David M. Boje

New Mexico State University

One of the overlooked authors of management communication discourse are multinational corporations (MNCs) such as Monsanto, Disney, McDonalds, Wal-Mart and others whose annual reports, press releases, advertising, and sponsored research and consultant reports becomes the stuff on which others' discourses rests. Corporate writing is embedded in a web of media, accounting, consultant, and ad writing that seeps into academic writing (student, doctoral, and professorial) that influences how groups, such as unions, state, women, minorities, and populist movements get characterized. I therefore call for a look at corporate writing not as a stand-alone but as part of the web fabricating management communication writing. In this brief space, I will outline how Nike corporate writing co-constructs post-industrial global capitalism and postmodern culture to legitimate industry-wide labor and ecological practices in wider management communication writing. It is not a level writing field. While corporate and sponsored apologist writing is embedded in a wider web of resistance writing, the later is less likely to ooze into management communication writing.

What do Nike, McDonalds, Monsanto, Target, Wal-Mart and the beef industry have in common? First, their popular culture management writing and discourse in the form of ads, web sites, annual reports, speeches, and sponsored academic and consultant studies has far-reaching implications for how we live our lives. Further, the forms and politics of popular culture writing then become sedimented in the university. Second, some (not all) corporations repackage themselves in their writing: Nike is an agent of economic development and ecology (Boje, 1998c, 1999), Monsanto is a cure for world hunger (Rachel's, 1998), World Bank is repackaged as an AIDS-elimination program, and WTO gets restoried as an anti-poverty organization (Klein, 2000). Third, there is evidence that the corporate writing is colonizing the university curriculum (Noble, 1999; Boje, 2000c). Increasing partnerships between corporations and universities, as well as corporate sponsored writing, fashions the textual web from which academics create their pedagogy. Global networks of students, NGOs, organized labor and a hodgepodge of activist cause groups are deconstructing corporate discourse and writing (Bissell et al, 2000; Cole, 1996; Hancock, 1996; Carty, 1999; Landrum, 2000). But much of this critique is not being sufficiently referenced in management communication or business journals. This scarcity can be partially explained by corporate intimidation of resistance-writers and potential publishers with libel as a way to muffle critical voices. This leads to thorny problems in sorting through claims and counter-claims that raise ethical, political, economic, philosophical, and multicultural differences. Finally, there are free speech issues relating to academic freedom and the vested interests created by corporate partnerships with universities.

For example, "two veteran news reporters for Fox TV in Tampa, Florida have been fired for refusing to water down an investigative report on Monsanto's controversial milk hormone, rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone)" [see Rachel's, 1998: 1]. In the infamous McLibel Trial, a British court case between McDonald's and a postman and a gardener from London (Helen Steel and Dave Morris), a major corporation acted as censor (McSpotlight, 2000). In yet another example, U.S. food disparagement laws in thirteen states are used to silence critics (academic and others) such as Howard Lyman (Lyman, 1998) who wrote about unsafe and unhealthy factory farm and slaughterhouse practices.

On February 29th, 1998, a Texas jury found former Humane Society of the US program director Howard Lyman and Oprah Winfrey not liable for comments made on a national show about eating beef. Dr. Lyman, Executive Director of the educational 501c3 non-profit organization Voice for a Viable Future, spent 6 weeks in Amarillo fighting "food disparagement" and libel charges against him. Until the jury rendered its judgment, Mr. Lyman and associates were barred from speaking about the lawsuit as a result of a court-imposed gag order (Lyman, 1998).

In my personal experience, a major corporation has intimidated both a book and a journal publisher to cancel publication of work that had been reviewed and accepted (Boje, 1998c, 2000b). Should we sit paralyzed before our keyboards, while global corporations proactively write a management discourse that scripts how we live and work and becomes fodder for the writing of academic business discourse? Without rigorous critique such corporate writing is pure public relations, even propaganda, that re-circulates into business and communication classrooms.

In this essay, I want to focus on how one MNC, the Nike Corporation, has recently changed its writing and discourse. Over the last decade, Nike has changed its writing (web sites, press releases, annual reports, sponsored studies) from denial of all responsibility of its subcontract factories to a campaign to show that it has changed those very practices for the better (Carty, 1999; Landrum, 2000; Boje, 2000d). It is, for me, an important example of the interplay of the writing and discourse of post-industrial capitalism, postmodern consumerism culture, and the post-WTO grassroots networking to oppose the writing/discourse of globalization and the commodification of sports. I want to focus on the consequences of corporate-writing for academic, business, and cultural practices.

