Critical Studies in Media Communication

ISSN: 1529-5036 (Print) 1479-5809 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcsm20

Nike, social responsibility, and the hidden abode

of production
Carol A. Stabile
To cite this article: Carol A. Stabile (2000) Nike, social responsibility, and the hidden
abode of production, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17:2, 186-204, DOI:
10.1080/15295030009388389
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295030009388389

Published online: 18 May 2009.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2310

View related articles

Citing articles: 12 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcsm20
Download by: [University of San Diego]

Date: 06 April 2016, At: 14:43

Critical Studies in Media Communication

Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2000, pp. 186-204

Nike, Social Responsibility, and the

Hidden Abode of Production

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

Carol A. Stabile

\^\-Nike Corporation irrefutably has created wealth for its owners and shareholders, but
its rhetoric of social responsibilityits self-presentation of the corporation as a now global
citizenconstitutes a more dubious claim. Nike is not alone in engaging in such marketing
practices, but the corporation has long been in the vanguard of innovations in both
production and marketing and therefore offers an instructive case study of how
multinational corporations produce and manage their public images. This essay looks at
the conditions that have made this particular self-presentation possible for U.S. consumers.

Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified

by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork
is a different hunger from that which bolts
down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail
and tooth. Production thus produces not
only the object but also the manner of
consumption, not only objectively but also
subjectively. Production thus creates the
consumer. (Marx, 1973, p. 92)

"free meals, housing and health care

and transportation subsidies," and "we
do our best to insure that labor abuses
do not occur." In a concluding flourish, Knight wrote, "add to this the
200,000 people employed by our contractors at the factory level and you
have a company that began in my
basement and today creates wealth
n June 1996, responding to journal- where none existed before" (p. A18).
ist Bob Herbert's scathing critique
Nike irrefutably has created wealth
of Nike's promotional rhetoric of so- for its owners and shareholders (when
cial responsibility (1996b, p. A19),
the corporation went public in 1980,
Chairman and CEO Philip Knight reitfor
example, at least six of its shareholderated Nike's alleged commitment to
ers
became multimillionaires), but its
humanity. Nike, he avowed, has long
rhetoric
of social responsibility-its self"been concerned with developing safe
presentation
of the corporation as a
and healthy work environments whernow
global
citizen-constitutes
a more
ever it has worked with contractors in
dubious
claim.
Of
course,
Nike
is not
emerging market societies," it provides
alone in engaging in such marketing
discourse, but the corporation has long
been in the vanguard of innovations in
Carol A. Stabile is an Associate Professor in the
both, production and marketing and
Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. She therefore offers an instructive case study
acknowledges the helpful feedback provided by of how multinational corporations proLisa Frank, Allen Larson, Nagesh Rao, Mat- duce and manage their public images.
thew Reichek, and Mark Ungeron earlier drafts In terms of communication research,
of this essay.
this essay proceeds from the assump-

Copyright 2000, National Communication Association

187

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

CSMC

STABILE

tion that analyses of Nike's advertising

and public relations campaigns and
the ideologies therein expressed offer
little in the way of critical insight. Indeed, the success of the rhetoric of
social responsibility depends on the
management of visible contradictions
and controversies, and the maintenance of a number of invisible contradictions and controversies. The following analysis moves from the level of
the visible to the invisible in an attempt
to understand how the terms "corporation" and "social responsibility" have
been knit together within the media.
and to illuminate the issues and conflicts thereby rendered invisible.

Sneaker Wars
What too many people who live in other
places don't understand is that there's a
part of America where a Big Mac is a
celebration.... Most of the people in this
store, their lives are shit; their homes in the
projects are shit-and it's not like they don't
know it. There's no drop-in center around
here anymore, and no local place to go
that they can think of as their own. So they
come to my store. They buy these shoes
just like other kinds of Americans buy
fancy cars and new suits. It's all about
trying to find some status in the worldSteven Roth, Owner, Essex House of Fashion, Newark, NJ. (in Katz, 1994, p. 271)
One of the first high-profile controversies Nike encountered involved an
association that emerged between
sneakers and the media's representations of inner-city violence. These
"sneaker wars" had their origins-ironically enough-in competition between
Nike and Reebok over market share.
In 1991, Nike and Reebok went headto-head in a television advertising campaign known as "the sneaker wars."1
Spending at least $130 million each,
their dueling commercials featured

NBA players who implied that their

respective brand of sneakers gave them
a competitive edge. Nike's own edge
over Reebok (by January 1992, Nike
had 40 percent of the market, while
Reebok had only 16 percent) and the
increased visibility of its Air Jordans
eventually provoked a public relations
crisis when the sneaker wars merged
with news coverage of inner-city violence (Rifkin, 1992, p. 10).
A spate of publicity in 1989 suggested that children were killing each
other over athletic shoes and, in 1990,
Sports Illustrated reported that innercity youths were committing homicides specifically for Air Jordans. In
August 1991, economic and racial tensions turned violent in the Crown
Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. In
the months that followed the turmoil, a
significant amount of print media coverage was devoted to the looting of a
store in Crown Heights called Sneaker
King, owned by a Korean family. The
brand name "Nike" featured prominently in the coverage (Barron, 1991,
p. 3; Faison, 1991, p. 25). In March
1992, a fifteen-year old in Philadelphia
reportedly was killed during the theft
of his AirJordans; in April 1992, South
Central LA erupted, with looting and
brand name sneakers again splashed
across pages and screens; and in July
1992, KP Original Sporting Goods in
Harlem was robbed. According to the
New York Times, in Harlem "10,000
pairs of Nike, Reebok and other highpriced sneakers" were stolen in a
"frenzy of looting and violence" that
was "explained by two words: 'greed
and sneakers'" (Fritsch, 1992, p. 25).
The suburbs also became implicated in
apparently sneaker-motivated criminal behavior. Fairfield, Connecticut's
First Selectman, Jacquelyn C. Durrell
described "situations in town where

188

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

NIKE

youngsters not only had their bicycles

stolen but their sneakerstheir Michael Jordan Air Pumpsright off
them" (Lomuscio, 1991, p. 1).
As the sneakers at issue became associated with the Nike brand (as inevitably they would given Nike's prominence in the market and its use of
African-American spokespersons), the
corporation was confronted with both
a problem and the opportunity for
some free, albeit dual-edged, publicity.
As Katz notes, "Magic had accrued to
the most carefully made shoes, and this
perception was clearly the result of a
hundred intricate cultural signalsmany of which had indeed been manufactured as a way to manipulate the
shape of popular desire" (1994, p. 269).
The problem Nike subsequently confronted had two main aspects. On one
hand, the sneaker wars threatened to
become a critique of the very consumerist desires Nike had so successfully
manipulated. Had Nike been too successful in manipulating "popular desire"; so successful, in fact, that those
without the wherewithal to purchase
the shoes were willing to resort to violence to acquire a pair? From the perspective of an advertising-supported
media industry, this line of questioning
is especially dangerous since it threatens to cast doubt on the very practices
that generate vast profits. Teen-agers,
for example, currently spend $57 billion of their own money and $36 billion of their families' money each year
(Conover, 1998, p. 13). Over the past
forty years, communication research
has invested enormous resources in
analyzing the effects of media violence
on viewers, while scant critical attention has been devoted to the effects of
advertising's ability to stimulate desires for products and lifestyles outside
viewers' economic grasp and related

