ATHLETIC APPAREL INDUSTRY TAMARA

David M. Boje, Ph.D.

February 24, 2001

Painting 1: Tamara de Lempicka auto-portrait in Green Bugatti - 1925

INDEX to page

• Tamara de Lempicka

• Tamara the Play

• Tamara and the Athletic Apparel Industry

ABSTRACT AND MY STORY

I want to share briefly how it is I tumbled headlong into the abyss and maze that is AA Tamara. I sought to invent a web site where spectators could choose which characters (corporations or workers) and which stories (from which space) to follow throughout the global stages of the AA industry.  I began by chronicling the stories of the most visible AA player, Nike corporation, a Prima Donna that seemed to hold the global stage (See Nike In the News). But chronology does not capture the dynamics of a Tamara because the important dynamics are a temporality that is multiple and non-linear. I began to situate the stories by country and begin the "Globe Project" of identifying the secret factory locations, revealed here and there in the either corporate, journalist, or activist reporting.

Tracing just one character (a worker or a corporation) was also, for me, not tapping the complexity dynamics of multiple storytellers giving accounts of the multiple AA industry corporate players across some thirty countries.  Somehow the AA logo corporations, led by Prima Donna performer Nike, kept up its storyline that it was entirely transparent (see Nike Transparency 101 http://nikebiz.com/labor/index.shtml). In my view, workers had no choice in how the corporate authors wrote and broadcast their stories. 

Finally,  I also wanted to stay true to Krizanc's (1981/ 1989) project and follow the experiences of servants, not masters from room to room; By 1998 (boje, 1998) I began to branch out to read the performance narratives of the workers; I had made a choice to follow the stories of the workers and be more skeptical in my viewpoint of the corporately mediated stories. 

In 2000  I began to take a serious look at the entire AA industry and organized four study groups with a total of 45 academic scholars who had some theory or empirical experience with the AA industry and sent a proposal to Nike Corporation in September, 2001, and then Industry-wide proposals to Ford and other foundations See http//business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/nike/call_for_nike_research.html  

December 6, 1999, I also began tracking the stock market stories to see if the complexity and chaos dynamics of the storytelling on this global stage could be explained as a Tamara or AA Tamara. I wanted to understand both the storytelling and theatrical dynamics of a complexly adaptive system, that on occasion became overwhelmed by a particular type of chaos.

INTRODUCTION

We are witness to the metamorphosis of late capitalism, the interpenetration of postindustrialism with postmodern culture. In this essay I relate this historic moment to the flamboyant life and art of Tamara de Lempicka, the play Tamara by John Krizanc (1981/1989), and to my own use of this work in an analysis of Disney, Nike and other transnational "logo" corporations that subcontract to third world factories while distributing to first world consumers (Boje, 1995, 2001). My purpose is to work out my sense of this modern art and postmodern play and to show how an Athletic Apparel Industry is a Tamara of stories chasing me, as I pursue them from room to room, how Tamara has become part of my existential being.

I begin with background on Tamara de Lempicka, then the play and concentrate on applying Tamara to the Apparel Industry. I also edit a journal called Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science and therefore seek to understand Tamara in its academic meaning: our complicity in production, distribution, and consumption of sweatshop labor.

Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) was born (Tamara) Maria Gorska, the middle child of a well-to-do Polish family, by age 14 she was attending school in Lausanne, Switzerland and vacationed in Saint Petersburg where she met Tadeusz Lempicka; they married in 1916 when she was 16.  The Bolsheviks arrested her husband during the Russian revolution, but Tamara helped get him released and the couple  fled to Paris (Néret, 1992; Claridge, 1999; Jablow, 2001).  Beautiful and Headstrong, Tamara enrolled in Academie de la Grand Chaumiere in 1918 and  began her paintings of unnervingly erotic and (soft) cubist portraits, and in the 1920s and 1930s, in an art industry dominated by men, she became the darling of the European aristocracy (de Lempicka Portrait Galleries on WWW: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th; Bios 1st, 2nd; 3rd, 4th, 5th; De Lempicka portraits 1st, 2nd, 3rd,).

