Antenarrating, Tamara, and Nike Storytelling

By David M. Boje Ph.D.

New Mexico State University

http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/ 

Paper prepared for presentation at “Storytelling Conference” at the School of Management; Imperial College, 53 Prince’s Gate, Exhibition Road, London, July 9^th, 2001.

June 17, 2001; Updated September 17, 2002

  For Session Outline

Pre-Stories - I will tell you gripping Nike tales of adversity, strategy, and triumph of global capitalism. But, I am more interested in the system than the story, in what I call Tamara  (Boje, 1995).  In terms of structure today, I would like to explain the origin of my work on antenarrative and narrative framing and then apply these in Nike Tamara.

My thesis is that stories are intertextual, the currency of storytelling organizations, that are colluding and competing in their storytelling ways, in transorganizational networks that are global. Nike has over 700 factory subcontracts in 35 countries employing 720,000 workers, mostly young women between the ages of 16 and 23. Then there is the distribution networks through NikeTown, Footlocker, countless other outlets, including licensing of college campus apparel.  Nike is described by Cheryl Cole (1996, 1997) as a postmodern organization, attempting to control its virtual corporate marketing and PR machine by celebrity storytelling, while outsourcing its sweaty labor across the globe. To me it is the dark side of the postmodern enterprise, one pursued by media, NGOs, and me. Yet, what kind of session would this be, if it did not begin with a story?  Let’s start with a story that sets Nike in its global Tamara. Let me being with a story from London, then Indonesia, and Vietnam to give some sense of the global character to Nike Tamara.

London - The Nike Tamara extends to Nike and includes the carnivalesque satire and protesting at NikeTown.

Photo 3 - 7 Jan 2001, Report on action in London - No Sweat January sales,
NikeTown takes on more child labor in 2001!

I am assuming this protest was organized organised by "No Sweat" ( http://www.nosweat.org.uk). A second UK group "Labour behind the Label" (LBL). LBL recently told CNN that despite Nike's attempts drafting Codes of Conduct, and hiring consulting firms to monitor working conditions,  "any changes made by firms were 'superficial' and that there had been no improvement in fundamentals such as providing workers with a living wage and allowing them the right to organize and join unions" (CNN March 15, 2001).

Note: the 2nd "No Sweat" conference is in November 2002 in London, and workers from Kukdong will be speaking. Full details of our activities are on www.nosweat.org.uk  but also can be found on http://uk.indymedia.org   and http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin  as well as http://www.schnews.org.uk

If we analyze this story as theater, it has several carnivalesque aspects. There is a good deal of satire, parody and ridicule in the London NikeTown protest . Nike claims repeatedly that child labor is not problem, has been solved, but the media just keeps dredging it up.  But, this is about parody, satire, and carnival more than the truth of the tale. Nike has curtailed its use of child labor since the 1996 Life Magazine article on soccer ball production in Pakistan.  Nevertheless, the perception among the anti-globalization campaigns is the Nike continues to exploit children, and child labor is part of globalization. It was also 1996 when U.S. talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford burst into tears on national TV when human rights activist Charles Kernaghan (UNITE) told Kathie she had a clothing line manufactured by children in Honduras.  The media is eager to discover defenseless, exploited children in Nike, Reebok, & Adidas factories, but overlooks the more macro story of exploitation of 700,000 young women workers, who could improve their situation, if they were not blocked from organizing independent unions.  Between Nike and child labor is a complex supply chain in which middlemen outsource from the subcontract factories to garage and home producers to disguise and camouflage the use of child labor. In the shoe and garment industry, parts made in one country are sent to a second for assembly and emblem stitching and then exported to the U.S. and U.K.   This makes storytelling quite interesting, since Nike can always claim plausible denial.