JUNE 2000

increases not in violence per se but in

crimes like burglary and theft.2 Since
the articulation of sneakers and greed
followed on the heels of the highly
visible "sneaker wars" advertising campaign, the possibility that Nike's aggressive marketing campaign could have
spurred such greed wasn't much of a
stretch. Given the pervasiveness of media effects theory in popular culture, if
children were killing one another over
sneakers, blaming the media and Nike's
advertising practices might not be far
behind.3
On the other hand, since Nike's ads
rely in large part on the positivism of
the contrast between the disciplined
African-American bodies it uses to sell
products and the criminalized AfricanAmerican bodies that abound in the
media, when die contrast threatened to
dissolve, the issue had to be carefully
managed. If Nike sneakers became
linked to gangs and inner-city violence-if the magic that had accrued to
them became tainted-consumption
might be affected, particularly if suburbanites feared that their Nike-shod children were at risk.4
Understanding the problem as a potential moral panic, Nike launched a
crisis management campaign.5 In 1992,
Nike ran a number of antiracist ads by
Spike Lee, and in November of tiiat
year, Nike and Michael Jordan jointly
donated $200,000 to Chicago Public
Schools. By 1993, Nike was a key supporter of "midnight basketball programs," and in 1994, during the intensified coverage of crime that heralded
Clinton's Crime Bill, Nike formally
launched PLAY (Participate in the
lives of America's Youth). With promotional moves that cost them very
little in the end (one need only compare the $130 million dollars Nike
spent on advertising during the sneaker

189

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

CSMC

wars with the corporation's paltry donation of $100,000 to Chicago schools),

Nike managed not only to publicize a
commitment to social responsibility,
but to suggest that the corporation was
part of the solution rather than part of
the problem.
PLAY in particular enabled Nike to
restore its veneer of social responsibility by implying that the solution to
inner city deterioration was through
the discipline of sport and its promise
of upward mobility. In so doing, the
program relied on a logic of inferential
racism:
There's a crisis in America right now. Kids'
sports andfitnessprograms are being axed
from schools and the country's playgrounds
aren't safe anymore. Access to play should
be a kid's inalienable right. Nike wants to
lead the charge to guarantee that these
rights to America's children are preserved.
(In Cole, 1996, pp. 7-8)
Framed in this way, the crisis locates
the problem as reductions in spending
to athletic programs thus implying that
the central problem in inner-city
schools is that poor children do not
have access to the formal discipline of
athletics. Despite the references to
"America" and "America's children,"
the crisis clearly emanates from the
inner-city, where crime runs rampant
and "playgrounds aren't safe anymore." Without sports programs, innercity youths have no hope for the future. As one PLAY ad puts it, "If you
couldn't dream of touchdowns, what
would you dream?" The undermining
of educational curricula in inner-city
schools through federal and state reductions does not generate the same kind
of marketing opportunities or moral
outragea fact that underscores the selfinterested nature of the campaign, as
well as its inferential racism. This is a
racist common sense that prioritizes (at

STABILE

least rhetorically) athletic programs for

African-American children while systematically and simultaneously attacking and eroding economic and educational programs. Moreover, behind the
humanitarian guise of PLAY, Nike's
perniciously exploitative recruitment
practices among inner-city youth remain concealed.6
The emphasis on "play" further relies on the deeply sedimented racist
belief that African-Americans are
"naturally" inclined to an excess of
energy and that they require appropriate, socially-sanctioned outlets for such
"natural" behavior. Historically, a similar paternalism has been extended to
various poor and working-class ethnic
and racial groups (the Irish, Italians,
Chinese), whose participation in either
unofficial or illegal economies was said
to illustrate their biological proclivity
toward criminal or excessive behaviors.7 However, where "gang" activity
in the case of these immigrant groups
occasionally led to upward mobility
and assimilation, racism in illegal (as
well as legal) economies has prevented
such mobility for African-Americans.8
In essence, PLAY's "Revolutionary
Manifesto" depends upon a very traditional belief that sport and athletic programs provide the disciplinary structure that poor children are said to lack.
Since the family is seldom understood,
much less represented, as the economic unit that it is, sport as surrogate
family is detached from economics. In
place of the economic stability that
might effect actual change in their lives,
children have an "inalienable right" to
"positive, energetic actions charged
with fun and free motion." Apparently, poor children do not need food,
health care, shelter, clothing, or access
to a decent public educationthey need
an "active life, sport and the pursuit of

190

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

NIKE

JUNE 2000

fun."9 Indeed, these children are said the electric company from turning off the
to have "choices" insofar as inner-city lights at his mother's apartment again.
youths can "choose" the immediate (Wilkerson, 1994, p. Al, emphasis added)
gratification of the drug tradean occu- Jovan's life is structured around an inpation that (despite the risk of being fantilized urge for commoditieswith
arrested or shot) yields a great deal of his responsibility to his mother added
cashor they can "choose" the more only as an afterthought and continarduous and culturally heroic path to gent, it is implied, on whether his illriches provided by athletics.
gotten funds hold out. Despite the
In establishing life "choices" in a voices that threaten to disrupt such
way abstracted from material contexts, representations of inner-city life"he
PLAY takes advantage of existing me- says he would be happy to find a job
dia discourses and policy debates about paying $6 or $7 an hour. But so far, he
youths, poverty, and crime. Typically, said, no one but the drug dealers seem
such discourses seek to minimize, or willing to hire him" (Wilkerson, 1994,
even ignore, reference to the economic p. A13);" 'There are no j o b s . . . What's
circumstances in which poor children Milton going to do to survive?' "
and their families struggle to get by. As (Purdy, p. A10); " 'I prefer having a
William Adler observes in his land- job to being out in the streets', he said,
mark study of the Chambers family 'getting harassed by cops, getting shot
and their crack cocaine empire in De- at by [the Latin] Kings'" (Nieves, p.
troit,
A l 1). The realities of economic immiseration are pushed by the narrative
Slam-bang stories and statistics outrage
where
people, but for the wrong reasons. Crack is structure into the background, 10
they
recede
and
fade
from
view.
a scourge; its carnage, its devastation of
In addition to its elision of economic
family and neighborhood life have been
documented thoroughly. But just as most issues, PLAY's emphasis on "play" furstories about homelessness fail to mention ther exploits a deep vein of media
that the federal government slashed hous- racism. Media coverage of poor, Afriing subsidies, the raft of drug stories com- can-American neighborhoods generpletely ignores why crack distribution is ally represents inhabitants as having
for so many a rational career choice. There too much leisure or too much unstrucoften is no content to the stories; it is as if
tured time on their hands, while the
crack fell from the sky. (1995, p. 5)
rhetoric of drug lords and welfare
For example, in one New York Times queens denotes a feudal economy in
article, despite its informant's insis- which actual class relations are thortence that he began dealing drugs be- oughly inverted. The camera obscura
cause his mother's welfare check could of such representational practices sugnot support him and his three younger gests that the majority of welfare recipisisters, a day in his life is structured ents are black and that they do nothing
around the following priorities:
all day but consume crack, alcohol,
and junk food, all the while hanging
On a spring morning four years ago in a
deadend neighborhood in Chicago, it was out on the streets and neglecting their
Jovan Rogers's turn to sell a little bag of children. In an interesting contrastcrack that, added to the bags that he fig- and one that reflects the class interests
ured were sure to follow, could buy him of the media-capitalists like Nike's
gym shoes and girlfriends and maybe keep Philip Knight are represented as up-