Painting 2: Kizette Sleeping - 1934

Her abstract and modern style (See Paintings 1 & 2) is widely recognized as the most important in all Art Deco; she held the first Art Deco exhibit in Paris in 1925 and is said to have had affairs with more than one wealthy patron of the arts. Tamara married Baron Raoul Kuffner in 1933. Manguel (1988: 1) asks:

In a time of Hitler and Mussolini, was Tamara de Lempicka answerable for her stories and characters rendered in Art Deco? Or does Tamara merely anticipate the postmodern consumer, who makes logo-purchases without awareness of their complicity in distribution and production? Are we answerable for our own consumptive and artistic choices?

The Play called Tamara

The play Tamara written by John Krizanc, was first performed at Strachan House in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Toronto, Ontario, Canada on May 8, 1981. The play was published as a book in 1981 (Krizanc, 1981/1989). The play, Tamara entraps spectators in a maze of story and character choices where our own complicity in civic responsibility stares back at us. And this is why John Krizanc included Tamara de Lempicka as one character among many had the cultural preeminence to have a voice, but elechttp://sunsite.dk/cgfa/lempicka/lempic13.jpgted not to use it.  For me this is my academic life under the emergent corporate university, where my own choices constrain my academic freedom.

I first attended the play Tamara when it was presented at il Vittoriale degli Italiani in Hollywood California in 1992.  I wrote about the complexity of Tamara in 1993 (with Robert Dennehy) and again in 1995 in an Academy of Management Journal article, but it is only recently that I came to understand that the content of the play was about our complicity as witness to fascism.  In August, 2000 I founded Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science and formed an interdisciplinary editorial board of some fifty scholars (http//www.zianet.com/boje/tamara). Our first issue is now (February, 2001) being printed and mailed to our subscribers, board members and authors. In Tamara Manifesto (Boje, 2001a) I look at the interpenetration of postindustrialism and postmodern culture, the intertextuality of production, distribution, and consumption.  There is an important theatrical innovation that Krizanc constructs to move us out of modern into postmodern theatrics.

The play Tamara is not the conventional modern theatrics spectacle with one space allotted to a passive and seated spectators and another to performing actors upon a stage (Boje, 1995).  Manguel (1988: 1-2) gives us a starting definition of traditional theatrics:

In "one space" theater, spectators and performers must follow the linear storyline of authorial authority and view the performance from the viewpoint the playwright has determined will be seen by the spectators. 

In Tamara the barrier between spectator and actor spaces has been breeched; the spaces co-mingle and spectators become actors on many stages. Tamara is postmodern theater performed in a mansion with a dozen (or so) rooms as ten actors perform simultaneous scenes, sometimes in one or two rooms, other times there is simultaneous action in eleven rooms. The spectator is given choices in the play, to accompany whatever character and story they choose, masters or servants from room to room, knowing that there are simultaneous performances and they can not be in two places at one time. The playwright provides the multiple stages, characters, and the content of the play, but the audience makes a series of choices, and depending upon those choices weaves together their own individual performance of the play; each spectator weaves their own chosen point of view. There are five choice points in the play:

1. Which performing character will you follow as they make their exit from one room to enter some other room?

2. Will you follow a character or wait to see who shows up in one or several rooms?

3. Will you follow the same character from one room to the next, or jump to a different character as each exits to different rooms?

4. If you came with friend (s) will you split up and follow different characters as they make their exit?

5. How will you respond when an actor asks you a question or direct you to move here or there on the stage (you become both spectator and actor, or spect-actor)?

There are several predecessors to the democratic Tamara-device of allowing the audience to fragment and choose which characters to follow from stage to stage. One is Kafka's The Castle where the reader can add his or her own obstacle but where the hero never completes his quest. Another is Julie Cortazar's Hopscotch where there are interchangeable chapters that allow readers to construct their own sequence of events. There is something about the movement from a divided space in modern theater to the interpenetrating one of postmodern theater that makes Tamara a fit metaphor to analyze the Athletic Apparel Industry.