What is Nike-Writing? Nike-writing includes a proliferation of sponsored and contracted writing: the Andrew Young study (Young & Jordan, 1997), Dartmouth studies (Mihaly & Massey, 1997), Kahle et al's (2000) University of Oregon study replicating the Young study, and 16 St John's University students' first-hand inspections conditions of some subcontract factories (Nike, 2000b). Nike's $750 million dollar advertising budget for writing and the sponsored apologist writing has spawned reactionary and resistance writing (Bissell et al, 2000), but that is not what makes its way into the Business College classroom. Consider what Nike (2000a) posts in its corporate web site:

Knight succeeded of his own accord, of course. But luckily for Lehigh, some of his seminal business insight for the company that became Nike has gone into a class that Professor Karen Collins had designed for incoming freshman in Lehigh's College of Business and Economics at the Bethlehem, Penn. school.

For the third year, Collins will use Nike as the model for a class of some 260 freshmen taking her Introduction to Business course. With full cooperation and support from Nike, students get a firsthand look at how the global athletic company does business, including marketing, finance and global responsibility issues. Students then ultimately design business plans for fictitious companies based on what they learn…

In the first year of her program, Collins used a large American automaker as the model, but student interest was low. She polled the class about which company they'd rather learn about, and the nearly unanimous vote was for Nike. "They buy the product, they know the ads," she says. "It was a natural fit."…

At the end of the semester, when the business plans are done, an independent judging group from Anderson Consulting reviews the plans and selects a winner. Members of the top three teams are each awarded a share of Nike stock and are honored at a daylong event in New York City. Nike awards a $2,000 prize for the best plan.

Nike provides course materials, access to Nike executives, and financial incentives that make student or faculty-critique of Nike at St. John's problematic. For example, such a course could include examples of how Nike is a writer of ghettoized race, questionable labor practices (Bissell et. al, 2000), and gender portrayals (Cole, 1996, 1997), and for its economic development and ecology rhetoric (Boje, 1998d, 1999) and global postmodern consumerism culture (Carty, 1999).

The interplay of Nike writing and resistance-writing may often occur around acts of grassroots, populist protest, such as those witnessed in WTO-Seattle. There were post-WTO acts of global networking, and a corresponding proliferation of Nike-writing deconstructing these movements as "simply not credible" (Nike, 2000e, f; Carty, 1999; Bissell et al, 2000). Nike apologist writing reduces the movement of 150 college campuses forming United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) groups, some using sit-in tactics of the 1960s, to the rant and rave of a youth misguided by leftist unionists unwilling to accept the necessity of the free market economy (Kidd, 1999; Kahle et al, 2000).

Intertextual Web of Nike Writing - There is an intertextual aspect to the web of writing about corporate writers (and apologists) writing about writing that is critical of the corporation, and vice versa. An examination of the dynamic web of texts and counter-texts over time could allow us to propose ways to improve the dialogue among apologists and critics.

Students of organization as well as journalists, investors, consumers, and activists read and write about Nike's and critics' writing. But, the writing opportunities are corporately financed, staged, and otherwise controlled. For example, Nike (2000b, c, d) sponsored 16 students from St. John's University to study code of conduct compliance auditing practices of Price Waterhouse Coopers and visit "some" Nike factories. The reports are posted to Nike's (2000b) corporate web site along with a transcript of a conference call (Nike, 2000c) and Nike's (e.g. 1998, 2000d) response to issues raised. Critics are skeptical of Nike-arranged factory tours to only 32 of over 600 locations. The question is, do off-the-tour factories operate in ways that violate Nike's code of conduct and are just not being reported in the FLA, Global Alliance, and Price Waterhouse Coopers studies (Bissell et al, 2000; Boje, 2000c). Nike also actively enters into management communication writing by deconstructing its critics for using "poor methodology" (interviewing workers outside the factory gate, not checking worker reports of income against factory records) "re-circulating reports from the Internet," "having an ax to grind", and "being a front for labor unionists" (Boje, 1999, 2000d).

New Writing - Finally, a trend relevant to management communication scholarship is the profusion of recent dissertations about Nike writing and acts of corporate-globalization and commodification (Athreya, 1995; Cole, 1996; Hancock, 1996; Carty, 1999; Landrum, 2000). These are focused studies of management communication, such as Landrum's (2000) contrast of Nike and Reebok annual report writing across a decade. Studies by Carty (1999) and Landrum (2000) suggest that other athletic apparel manufacturers engage in less (defensive) writing about management practices, and do less deconstructing of their critic's writing. Adidas, for example, restricts its web site to technical and financial information. Nike, on the other hand, keeps libraries of press releases (2000 c), study reports (2000 a, b), and rebuttals of its critics (1998, 2000d). The same would be true of Monsanto, who is more prolific and more ready to send squads of its own science experts to rebut studies that speak to the harmful effects of genetically engineered foods. Hancock's (1996, 1997) study raises issues about how writing about corporate behavior produces unforeseen changes. Nike reacted by closing one of two subcontract factories Hancock (1996) studied in Indonesia when that writing was written about in the media. Nike issued a press release stating the problem was no longer a problem, end of story (cited in Hancock, 1997).