Indonesia - "When Nike was recently accused of having Michael Jordan’s line of sneakers made by 11-year olds in Indonesia at 14 cents an hour, Nike officials pointed to the fact that the sneakers carry the label "Made in Taiwan." That label, however, only indicates that the final assembly was done in Taiwan. It does not mean, however, that no portion of the sneaker line is made in Indonesia" (The Tragedy of Child Labor, an edited version of the article originally published in the Summer 1996 issue of Working People).

One Nike Tamara story came in this morning from Indonesia: My friend Tim Connor of NikeWatch, begins the story with a caution (June 18, 2001 email):

In places like Australia, Europe and North America there is relative freedom to criticize corporations and governments and to campaign for greater democracy and accountability. It’s easy for those of us who live in those places to forget that in countries like Vietnam, China and Indonesia  (countries where Nike chooses to have its products made) it can be very dangerous to engage in the kind of debate and protest that we take for granted.

Tim sets the scene and provides some context, pointing out that Ms. Dita Sari and the labor movement in Indonesia have a history. Before looking at Tim’s narrative, a bit of history about Dita Sari and Cicih Sukesih, two rare voices in the Nike Tamara:

Photo 1 - Dita Sari

Dita Sari is Chair, of Indonesian Centre for Labour Struggle (PPBI), founder of Indonesian trade union organization FNBPI (National Front for Workers’ Struggle in Indonesia. She was jailed in 1996 for leading a strike of 20,000 workers and for three years she was a political prisoner in Indonesia (Dita was released on 5 July 1999).Dita has had no direct involvement with the Nike campaign, although members of her organization, FNPBI, certainly have.

“Dita Sari looks more like a rural schoolteacher than a trade unionist. But working out of a converted house in the back streets of east Jakarta, the 28-year-old former political prisoner and university drop-out is rapidly emerging as a key figure in Indonesia's fledgling labor movement as it struggles to emerge from three decades of stagnation and oppression” (McBeth, 2001).

Photo 2 - Indonesian labor activist Cicih Sukesih being interviewed

Cicih Sukaesih, for example, reported that one soldier put a revolver on the table during questioning of her friend. That gives you some context for this story of Dita Sari in Indonesia and her part in the campaign to watch Nike. With this as context, let us return to Tim Connor’s narrative of events of June, 2001.

For More Photos See Nike slide Show

On Friday June 8 an international conference on militarism, labor rights and democracy held in Indonesia was broken up by police and then the conference attendees were attacked by civilian militias. The conference was organized by the PRD, a social democratic political party in Indonesia, which is lead by Budiman Sujatmiko and Dita Sari. A number of the Indonesians at the conference have been actively involved in the Nike campaign and regularly pass on information from Nike workers about conditions in their factories to NikeWatch.

This description of the attack was sent from a participant in the conference to a friend of NikeWatch (Connor, 2001). The Story is told as follows:

