Nike Nations
David L. Andrews
Professor
University of Maryland School of Public Health
The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural but rather effects of a
regime of production . . . . Globalization, like localization, should be understood
instead as a regime of the production of identity and difference. . . local identities
are not autonomous or self-determining but actually feed into and support the
development of the capitalist imperial machine.1
- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Advertising, if indeed it is to be successful, needs to grab the attention; stir the
emotions; and, permeate the consciousness of potential consumers. This was clearly
the intention of a 60-foot roadside Nike advertisement (Figure 1), strategically positioned—with regard to both space and time—to capture the attention of commuters
stuck in the interminable West London traffic during June 2006. Encouraged by Nike,
the thoughts of this captive audience were turned to a subject that has come to be the
media-induced obsession of the English populace: the state and fate of the national
football team. Dominating the advertising billboard was the image of a gargantuansized Wayne Rooney (the talented, if flawed, populist everyman hero of English tabloid
football culture) in familiar post-goal celebratory exclamation; but, less familiarly, with
a red cross roughly daubed on his purposefully monochromatic bare head, arms, and
torso.
This arresting image was developed and mobilized at this time in order to herald
Rooney’s return from injury, in time to play on the national team in the 2006 FIFA
World Cup. Thus, the messianic Rooney returns from the wilderness of injury to surely
propel the England team to its long overdue triumph on the world football stage.2
According to a Nike spokesperson—responding to predictable criticisms of it being
both overly aggressive (a de facto throwback to Crusade imagery) and sacrilegious (by
invoking a Christian crucifix)—the advertisement was “a case of catching the mood
of the nation as everyone urges Rooney on to great things, and of course our slogan
puts it perfectly.”3
David L. Andrews is a professor in the Physical Cultural Studies Program of the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
Copyright © 2008 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs
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David L. Andrews
Figure 1: Nike’s Wayne Rooney advertisement
42
From some vantage points, the Rooney “warrior” advertisement may seem a rather
frivolous and incidental cultural artifact, but there is much to be gained in terms of
socio-historic insight by placing the banal aspects of contemporary existence in their
broader social, economic, and political contexts.4 Within advanced consumer societies, advertising discourse is clearly a routine element of everyday life. Moreover, and
specifically when looking to appeal to the populist sensibilities of the mass market,
advertising is a cultural field constituted by, and a constituent of, the forces and sensibilities shaping society in general.
The sight of Rooney’s bullish image plastered on a West London billboard and
announcing itself from pages of various national newspapers speaks of important tensions within the formation of contemporary “capitalist globalization.”5 Nike’s rendition
of the warrior Rooney provides a graphic point of entry for debates about the complex
intersections of transnational capital, transnational corporations, and transnational
products. In particular, the juxtaposition of transnational leviathan (Nike) and national
allegory (flag, football, Rooney) highlights the relationship between the global and the
local; between universalism and particularity; and between homogeneity and heterogeneity. These generative relations provide the focus for this discussion: transnational
capitalism’s productive engagement with various aspects of the sporting nation and
sporting nationalism. In focusing largely, but not exclusively, on Nike, this article aims
to critically highlight transnational capitalism’s penchant for utilizing sport as a means
of operating simultaneously and seamlessly in multiple national cultural contexts, thus
reconfiguring both national and international relations.
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Nike Nations
The Nation and Transnational Capitalism
The image of Rooney as the cross of St. George attests to deep-rooted national affiliations
and attachments that inform transnational advertising. 6 This is because the very idea
of the nation, and the associated feelings of national belonging, have endured even as
the autonomous structure and function of the nation-state have been compromised by
global political and economic ideologies, structures, and alliances.7 National affiliations
“have proved . . . durable, protean and resilient through all vicissitudes” associated with
the spread of transnational capitalism.8 Nations continue to carry out important political, economic, legal, and military functions to sustain the global architecture and flow
of “capital, trade, investment, services, and numerous other interactions.” 9 Therefore,
transnational capitalism still relies on the nation as a source of mass cultural belonging
and identification, through which national markets can be effectively constituted.