Corporate power - I know from personal experience that Nike can block a publication by an academic, by making a (UK) book or journal publisher or editor nervous about being sued for libel. Right now, I wonder if this present article will be published. This is a particularly important point about free speech and scholarly autonomy. I have been told, for example to "tone down my web pages," and to "be less critical of corporations in the classroom." Managing editors of the journal I edit have pulled a reviewed and accepted manuscript because representatives from the Nike Corporation told them and me that litigation was an option if the article went forward.

University Contracts with Corporations - A second way corporations can control writing is through their contracts and endowments to universities. Nike, for example, has cut off funding to three universities (University of Oregon, University of Michigan, Brown University) because those campuses signed up for Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) monitoring, rather than the corporate-initiated Fair Labor Association (FLA). Nike and Reebok both contract for apparel production and endorsements with a score of major universities, but often the contract prohibits critique of the apparel manufacturers by university employees and athletes. This makes publication of articles critical of Nike (or Reebok) grounds for action:

"Clearly, the CEO of Nike and the corporate entity [is,] in this triple shot across the bow of the institutions involved, seemingly saying, 'Our financial support is not unconditional,' " said Sheldon Steinbach, vice president and general counsel for the Washington-based American Council on Education, an organization of the nation's colleges and universities (Asher & Barr, 2000).

University employment may depend upon what is written and what is worn or not worn. For example, James Keady, a St. John's graduate assistant soccer coach, who wrote a term paper critical of Nike's wage practices in its 500 Asian subcontract firms, was forced to resign. Keady resigned (McCall, 1999). Keady, in his writing, argues Nike's labor practices violate the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the mission of the university. He put his conviction to the test when he refused to wear shoes and clothing with the Nike logo thereby violating a contract requirement between Nike and St. John's that coaches and players wear Nike apparel during games. Keady was given the choice of wear the Swoosh logo-apparel or resign. In some (but not all) contracts, is a clause such as the following between Wisconsin-Reebok: "The university will not issue any official statement that disparages Reebok [and] will promptly take all reasonable steps to address any remark by any university employee, including a coach, that disparages Reebok" (Luce, 1999: 1). In short, Nike is a global MNC that retaliates against universities and their employees for their stance on labor issues.

Outside the new dissertations (listed above), academic critique of the relation of corporations and universities is rare. An exception is Wilcox, (1999: 1) who asks "Should a Catholic university, proud of its religious identity and advertised as such in its admissions literature, associate itself with a large multinational corporation whose outsourcing contracts generate enormous revenue while employing 'factory workers hired by subcontractors scraping by on what human rights advocates call starvation wages'?" But not everyone enjoys the academic freedom to be able to ask such questions of corporations providing substantial university funding.

Who has more writers? There are fewer critical academic writers than the number employed, contracted, or sponsored as corporate writers. Nike, for example, employs hundreds of people (in advertising and Labor Practices departments), and subcontracts with more people (major PR, ad and consulting firms) and even sponsors its own university studies (Amos Tuck Business College wage study, University of Oregon marketing department, St. John's University), and the paid monitor-writers (FLA, Price Waterhouse Coopers, and Global Alliance monitoring enterprises).

There is a wide distribution of corporate writing that finds its way directly into the classroom at Lehigh (Nike, 2000a) and St John's (Nike 2000b, c, d). For example, Nike distributes learning modules on how to construct sneakers with water-based solvents as an environmental program marketed to grades 4 through 12 (Nike, 2000f). And this becomes a role model to other universities for business practice.

Nike business practice is also facilitated through popular culture. Nike's PR writing about its management is much more popular and more widely read than "academic" writing. In the case of Lehigh, students were less interested in best practices in automobile companies, than in studying Nike (2000a). Why not, Nike spends $750 million annually on writing. The Swoosh is a mainstay in popular consumer culture and a favorite case for marketing, advertising, strategy, human resource, labor process, communication, sociology, and countless other college courses.