191

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

CSMC

STABILE

standing citizens and workaholics, who run during particular television procan barely fit a television interview grams or in the specialized domain of
into their hectic schedules. Of this con- magazines, reveal much about the intrast, Adler perceptively points out,
come level and consumption habits of
the
target audience for whom that proJust as Wall Street's inside traders cannot
gram
is intended, as does advertising
be written off as greedy aberrants, neither
in
the
more obviously specialized
can the Chambers brothers be dismissed
magazine
industry. One need only conas aberrant ghetto capitalistseach took
their cue from the wider society. They did trast the products advertised in Ebony,
not reject mainstream values; rather they for example, with those advertised in
embraced them in the only way they could. Newsweek, or commercials broadcast
In yearning and looking and groping for a during ER with those broadcast during
way out, the Chamberses did what most daytime soap operas, to understand
Americans would have said was the right this point.
thing to do had they not sold drugs: they
As a commodity, the audience is a
strove for financial success. Indeed, their
story should frighten not because it shows quantity, but it is a quantity with parwhat made them different, but rather what ticular qualitative features. As Ben Bagmade them so common, (p. 7)
dikian puts it, the "iron rule of advertising-supported media" is that "It is less
Similarly, if we scratch the surface of
that people buy your publiNike's veneer a bit, we can see how the important
cation
(or
listen
to your program) than
codes of conduct so valued by corpothat
they
be
'the
right kind' of people"
rate culture are displaced onto groups
(1992,
p.
109).
A
case in point of this
of people who haven't the economic
iron
rule
is
the
contemporary
predicameans to pursue them legally but are
ment
of
the
conservative
magazine
nevertheless held responsible for the
Reader's Digest. Although the magazine
genesis of such codes and desires.11
boasts a circulation of 28 million worldwide and publishes 48 editions in 19
"There is no Finish Line":
languages, it recently posted a loss of
Nike's Pitch to the
$114 million for the fiscal third quarter
Consumerist Caste
of 1996. The problem now confronting
the
publishers involves the median age
Of course, corporations are not parof
its
readers (forty-seven) and the ecoticularly concerned about the casualnomic
imperative to attract a more
ties of consumerist ideologies since their
"valuable"
demographic, "like famiattention is focused on a more lucralies
with
parents
under the age of 50
tive group of consumers. For media
who
have
children
at home and houseindustries, audiences are commodities
holds
with
incomes
of $75,000 or
that are sold or delivered to advertismore"
(Pogrebin,
1996,
p. C8).12
ers. Because the content of television
programming and print media articles
The homogeneity of media content
is produced, distributed, and exhibited produced for such a "consumerist
for the audience as a commodity, a caste" (Meehan, 1993, p. 210) has sigsitcom, soap opera, or news broadcast nificance for how we understand the
must attract the appropriate demo- content of both programming and adgraphic, those consumers to whom the vertising. The pleasures and experiencontent of advertising is oriented, in tial frameworks of those outside of, or
order to succeed. Advertisements that marginal within, the consumerist caste,

192

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

NIKE

are, as Eileen Meehan puts it, "economically irrelevant" (p. 210) and although the form of advertising's address is a seemingly universal "you," in
reality, the ideology of that address is
both economically and racially specific, although it may serve to make
those outside the consumerist caste desire commodities beyond their economic reach.
The "success" of Nike's ads and
products has depended on the corporation's ability to reach a target audience
of middle-class consumers through appeals to the values and belief systems
of that audience. This does not mean
that audiences who do not fit this demographic profile are untouched by Nike's
advertising campaigns in particular or
the commodity fetishism it promotes
in general. It does mean, however, that
Nike pitches its ads not to some fictive
mass audience, but to those consumers
most likely to be able to buy their
products.
The specificity of Nike's address to
this consumerist caste (not to mention
the specificity of its product line) is
evident in its television ads from the
late 1970s when the corporation was
gaining ascendancy. Capitalizing on the
running fad among the demographic
known as baby boomers, the early ads
incorporated certain watered-down ideals from the 1960s with the counterculture now firmly articulated to a particular consumer life style. These
advertisements repeatedly featured
white men, loping through sylvan landscapes-sneaker-clad versions of Thoreau's rugged woodsman-while the
voice-over equated the individualism
of the runner with the individualized
craftsmanship and technology of the
nascent Nike corporation. Another ad
established Nike's now familiar rhetoric of revolution. Set to the strains of

JUNE 2000

the 7572 Overture, Nike proclaimed a

"revolution" in running-shoe technology, with the corporation positioned in
the "vanguard" of such revolutionary
change. The corporation's later use of
the Beatle's "Revolution" in 1987 and
Gil Scott Heron's "The Revolution Will
Not be Televised" in 1995 testify to the
continued success of this countercultural theme. As Katz observes, "somehow Just Do It' managed to evoke
countless previously impeded visions
of personal responsibility. The phrase
entered popular discourse like some
consumer-age variation on the old revolutionary interrogative, 'What is to be
done?'" (1994, p. 146). These early
advertisements contain a reasonably
straightforward address. Representing
itself as a small entrepreneurial venture long after it had become a multimillion dollar enterprise, Nike initially
appealed to white male consumers on
the basis of its craftsmanship, commitment to excellence, and social responsibilityall attractive characteristics to
its audience. Its outdoor, naturally lit
scenes and narrative focus on individuals spoke to the experiential framework of white, middle-class consumers
for whom fitness was an increasingly
important leisure activity.
Such a niche market of runners had
its economic limitations, however, and
in 1977, Nike executives discerned a
shift in their consumers from "running
geeks" to "yuppies"an "emerging
consumer [who] was shallow and had
little sense of history" (Strasser & Becklund, 1991, p. 268). Nike had been
diversifying its product line for some
time: tennis shoes were introduced in
1972, the move into basketball shoes
began in late 1974, the "Senorita
Cortez" women's running shoe was
introduced in 1976, and a clothing line
in 1979. When the corporation went