Tamara and the Athletic Apparel Industry

Athletic Apparel (AA) Industry Tamara was formed and performed much earlier than the Tamara play.  And in the AA Tamara was not a democratic global theater; their corporate forte is to sustain the modernist barrier between spaces, as in contemporary theater. Spectators (consumers and investors) are given only narrative fragments to construct (worker) stories from the vantage points of entry authored by corporate hegemony. Hegemony here referring to authorial-power taken for granted and plots scripted in ways unseen.  The locations of Third World factories was not known to consumers or investors, nor did one ever hear stories directly authored and voiced by workers.  The AA industry stood as gatekeeper, authoring ventriloquist stories on behalf of workers who remained voiceless.

In 1998 I began posting material and writing articles about the The Athletic Apparel (AA) industry to see if I could understand the dynamics of divided theatrical spaces that were being increasingly interconnected and breeched by wandering storytellers (See Academics Studying Nike). It was then I noticed the divided spaces of Tamara in this industry and the resistance movements of efforts such as United Students Against Sweatshops and the Workers Rights Consortium who penetrated those corporately-authored barriers. And as narrative barriers tumbled down, the AA Industry Tamara transformed into something different.

What are the three divided spaces of AA Industry Tamara? There are three divided spaces in the initial performances of AA Tamara:

1. spectators, consumers and investors were in a consumptive space;

2. a second distributive space is reserved for performing executives, PR managers, and consultants, who mediate stories performed to the first space on behalf of those in a third space;

3. in a third productive space, workers of the Third World (mostly young women) could not be seen or heard by those in the first space (and maybe not the second).

Complexity theory says that from a wide range of initial system conditions, a small fluctuation can push it into chaos where convolutions can tear a system apart.

This is the chaos that happens when too many people walk across a suspension bridge, and the off-setting rhythms set off escalating vibrations and random fluctuations whose turbulence can throw everyone into the river and cause the bridge to collapse.

Galloping Gertie - After its construction everyone noticed harmless vertical motions of the roller coaster-like thrill of crossing "Galloping Gertie," the nickname given to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (TNB), at 2,800 feet, the longest suspension bridge at that time (Koughan, 1996). On November 7, 1940, four months after it opened, a wind of 42 miles per hour blowing over the bridge deck produced torsional oscillations and undulations of the TNB that increased in amplitude until a support cable snapped at mid-span, producing an imbalance in stress loads on other bridge components that led to the bridge's collapse.

I reasoned the same thing must be happening as so many stories circulate among so many tellers and breech the boundaries between three spaces of AA Tamara.  My hypothesis is that when these breeches set of patterns which transnational corporations can no longer control, then investors become uncertain about the AA industry stocks.

The problem of the second space is to construct and sustain a strong coherent corporate image to the first space. In an age of idols and icons, the corporation substitutes logo worship for the reflection of workers doing production.  Activists seek to reassert the reflection of their repressed material and historical conditions.

In the early era of AA Tamara, the spectators were fed morels of glossed accounts of events in the third world. The spectator had little choice as to what perspective to view the stories, since they were being corporately authored.  This was the state of global AA theatrics from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Activists in the late 1980s  began invading the third space (especially in Indonesia) to tell stories from an anti-corporate perspective, laying the blame for sweatshop conditions they uncovered at the feet of the AA industry giants.

There were also notable first space journalistic invasion of the sacred third space, appearing since 1996 (Schanberg, June, 1966 Life Magazine). For example, photos of children in Pakistan as young as three years old showed them making Adidas and Nike soccer balls appeared in Life Magazine. "Silgi is only three. Her hands are so tiny she can't handle a scissors" says one caption (See Pakistan). This is one time when the three divided and bounded spaces were breeched. It was not the first time nor the last one (Kathie Lee Gifford Wal-Mart sweatshop scandal had prompted Gap and Nike to join the Clinton Apparel Partnership, See Boje, 2001b). The Life Magazine story, however, did signal the end of an era when the AA industry was a triple divided space in which the first world knew nothing of factory conditions in the third world. it is also when postmodern consumers fixated on icon-logo sports stars and legends came into contact with postindustrial capitalism supply chain, and the then invisible subcontract factory conditions of labor practice.