Nike as Corporate Role Model - My thesis is that corporate writing has been imitated and celebrated by academic writers without much critical reflection regarding the kinds of issues being raised in the new dissertations. It is interesting to see how much of the public relations writing by Nike wiggles its way into college textbooks (especially in the Business School), but how little critical writing finds its way there (although, this too is changing). For example, Hodge, Anthony, and Gale's (1996) Prentice Hall, 5th Edition text presents Nike and Phil Knight re-writings in three chapters of their text on Organization Theory. The result is a tame managerialist perspective that ignores alternative perspectives. In chapter four (Hodge et al, 1996: 88-89, as summarized by Boje, 1998a):

Nike is applauded for bring a strong "work ethic" to the Third World workers, but for the authors the "real" problem is not Asian workers, but the unpredictability of over-paid sports labor in the U.S., counterfeit production of Nike and Reebok products by subcontractors, and rising costs of production.

Nike actively promotes its role model. Kahle, Boush, and Phelps (2000) just published a study that was recommended to the audience of the August, 2000 meeting of the Academy of Management by Amanda Tucker (of Nike's Labor Practices Department) as an example of academic research more rigorous than what student and union groups "pass around on the Internet" (Barry et al, 2000). A critique (Boje, 2000b, d) of Kahle et al (2000) predicts that this study will be as widely disputed as the Young and Jordan (1997) study for its method flaws (See Carty, 2000 for a review). Kahle et al. (2000: 46), for example, conclude from an N of 1, on a pre-announced factory tour in Vietnam, "Overall, we did not see anything that struck us as out of the ordinary for a manufacturing facility" and note at length that their findings agree with those of Andrew Young (former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations). At Phil Knight's (and Nike's) request, Young visited12 factories he, (like Kahle et al) observed to be "clean, well-organized, adequately ventilated, and well-lit" and both efforts found "no evidence or pattern of widespread or systematic abuse or mistreatment of workers" (Young & Jordan, 1997). Both studies use the same methodology (walking tours through a factory with Nike translators). The problem for management communication is how to get beyond academic tourist, staged corporate-packaged spectacles that are little more than rewrites of corporate-provided PR into academic pages (both tables, wage statistics, and other data included in the Kahle et al study come from Nike web pages and corporate representatives).

My point is that with the new dissertations on Nike writing and practices (Athreya, 1995; Cole, 1996; Hancock, 1996; Carty, 1999; Landrum, 2000) and the growing list of NGOs, labor and student groups (Bissell et al, 2000), such pronouncements are being challenged at an accelerated rate (See exchanges between Kidd, 1999 and Bissell et al, 2000). Yet, there is an important difference in power between the young Ph.D.s and the corporate-writers they challenge. Clearly additional research sensitive to validity and reliability issues needs to be implemented to sort through PR and propaganda by both Nike and its critics. And research that includes the voices of workers would be quite unique. Otherwise, corporate and apologist writing controls the flow of the information that gets discovered in such studies.

As a writer of postmodern popular culture, Nike is without equal. Millions of consumers around the globe wear Nike slogans and images to construct their identity in popular culture. But Nike is having its problems sustaining its "hip, rebel, irreverent, socially-minded" image. If your parents and grand parents wear Nikes, are they still hip? Skateboarders do not think so. Adidas is having a come back, not even having to advertise itself as the "anti-Nike" alternative. There are other problems. Since the Swoosh is everywhere, where it ends up can be embarrassing to Nike. For example, photos showed a suicide cult wearing Nike (Carty, 2000). Committed employees of Nike demonstrate it with the EKIN tattoo, one that Phil Knight has on his leg.

To a growing segment of consumers, Nike's aggressive rebuttal of its critics, and its competitive endorsement contracts (including university contracts), are seen as examples of predatory hyper-competitiveness. Hyper-competitiveness means working to defeat the enemies' ability to compete.

The Swoosh is a more recognized world symbol than the crucifix. Though "Just Do It" is not translated by Nike in its writing to various countries, young and old consumers know what it means. Writing by Nike has saturated popular culture and capitalist business culture. Nike representatives have, for example, been appearing at business academic conferences (International Academy of Business and Society and the Academy of Management) to give their side of the research record. Audience reaction has tended to seek a middle ground between Nike and academics and activists critical of Nike. Polls by consumers (ESPN in 1998) show that most consumers do not care where their apparel is made, as long as the cost can be lower (Nike, 2000h). Work by Clean Clothes Campaign in the Netherlands (and other NGOs) seeks to write the name and location of factories and the working conditions on the label of each garment.