193

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

CSMC

public in 1980, Nike began its aggressive advertising campaign. In 1982,

Nike hired Chiat/Day, die firm that
went on to produce Nike's city campaigns as well as many of its successful
television commercials.
As Amy Hribar and Cheryl Cole
point out, Nike achieved its most widespread publicity through basketball
(1995, p. 349) and its marketing of
African-American celebrities like Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. This strategy has allowed Nike to capitalize on
cutting-edge fashions that originate in
inner-cities and among urban minorities. Advertising industry experts claim
that this emphasis on "inner-city chic"
permits advertisers to "jazz up their
sales pitches" (Tyson, 1996, p. 8) or, as
in the case of ad agency DDB
Needham's hiring of Spike Lee in 1996,
to revitalize a company's "stodgy, lily
white image" (Hirschfield, 1997, p. 36).
Experts also assert that advertisers'
growing emphasis on city fashion reflects the importance of the "urban
market," which Ken Smikle, publisher
of Target Market News, says "has be-

come one of those phrases that can be

used comfortably by those who don't
want to say black or African-American" (Tyson, p. 8). Advertisers also
admit that they use the term "urban
market" so as not to alienate white
consumers by openly casting a trend
or product as African-American or Hispanic.
Nike's move into basketball also coincided with a boom in the marketing
of multicultural texts across the media,
especially in the area of book publishing. The boom in multicultural images
had specific ideological effects insofar
as it helped to maintain the illusion
that consumption reflected or was identical to political practice. First, multicultural images appeared to provide an

STABILE

antidote to the media's reliance on

overtly racist stereotypes as well as an
alternative to the criminalized images
of African-Americans that proliferate
on the nightly news. By providing
"positive" images, or role models, corporations (including the media) could
represent themselves as being socially
responsible to people of color and link
this to the products being sold. The
consumerist caste could participate in
a feeling of social responsibility by consuming multicultural images that provided a simulacrum of racial integration. The representation of a very few
successful African-Americans further
reinforced Nike's trademark of individual and individualized excellence,
thereby denying the obstacles that institutionalized racism places in the paths
of African-Americans (indeed, to acknowledge the existence of this would
be to contradict its very slogan'Just
Do It").
As Hazel Carby (1992) points out in
regard to the consumption of multicultural texts in university classrooms, representations of African-Americans have
come to stand in for the actual presence (and advancement) of people of
color thus giving white Americans the
comforting illusion of inhabiting a
color-blind society. Certainly, this was
a convenient fiction for white Americans to consume along with their Nikes,
since it denied the material realities of
racist oppression and material segregation in the United States. Recent advertisements featuring golfer Tiger Woods,
in which individuals state "I am Tiger
Woods," as a procession of people of
varying races, ages, and genders flash
across the screen, offer a vivid illustration of Nike's assertions about the mobility of identity. Nike's use of aprotofeminist pitch offers an instructive
contrast to this multiculturalism. As

194

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

NIKE

image of girl after girl moves across the

screen, their voices intone: "If you let
me play sports, I will have more selfconfidence. If you let me play sports, I
will be more likely to leave a man who
beats me. If you let me play sports, I
will be less likely to get pregnant before I want to." Here, it is revealing
that while Nike can refer to domestic
violence and other gender issues to sell
its sneakers, it does not refer to statistics on racist oppression. After all, Nike
was selling sneakers to female members of the consumerist casteto detail
the effects of racism threatened to disrupt the ideological framework of the
entire consumerist caste.
Framed within the poles of "positive" and "negative" role models,
Nike's use of African-American men in
its ad campaigns relied upon what Stuart Hall has described as a logic of
inferential racism, a logic with a lengthy
history and one that is all too frequently invisible to white consumers
(1990, p. 13). Where sport for white
athletes is equated with leisure (however competitive), sport has more gravity when connected to African-Americans. After all, in a white supremacist
culture, professional sport provides one
of the few entry-points into the Horatio
Alger myth for African-Americans,
with the traditional entertainment industry being another. And basketball,
more than any other sport, has been
inextricably articulated to urban spaces
and African-American athletes. Thus
basketball, in a white imaginary, confirms that the American Dream is
within the grasp of African-Americans,
if only they would pull themselves up
by their Nike laces and "Just Do It."
The implication of such narratives
is that African-American possess bodily capital rather than the entrepreneurial cunning of an Andrew Carnegie

JUNE 2000

or Ted Turner. Their impulsiveness,

or excess energy, must find an appropriate physical outlet-it must be disciplined-or else it runs the risk of
turning into senseless, undisciplined
violence. Even "successful" AfricanAmericans are represented as being
dogged by this problem as the media
attention to Michael Jordan's gambling illustrates.13
Although Nike has long cultivated
"bad boy" endorsers for their products, the "bad boy" image functions
quite differently for white athletes like
Ilie Nastase and John McEnroe. In the
case of African-American spokespersons, crime implicitly and explicitly
haunts Nike's commodification of African-American athletes. Again, these ads
take their meaning from and must be
situated within a constant flow of television images that largely serve to criminalize African-Americans and demonize inner-city communities. Nike's
grainy black-and-white images of basketball courts stand in stark relief
against nightly local and network coverage of urban carnage; the disciplined
choreography of the court and athletic
culture posed as the alternative to the
ruthless anarchy of the streets, while
organized sports offer an antidote to
die criminal behavior of gangs. Given
the levels of segregation diat exist in
the United States, many white Americans (and certainly a large percentage
of the consumerist caste) have their perception of people of color structured
around such mass-mediated poles.

Consumption and Its Casualties

The racial specificity of the consumerist caste is also evident in die case of
a largely invisible consumer boycott of
Nike products, staged by those marginal to or within the consumerist caste.
Publicly, Nike has found it useful to

195
CSMC

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

allow their commodification of AfricanAmerican athletes to imply a commitment to African-American consumers.