In the 1990s the global stage fragmented, and the AA industry could no longer control the boundary between the three spaces; the spaces became interconnected by traveling witnesses, virtual chronicles, and what was hidden in the third space became more visible to the first space.  The AA transnational corporations kept trying to keep the spaces divided. In the early 1990s the corporate logo giants denied all responsibility for factory conditions, claiming they did not own them, and were only subcontracting. Pressed further they wrote codes of conduct, but enforcement lagged behind.  They sought to control what could be seen in those subcontract sites, but eye witness stories shared experiences from third space of postindustrial supply chain work to the first space of postmodern consumer culture; consumers began to boycott stores and write their congress representatives.  Consumers submitted to the whim of the corporate authors, while the workers stayed silent beyond factory gates.

In the mid 1990s there were frequent demands for independent monitoring of factory conditions. The second space attempts to mediate contact between the first and third space by avoiding all independent monitoring, and instead proposed its own corporate Codes of Conduct which would be monitored by corporate staff and by contract consulting firms such as Ernst and Young (E&Y), then Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) and more recently Global Alliance (GA).

The clamor for independent monitoring continued as more reports of child and sweatshop labor circulated in the press and on activist web sites such as Corporate Watch, Sweatshop Watch, Press for Change, Campaign for Labor Rights, Global Exchange, Thai Labor Campaign, and hundreds more. The WWW result of all these bandit sites, was since the mid 1990s there are too many end runs by activists to the third space to control the story being told to the first space. Publications like Mother Jones (MJ, September 8, 2000) says, for example, they are "uncovering the stories you have not heard." There is more democratic spectator freedom to follow characters and stories from country to country and from character to character as the omnipresent transnational corporate power of the AA industry devolves. And it is a devolution authored and storied in one catastrophe after another.

Now the AA Tamara spectators have some democratic choice in the matter and a few are no longer content to make obedient consumer purchases and investments without insuring that their garments (and toys) are not being made by child or young women in sweatshops. Can the spectators submitted to the whim of AA corporate authors ever be free enough to set against their "free market" consumer choices their ethical-answerabiltiy for their complicity in the conditions of work that permit their cheap purchases? Can spectators unlock their confinement in the first space and be critical of mediating corporate performances in the second space, and begin to understand how their consumer choices are affecting the third space of workers' working conditions?

Yet in AA Tamara the public relations machinery still overpowers spectator choices by broadcasting widely and effectively the characters, stories, and viewpoint to corporate advantage.  As web-activist, academic and news writers, corporate writers, and press agents craft story and counter-story, the spectators of the first space tend not to see the trees for the forest. Spectators can not roam freely from country to country to enter a thousand factories and see from them selves.  Spectators can not be in a thousand factories or even in the thirty countries where factories co-locate to see the simultaneity of the performances. They can track a character here and there, comparing the scripts and viewpoints presented by corporate and activist authors, but rarely does one ever read an unmediated quote from the workers' voice. We can not see these tree (voices) in the forest that is a raging storm of so many other voices.  our democratic freedom to follow characters from room to room is also curtailed by the omnipresent transnational corporation who does have access to all the factories and can grant or deny access to other witnesses.

Freedom and its lack are expressed in stories (including this one). We are trapped in stories authored by corporate power and activist resistance. No matter which character or sty we elect to follow each character is the words the stories we can access allow him or her to be. The AA Industry logo corporations, the contracted and independent monitors and the first and third spaces are trapped in stories of stories and counter-stories of counter-stories (in infinite regress).  This is the maze, I call AA Tamara.  We spectators weave the web of story fragments and counter-stories and our only freedom is the choice of threads we knit together.  Meanwhile the workers remain prisons somewhere deep within the Tamara maze. And ironically, it is the workers who given a voice could spin the largest number of possible escape routes out of the Tamara maze. 

The worker is like Cinderella, "condemned to the ashes of the hearth not only by her social standing by by her sex, and triumphantly rising over the condemnation of both" (Manguel, 1988: 1-5). The Cinderella-worker is for me a better, wiser heroine than those in whose factory she serves.

The AA Tamara is not just one global stage nor is it one theater; it is a multitude of plays, that must be read a number of times as we spectators wander from country to country, finding one factory then another, hearing a call from one worker then two or three of millions, and in the midst of these fragmented scenes, knitting together the maze by our choices in this complex and Protean Tamara.  And depending upon our choice of characters and stories to follow, another play is knitted together each day in the eyes of each spectator, none of whom have access to the underbelly of the AA Tamara, the factory floor and the dorm rooms where the workers perform day after day.