I had a long-long night on June 8.  I attended the conference on Asia Pacific People's Solidarity. The main theme of the conference is about struggle against neo-liberalism and militarism. It held by Increase (Indonesian Centre for Reform  & Social Emancipation), started on 7 June at Sawangan, Bogor. It supposed to end on June 10, but we, actually the police, ended it earlier.  On June 8, around 2 or 2.30 at noon, the police came and we're instructed to stop the conference at once in the name of the law. Firstly, because the conference held without an official permit, and secondly, because all the foreign participants (about 35 of them) used tourist visas to enter Indonesia.  After a long negotiation between Budiman Sujatmiko and the police, there's a news that the police headquarter finally issued the permit. But they insisted to take all the foreign participant to the police station for a further process. Only 32 of them (mostly from Aussie) went, and 2 Filipinos and 1 Indian stayed with us, because they looked like Indonesian, and the police didn't know their identity.   I had this bad feeling about the worst thing going to happen, because while the police came, they were followed by around 10 people in red-army-look uniform. These red uniformed guys tried to provoke the local people who came to watch the incident. But they all left by police order. But as many experienced friends told that they usually came back with more troops, so the organizing committee asked us to stay together waiting for our bus, and didn't allow us to leave the conference room, just in case they waited us outside. There's only one gate lead to the main road. It took almost 2 hours until the bus arrived; we even had a chance to have dinner.   Apparently, those red uniformed people waited and took the arriving bus as a sign for us to leave, so 5 minutes after the bus arrived, they attacked us. Later I know, there were about 20 of them. (I didn't know exactly whether they were armed or not, but later a student participant told me that he was kicked and hit by one of them, so even if they were armed, they didn't use it.)  The moment we noticed a sound of car with lots of noises screaming: "Attack! Kill the communist!", we got panick[y] and  all ran out from the conference room. I ran as fast as I can. I heard someone called for Dita Sari (FNPBI), so I followed that guy. I had this quick thinking that they would do anything to keep Dita safe, so hopefully they wouldn't abandon me. I was right.  We ran into the deepest rainy night, through a lake, paddy fields and golf yard, tried to avoid the main road. Once we had to hide between bamboos and bushes for we noticed 3 guys passing through.  We were not sure who, but obviously, they're not our friends. I prayed, Dita prayed without a pause. I felt so fragile, defenseless, hopeless, but not exhausted yet. I wonder where my strength came from, because I got very sick on the 1st day and still took some medicine that day.  At the end of the golf yard, we met 2 groups of our friends, and that made us 23 men and 2 women all wet and exhausted, too frightened to cry. We met a couple of local people (they're dating there, actually, and it was funny we met them that way) and they led us through a hole they made to enter the golf yard, and we had to walk about 2 km between houses of a village till we found another main road. We took separate transport, but I was... with Dita Sari. We went to a PRD activist's home. It almost 10 pm. We knew from TV news that the red-uniformed  people claimed themselves as Angkatan Muda Kaabah (Young Generation of Kaabah;  Kaabah is a religious place at Mekkah where Moslem throw stones during a ritual of Haj; these AMK are well-known for their militant way to defend  Moslem way of life, for example they destroy a cafe for the reason of  degradation of morality).  Dita and friends soon made phone calls, and in the end 2 LBH staff came pick us up. Dita & Hendardi (PBHI) made an appointment to meet at Cikini, so on the way there they drove me home. It was 2 pm.  Dita later told me that 4 wounded plus 1 dehydrated and hospitalized, but I believe there are more than 10 friends who also got kicked and hit but didn't see as wounded.  I suspected the police knew that those AMK would be back, that's why they insisted to take all the foreign participants. They even intended to leave Budiman with us, because they didn't ask him to come along with those foreigners at the first place. As you might know, not long ago Budiman was threatened to be killed by a group of Moslem militia.  I'm sorry that you have to read this long email. I need to make it out of me, so I won't afraid to sleep. You can see that a life is invaluable in front of blind fanaticism, and also, even in the reformation era, they still apply new order's way of repression not just by the police or army, but also by civil militia. My God, how easy they painted us all as communist... I don't even know by what criteria someone claimed as socialist or leftist.  I was and still am exhausted. But don’t worry, my friends take good care of me. 

Thanks so much for your extra time reading this...

Yannis argues such questions about stories miss the ways they are “open valuable windows into the emotional and symbolic lives of organizations, offering researchers a powerful research instrument” but not one mired in facticity (1998: 135).  I argue that asking such questions is essential to tracing the fantasy-creating storytelling machine that can easily make us into corporate apologists.

When women in the Nike storytelling machine voice their stories, they can become victims (Lap, 2000; Boje, 1998). Ms. Lap Nguyen was forced out of her Nike factory job in Vietnam following her interview with the ESPN program that was televised. She was also interviewed in the 1996 60 Minutes expose on Nike in Vietnam.  The point is that being interviewed for one's story can have disciplinary results in the Nike Tamara.

Table 1: Nguyen Thi Lap’s Story

 

Time Line for Lap Nguyen and Nike

For complete time line of events See Nike In The News; For items relevant to Nike's Stock Prices, see Nike stock stories. See year by year Nike chronology.