In keeping with this, Strasser and Becklund offer the following description of
Nike's move into basketball:
Basketball was a city sport, partly because
courts were available and free. Canvas
converse shoes were almost a required
uniform for inner-city kids. The day Knight
put basketball shoes into the new Nike
line, he crossed over into his first market
that had a black target consumer. Oregon
was as white as states came, and distance
running had always been a white sport
except for the small but growing number
of world-class African runners. Blue Ribbon [soon to be renamed Nike] didn't have
many, if any, black employees, and knew
little about the black consumer, (p. 224)
But far from signaling a shift in product
marketing, or a desire to "target" African-American consumers, the use of
images of African-Americans to sell
commodities was an advertising strategy that was structurally intertwined
with the successful television marketing of the NBA. As it turned out, "black
consumers," who constitute only a
slight percentage of the consumerist
caste, were less than important to Nike.
The question of race and target audience for television programming, however, should be approached with some
caution since the main issue is class
and not race. In addition, the industry's understanding of a target audience is based not on objective realities,
but on executives' and researchers' perceptions about the values and belief
systems of the audience they most want
to reach. As the president of 20th Century Fox Television, which produces
television shows, candidly put it, "I
don't think that anyone's crying out for
integrated shows.... By pursuing advertisers and demographics rather than

STABILE

a mass audience, the networks have

declared they don't need blacks in their
audience" (Sterngold, 1998, p. A12).
In this respect, the cable industry is
often contrasted positively with network television, although it is seldom
acknowledged that cable's niche marketing is underwritten by the fact that
its viewers must pay a fee for service
and are therefore considered more demographically attractive.
Evidence abounds that illustrates
Nike's overall lack of interest in African-American consumers, although
one example will suffice here. In August 1990, Operation PUSH (People
United to Serve Humanity), a Chicago
Civil Rights organization founded by
Jesse Jackson in 1971, launched a boycott of Nike products. Organized by
PUSH'S new director, Reverend Tyrone Crider, the boycott responded to
what PUSH described as Nike's "zero"
policy. Although purchases by AfricanAmericans, according to Crider, accounted for 30 percent of Nike's $2.23
billion annual sales, "zero AfricanAmericans hold executive-level positions; zero African-American-owned
newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations carry Nike advertisements, and zero African-American professional service providers have
contracts or do business with Nike"
(Woodard, 1990, p. 17). The gist of
PUSH'S critique was clear: Nike was
pleased to use a few successful AfricanAmericans to sell its products, but when
it came to materially supporting
middle-class African-Americans by giving them a piece of their business, the
picture was quite different.
On August 17, 1990, Nike president
Richard Donahue, and Chairman and
CEO Philip Knight made a twopronged response to PUSH. Nike immediately undermined PUSH's cred-

196

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

NIKE

ibility by suggesting that the boycott

had been instigated by its major competitor, Reebok. In a profoundly contradictory move, they then observed
that African-Americans constituted a
mere ten percent of their consumers
(thereby implying that in the larger
scheme of things, they were an unimportant minority), but in the same
breath cited the company's "aggressive minority recruiting effort" and its
"exemplary" record on the use of "minority spokespeople" such as San Antonio Spurs' David Robinson, Michael
Jordan, Spike Lee, and Bo Jackson.
Donahue and Knight refused to answer questions from the press about
Nike's statistics on African-American
employment instead speaking only in
terms of "minorities" (Strasser & Becklund, p. 658). In response, Crider conceded that Nike did promote "positive
Black role models," but argued that the
boycott was "not about four or five
African-Americans. It's about 30 million African-Americans" (PUSH Holds
First Meeting with Nike, 1990, p. 27).
Prior to the Nike boycott, PUSH
had staged successful boycotts against
the Adolph Coors Company and
Burger King, forcing both companies
to make minor concessions to middleclass African-Americans (Coors invested some of their profits in AfricanAmerican communities, while Burger
King added African-American franchisees). But despite the support of Jesse
Jackson, Maxine Waters, the National
Council of Negro Women, and support at the grassroots level, the Nike
boycott not only failed, but almost destroyed PUSH itself. In January 1991,
six months after announcing the Nike
boycott, PUSH reported a deficit of
several hundred thousand dollars, laid
off its entire staff, and in March, Rever-

JUNE 2000

end Crider resigned (Wilkerson, 1991,

p. 12).
The boycott received no coverage in
the mainstream media, although it was
covered by African-American media
that received no advertising dollars
from Nike.14 The New York Times, for
instance, never mentioned the boycott while it was active but covered
PUSH's demise in detail. Claiming
that the "public relations failure" of
the Nike boycott hurt PUSH enormously because the "protest never appeared to catch on" (Wilkerson, 1991,,
p. 12), it added that "Several prominent blacks opposed the boycott, which
was widely perceived as a failure when
Nike officials refused to negotiate with
PUSH" (A Troubled Operation PUSH
Struggles to Focus its Mission, 1991,
P-14).
There are a number of interesting
contradictions between mainstream
media coverage and coverage in African-American print media. Jet, which
devoted a substantial amount of coverage to the Nike boycott, as well as
PUSH's other activities, never mentioned dissent among African-Americans over the boycott. Jet also reported
that Nike officials had met at least twice
with PUSH representatives, which contradicts the New York Timers assertion
that Nike had refused to negotiate. In
addition, Black Enterprise claimed that
Nike in fact had made concessions to
PUSH: they agreed to name a minority
to Nike's board of directors within one
year and one minority vice president
within two.
In contrast to the public relations
maneuvers that followed the sneaker
wars, the PUSH boycott was quietly
and easily managed, a point that reinforces the comparative powerlessness
of even middle-class African-American consumers within the consumerist

197

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

CSMC

caste. The boycott subjected PUSH to

a great deal of public scrutiny at the
hands of a powerful, multinational corporation during a period in which the
organization was experiencing a series
of transitions in both leadership and
orientation and when contributions
from its middle-class base had dropped
significantly. In the end, the boycott
was unsuccessfulnot, as the mainstream media would have it-because
African-Americans did not agree with
it (in fact, Michael Jordan himself told
Jet that he understood and supported
PUSH concerns), but because die boycott did not jeopardize Nike's sales or
public image (indeed, to affect either
the boycott would have needed widespread publicity and support from the
consumerist caste). Although Nike advertises extensively in women's magazines, to this day, it does not run ads in
African-American magazines ]ikeJet or
Ebony, nor does it run ads during television programming that attracts a largely
African-American audience.15

STABILE

when founder Philip Knight struck a

deal with a Japanese firm, Onitsuka
Company, Ltd., to be the West Coast
distributor for Tiger track shoes, a
knock-off of the German-made Adidas
brand that then dominated the market.
Blue Ribbon Sports, as the company
was originally named, was among the
first to take advantage of Asian-produced, inexpensive imitations of brandname footwear. Knight's capitalist acumen cannot be overestimated: in 1960,
only four percent of shoes sold in the
U.S. were imported; by 1969, 32 percent were imports (Strasser & Becklund, p. 185)an increase that was to
have disastrous consequences for the
small New England towns that were
then the centers of domestic shoe production. By 1984, imports had risen to
11 percent of the U.S. shoe market (p.
559).