Since I have been denied access through the corporate gates, I concentrate on the texts produced and distributed by corporation and activist, by academic and journalist writers.  And I immerse myself in the intertextuality, the weave of textual anticipations and responses to other texts. Sometimes I choose to read a set of simultaneously constructed texts occurring in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico or El Salvador. And I read the different perspectives. Other times I follow just one character from first factory employment, then watch her star rise in the Tamara as her media interviews send her into cyberspace, and as is usual fall flat on her belly as she is blamed by her managers for growing public awareness of factory conditions.

Photo 1: Factory in Vietnam (source)

This is women's work (photo 1). We see the photos brought out by Dara O'Rourke from a factory in Vietnam then displayed on the Corporate Watch or Mother Jones web pages (see MJ, photo gallery). We see workers using toxic solvents without adequate protection (photo 2).

Photo 2: Factory in Vietnam - Worker with Inadequate Protection

These are photos of nameless women, who are not speaking to anyone, just being photographed by another storyteller who has a voice. Yet they are the ones who know the secrets of the underbelly of their social fabric.

If I follow one character through the AA Tamara, and read her stories, I become answerable for the outcoming reality. I traced the character, Nguyen Thi Lap started working for Sam Yang (Korean owned) sneaker factory in Ku Chi, Vietnam. Her employee number was 11204.  In March, 1996 she was promoted to section (team) leader of sewing line number 15 and that month she was one of 15 team leaders slapped about the head and shoulders with the sole of a sneaker by a Korean supervisor upset with poor quality performance of some team members.

The AA Tamara did its thing and a headline story in The Vietnam Worker newspaper on March 31, 1996 proclaimed, "Foreign Technician Strikes 15 Vietnamese Workers." The same newspaper, on April 1, 1996, proclaimed: At Sam Yang Company, Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City, Korean Technical Employee Strikes Many Vietnamese Female Workers. This slapping incident did not initially cause much uproar in the AA Tamara, but soon, 970 workers went on strike to protest the mistreatment of their fellow workers and reporters from the first space flew to the third one to interview those 15 workers.

And Nguyen Thi Lap had her first 15 minutes of Tamara stardom.  On October 17, 1996, the CBS News 48 Hours reporter, Roberta Baskins was on site to give Nguyen Thi Lap her first interview.  For Ms. Lap was a team leader that day, and one who was slapped by her Korean supervisor, Madame Baeck.

The story was reauthored March 29, 1997 in a Vietnam Labor Watch Report , a 16-day fact finding tour of Vietnam factories, that included a study of the Sam Yang factory by Vietnamese-American businessman, Thuyen Nguyen. An apparel industry logo-corporation flew former Ambassador Andrew Young to this factory in Vietnam, several others in Indonesia, and China to assure the first space spectators that the AA industry was under control and such incidents were exceptional or just misrepresented by an errant media (Young, 1997).

Nguyen Thi Lap had her 15 minutes of fame, and settled back to work as a team leader on line number 15. She had a new Korean supervisor, the other having been convicted in Vietnamese court, but allowed to be leave the country without punishment. Work returned to its normal pace, until ESPN arrived in February of 1998 to do a follow-up visit an push her once again into the Tamara spotlight. 1998. On April 2, ESPN's "Outside the Lines" ran an hour-long show on sweatshop abuses in Vietnam to coincide with their coverage of the Olympic Games.

This time Ms. Lap was forced to quit her job. Ms. Lap was demoted several times after the April, 1998 interviews with ESPN aired. She went from team leader with a spotless work record to toilet scrubber. When she fell ill, she says she was denied medical leave, eventually forced to quit her job, and then diagnosed with tuberculosis. Lap is currently unemployed.

