Josh Greenberg

Promotionalism and Subpolitics : Nike and Its Labor Critics

This article examines why Nike, the leading sports shoe and apparel merchandiser, has become a principal target of activism against sweatshop labor conditions in developing countries and why it has faced persistent public relations problems in its response to antisweatshop criticism. Nike has become a major target because it has successfully integrated different forms of corporate communication into the promotion of a high-profile corporate identity. The reflexive character of Nike’s promotionalism, however, has allowed for activist criticism that contrasts Nike’s claims of social responsibility with the labor conditions in its manufacturing operations. Antisweatshop activism, an example of what Beck calls subpolitics, is motivated by ethical interests, has a decentered network form of organization, and has a pluralistic, tactical focus. The effect of this activism has been to turn the debate over Nike’s labor practices into a dialectic between issues and crisis management, which accounts for Nike’s public relations problems.

Spinning climate change: Corporate and NGO public relations strategies in Canada and the United States

This article examines the role of PR in the debate about global climate change. Seeking to move beyond a focus on PR as just the handmaiden of corporate power, the article documents the fluid role of professionalized communication in terms of its impact on both corporate and NGO actors and their activities, focusing on communication tactics and the influence of PR consultancies. Drawing from the debates around the transformation of the public sphere, the article argues that the climate change issue illustrates not only structural change but also a wider cultural transformation marked by the emergence of promotionalism as the dominant communicative logic of both powerful and institutionally weaker players. It is argued that although existing political and economic resources provide certain actors with significant advantages, these assets and the structural advantages they tend to accrue cannot alone determine the outcome of struggles over climate change policy and public opinion.

Framing sweatshops: Nike, global production, and the American news media

This study examines US newspaper coverage of sweatshops, focusing on the case study of Nike (1995–2000) and asking how the coverage was structured, how sweatshops were problematized, and how they were explained. We find that while activists established a measure of definitional control over the coverage, it tended to concentrate on solutions rather than causes, and the source of the problem tended to be rooted in the agency of consumers rather than producers. This has implications for explaining how social, political, and cultural issues are transformed into essentially economic problems.

Media, communication and the establishment of public camera surveillance programmes in Canada

Throughout Europe and North America, policing services, government agencies and private-sector interests have turned increasingly to open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance to address crime, fear of crime and perceptions of social disorder. Although recent scholarly contributions have displaced the traditional explanatory reliance on the panopticon with mechanisms of consumer seduction, ‘post-panoptic’ insights into the establishment of open-street monitoring programmes have not advanced completely beyond the determinism reminiscent of the exercise of panoptical power. With the intention of supplementing the displacement of the panoptic paradigm with a less deterministic and more flexible framework, we conceptualize the establishment of public monitoring programmes in terms of the central role of communications and media in surveillance policy development and change. Presenting empirical data from an investigation of public camera surveillance in Canada, we develop theoretical and, necessarily, empirical insights that enable us to move beyond explanatory emphases on responsibilization strategies and social ordering techniques.