Long gone is the phase of market internationalization wherein corporations
looking to increase their geographic reach treated the “entire world” as a single, undifferentiated entity, thereby selling the “same things in the same way everywhere.”10 This
commercial and cultural imperialism, which largely emanated from the United States,
ultimately proved financially limiting.11 Despite aspirant international corporations’
overt economic might—and more covert political underpinning—local cultures failed
to buckle under the weight of strategic global uniformity. Thus, many corporations realized that the objective of securing a profitable global presence requires operating within
the local practices and sensibilities of multiple geographically and culturally disparate
locations simultaneously.12 While this discussion focuses on the sporting iterations of
transnational strategizing, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that this local sensibility has become a normalized practice in general. The McDonald’s corporation is
an illustrative example of a global leviathan that has actively, if superficially, embraced
the local. Whether referring to restaurant location and design, the constituents of
the menu and products, or marketing and advertising, McDonald’s clearly seeks to
localize itself, simultaneously, in a multitude of disparate locations. The KiwiBurger,
introduced in New Zealand restaurants in the early 1990s, represents an illustrative
example of this practice.
While the endangered Kiwi bird was in no way involved, the sandwiches ingredients did include New Zealand favorites such as beets and fried eggs. Furthermore, the
marketing of the product was clearly indigenized, incorporating a song and product
packaging that spoke to ingrained and emotive elements of New Zealand popular
culture:
Kiwis love, hot pools, rugby balls, McDonald’s, snapper schools, world peace, woolly
fleece, Ronald and raising beasts, chilly bins, cricket wins, fast skis, golf tees, silver
ferns, kauri trees, Kiwiburger™, love one please!! 13
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David L. Andrews
Figure 2: McDonald’s Kiwiburger
44
McDonald’s has been localized with considerable success (the discontinued KiwiBurger
was brought back by popular demand in 2007). As anthropologist James L. Watson
noted, “McDonald’s has become a routine, unremarkable feature of the urban landscape in Japan and Hong Kong. It is so ‘local’ that many youngsters do not know of
the company’s foreign origins.”14 So, from McDonald’s to Coca-Cola, Heinz to Toyota,
and far from transcending the nation—as is commonly misunderstood—contemporary
modes of transnational capitalism seek instead to inhabit and commandeer it.
Corporations are now playing an ever more significant role in the processes
of national “re-localization” or re-territorialization—arguably, the counter-intuitive
corollaries of the maturing global capitalist order.15 Transnational brand strategies
increasingly use locally resonant sport practices, teams, spectacles, and celebrities as a
means of engaging local consumers and markets. This is because the dominant, and
even residual, sporting culture of a nation represents a compelling cultural shorthand
for the nation itself.16 Indeed, apart from the military, one is hard-pressed to identify
an institutional embodiment of the nation as emotively charged as sport. Sport clearly
exerts a considerable influence upon the hearts, minds, and—crucially—spending habits
of the national populace. For example, following England’s recent ignominious failure
to qualify for the 2008 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Championship, a spokesperson for the British Retail Consortium estimated a £600 million
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Nike Nations
decline in sales due to the fact that “major football tournaments unite the country more
than any other national event. . . . Spending is going to be hugely affected in pubs, on
food, flags, and even in big screen TVs.”17 However, the paradox of the modern sport
system is that while it is local in its resonance and experience, it is unequivocally global
in structure and reach.