In late 1998, I became a player in the AA Tamara visible to one its logo corporate giants. I published a journal article titled Nike, Greek Goddess of Victory or Cruelty? Women's Stories of Asian Factory Life. In the Spring of 2000, a book editor and UK publisher asked to reprint the article in a book on Asian corporate strategy. The publisher then asked Nike Corporate, Phil Knight and Dusty Kidd if they re-published my article, would Nike sue them?  I was quickly informed that my article would not be be appearing in the book. I challenged the decision, and invited Nike to publish a response to the article. Dusty Kidd first promised to write a response to be published in the book, while subordinates threatened the publisher and editor with liable if my chapter was not withdrawn. To make a long story of many episodes, twists and turns in the maze, short and brief, Nike wrote a response  in the summer, but said If I ever quoted or reproduced it, the book publisher, editor, and me would be sued for liable. The publisher folded and decided not to include what was already published.  I am barred from quoting the Nike response. I informed the journal I edit where the 1998 article on Ms. Lap had appeared, that Nike had raddled its saber. Their response was also decisive, no more articles on Nike will ever appear in the pages of Journal of Organizational Change Management. I tested this out with an article reviewed and accepted by a JOCM guest editor, which was then rejected by the MCB publishers and owners of JOCM.  I was given the option of submitting an article on any other corporation to make the same points, and so I took out the word Nike and all its examples, and substituted Disney and all its examples.  I then wrote an article containing some of the original article examples and it was published by Management Communication Quarterly. And Hugo Letiche and I are collaborating on a follow-up piece on Nike and its censorship for Emergence: A Journal of complexity Issues in Organizations and Management. In the summer of 2000 (August) I was chair of an All-Academy session, "Nike and Time" and was face-to-face with Amanda Tucker, a Nike spokeswoman who reports to Dusty Kidd. I knew this confrontation was coming and prepared by transcribing a tape of her performance at an IABS conference earlier that year.  I deconstructed each of her claims and post it on the web to get ready for the Academy of Management event in August.  We debated before a ball room full of academics and among other challenges I made a formal request that Ms. Lap be reinstated. And went on to ask that Phil Knight open the factory gates to any academics in the room that would to and study these factories.  I knew that none of the presenters papers on Nike would ever appear in JOCM. I knew I could not quote the Nike rebuttal to the 1998 article in JOCM or be sued. Finally, I decided to launch a journal called Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science and wrote "Tamara Manifesto" (2001) in its first issue, an essay on the need to study the sweatshop and anti-sweatshop movements without corporate or publisher censorship. This is how complicit I have become in Nguyen Thi Lap's story and in the AA Industry Tamara. I am deep in the underbelly of this Tamara.

As Ms. Lap reports in 2000, "When I went to the interview" says Lap (in 2000 ESPN Interview aired in December about here forced resignation), " the Korean manager kept suggesting to me that as an employee of the company I always had to speak well for the company." Ms. Lap contends she did speak well of the company in the 1998 ESPN interviews, but was intimidated to quit.

By 1998, The AA Tamara was in one of its more chaotic epochs, and something had to be done to quiet all the turbulence after the ESPN stirred up a bigger hornets nest than the 1996 48 Hours or Life Magazine events, and before independent monitoring was made mandatory either by legislation or by consumer and investor protest.  There was also the leak of the Ernst and Young audit of a AA factory in Vietnam that became front page news in November 1997 and to harass the bees a bit more (Hammond, 1997).  There was also 1997 California class action suit filed by Marc Kasky claiming that the AA industry and Nike in particular was making false advertising claims in saying its workers were being well treated and there were no subcontracts with any sweatshops. Nike is claiming its right to "free speech" and its defense includes a brief by the ACLU. The Supreme Court of California will soon decide the case (Richman, 2001). 

From the mid-1990s to May, 1998 Nike had keep up a steady public relations counter-offensive against its critics. Adidas stayed silent, while Reebok continued to pass out annual Human Rights awards to reinvent its own character.

On May 12, 1998, a month after the ESPN report, Nike CEO Phil Knight took the stage at the National Press Club Luncheon in Washington D. C. and said: "One columnist said, 'Nike represents not only everything that's wrong with sports, but everything that's wrong with the world.' So I figured that I'd just come out and let you journalists have a look at the great Satan up close and personal."

I am increasingly responsible and answerable for the stories I read and especially the ones I circulate in the AA Tamara. I have crossed over, become not just by-stander spectator to the spectacle, but an active participant in performing its stories.

