Youth Culture and Sport

Identity, Power, and Politics

Michael D. Giardina, Michele K. Donnelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135914639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Youth Culture and Sport critically interrogates and challenges contemporary articulations of race, class, gender, and sexual relations circulating throughout popular iterations of youth sporting culture in late-capitalism. Written against the backdrop of important changes in social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics taking place in corporate culture's war on kids, this exciting new volume marks the first anthology to critically examine the intersection of youth culture and sport in an age of global uncertainty. Bringing together leading scholars from cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, sport studies, and related fields, chapters range in scope from 'action' sport subcultures and community redevelopment programs to the cultural politics of white masculinity and Nike advertising. It is a must read for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the role sport plays in the construction of experiences, identities, practices, and social differences of contemporary youth culture.

SECTION II

Branding the “Alternative”

CHAPTER 4

Exploiting a New Generation

Corporate Branding and the Co-Optation of Action Sport

ROBERT E. RINEHART

[Brands] are commercial propaganda, much more insidious than political propaganda, which has never achieved such planetary scope.

—Emmanuelle Garnaud, 2000

… tell the traveling public “Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”

—George W. Bush, September 27, 2001

The above quote is from a speech given by U.S. President George W. Bush to a group of airline employees at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport just two weeks after the U.S. airline industry virtually had come to a standstill post-9/11. It was meant to serve two major purposes: it was intended to reassure an American public—frightened by repetitive visual traumatization through a voracious and voyeuristic media—that flying was again safe, and it was meant to tell the world that the United States would not let a terrorist attack affect “our way of life.” But it also served third and fourth purposes: the statement demonstrated that the U. S. way of life insisted upon a capitalist model of spending beyond one’s means, and it showed that perception and the surrounding aura of advertising—in this case advertising as exhortation to spend, spend, spend!—could be convincing and, indeed, could itself produce self-certain conviction.

Leaders have often sought to reassure their publics during times of crisis, but rarely have leaders—even of capitalist nations—sought to reassure by overtly calling upon the crass commercial resources of a nation as sites of nostalgic comfort and basic security. Thus, it is that visiting Disney World (not coincidentally in Bush’s gubernatorial brother Jeb’s home state of Florida) received a White House sanction as a patriotic gesture that people could perform in order to recover from the devastating trauma of 9/11. The fact that Disney is a part of a non-threatening, collusive “living brand” (Nadeau, 2007, p. 279), which translates to a continual source of what Ritzer (2005) has come to claim is consumer “enchantment,” only serves to make Bush’s statement more comforting to American consumers: it is as if the terror and shock of the events of 9/11, replayed over and over and over ad nauseam, could somehow be assuaged by the cuddly, feel-good consumption of Disney artifacts and presence. The nostalgic yearning for a yesteryear-that-never-was is a part of this mindful-less retreat from reality, and media corporations, performing what Michael Eisner termed “synergies” with one another, push and pull at the consumer. The very same ABC/Disney/CapCities venture that brought you terrorists (repeatedly) steering an airplane into the Twin Towers comforts you with a (repeated) reenactment of a safer, more “enchanted” time.

Thus, as a Disneyfication of security has occurred, so, too, has a linkage between sport, security, “traditional” values, and consumerism become naturalized. Nowhere has the use of sport as a vehicle for consumerism been more obvious than in extreme, or action, sports. While the professed values of action sports participants trace their roots from non-violent, non-traditional, oppositional, and non-consumerist ethos, the appropriation of such sport forms by commercially-driven trans-national corporations has created an uncomfortable dynamic.

Gen Xers and the Millennial Generation (or Gen Yers) are the primary targets of the dismantling of individual agency—aligned, of course, with the implicitly naturalized rhetorical assumption by Bush that Americans are their most patriotic when we are consumers. Gen X has been characterized as a whole generation of mythical slackers (Holt, 2004, pp. 51–53); the Millennial Generation (“born in or after 1982”; Howe & Strauss, 2000, p. 4) has been characterized (in contrast to Gen X) as

… unlike any youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse. More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty, and good conduct. (Howe & Strauss, 2000, p. 4)

While Gen X still embraced a counter-culture ethos, the Millennials are demonstrating an aversion to controversy, to disagreement, to oppositional stances. On the one hand, Neil Postman (cf., 1985, 1994) characterizes current generations’ troubles as fundamentally media-driven. At the same time, Grossberg (2005) points out that “the so-called millennial generation… are living in a society in which the government spent significantly more on their parents than it did on them” (p. 38). Giroux (2000) sees a more complex problem: an ambivalent attitude by adults, a giving up of agency, a refinement and efficient manipulation of corporate culture, all structures which serve to induce children to behave in ways antithetical to their own best interests. Is this because the Millennial Generation has already been appropriated, seduced through commercial socialization (that is, the socialization that occurs when an individual identifies primarily with corporate goals), to assume themselves as, most saliently, consumers? And has this sociological seduction occurred in the quiet non-struggle within and from such corporate giants as Disney, Fox, or ESPN, in such gentle venues as Disney World, the Gravity Games, or the X Games?