Sport’s Universal Particularism
The pre-modern sporting landscape comprised a patchwork of localized game forms that,
although displaying significant common elements, were sufficiently distinct according
to local rules and customs so as to prohibit them from acquiring wider resonance and
mobility. The socially, politically, and economically transformative processes of Western
European urbanization and industrialization led to the standardization, codification, and
bureaucratization of many traditional sport forms.18 Pre-modern localized sport forms,
with their necessarily restricted reach of participants and adherents, could not survive the
spread and hegemony of universal sport practices. Furthermore, in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, national sporting bodies were compelled to adhere to a
Western European–dominated universal architecture of sport organizations in order
to be included within the unfolding international community of sporting nations.19
Highest among these universalizing sport organizations were the International Olympic
Committee and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), founded
in 1896 and 1904 respectively. In the second half of the twentieth century, aggressive
corporatization (the management and marketing of sporting entities according to profit
motives); spectacularization (the primacy of producing entertainment-driven experiences); and commodification (the generation of multiple sport-related revenue streams)
have confirmed the global uniformity of sport’s institutional infrastructure to the degree
that there is no longer any viable alternative to the corporate sport model.20
Despite the homogenizing aspects of the global sport system, cultural particularities have endured—ironically, through the very manner in which universalized sport
forms were popularized within, and incorporated into, local sporting cultures. Oftentimes encouraged by political and commercial elites, sport became an important part of
the collective mythos of many formative nations.21 However, sport was by no means a
practice imposed on the national populace from above. By the late nineteenth century,
arguably due to its visceral and emotive corporeality, sport had acquired a popular
appeal that the political elites of industrializing nations sought to harness in building
national cohesion and identity. Eric Hobsbawm most insightfully captured the generative relation between sporting bodies and the sense of belonging to the modern nation
in his oft repeated dictum: “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a
team of eleven named people. The individual, even the one who only cheers, becomes a
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David L. Andrews
symbol of his nation himself.”22 Furthermore, the universalization of modern sporting
particularisms has created a global network of “distinctive corporeal techniques, playing
styles, aesthetic codes, administrative structures, and interpretive vocabularies” through
which localized sporting cultures define and delineate themselves within the universal
language of sport.23 Interestingly, and while not the focus of this discussion, these
sporting locales are often sub-national, regional, metropolitan, or even neighborhood
in scale, and are increasingly coming within the purview of commercial strategists, as
micro-marketing approaches have come to the fore.
Nike Nationalisms
Given sport’s symbiotic relationship with the modern nation as a “constant evocation . . .
anchor point and rallying cry,” transnational capitalism’s interest in local sport cultures
is understandable, if not always fully acknowledged or understood.24 In a 2003 Guardian newspaper interview, Phil Knight—then Nike CEO and president—provided an
interesting response when questioned about the company’s stance on globalization:
46
We want the brand to stand for the same thing all over the world. We don’t want
the brand to be different in Europe or Asia, but we know that is not easy . . . accept
our Americanism with an asterisk. Our goal is to be a global company. We will never
duck our American heritage, and that’s not a bad place to be. As a friend of mine
once said to me, America and sports is like France and cooking.25
Knight’s response was surprising for two reasons. First, whether knowingly or otherwise,
he barely acknowledged the changing climate in which globally expansionist capital
now operates. With an increased awareness of exploitative production practices within
developing economies and the perceived threat of global cultural homogenization,
the time of Knight’s statement was actually a moment of intensifying hostility toward
global brands such as Nike, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Disney.26 This was also a
time of heightened scrutiny regarding U.S. expansionism of all varieties, as the U.S.
military initiated incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq in October 2001 and March
2003, respectively. Knight ignored all of this in his largely unapologetic paean to Nike’s
corporate imperialist aspirations, in addition to the localized advertising practices of
his own company.
Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, Knight’s cavalier Americanism was clearly
at odds with the manner in which Nike and its global advertisers, primarily Wieden
& Kennedy, had consciously and carefully crafted Nike’s brand identity over the past
decade or so. During this time, Nike had experienced significant phases of reconfiguration, rendering it an exemplar of the contemporary transnational corporate order.
Nike was never a uniquely national entity, existing and operating within the
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Nike Nations
boundaries of a single nation-state. Rather, from its moment of origin in the early 1960s,
in order to take advantage of reduced labor costs, Nike was built on a foundation of
international trade relations between Japan (the original site of shoe manufacture) and
the United States. Nike’s success in the U.S. market during the 1970s and 1980s led to
the recognition that the corporation’s future growth could only be realized by a more
concerted expansion into international markets. At this time, Nike took on the structure
and mission of an international corporation, engaging the international marketplace as
a single, undifferentiated entity, with its explicitly U.S. ethos and inventory.