Changes are Occurring, There is an Emerging Popular Culture image of Nike as a Labor Bully - First, in post-WTO (and before) there is a postmodern form of social movement that is influencing Nike's choices. It is a networking of fragmented and diverse affinity groups from the 1st to the 3rd world economies. It began with a number of grassroots campaigns using no cost web sites, leafleting, and even some street theater to question the Nike writing and discourses, especially the way Nike self-narrates. Over time, the networking continued and media began to pay attention then labor, government committees, university administrators, and a whole lot more institutions got involved. It is all rather interesting. Here you have a multinational corporation (MNC) with its own global networking across subcontract factories, contracting distributors, celebrity endorsees, and even university athletic departments (and coaches), a collective virtual network epitomizing the flexible structuration of post-industrial capitalism --- being influenced (harassed) to change its management writing and discourse. Of course Nike has always changed its discourse and writing to respond to "bad news" often hiring celebrity endorsements and celebrity writers (like former Ambassador Andrew Young) to spin it all into "good news."

But more interesting is that a rag tag grassroots initiative of NGOs and students from around the 1st world economies, networked to third world interest groups and NGOs as well as media, got Nike to commit to making substantive changes in working conditions and labor practices (Nike, 2000g).

It is a profound set of promises, and perhaps some major changes in practice will result in the Nike virtual production and distribution network. Nike agrees to raise working conditions to OSHA standards, give women workers loans to found businesses, and is moving to certify all its subcontract factories for ISO14000 environmental standards (Boje, 1998, 1999, 2000c; Carty, 1999; Landrum, 2000).

The Growing Popular Culture Image of Nike as Sports Bully - Nike is becoming known as a sports bully. For example, in the Olympics, Nike does not purchase a contract with the official Olympic organizers, it just buys up much of the available billboard space. This is known as bandit marketing. Newscasters at the Olympic games had to wear Nike logos on their apparel, which some saw as a compromise to journalistic independence. Then there was the Olympic team sponsored by Reebok where Barkley and Jordan refused to wear the team jersey's for the medal ceremony, instead pulling on their Nike logos. This was interpreted widely as poor sportsmanship, putting Nike Corporate loyalty ahead of the team, sports, country and the Olympics.

Sports celebrity endorsement contracts, for example, with the Brazilian soccer team included a tiring set of Nike-promotion tours which some blame for the team's poor showing in this season's matches. Athletes from high school programs are recruited by Nike and encouraged to skip university, or in the case of Tiger Woods, to not finish at Stanford.

The history of Nike's choices of sports celebrity endorsees has had a "bad boy" image that Nike cultivated to cast the corporation as somewhat rebellious. Nike's first celebrity endorsee was Steve Perfontaine, a track star with an attitude that was "irreverent, rebellious, anti-establishment, and contentious." A perfect image to attract the youth market. Then came Jimmy Connors, John Macinroe, and Andre Agissi in tennis who manifested similar behavior, but also some poor sportsmanship attitudes. And Barkley and Rodman in basketball continued the trend. Michael Jordan may be more responsible than any other sports star for building the Nike global empire. But despite his mild manners and stylish dress, Jordan has had controversies that contributed to Nike's image. Most notably being fined $1,000 a game for wearing the first black and red shoes in professional basketball (previously they were all white).

Nike's Recent Reputation as Education Bully - There is a third reason, it is another facet in sports bully image making having to do with education. As mentioned, the contracts with high schools and universities, to be sole source provider, sign up players to leave education behind and turn pro without attending (or finishing) college. Many contracts contain standard prohibitions against speaking out against Nike on labor or any other issues. As well as examples already stated of direct and indirect (or assumed) influences by Nike over academic publication.

Nike labor, endorsement, and education practices are making fans (and others) more conscious of the impact of the commodification of sports.

I think it is imperative that we study MNC writing/discourse and take it quite seriously. It is a form of expression that legitimates the marriage of postindustrial capitalism and postmodern popular culture. In postindustrial capitalism outsourcing production became the management fashion in the 1980s and 1990s. Nike has subcontracts with over 600 producers, as well as distribution contracts with hundreds of distributors and product endorsers. The management communication problem for Nike has been how to continue to squeeze producer and distributor networks while not succumbing to the accusations of critics over sweatshop and bully-ish image. At the same time shifts in popular culture fashion makes Nike susceptible to over-branding and to loosing touch with what consumers find as too-rebellious and hyper-competitive.

There is so much to deconstruct about Nike writing and discourse it will keep communication and philosophy classes busy for decades. In closing, I would like to suggest that management communication scholars pay closer attention to new dissertation work and activist texts, to gain a more critical and balanced perspective on huge corporations like Nike, Disney, Monsanto, RJ Reynolds, Wal-Mart.