The claim is that Generation Y (“the Millennials”) is the first generation to be totally immersed in branding, because “branding,” as opposed to the mere “advertising” of a tangible product, really reached its ascendancy beginning in the 1980s (Klein, 2000). As Shank (2005) describes it, branding “allow[s] an organization to distinguish and differentiate itself from all others in the marketplace” (p. 228). But the emphasis on product and mass advertising, so prevalent televisually during the 1950s and, prior to that, from the late 1800s onward, has neatly elided with this new seamless emphasis on branding.

Concomitant to that emphasis, and, of course, resistant to it as well, stands a new consumer, one awash in branding symbology, immersed in myriad logo-identifications, who is perhaps a dupe of the complex postmodern world of advertising. While Giroux (2000), I think rightfully, points out that “popular culture is not only a site of enormous contradiction but also a site of negotiation for kids, one of the few places where they can speak for themselves, produce alternative public spheres, and represent their own interests” (p. 13), kids also own less and less power on a daily basis vis-à-vis transnational corporations. Their very persons have grown up with a naturalized stance that they are consumers—few alternatives have been offered to that self-identity. Assumptions that the world is a growing capitalist endeavor, and that capitalism is somehow linked with democratic ideals, are rarely questioned. And marginalized groups are especially disempowered: Giroux (2000) points out that “Latino and black youth bear the burden of an adult society that either views them as disposable and as a threat to middle-class life, or reifies them through a commercial logic in search of a new market niche” (p. 14).

In terms of this “commercial logic,” we see in the sport marketing literature, for example, cases of how sport marketers may more effectively motivate consumers, of how they may provide more efficient services, of how they might rate consumer satisfaction. The very facts of consumerism are rarely questioned in such literature. But if they are rarely questioned by adults, who presumably have more experience and more perspective, how are they viewed by children?

If that targeted consumer¹ happens to be youthful, happens to have a tabula rasa upon which corporate interests may imprint their messages of consumption—not just of certain products, but of consuming itself—the use of such repetitive marketing devices has evolved into a mass-marketed socialization of youth with the goal of creating over-consuming adults. In the 1990s, the tobacco industry was maligned for targeting youth for consumption of cigarettes and tobacco products, but one of the motivating forces behind that legal attack on the industry was based on health issues. Creating lifelong consumers, such as Disney and the NFL and MLB and NHL (and so on) do, is seen as an almost-exclusively positive gesture by corporations. After all, if kids aren’t fawning over Donald Duck or Tiger Woods, aren’t modeling Tony Hawk or Kim Possible^® (whose “brands” are hegemonically constructed as positive), the thinking goes, they might be getting into trouble! As Giroux (2000) explains, the linkages between “the market and representative democracy [are seen as constituting]… with few exceptions, the universal values of the new global village” (p. 1). The potential for extreme sport to align itself with such a cultural myth have been, and continue to be, realized, often at the expense of spectators, athletes, and the general public. And branding provides one of the key linkages between the marketplace and this sense of democratic values. In a sense, identification with a brand has been portrayed as a substitute for representative democracy.

Branding, ubiquitous as ever, marks postmodern sport: the Nike swoosh marks professionalized collegiate teams (due to product and sponsorship deals wrought by Nike with many of the coaches—and schools—in the United States), corporate interests mark bowl games (e.g., PapaJohns.com Bowl, Allstate Sugar Bowl, Wells Fargo Sun Bowl, Outback Bowl), and corporations even mark sites like arenas and stadia (e.g., Le Centre Molson/The Molson Centre, now the Bell Centre, in Montreal; AT&T Park—formerly SBC and Pacific Bell Park—in San Francisco; TD Banknorth Garden/Fleet Center in Boston). But while it marks postmodern sport, as well as the adults who consume it, branding also marks and socializes youth consumers in unseen and often unexamined ways. As Hughes (2004) puts it, there is a “corporate aggression [by] brands” that results in “prefabricated desire” (pp. 6–7).

The inculcation of such a “prefabricated desire” is the goal of many corporate interests, but also the goal of such religious and cultural zealots like James Dobson: “The predominant value system of an entire culture can be overhauled in one generation, or certainly in two, by those with unlimited access to children” (cited in Grossberg, 2005, p. 305). Grossberg’s characterization of youth today sees neither the “tabula rasa of the Enlightenment [nor] the noble savage of romanticism and the counter-Enlightenment” (2005, p. 304): rather, kid culture today attempts to “throw the asocial child into the position and life of adulthood” or “beat, both literally and figuratively, the wildness out of the child….” (p. 304).