1995 - October -  Nguyen Thi Lap starts working for Sam Yang (Korean owned) sneaker factory in Ku Chi, Vietnam. Her employee number is 11204.  March, 1996 she was promoted to section (team) leader of sewing line number 15. 

1996 - March 31 - The 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. It went on to say that immediately after the incident took place, 970 workers on strike to protest the mistreatment of their fellow workers (See Vietnam Labor Watch Report).

1996 - October 17 - CBS News 48 Hours transcript, October 17, 1996. CBS News. (c) MCMXCVI, CBS, Inc. Transcript of Roberta Baskins on site visit to Nike in Vietnam   This was the first interview with Nguyen Thi Lap a team leader in Nike's Sam Yang (Korean owned) sneaker factory in Ku Chi, Vietnam. 

• Nguyen Thi Lap's Her basic wage, even as a sewing team leader, still doesn't amount to the minimum wage, $42 a month for working six days a week.  Lap puts in more overtime than the annual Vietnam legal limit of 200 hours. 
• Lap " and 14 other team leaders were singled out and punished by their Korean supervisor, Madame Baeck, seen here sitting at a table with the Nike shoe she used to hit the women. It was in retaliation for some poor sewing. " Two were later sent to the hospital (Nguyen, Vietnam Labor Watch Report March 29, 1997). Madame Baeck was convicted, but was allowed to leave the country after the incident, despite conviction (source). 

1997, March 29 Vietnam Labor Watch Report is released that includes study of the Sam Yang factory.

1998 - April 2, ESPN's "Outside the Lines" ran an hour-long show on Nike and Reebok sweatshop abuses in Vietnam (Sweatshop Watch). This was based on ESPN's visit to Vietnam factories in February, 1998 (See Globe Project, Vietnam). 

• Thi Lieu was a 22-year-old worker in Reebok's Powyen  (Pou Chen?) factory. Lieu was fired after the ESPN report aired in April, 1998, then rehired after ESPN protests to Reebok. 
• In Spring 2000 (before August), Thi Lieu was let go along with 3000 other employees,  "When their contracts expired so they could be replaced by minimum wage workers, a common practice.
• In February, 1998, ESPN interviewed Nguyen Thi Lap, a senior worker with an exemplary history at Nike's Samyang plant in Ku Chi "When I went to the interview" says Lap (in 2000 ESPN Interview aired in December), " the Korean manager kept suggesting to me that as an employee of the company I always had to speak well for the company."
• In February and March, 1998 Lap worked 113 hours of overtime. 
• Lap was demoted several times after the April, 1998 interviews with ESPN aired.  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. 

1998 - May 12 - Knight spoke May 12th,1998  to the National Press Club Luncheon. 

• One month after the ESPN report aired, A CA class action suit was filed, and the Ernst and Young audit was front page news, Phil Knight, CEO of Nike announced major reforms. 
• Phil Knight 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" (May, 1998). 

2000 - Thuyen Nguyen's interview with Nguyen Thi Lap (a second copy is on the Clean Cloths Campaign Web site, and what happened to Lap). Thuyen Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American business man who has traveled to Vietnam to verify working conditions first hand.  Thuyen issued the Vietnam Labor Watch Report on March 29, 1997, after he returned from 16-day Fact-Finding Tour of Vietnam Factories in Vietnam.

2000- Chairman Phil Knight withdrew a $30 million contribution to the University of Oregon, which is Knight's alma matter. It is one of 45 universities that have joined Worker's Right Consortium (WRC), a student-backed anti-sweatshop group (See New York Times,  "Sweatshop King: Nike Exec Reneges On $30 Million Pledge" by Steven Greenhouse, April 25, 2000). See also Knight, P. H. 2000, 'Statement from Nike Founder & CEO Philip H. Knight Regarding the University of Oregon', Nike's web
site , Portland. 