I think I understand the AA Tamara enough to make some predictions.  The AA Tamara will become the exact antithesis of its current hegemony because the spaces are becoming interpenetrated, and spectators are making democratic choices to move from passive to active witness. One day the AA Tamara, the stories you experience form country to country in the postindustrial supply chain will no longer give those in the first space the slip.  Witnesses will see the maze, and see the pattern of this forest. Hegemony is by definition hidden power, and here it is becoming visible, as intersecting gazes of a thousand witnesses travel the globe.

Escape Routes From the Tamara Maze - Can AA Tamara be restaged in such a way that spectators can exit with the workers and find routes out of the Tamara maze?  Or can this maze metamorphosize?  I am less interested in pursuing the clever reports concocted by contract monitors such as E&Y, PWC, GA, and these two months (January the strike and February the negotiations with Nike and Reebok, and the new monitors, Verité, corporately- contracted to write the workers' story ). Yet, in the Mexico update I just received about the workers' action (mostly young women) to create an independent union at Kuk Dong, a Nike and Reebok plant in Puebla, Mexico, these women are writing their own story:

What interests me most are the workers, the sullen women and men in Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Cambodia, Mexico, El Salvador and countries around the world.  The action in Mexico is happening as I type in an Athletic Apparel industry that is the epitome of corporate-driven globalization.

The women courage and persistence of (mostly) young Mexican women workers, who risk everything, to create a voice for themselves,  who drop a line here or there and return into the factory gate, and who shoulder the battle against corporate PR teams, to create their independent union.  This week two of the five workers fired for taking leadership successfully entered the factory and their story was broadcast live on local radio. They did not play their docile character roles, of looking the other way and pretending nothing happened. The question is how will this story play and be retold as it circulates in the AA Industry Tamara?

We as academics struggle with our own clash of civic and scientific responsibility, and with the boundary of consumer and postindustrial culture. But it is the young women of Mexico and other countries who face the risks of violence, resist the tactics of corporate intimidation, and do the night meetings after work to author their own destiny.

The stories of Kuk Dong are reverberating through the AA Industry Tamara. They are today's front page headlines. At issue in the editorials and articles is this question: do the transnational logo corporations bringing their investments to the third space also have the obligation to pay living wages, recognize bargaining rights, and provide safe working conditions free of threat and intimidation? 

The AA Industry Tamara is in metamorphosis, the spaces once cordoned off from one another and interpenetrating, and the voice of women workers is reverberating through out the globe. The new Tamara gives the stories and characters new context as we follow the leadership of these courageous women (See http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/nike/mexico.html for listing of additional updates).

Studying the AA Industry Tamara - Method and Theory Recommendations. The complexity dynamics of Tamara occurs at the micro event level and that macro event horizon. If we approach AA Industry as Tamara then we can look at how as each act occurs, the stories get told on one or more simultaneous rooms (countries, shareholder meetings, university demonstrations). The greater the number of stories, characters, rooms, media circulation of the stories, and the level of disagreements among the players constitute the complexity dynamics of Tamara. This complexity can be approximated with five measures:

1. S- The number of stories per event horizon.

2. C - The number of characters performing in the stories.

3. M - The number of media publications circulating and recirculating a story at t + 1.

4. R - Number of rooms active within an event horizon.

5. D - Disagreement among storytellers about facts, plot, and implications.

The idea I have is to track the event horizon over time looking for nexus points where multiple stories are taking flight all at the same time,  such as in different countries. As I write, I believe the AA Industry is in just such a horizon, with Nike and Adidas situation in Pleubla, Mexico factories (Kukdong Apparel Factory outside Mexico City), the recent BBC exposé of child labor in a factory in Cambodia (Nike and Gap), the release this week of the Global Alliance (GA)  study of Nike with sexual harassment and other serious charges. Nike paid $7.8 million for the study:

What kind of salary increase would $7.8 million mean to 115,000 Nike workers in 30 factories receive assuming an average daily wage of $1.25 per day?  

Go to Nike's web site http://www.nikebiz.com/labor/index.shtml and you will see how complex it is for them this week (February 23, 2001).  This is an event horizon where Nike is putting out fires in several countries all at the same time. It will take more than PR to take the next step. And with the release of questionable practices by its contracted monitors, Nike and the entire AA Industry can not stay in denial, that there are widespread and serious stories coming to the surface all around the world.  The AA Tamara is about to change in a major way. The three spaces are being interpenetrated' barriers can not be sustained.