Concerned about relying solely on

Japanese manufacturing and in search
of ever cheaper labor, Blue Ribbon
opened its first factory in Korea in
1976.19 In 1979, during the first year of
"Dirty, Dangerous, and
China's "economic adjustment" (at a
Difficult:" Nike and the
time
when monthly wages there were
Mode of Production16
$30), Nike, whose name had officially
As problematic as it is to make claims changed in 1978, opened its first facabout the universality of Nike's adver- tory in mainland China. At the Yue
tising appeal and its "mass" audience, Yuen factory, ninety-percent of workan analysis (not to mention political ers are women who "must obey a long
practice) that remains at the level of list of rules concerning fraternization
advertising and consumption serves to with men and curfews" (Katz, 1994,
obscure yet another, even more invis- pp. 179-80). By 1980, 90 percent of
ible, contradiction.17 For nowhere is Nike's production took place in Korea
the distinction between the consumer- and Taiwan. Presently, more than a
ist caste and those outside it as visible third of Nike products are produced in
as it is from the standpoint of produc- Indonesia, but with an increase in minition, a standpoint that is, understand- mum wage to $2.20 a day in that counably enough, invisible from the per- try (after almost four years of labor
spective of consumption promoted by struggles), Nike moved into Vietnam,
where the daily wage is a meager $1.50
the media.
In terms of production, Nike's corpo- (Herbert, 1996a, p. A19).
rate origins can be traced back to 1963,
In the United States, Nike operated

198

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

NIKE

a factory in Saco, Maine, from 1978 to

1984 and in Exeter, New Hampshire,
from 1972 to 1984. At the time, these
United States-based factories (which accounted for only a tiny percentage of
total production) were a safeguard for
the corporation. On one hand, they
gave the company a place to develop
designs with relative security and establish a new model in the marketplace
before mass-producing it abroad. On
the other hand, given serious concerns
about protectionist legislation in the
shoe manufacturing industry, United
States-based factories were a form of
insurance. If protectionist legislation
became a reality, Nike's U.S. factories
maintained a domestic manufacturing
base. Nike had already experienced
such a problem: In 1974, U.S. Customs had levied additional import duties on Blue Ribbon Sports shoes under the American Selling Price statute
(ASP). The resulting litigation was not
settled until 1980, when the proposed
back payment was reduced from $16
to $9 million, and the ASP method of
computing duty was rejected.20
Currently, Nike operates a high-tech
distribution center in Memphis, Tennessee, where between 60 and 225 temporary workers with no job security
and no health benefits are employed
on ajust-in-time basis. Nike has continued to refuse to release its AfricanAmerican employment figures, referring instead to "minority" employees,
200 of whom are employed in the
Memphis facility and a number of
whom are Vietnamese manual laborers in Beaverton, Oregon, engaged in
the production of Nike's Air-Soles
(Strasser & Becklund, p. 658).
Readers of business newspapers and
journals, as well as corporate literature,
will be familiar with this brief history:
like the majority of successful corpora-

JUNE 2000

tions, Nike has pursued cheap labor

sources in countries like Indonesia
where "friendly" governments are willing to guarantee cheap labor using
whatever means necessary. In Indonesia, for example, daily wages were set
below the official minimum wage (an
official wage the government had set
below the poverty line in order to attract and maintain "footloose" corporations like Nike) and workers who struck
for higher wages were fired.21 Countries like the Philippines and Thailand,
either unwilling or unable to guarantee
such conditions, were deemed "culturally challenging" and received little or
no business from Nike (Katz, p. 172).
With increasing frequency, Nike's
production practices have erupted into
the mainstream media causing a flurry
of public relations activity. The first
major eruption occurred on July 2nd,
1993, when CBS's Street Stories ran a
segment that explored the contradiction between "a one-hundred dollar
pair of sneakers and a worker making
those sneakers being paid a dollar-fifty
a day" (In Katz, p. 187), a contradiction that again emerged in late May of
1996, when, according to the media,
consumers were dismayed to learn that
their $130.00 Air Jordans (produced
for $30.00 in Indonesia) had been made
by poorly paid Indonesian workers, as
well as sweatshop workers in New York
City. Nike's response to such exposes
exemplifies the central contradiction
therein revealed. On one hand, Nike
has defended its labor practices, claiming that the $1.50 paid to Indonesian
workers was not really $1.50, but 3,000
rupiah and that, in any case, it was
substantially more than the wages made
by local farmers (Katz, p. 190).22 When
confronted with the fact that the minimum wage in Indonesia had been set
below the poverty line, Nike retreated,

199

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

CSMC

asserting that it was not their job to

dictate just wages. As Katz puts it,
"Only when foreign labor issues come
up can a Nike manager be heard to
say, 'We're not good enough to change
that system'" (pp. 191-2).
In the end, Nike's images merit far
less attention than the realities those
images are designed to conceal. Nike,
like corporations in general, will use
any image to sell its products, providing that such images can be stitched
into a seamless narrative that poses few
contradictions for its consumers-a narrative designed to guarantee the very
invisibilities outlined above. Certainly,
the marketing of social responsibility
works mainly for those more distant
from economic necessitythose more
likely to buy into the ideology of the
corporation as global citizen. For those
who recognize that "positive" role
models do not pay the bills and that
economic and political justice will not
proceed from revarnished corporate
images, Nike's veneer of social responsibility is less than persuasive.
Nike's commercial image, like many
such corporate images, absolutely depends on maintaining the invisibility
of real contradictions for the consumerist caste. For example, female consumers of Nike products can only find
Nike's ads progressive insofar as its
largely female labor force (not to mention its masculinist corporate culture)
remains out of sight.2$ For instance,
one can believe that Nike's "If you let
me play sports" ad signifies a commitment to women's liberation and empowerment, as long as the Vietnamese
women who make Nike shoes, working 12-hour days for a wage of between
$2.10 and $2.40 a day, are kept off the
screen. Similarly, middle-class consumers may very well believe that Nike's
use of African-American spokesper-

STABILE

sons indicates its commitment to people

of color as long as nothing in the field
of the media contradicts such a belief,
or perhaps as long as journalists avoid
mentioning that Michael Jordan's salary may well be greater than the combined annual payroll of the six Indonesian factories that make Nike shoes
(Lipsyte, 1996, p. 2). For the consumerist caste, the PLAY campaign can appear as a signifier for Nike's commitment to "social responsibility" because
the contradiction between corporate
production and employment practices
and chronic unemployment in AfricanAmerican communities remains outside the screen or printed page.24
To an extent, recent controversies
involving Kathie Lee Gifford, WalMart, and Nike have made visible some
of these real contradictions. The targeting of Gifford, Wal-Mart, Nike, J.C.
Penney, and the Disney Store by labor
activists like the National Labor Committee, journalists like Bob Herbert,
and activists like the Pittsburgh Labor
Action Network for the Americas
(PLANTA) is a strategic move that
works to make visible some of the very
contradictions discussed. Their purpose is not to boycott Air Jordans or
Disney's popular Pocahontas doll
(made by Haitian workers for eleven
cents an hourhalf of Haiti's already
pitiful minimum wage) because such a
boycott would only encourage consumers to buy other products likely to have
been made under similarly exploitative conditions. Rather, their purpose
has been to bring such relations of
production into consumers' range of
vision by singling out those corporations who sell their products on the
basis of social responsibility, decent
family values, and other nonsense,
while at the same time engaging in
labor practices that give the lie to their