2000- December - ESPN's Monthly Outside the Lines 10th Anniversary show which aired in December, 2000. This was their 10th Anniversary show. (See Globe Project, Vietnam). 

In sum, I read such stories everyday, sent to me by a circle of NGOs and friends who know I track Nike Corporation stomping and jumping around the globe. Why do I do this?  I am interested in the Nike storytelling organization, and in its relationship to other storytelling organizations, such as NikeWatch, and in leaders such as Dita Sari and victims like Lap Nguyen in this transorganizational network of storytelling organizations. I would like to give you some sense of this Nike Tamara.  At the root of Nike Tamara is what I have come to call the struggle over ‘narrative framing’ and a concept I am inventing called ‘antenarrative.’

Part I: Narrative Framing

Narrative Frames - In the past decades I have been conducting a number of class experiments and supervising research projects and dissertations into what I call “narrative frames” (Boje, 2000d; Luhman & Boje, 2001; Landrum 2000a, b; Landrum, 2001; Gardner, 2001). 

Narrative frames have a plot, as well as coherence, but not everyone in an organization subscribes to particular frame. The work to define and study narrative frames begins with a JABS article on mythmaking, then the 1991 ASQ article on the storytelling organization work of an office supply firm.  Research on the book with Dennehy (1993) tried to isolate premodern, modern, and postmodern narrative framing. Students conducted interviews to collect stories and then did a content analysis of their texts (Luhman & Boje, 2001).  For Managing in the Postmodern World book, and in the AMJ (1995) article, I analyzed Disney stories using the Tamara metaphor of storytelling organization, and looked at premodern, modern, and postmodern interpenetrating discourses of Disney’s official storytellers and the many unofficial counter-story narrators. 

SciLab Narrative Frames - My main premise is that even the most rigid bureaucracy, has spaces here and there where chaos intrudes, and where people have some freedom to be postmodern.  In the past four years, I have conducted a number of narrative frames experiments with a Science Lab (SciLab) in New Mexico.  The SciLab has been around since World War II and began as a militaristic, university-based bureaucratic narrative.  SciLab interviews, focus groups and recordings of talk at their meetings strongly suggest that SciLab has viewed itself through a bureaucratic narrative frame since World War II. When a new director took charge of SciLab in 1996, he began to counter the bureaucratic frame with his own rendition of chaos and complexity. 

This is really what I guess I mean by edge of chaos is that if you have an organization that's structural hierarchical and everybody's looking for these tasks to occur. It’s a very limited organization. It’s a high control organization. In other words, what you plan for or control for may well happen, but nothing else is going to happen and if you are at all wrong about where you're going or if you require thinking at various levels, it’s not going to happen. They're going to do what one person conceives for the whole organization. Now I'm a believer that one person who’s leading an organization should work with the organization to set a direction, but I'm a believer that that one person is a lot less effective than the three hundred other ones that work here.

So now I've got an organization, if it's an organizational mode, that is able to employ a variety of ways to match into the economy of the world. OK, a lot of people thinking, a lot of different energy states in which they're working in. Rather than all down at one, following one leader. Edge of chaos to me means that's where you are. You've got everybody occupying energy state where's there's this real mesh/ they're all really looking to see what's the best thing to do, how best to do their process. They're thinking ahead about where they think the organization should go. But there is an overall constraint and to say 'I've got to do it within this plan' sort of speak. So it does not all bubble away. You know what, everybody's not going every direction possible and you lose complete control.

Right at the edge of chaos is where you've got the maximum energy content without losing the structure.

One of the things they tried to do about eight years ago, is to change the structure by making (it) flatter. But they just renamed offices. They didn’t make it any flatter, they just renamed them. It stayed the same, with different names. I was no longer a supervisor, I was a team leader. (I did the) same thing. The organization stayed the same, and we got moved along into different areas, which, like I say, at the time it was not a good move.

This director wanted to shake up SciLab by introducing chaos and complexity as a disrupting narrative. 