And of course, branding ideologies and techniques have become more and more sophisticated in their usually successful attempts at overhauling the “value system” of youth. Sport marketing types of branding, in their most recent incarnations, rely on what former-CEO Phil Knight of Nike has been credited with introducing: “the marketing of ideas” (Pelletier, 2002). This type of branding, where the actual physical product’s visibility is purposely diminished in favor of the very idea of the product, the surrounding aura of the product, is very difficult to oppose. It is difficult to oppose because it is ubiquitous, because it is difficult to oppose ideas in a foundationally-democratic culture, and because this type of branding is about products that are, on the face of them, non-contestably benign. Ultimately, of course, the lifestyle that multinationals want consumers to align with is that of the over-consuming adult. But this process starts much earlier, for young[er] consumers.

Branding, in contemporary culture, still marginally involves a product, a tangible bit of easily-replicable something, but branding tends more toward holistic selling of lifestyle, of attitude, of ethos, of emotional or symbolic identification with that product—and, more than that, with a product’s image. Examples abound in popular culture: the simple sizzle of a “brownish sugared water [can transform] into a commonly desired fluid called Coke” as a brand of desired soda (Katz, 1994, p. 149); the use of team names as brands, such as the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, is meant to “ensure the name symbolizes strength and confidence” (Shank, 2005, p. 225); and Disney World is branded to be a site “where ‘the fun always shines,’ [as it] makes an advertising campaign out of a real utopian longing” (The Project on Disney, 1999, p. 7).

The selling of a series of ideological constructs, including individuality and an emotional product-identification, is, of course, meant to discriminate between mass-produced items, so that one type of shoe encourages healthy lifestyle; while a second merely is a shoe; a third is intended for use value, for example, for pronators or supinators, by virtue of some obscure construction; a fourth discriminates between the male and the female foot—and argues that any biological differences are significantly interladen within the brand of the shoe. Ironically, as corporate brands encourage discrimination between nearly identical fabricated objects, they simultaneously encourage mass-think in creating desire for a simulacra of a life. Nowhere is this kind of branding—this marketing of ideas—more prevalent than in the sports arena, and particularly within the new sport forms of action/lifestyle/extreme sports. These sports are relatively new; the forms of promotion, likewise, hold trendy and “cool” currency as well (the irony of marketing to mass groups is that, while the branding efforts privilege individuality and uniqueness, the massified nature of selling/consuming requires groupthink).

And yet, while this branding of youth culture cum action sports is simultaneously insidious and blatant, it is quite under-studied in sport studies literature. In this chapter, I intend to, first, provide a brief background regarding these action or extreme sports, particularly in terms of what their “sportifi cation” has done to youth culture; second, discuss the simultaneous expansion and appropriation of so-called extreme sports by corporate America and multinational and transnational corporations; and third, illuminate what an expansion of cultural and societal trends toward consumption of action or extreme sports may mean for youth culture itself.

The Advent of Action Sports: A Model of Expansionism and Corporate Co-Optation

Action sports (sports like skateboarding, Rollerblading^®, wakeboarding, snowboarding, BMX, motocross, and others)² have in common with each other the fact of an encompassing excitement, a sense of daring, a skew of the derring-do, that is meant to create in the consumer (in this case, the participant) a sense of disorientation, of what Caillois (1961) terms “vertigo.” The thrill aspect of the sports themselves combines easily—and seemingly, naturally—with the self-proclaimed outside statuses of the participants. When the X Games broke onto the 24/7 cable television programming scene in 1995, mass audience for what was up until that time relatively esoteric and grass-roots types of activities was merely an experiment in programming. In fact, Ron Semiao, an ESPN executive, who has been credited with coming up with the idea of putting niche-type recreational activities (like snowboarding, Rollerblading^®, skysurfing, street luge, wakeboarding, bungee jumping, and skateboarding) into a multi-event, Olympic-style format, said:

… advertisers were trying to associate themselves with something—a lifestyle, a culture. [additionally] … there was no Sports Illustrated of extreme sports, no Olympics. (cited in Hughes, 2004, p. 129)

Semiao and ESPN were willing to jump into that breach.

As extreme sports have evolved, from grass-roots play to recreational activities to bona-fide sports, the normalization of extreme activities as sports has been inevitable. But originally (if there are, in fact, originals), the activities were not envisioned by their practitioners as sports. They were lifestyle choices; they were self-expression; they were artistic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• Foreword: A Critical Youth Studies for the Historical Present
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I: Politics of Culture/Culture of Politics
• Section II: Branding the “Alternative”
• Section III: Racialized Pedagogies
• Coda: Youth Sport in the Shadows of American Vertigo
• Contributors
• Index