200
JUNE 2000

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

NIKE

public propaganda. In a similar spirit,

campus activists throughout the country have been protesting their schools'
contracts with Nike. Some schools have
now adopted anti-sweatshop codes as a
result of this activism.
Yet another blow to Nike's public
image occurred in Michael Moore's
1998 documentary, The Big One, in
which Knight agreed to be interviewed
on camera. In the interview, Moore
gets Knight to agree to consider building a shoe factory in his hometown of
Flint, Michigan, if Moore can get local
workers to agree to work there. When
Moore returns to Nike headquarters
with poignant footage of eager Flint
workers, Knight-at this point, visibly
uncomfortablecontinues to justify
Nike's overseas practices by arguing
that Americans "just don't want to
make shoes."
Just over a month after The Big One
was released, Knight engaged in some
damage control in an address to the
National Press Club (Cushman, 1998,
p. Cl). During his speech, he committed Nike to raising the minimum age
for hiring new workers and to meeting
U.S. health and safety standards in all
overseas factories. Nike did not, however, pledge to raise wages. The second provision, on health and safety
standards, could be significant if (and
the significance of this if cannot be
overemphasized) truly independent observers are admitted into the plants.
Moreover, since health and safety standards are only haphazardly enforced
in the U.S. these days, it seems less

than probable that such regulations will

be enforced with any commitment
overseas. Furthermore, Knight's reference to child labor was a public relations coup, as Bob Herbert was swift to
point out (Herbert, 1998, p. A27). Child
labor was not a central problem at
Nike's overseas plants: below subsistence-level wages (in China and Vietnam, less than $2 a day; in Indonesia,
less than $1 a day) and exploitative,
unsafe working conditionsin which
77 percent of employees suffer from
respiratory problemsare (Greenhouse,
1997, p. Al).
In spite of Nike's ongoing damage
control and because of the efforts of
such organizations and individual activists, corporations like Nike, Disney,
Wal-Mart, and others have been less
successful in managing public relations
crises. Academics would be well advised to take their cue from these efforts. Those who study the media and
popular culture often spend a great
deal of time analyzing what multinational corporations make visible in the
form of advertising and corporate
propaganda. In so doing, we only direct attention to what these corporations want us to see. Unless our goal
as critics is to contribute to their market research and to add further sophistication to their advertising techniques, it might be more useful and
politically effective for us to concentrate on making visible those practices
and realities that are routinely kept out
of sight

NOTES
1

Actually, 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 was
unsuccessful: in 1986, Reebok had a 30 percent market share, while Nike had only 21 percent
(Strasser & Becklund, 1991, p. 591).

201
CSMC

STABILE

For a suggestive analysis of television's impact on "instrumental crime," or "that aimed at

acquiring money or property," see Hennigan, et al. (1982).
3

It is worth noting that media effects theories that focus on amorphous categories of violence are
among the few critiques that media institutions are willing to make of themselves, although
generally 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 programming
and advertisements). In contrast to critiques of monopoly ownership of the media, media effects
theory provides a simple explanation for social problems (i.e. "Kojak made me do it"), a quick and
convenient fix (self-regulation), and an opportunity for some corporate promotion.

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

That the fear so central to the ideology of the suburbs is based on class interests rather than race
was made clear in a Washington Post article on the African-American suburb of Perrywood in Prince
George's County (a suburb where homes sell for between $180,000 and $300,000). The Perrywood
Community Association decided to hire policemen to make sure that those using the basketball
court could "prove that they 'belong in the area'." As one resident candidly put it, "People have a
tendency to stick together because they want to maintain their property values, their homes-class
issues. . . . We're just strong working people who want something nice. Race never entered the
picture" (Saulny, 1996, A7).
5

Donald Katz is clear on the fact that Nike understood the sneaker wars as a "moral panic" in the
sociological sense.
6
For a narrative that details the effects of Nike's recruitment policies within disadvantaged
communities, see Darcy Frey's The Last Shot.
7
Charles Loring Brace's Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them and
Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York offer stunning
illustrations of this.
8

See 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 Michael
Katz, ed., (1993) The "Underclass" Debate: Viewsfrom History for historical accounts of this point.
9
It is worth mentioning that PLAY's emphasis on "free motion" and "fun" marks a departure
from earlier athletic programs' emphasis on discipline, structure, and abstinence reflecting a shift
from the religious inflection of past programs to the more contemporary logic of leisure and
consumption.
11

For an excellent analysis of such inversions and their effects, see David Simon and Edward
Burns's The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.
12

Ben Bagdikian offers another illustration of this point in The Media Monopoly. In 1967, The New
Yorker's circulation remained the same as it was the previous year (when the magazine reported a
record number of ad pages), but the number of ad pages dropped by forty percent. The loss in ad
pages was not because advertisers objected to the magazine's position on the Vietnam War, but
because, largely as a result of this anti-war content, The New Yorker had begun to attract younger,
less affluent readers.
13

Cheryl Cole's "PLAY, Nike, and Michael Jordan" (1996) provides a detailed reading of this
and related aspects.
14

See Todd Putnam's "The GE Boycott: A Story NBC Wouldn't Buy" (1995) for a discussion of
the media's management of consumer boycotts.
15

Nike's female niche market also exercises an influence over the content of Nike's ads that
African-Americans do not In contrast to PUSH's boycott (which had no effect on advertising or
corporate practices), when female consumers objected to a Nike commercial featuring triathlete
Joanne Ernst, which ended with Ernst saying to the camera, "While you're at it, why don't you stop
eating like a pig?" the ad was pulled within two weeks.
16
T. 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

202
NIKE

JUNE 2000

line is something people do only because they see it as an important and lucrative job. Nobody
who could do something else for the same wage would be here" (In Katz, p. 161).
17
One limitation of this analysis is its focus on U.S. consumption. Further research could usefully
examine Nike's adoption of "global localization" from Japanese consultant Kenichi Ohmae's The
Borderless World. In this, Ohmae argues that "at a per capita income level of $26,000, consumers
went 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 this
emerging global consumer caste.
18
In no way should this suggest that domestic manufacturing was the sole casualty of this shift
For an analysis of the effects of this shift, both domestic and international, see Alex Callinicos'
"Marxism and Imperialism Today" (1994).
19

In contrast, Reebok did not open its first factory in Korea until eight years after Nike in 1984.