It is this U.S. imperialist phase within the globalization of Nike that Phil Knight
expressed when pointing to the undesirability, and indeed impossibility, of separating the
Nike brand from its U.S. aura. However, this is precisely what has happened. Since the
mid-1990s, Nike has become an enthusiastically transnational corporation by actively
engaging and mobilizing national and regional markets as part of a differentiated global
approach. Indeed, despite Knight’s later confusion, this was Nike’s stated goal in 1996:
“We have to approach our brand marketing from a global point of view, but also must
devise a country-by-country plan to make the brand part of the cultural fabric.”27
Honed within the U.S. context, the Nike brand’s meticulously crafted blend of
sport performance attributes, oft-irreverent individualism, unbounded possibility, and
stylized aesthetics has been transposed and transformed far and wide.28 In a manner
analogous to McDonald’s,29 Nike exemplifies the “glocalizing” structure and practice
of the transnational corporation—glocalization referring less to the “presence of global
artifacts in the local, and more to a process of institutionalization, in which there is a
global creation of locality.”30 With a television and print advertising budget of $1.91
billion in fiscal year 2007,31 and the institutional reach of Wieden & Kennedy offices
in Portland, New York, London, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Tokyo, Nike has pursued
national market building objectives within locales as diverse as Germany, Brazil, Malaysia, Australia, and China.32
A Nike Japanese television commercial campaign titled “Birth Series,” developed by Wieden & Kennedy’s Tokyo office in 2005, is an excellent illustration of
Nike’s transnational contrivances. In philosophical terms, the aim of this campaign
was to promote Bukatsu, the club system within Japanese schools and expected venue
for student’s extracurricular activities. Specifically, the goal of the campaign was to
encourage the physical activity–nurturing forms of Bukatsu as a stimulus for youth
sport participation.
The entire campaign is centered around an anthropomorphized breaded pork
cutlet, created in the kitchen of the archetypal Japanese grandmother. This staple element of Japanese home cooking jostles while training with Japanese soccer star Junichi
Inamoto, plays one-on-one basketball while its shed breading covers the court floor,
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David L. Andrews
48
and runs in a high school track race. The peculiar juxtaposition between the traditional
food item and youth sport participation is explained by the fact that the Japanese for
breaded pork cutlet is Katsu-kun, and Katsu also means to win. Hence, the double
entendre proves meaningful for the local initiate, if not for the global voyeur.
As exemplified by “Birth Series,” transnational Nike differs from international
Nike through its explicit engagement with, and incorporation of, the local differences it had previously sought to overcome.33 This does not mean Nike inhabits and
advances a multiplicity of wholly distinct identities, in accordance with its incursions
into a multitude of national markets. Rather, Nike’s core brand identity and ethos is
re-worked according to the specificities of the local culture being engaged. However,
along with advertising campaigns seeking to resonate within specific national sporting contexts, Nike’s transnational strategizing also incorporates initiatives designed to
engage a multitude of markets simultaneously. These have included regional campaigns
focused on the core markets within the Nike brand’s four geographic operating regions:
the United States; the Americas; Asia Pacific; and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
To rationalize escalating global advertising costs, Nike has also developed a series of
“mono-textual yet multi-vocal” global promotional campaigns, which combine elements
from diverse national sporting cultures within a single advertising text.34
Nike’s “multi-vocal” campaigns are most evident within their incursion into the
global football marketplace, which began in earnest during the lead up to the 1994
FIFA World Cup, held in the United States. From this moment onwards, for each
FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Championship tournament, Nike has produced
increasingly elaborate, multi-vocal and multi-platform global campaigns aimed at
challenging Adidas’s supremacy in the football marketplace.35 Within each campaign,
a shifting collection of Nike-sponsored football notables are positioned and presented
as representatives of their respective nations.
Through its mono- and multi-vocal transnational sport strategizing, Nike has
advanced evocative, yet fundamentally caricatured and shallow, embodiments of the
nations that inhabit Nike’s world. We are ensconced in the age of the “Nike nation”:
an epoch in which transnational capital’s commercially inspired representations of
geographically bounded markets (nations) and consumers (national populaces) are
produced and imagined as much through the sport-related promotional and advertising discourse of transnational corporations as they are through traditional vehicles of
national cultural constitution.36 Of course, Nike is by no means the only participant in
the transnational sporting circus; it is simply the most successful and visible one.