And they run a team, and it’s much more chaotic and disorganized than the other part of the group. And the mistakes and craziness that's happened there, that upsets the people on the other side, because they think, "well we told you all along, it's going to get out of control." But, the amount of new ideas that is coming from it is tremendous. I mean it's just a generator of new ideas. Unfortunately those new ideas aren't leading into the other organizational elements. So part of it is how do you bring people into this culture. Because who wants to come to a culture like this?

Reactions to chaos and complexity framing were not all appreciative:

People DO NOT LIKE to work an organization that has edge of chaos. I've had people that will come to you and say, "I just don't know what's going on any more. Before I knew what I was supposed to do. What was going on." Of course what they knew to do was not the things we needed done.

We've had change and where we've made the changes it’s been very successful, but the organization doesn't want to go there.

In conducting our research we noticed that the SciLab employees and managers frequently recounted a third type of narrative frame, which we soon labeled “quest.”

We restructured into what was called a ‘Matrix’. All software people were in this group, and hardware people in this group, and when the project came around .. You took a programmer from here, and an engineer from here. (3) So that seemed to be a little bit more reasonable. There wasn’t quite as much fear.

Quest is a Joseph Campbell term for a journey in which the hero picks up traveling companions to obtain and return with the boon. For SciLab these were attempts to transform the bureaucratic discourse and practice and replace it with some other boon. In their case a matrix design in the 1970s, then in the 1990s the chaos and complexity narrative, and most recently attempts to convert to postmodern forms of organizing such as the network of semi-autonomous business units. 

So what edge of chaos is to my way of looking at is. Is looking at as a ... pot of water boiling so to speak. Or changing the temperature of a pot of water. You (2 second pause) as you first start boiling water. Let's say [WE ARE] an organization in its hierarchical form represents the water surface sitting there boiling. But as I move from that kind of fixed thing or even fixed flows that are occurring OK I start moving up to an area where when I get to boiling everything goes to chaotic mode OK/ there's turbulent behavior, you can't predict anything. That type of thing. But as I get close to boiling what happens is and I almost have to use a physics model. Have any of you had any physics?

It is my fault that SciLab became infected with the postmodern narrative frame. I could not resist introducing this lens to their sensemaking. The postmodern condition is one of fragmentation, the storytelling in which coherence is lacking and fragments are everywhere. This ideal frame was quickly perverted into discussions of networking, flux, and hybridity.  As one SciLab person put it:

Postmodern may actually be the best type, as far as technical support goes. Bureaucracy, to some extent, may be necessary to maintain an effective structure across the entire organization.

Many of the technical groups, as a sub-organization, already fall under this type of structure by default. The group needs to function as a team with empowered members that can react to the challenges without having to work through management.

Yannis (1998) argues that researchers who use stories as a research instrument, sacrifice some core values of their trade, such as being “objective, reliable, accurate etc.” (p. 136).  In this duality, researchers generate “factual account[s],” while storytellers depend on “an emotional engagement.”  At some point I crossed this boundary.

Together, in our action research, we developed a typology of bureaucratic, quest, chaos/complexity and postmodern/network narrative frames. We also crossed and recrossed the boundaries between emic (insider) and etic (outsider/researcher) categories, language, and frames. We repeatedly went back to SciLab collected more interviews, focus groups, and workshops to get feedback on these frames, to see if SciLab was a hybrid, competing multiple frames.

Table 1: Five Narrative Frames  

Since not everyone could attend focus groups or interviews, we developed an online method whereby SciLab members could enter stories of the various narrative frames and see the stories we had collected in interviews and focus groups up to that point (their stories are confidential and are not shown, See Narrative Frames Surveys).

Table 2 – Buffalo and Network Model

 Boje (2000a, b, c) gives you some insight into the attempts to move SciLab along its quest from bureaucracy they came to call the “Buffalo” model, to the Network/Postmodern they came to call the “Geese” approach.

Table 3: Five Narrative Frames