kept outof sight •

NOTES1Actually, the "war" had begun earlier, in 1985, with Nike's "Guns of August" campaign, which

was a marketing push to win back retail floor space from Reebok. "Guns of August," however wasunsuccessful: in 1986, Reebok had a 30 percent market share, while Nike had only 21 percent(Strasser & Becklund, 1991, p. 591).

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2For a suggestive analysis of television's impact on "instrumental crime," or "that aimed atacquiring money or property," see Hennigan, et al. (1982).

3It is worth noting that media effects theories that focus on amorphous categories of violence areamong the few critiques that media institutions are willing to make of themselves, althoughgenerally in the shape of criticizing entertainment programming rather than news or, especially,advertising (the single exception to this last being very mild critiques of children's programmingand advertisements). In contrast to critiques of monopoly ownership of the media, media effectstheory provides a simple explanation for social problems (i.e. "Kojak made me do it"), a quick andconvenient fix (self-regulation), and an opportunity for some corporate promotion.

4That the fear so central to the ideology of the suburbs is based on class interests rather than racewas made clear in a Washington Post article on the African-American suburb of Perrywood in PrinceGeorge's County (a suburb where homes sell for between $180,000 and $300,000). The PerrywoodCommunity Association decided to hire policemen to make sure that those using the basketballcourt could "prove that they 'belong in the area'." As one resident candidly put it, "People have atendency to stick together because they want to maintain their property values, their homes-classissues. . . . We're just strong working people who want something nice. Race never entered thepicture" (Saulny, 1996, A7).

5Donald Katz is clear on the fact that Nike understood the sneaker wars as a "moral panic" in thesociological sense.

6For a narrative that details the effects of Nike's recruitment policies within disadvantagedcommunities, see Darcy Frey's The Last Shot.

7Charles Loring Brace's Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them andJacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York offer stunningillustrations of this.

8See Cyril D. Robinson's "The Production of Black Violence in Chicago" (1993), James R.Grossman's Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989), and MichaelKatz, ed., (1993) The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History for historical accounts of this point.

9It is worth mentioning that PLAY's emphasis on "free motion" and "fun" marks a departurefrom earlier athletic programs' emphasis on discipline, structure, and abstinence reflecting a shiftfrom the religious inflection of past programs to the more contemporary logic of leisure andconsumption.

11For an excellent analysis of such inversions and their effects, see David Simon and EdwardBurns's The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.

12Ben Bagdikian offers another illustration of this point in The Media Monopoly. In 1967, The NewYorker's circulation remained the same as it was the previous year (when the magazine reported arecord number of ad pages), but the number of ad pages dropped by forty percent. The loss in adpages was not because advertisers objected to the magazine's position on the Vietnam War, butbecause, largely as a result of this anti-war content, The New Yorker had begun to attract younger,less affluent readers.

13Cheryl Cole's "PLAY, Nike, and Michael Jordan" (1996) provides a detailed reading of thisand related aspects.

14See Todd Putnam's "The GE Boycott: A Story NBC Wouldn't Buy" (1995) for a discussion ofthe media's management of consumer boycotts.

15Nike's female niche market also exercises an influence over the content of Nike's ads thatAfrican-Americans do not In contrast to PUSH's boycott (which had no effect on advertising orcorporate practices), when female consumers objected to a Nike commercial featuring triathleteJoanne Ernst, which ended with Ernst saying to the camera, "While you're at it, why don't you stopeating like a pig?" the ad was pulled within two weeks.

16T. H. Lee, a Nike employee who has worked in Portland, the Philippines, and South Korea,described shoe manufacturing as "dirty, dangerous, and difficult Making shoes on a production

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line is something people do only because they see it as an important and lucrative job. Nobodywho could do something else for the same wage would be here" (In Katz, p. 161).

17One limitation of this analysis is its focus on U.S. consumption. Further research could usefullyexamine Nike's adoption of "global localization" from Japanese consultant Kenichi Ohmae's TheBorderless World. In this, Ohmae argues that "at a per capita income level of $26,000, consumerswent global and became, in effect, world consumers" (In Katz, p. 204). Asian MTV and Star TV(whose audience quadrupled between 1992 and 1993 alone) are marketing Nike products to thisemerging global consumer caste.

18In no way should this suggest that domestic manufacturing was the sole casualty of this shiftFor an analysis of the effects of this shift, both domestic and international, see Alex Callinicos'"Marxism and Imperialism Today" (1994).

19In contrast, Reebok did not open its first factory in Korea until eight years after Nike in 1984.20Nike also successfully used advertising to push its corporate agenda. In 1979, during the ASP

litigation, the company produced a video called "Yankee Freedom" that utilized a now familiaranti-government appeal to suggest that government regulations were driving Nike out of business.

21Very few of the mainstream articles on Indonesian labor, including those written by BobHerbert, are critical of the Indonesian government's overall murderous policies, including itsgenocidal treatment of the East Timorese.

22This line of reasoning is typical of the capitalist press, where the exploitation of workersoverseas is reduced to a problem in perception. As the New York Times' Larry Rohter recentlyobserved, "What residents of a rich country like the United States see as exploitation can seem arare opportunity to residents of a poor country like Honduras" (1996, p. 1).

23For an example of a feminist argument about Nike's "progressive" ad campaigns, see LindaScott's "Fresh Lipstick—Rethinking Images of Women in Advertising." For some unintentionallyhilarious descriptions of Nike-style capitalists as puking frat boys, see Strasser and Becklund'snumerous anecdotes in Swoosh.

24In the city where I live, for example, unemployment among young black men is 37 percent asopposed to 13 percent for white men. Only corporate apologists and certain consumers can affordto believe that any amount of midnight basketball or PLAY can remedy this situation.

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