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Anything You Can Do
Adidas Ltd., the German-based sports footwear and apparel manufacturer, has forged
a truly global presence through its engagement with multiple sporting locals. Perhaps
the most insightful of Adidas’s transnational ventures came with its incursion into
the rugby culture of Aotearoa/New Zealand. As the sponsors of the New Zealand All
Blacks rugby team, Adidas looked to utilize this most iconic of New Zealand sporting institutions as a means of articulating the brand within the popular practices and
sensibilities of the local populace, a process described by as the “Adidasification of the
New Zealand All Blacks.”37
For the lead up to the 1999 World Cup, transnational advertising firm Saatchi
produced an emotive and controversial commercial which sought to suture, in material and symbolic senses, Adidas’s place on the All Black jersey to New Zealand and
global audiences alike:
In brief, the commercial begins with shots of bubbling mudpools, symbolic of the
volcanic thermal hot springs that are a key feature of the tourist hot spot, Rotorua,
home to one of the largest tribes, Te Arawa. The scene then shifts back and forth
between images of current All Blacks players performing the haka and Mäori
warriors of the past. The scantily clad warriors are portrayed as intense, angry fighters
complete with moko, that is, traditional Mäori facial tattoos. The ad’s concluding
shots feature Mäori All Black Kees Meeuws staring back intensely at his opponents
after completing the haka.38
Although similar in practice to Nike’s playful appropriation of the Japanese breaded
cutlet, Adidas’s transnational production of locality stirred significant resistance. This
resistance centered on the non-sanctioned corruption of a highly symbolic element of
indigenous culture (the Mäori haka), but objections also arose because the advertisement
depicted an indigenous people (the Mäori) as primitive savages, all for the purpose of
selling rugby shirts and advancing the Adidas brand.
The culturally and commercially seductive use of sporting imagery is by no means
exclusive to the sport industry. There is a welter of global corporations that use sport
as part of transnational brand strategies. Coca-Cola has long looked to neuter its U.S.
edge when operating in the international market. Initially, this was achieved by producing nationally ambiguous, and thereby globally inclusive, advertising campaigns.39
In more recent times, specific Coca-Cola campaigns have provided a narrow focus
on specific regional and national cultures. The global “Eat Football, Sleep Football,
Drink Coca-Cola” campaign focused on the dominant football forms within specific
market regions: North American (U.S. football); Latin American (association football);
European (association football); and Australasian (Australian rules football). Within
each setting, and through commercial narratives that focused on the relevant football
code, Coca-Cola was conjugated with the passion, intensity, and excitement of the lo-
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David L. Andrews
cal football culture. As Michael Black, Coca-Cola’s director for marketing for Central
America and the Caribbean, stated in regard to promotions linked to the 1998 FIFA
World Cup, “We want to communicate to our consumers that Coca-Cola is the brand
that best understands their passion for soccer.”40
The case of Guinness is perhaps an even better example of glocalized branding
by a transnational organization, particular in its engagement with the Africa market.
In seeking to modify its core brand values of “self-belief ” and “inner strength” for the
African context, Guinness turned to football. Their brand director for Africa explained
that Guinness produced advertisements of resource-limited African teams succeeding
in international competition to evoke and tap into feelings of inner strength among
their viewers:
50
The need for self-belief, the need for inner strength is particularly relevant in Africa.
The reason is that Africans see themselves as coming from a disadvantage. In every
way of life, Africa is behind the world. Again Africans believe, “Because we are
Africans we can overcome all of those obstacles and we can achieve things almost of
world standard. . . .” We have leveraged that during the World Cup with the football
ad, where we have shown Africans training on sub-standard pitches without sports
equipment and saying “Well, because we are what we are, because we believe in
ourselves, we can overcome” and then we lead on from that showing national teams,
African national teams, that have played in the World Cup and have performed well.
So again, it is tying the need of Africans to believe that in spite of our disadvantages
we can still be reckoned with at the global stage, and tying that to the brand benefit
of inner strength, that it reflects your inner strength.41
The reduction of an entire continent to a single market inhabited by uniformly African consumers is a remarkable insight into the minds of transnational marketers. It is
also a telling example of how particular representations of the local (in this case, the
continent-wide local) enter, and potentially inform, the public domain.
