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Nike, Wile Coyote, and the Road runner in Vietnam
1st June 1998
Back to News Menu Submitted by Usha C. V. Haley Academic Advisor to the Asia Pacific Management Forum
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Professor David Boje, Editor of the highly-acclaimed
Journal of Organizational Change Management (USA), has an extremely
interesting WWW site chronicling the management abuses
of major US-based MNC, Nike, in Vietnam. Nike's flagrant
abuses of human rights include physically beating Vietnamese
women workers and keeping them in bondage. I strongly advise
reading two of his recent articles on the subject for a view
of the dark-side of foreign direct investment into Vietnam.
"Amos Tuck's Post-Sweat Nike Spin Story" -- To be published in
1998 Business Research Yearbook, accessible at the following URL on the
WWW: Excerpt...
My theory is that local stories are constantly deconstructing the official legends. Nike, as a storytelling organization, resorts to spinning dis-information, distortion, and diversion stories, constructed to mimic rigorous, empirical, and valid Academy-science. A Nike-sponsored Amos Tuck study suggests Nike workers can set aside almost half their income, as does the average worker in their Vietnamese study. My reanalysis of this Tuck empiricist wage-tale tells a different story: Nike workers in Vietnam are not only not saving, they are starving. Spin control?"Wile Coyote meets Roadrunner: Nike's Postmodern Encounters with Entrepreneurial Activists", accessible at the following URl on the WWW: http://cbae.nmsu.edu/mgt/handout/boje/coyote/index.html Excerpt...
Roadrunner and Wile Coyote are used as narrative metaphors to analyze how activist entrepreneurial strategies involve setting off chaos effects. Dozens of small entrepreneurs have been using their web sites in activist ways to change Nike Corporation's labor and environmental practices. Activists, engage in Roadrunner small change (ad)ventures to trip Nike, a Wile Coyote, multi-billion dollar company and even the entire sneaker industry into a chaos event chain that may well change the labor and environment practices in Third World countries. The entrepreneurial activist strategies include: telling the local story of individual worker's life experience to poke holes in Nike PR story lines about bringing the good life to Third World workers, setting up web site libraries of counter-stories to Nike's grand narratives of utopian economic progress, and using spectacles such as protests on campuses and boycotts at Nike outlets to seduce Nike consumers away from the allure of Nike's consumer culture spectacles. Each of these entrepreneurial strategies is analyzed using both postmodern and chaos theory.Professor Boje also has an extensive list of pro and ant-Nike sites on the WWW, accessible at the following URL: http://cbae.nmsu.edu/mgt/syllabi/1998/smr1/mgt514/sec1/index.html He is looking for more WWW links that discuss Nike's operations in emerging economies. Should you have such information, please contact him at dboje@nmsu.edu
Submitted by Usha C. V. Haley
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The views expressed here may not necessarily reflect those of Orient Pacific Century or partners of the Asia Pacific Management Forum
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