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

20

Nike 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 familiar
anti-government appeal to suggest that government regulations were driving Nike out of business.
21

Very few of the mainstream articles on Indonesian labor, including those written by Bob
Herbert, are critical of the Indonesian government's overall murderous policies, including its
genocidal treatment of the East Timorese.
22
This line of reasoning is typical of the capitalist press, where the exploitation of workers
overseas is reduced to a problem in perception. As the New York Times' Larry Rohter recently
observed, "What residents of a rich country like the United States see as exploitation can seem a
rare opportunity to residents of a poor country like Honduras" (1996, p. 1).
23
For an example of a feminist argument about Nike's "progressive" ad campaigns, see Linda
Scott's "Fresh LipstickRethinking Images of Women in Advertising." For some unintentionally
hilarious descriptions of Nike-style capitalists as puking frat boys, see Strasser and Becklund's
numerous anecdotes in Swoosh.
24
In the city where I live, for example, unemployment among young black men is 37 percent as
opposed to 13 percent for white men. Only corporate apologists and certain consumers can afford
to believe that any amount of midnight basketball or PLAY can remedy this situation.

References
Adler, W. M. (1995). Land of opportunity: One family's quest for the American dream in the age of crack.
New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press.
Bagdikian, B. H. (1992). The media monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press.
Barron, J . (1991, August 22). Tension in Brooklyn. New York Times, p. 3.
Brace, C. L. (1973). Dangerous classes of New York and twenty years' work among them. Washington,
D.C.: National Association of Social Workers.
Callinicos, A. (1994). Marxism and imperialism today. In A. Callinicos & C. Harman, Marxism and
the new imperialism (pp. 11-66). Chicago: Bookmarks.
Carby, H. (1992). The multicultural wars. In G. Dent (Ed.), Black popular culture (pp. 187-199).
Seattle: Bay Press.
Chicago schools troubled, Jordan and Nike to rescue (1992, November 2). Jet, 10.
Cole, C. (1996). PLAY, Nike, and Michael Jordan: National fantasy and racialization of crime and
punishment. Memphis, TN: Working papers in sport and leisure commerce.
Cole, C., & Hribar, A. (1995). Celebrity feminism: Nike style, post-Fordism, transcendence, and
consumer power. Sociology of Sport Journal, 12, 347-369.
Cole, C., & Andrews, D. (1996). Look-it's NBA show time! Visions of race in the popular
imaginary. Cultural Studies, 1, 141-181.

203
CSMC

STABILE

Conover, K A. (1998, February 10). Why Johnny has to have those sneakers. Christian Science
Monitor, p. 13.
Cushman, J. H. (1998, May 13). Nike pledges to end child labor and apply U.S. rules abroad. New
York Times, p. C1.
Faison, S. (1991, October 20). Looted Crown Heights store reopens. New York Times, p. 25.
Frey, D. (1994). The last shot: City streets, basketball dreams. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Fritsch, J . (1992, July 18). Looters booty: A dream. New York Times, p. 25.
Gifford, K. L. (1996, May 31). Controversy a chance to help more children. USA Today, p. 12A.

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

Greenhouse, S. (1997, November 8). Nike shoe plant in Vietnam is called unsafe for workers. New
York Times, p. A1.
Grossman, J. R. (1989). Land of hope: Chicago, black southerners, and the great migration. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hall, S. (1990). The whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media. In M. Alvarado and J. O.
Thompson (Eds.), The media reader (pp. 7-23). London: BFI.
Hennigan, K. et al. (1982). Impact of the introduction of television on crime in the United States:
Empirical findings and theoretical implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42(3),
461-477.
Herbert, B. (1996a, June 24). From sweatshops to aerobics. New York Times, p. A11.
Herbert, B. (1998, May 21). Nike blinks. New York Times, p. A27.
Herbert, B. (1997, March 31). Nike's boot camps. New York Times, p. Al 1.
Herbert, B. (1996b J u n e 10). Nike's pyramid scheme. New York Times, p. A19.
Hirschfield, L. (1997, April 20). Spike Lee's 30 seconds. New York Times Magazine, p. 36.
Katz, D. (1994). Just do it: The Nike spirit in the corporate world. New York: Random House.
Katz, M. (Ed). (1993). The "underclass" debate: Viewsfrom history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Knight, P. (1996, June 21). Nike pays good wages to foreign workers. New York Times, p. A18.
Lipsyte, R (1996, July 21). Pay for play: Jordan vs. old-timers. New York Times, Section 4, 2.
Lomuscio, J. (1991, October 6). Fairfield City suburbs. New York Times, Connecticut Weekly
Desk, p. 1.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. London: Penguin.
Meehan, E. R (1993). Heads of household and ladies of the house: Gender, genre, and broadcast
ratings, 1929-1990. In W. S. Solomon & R. W. McChesney (Eds.), Ruthless criticism: New
perspectives in U.S. communication history (pp. 204-221). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Nieves, E. (1994, December 26). Hartford becomes test case in fighting menace of gangs. New York
Times, p. A l .
Pogrebin, R (1996, July 22). A magazine only a mother could love? New York Times, p. C l .
Purdy, M. (1995, January 2). Drug turf is safer as dealers avoid streets. New York Times, p. A l .
PUSH confab focuses on economic development and education advancement (1990, August 20).
Jet, p. 24.
PUSH holds first meeting with Nike, plans another (1990, August 20). Jet, p. 27.
PUSH says Nike withdrawal campaign will continue (1990, September 3). Jet, p. 10.
Putnam, T. (1995). The GE boycott: A story NBC wouldn't buy. The Best of EXTRA! New York, 10.
Rifkin, G. (1992, January 5). All about basketball shoes. New York Times, section 3, 10.

204
NIKE

JUNE 2000

Riis, J. (1971). How the other half lives: Studies among the tenements of New York. New York: Dover
Publications.
Robinson, C. D. (1993). The production of black violence in Chicago. In David F. Greenberg
(Ed.), Crime and capitalism: Readings in Marxist criminology (pp. 279-333). Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Rohter, L. (1996, July 18). To U.S. critics, a sweatshop: For Hondurans, a better life. New York
Times, p. A l .
Saulny, S. (1996, July 8). On the inside and looking out: Black suburb rebuffs uninvited black
visitors. The Washington Post, p. A1.

Downloaded by [University of San Diego] at 14:43 06 April 2016

Scott, L. (1993). Fresh lipstick-Rethinking images of women in advertising. Media Studies 7(17),
141-155.
Simon, D. & Burns, E. (1997). The corner: A year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood. New York:
Broadway Books.
Sterngold, James (1998, December 29). A racial divide widens on network TV. New York Times,
p.Al.
Strasser, J. B., & Becklund, L. (1991). Swoosh: The unauthorized story of Nike and the men who played
there. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
A troubled operation PUSH struggles to focus its mission (1991, April 1). New York Times, p. A14.
Tyson, J. L. (1996, December 27). Ad agencies walk fine line in tapping inner-city trends. Christian
Science Monitor, p. 8.
Wilkerson, I. (1994, December 13). Crack's legacy of guns and death lives on. New York Times,
p.Al.
Wilkerson, I. (1991, January 26). Entire staff is laid off from Operation PUSH. New York Times,
p. 12.
Woodard, W. M. (1990, November 17). It's More than Just the Shoes. Black Enterprise.
Received September 9, 1998
Final revision received January 12, 1999
Accepted July 23, 1999