The propositions I want to explore, should anyone care to join me are that as the connectivity of Tamara storytelling increases, the level of complexity also rises. The industry can handle one maybe two catastrophes at a time.  As the level of disagreement rises, this can be registered as noise or a time to reassess stock prices (See Stock Market page).

Conclusions

Many academics first create the understanding of corporate hegemony, and then submit to its conventions by choosing to remain silent.  Others voice their concerns and get lost in the Tamara-maze of story and counter-story.  Whoever we are, investor or consumer, owner or worker, professor or student - we move in and out of our complicity with globalization and its predation (some say salvation) of the third world. Even as we seek to deconstruct corporate tales, we become caught in the Tamara web. In this essay I have suggested that that web was part of the life of Tamara de Lempicka, the the playwright John Krizanc, and now I am among its prey.

The question is this, is the Athletic Apparel Industry Tamara going through some evolution, a metamorphosis to something beyond itself. As we move in and out of belief and disbelief in corporate promises of Athletic Apparel industry sweatshop reform is this one for real?

References

Boje, David M. (1995). "Stories of the Storytelling Organization:  A postmodern analysis of Disney as
'Tamara-Land'." Academy of Management Journal. August 1995, Vol. 38 (4): 997-1035

Boje, David M. (1998) Nike, Greek Goddess of Victory or Cruelty? Women's Stories of Asian Factory Life Journal of Organizational Change Management. Vol. 11(6): 461-480.

Boje, David M. (2001a) Tamara Manifesto. Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science. Vol 1 (1): 15-24. http://www.zianet.com/boje/tamara/issues/volume_1/issue_1_1/tamara_manifesto2.htm

Boje, David M. (2001b) Are Sweatshops Misogynistic Revenge? The Misogynistic Marriage of Women and Transnational Corporate Supply Chains. January 8. http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/nike/sweatshops_overview.htm

Ernst and Young Leaked audit report dated January, 1997 is available on the Corporate Watch Web Site http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/nike/audit.html

Hammond, (1997) Leaked Audit: Nike Factory Violated Labor Laws. Mother Jones (November 7).

Koughan, James (1996) "The Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Evaluation of Competing Theories of its Demise, and the Effects of the Disaster of Succeeding Bridge Designs." http://www.me.utexas.edu/~uer/papers/paper_jk.html

Krizanc, John (1981/ 1989). Tamara. Toronto, Ontario: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited. Dates are for first and second edition.

Manguel, Alberto  (1988) "Foreword" to Tamara. Signed and dated as March, 1988. pp. 1-5, in Krizanc, John (1989). Tamara. Toronto, Ontario: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited.

Richman, Josh (2001) "Green Washing on Trail." Mother Jones (September 23). http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/greenwash.html

Athletic Apparel (AA) Industry Cast of Characters

Global Alliance was founded in 1999 (http://www.theglobalalliance.org/).

• Maria Eitel, Vice President Corporate Responsibility, Nike, Inc., United States is a member of the Global Alliance Operating Council. 

• Anne Gust, Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer, Gap, Inc.,
  United States is a member of the Global Alliance Operating Council. 
  

Books and Articles on Tamara de Lempicka

Claridge, Laura (1999) Tamara De Lempicka : A Life of Deco and Decadence.  Bloomsbury Crown/Clarkson Potte. ISBN: 0-517-70557-5  Excerpt. Review.

de Lempicka, Tamara  Tra Eleganza e Trasgressione

deLempicka-Foxhall, Kizette Baroness and Charles Philips () Passion by Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka.

Durozoi, Gérard (Ed)  Dictionary of XX Century Art  Original title: Dictionnaire de l'art moderne et contemporain.

Jablow,  Evelyn (2001)  Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco artist extraordinaire. 

Lucie-Smith, EDWARD (19990) Art Deco Painting. NY: Clarkson Potter/Publishers.

Néret, Gilles (1992) Tamara de Lempicka 1898-1980. Benedict Taschen Verlag
GmbH. Köln 1992.

Ricci, Franco Maria Tamara de Lempicka

Net Postcards of Tamara de Lempicka paintings

Stories without Words - Net postcards

For More on Tamara please consult Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science

http://www.zianet.com/boje/tamara