Conclusion
While we have by no means entered a “post-national” world as some predicted, we are
in a period in which the very derivation and experience of the nation is changing under
the logics of transnational capitalism.42 As such, this discussion has sought to provide
an introduction to the phenomenon whereby the core constituents within the global
sport industry are complicit in advancing the contemporaneous dynamics and practices
of national “re-localization.”43 Such transnational corporate iterations of nation and
national difference are not necessarily any more false, imagined, or inauthentic than
those constituted internally through political doctrine and dictate. They are, however,
motivated by different, although undoubtedly related, objectives: the nation-state seek-
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Nike Nations
ing to advance a more cohesive national formation in order to produce a more governable
and productive citizenry, versus the transnational corporation looking to represent the
nation as a means of constituting a desirous consumer populace. In this process, the
locals being imagined and authenticated “from above or outside” are “expressed in terms
of generalized recipes of locality.”44 Hence, the transnational approaches developed by
Nike and others do not imply “any serious recognition of the autonomy of the local”
but are intended to recognize and advance superficial and largely caricatured “features
of the local so as to incorporate localities into the imperatives of the global.”45 Clearly,
we need to heed Lawrence Grossberg’s warning regarding the uncritical perception of
the local as an “intellectual and political” corrective to, or site of “agency and resistance”
against, the global.46 The sporting nation, as presently constituted and experienced, has
become a covert accomplice of capitalist globalization, and needs to be both recognized
and addressed as such. W
A
Notes
1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 45.
2. Much to the dismay of an overly expectant national populace, who should know better by now than
to listen to media hyperbole, the English team’s search for glory ended ignominiously with yet another
penalty shoot out loss, this time to Portugal.
3. Anon, “Nike Attacked over Rooney ‘Warrior’ Picture,” Daily Mail, June 21, 2006.
4. John Frow and Meaghan Morris, “Cultural Studies,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman
K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 315–346.
5. Leslie Sklair, “Capitalist Globalization: Fatal Flaws and Necessity for Alternatives,” Brown Journal of
World Affairs 13, no. 1 (2006): 29–37.
6. Kevin Robins, “What in the World’s Going On?” in Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, ed.
Paul Du Gay (London: The Open University, 1997), 20.
7. Peter L. Berger, and Samuel P. Huntington, ed., Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the
Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds.,
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press,
1999); Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobilty of People and Money
(New York: The New Press, 1998).
8. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 163.
9. Mark C. Gordon, Democracy’s New Challenge: Globalization, Governance, and the Future of American
Federalism (New York: Demos: A Network for Ideas and Action, 2001).
10. Theodore M. Levitt, The Marketing Imagination (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1983), 22.
11. Uri Ram, “Liquid Identities: Mecca Cola Versus Coca-Cola,” European Journal of Cultural Studies
10, no. 4 (2007): 465-84; John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991).
12. Arif Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” in Global Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational
Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 21–45; Stuart
Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the WorldSystem, ed. Anthony D. King (London: Macmillan, 1991), 19–39; David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces
of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995).
13. Scoop, “McDonald’s Celebrates Return of KiwiBurger,” May 1, 2007, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0705/S00017.htm.
Spring/Summer 2008 • volume xiv, issue 2
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David L. Andrews
52
14. James L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: Mcdonald’s in East Asia (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 37–38
15. Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity, 115.
16. Michael Silk, David L. Andrews, “Beyond a Boundary? Sport, Transnational Advertising, and the
Reimagining of National Culture,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 25, no. 2 (2001): 180–201.
17. Teena Lyons, “Sports Retailers Issue Profit Warning,” The Guardian, November 22, 2007.
18. Norbert Elias, Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986); Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1978).
19. The geo-political origins of the contemporary sport system are plain to see from the places of foundation of the following international sporting governing bodies: the International Rugby Board (originally the
International Rugby Football Board), founded in the United Kingdom in 1886; the International Olympic
Committee, founded in Paris in 1894; the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, founded in Paris
in 1904; the International Cricket Council (originally the Imperial Cricket Council), founded in London
in 1909; and the International Association of Athletics Federations founded, in Stockholm in 1912.
20. David L. Andrews, Sport-Commerce-Culture: Essays on Sport in Late Capitalist America (New York:
Peter Lang, 2006); David L. Andrews and George Ritzer, “The Grobal in the Sporting Glocal,” Global
Networks 7, no. 2 (2007): 135–53.
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983); Alan Bairner, Sport, Nationalism, and Globalization: European and
North American Perspectives (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Maarten Van Bottenburg, Global Games, trans. Beverly Jackson (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Joseph A.
Maguire, Global Sport: Identities, Societies, Civilization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
22. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
23. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992); Richard
Giulianotti and Roland Robertson, “The Globalization of Football: A Study in the Glocalization of the
‘Serious Life,’” British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 4 (2004): 549.
24. David Rowe, “Sport and the Repudation of the Global,” International Review for the Sociology of
Sport 38, no. 3 (2003): 287.
25. Phil Knight, quoted in Stefano Hatfield, “What Makes Nikes Advertising Tick: Phil Knight is
Prepared to Take Risks to Give his Company a Sporting Chance” [Electronic Version], Guardian, 2003,
June from http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,978807,00.html (accessed June 18, 2007).
26. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999).
27. Liz Dolan, Nike’s Vice-President for global marketing communications, quoted in Jeffrey Jensen,
“Marketer of the Year,” Advertising Age 67, no. 51 (1996): 1, 16.
28. Cheryl L. Cole and Amy S. Hribar, “Celebrity Feminism: Nike Style—Post-Fordism, Transcendence,
and Consumer Power,” Sociology of Sport Journal 12, no. 4 (1995): 347–369; Robert Goldman, Stephen
Papson, Nike Culture (London: Sage, 1998); Jeremy W. Howell, “’A Revolution in Motion’: Advertising
and the Politics of Nostalgia,” Sociology of Sport Journal 8, no. 3 (1991): 258–271.
29. Watson, Golden Arches East.
30. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, “Globalization, Modernity and the Spatialization of Social
Theory: An Introduction,” in Global Modernities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 4.
31. For fiscal year 2007, Nike’s total revenue was $16.3 billion, with net income of $1.49 billion. See
www.nike.com/nikebiz/.
32. See http://www.wk.com/.
33. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and
the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King, (London: Macmillan, 1991), 19–39.
34. Silk and Andrews, “Beyond a Boundary.”
35. Campaigns included “The Wall” (1994), “Good versus Evil” (1996), “Beach” and “Airport” (1998),
the brown journal of world affairs
Nike Nations
“The Mission” (2000), “Secret Tournament” (2002), “Olé Football” (2004), and “Joga Bonito” (2006).
36.To my knowledge, this phrase was coined by the insightful and innovative mind of C.L. Cole.
37. Steven J. Jackson, Richard Batty, and Jay Scherer, “Transnational sport marketing at the global/local
nexus: The Adidasification of the New Zealand All Blacks,” International Journal of Sports Marketing and
Sponsorship, 3, no. 2 (2001): 185–201.
38. Steven J. Jackson and Brendon Hokowhitu, “Sport, Tribes, and Technology: The New Zealand All
Blacks Haka and the Politics of Identity,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 26, no. 2 (2002): 132.
39. Mark Prendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the Great American
Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998).
40. L.R. Sigual, “Scoring Sales,” Latin Trade 6, no. 6 (1997).
41. Quoted in John Amis, “Beyond Sport: Imaging and Re-imaging a Transnational Brand,” in Sport
and Corporate Nationalisms, eds. Micahel L. Silk, David L. Andrews, and Cheryl L. Cole (Oxford: Berg,
2005), 157.
42. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 143; Ulf Hannerz, Transnational
Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Comedia, 1996).
43. Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity.
44. Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, eds. Michael Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 26.
45. Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” 34.
46. Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies, Modern Logics, and Theories of Globalisation” in Back to
Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies, ed. Angela McRobbie (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997), 8.
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Spring/Summer 2008 • volume xiv, issue 2