Article

Producing Allblacks.com: Cultural Intermediaries and the Policing of Electronic Spaces of Sporting Consumption

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

Despite the rapid growth in new media technologies and interest from both sport organizations and corporations in interacting with premium consumers, very little research examines the cultural production and regulation of electronic sporting spaces of consumption. Drawing from interviews with the New Zealand Rugby Union's (NZRU) cultural intermediaries, this article presents an investigation of the production of allblacks.com. the virtual home of the New Zealand All Blacks and the official website of the game's governing body. Specifically, we employ a cultural-economic theoretical framework to illuminate the institutionalized codes of production and work routines of the rugby union's cultural intermediaries who police and regulate what appears on the website to unashamedly promote an elective affinity that includes corporate sponsors, media organizations, players, and the NZRU.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

... They noted, "It was a 'rather difficult' exercise when you are allowed to write a blog entry, but at the same time are forbidden from mentioning your team members or opposition" (Mikosza and Hutchins 2010, 286). Scherer and Jackson's (2008) study of the All Blacks (New Zealand's national rugby union men's team) website noted that staff wanted the site to be the number one source of news on the team, but also stated these staff saw allblacks.com as a "controlled and managed" way for players to record their thoughts and experiences and connect with fans directly, rather than the "unknown" experience of communicating through a newspaper reporter that they do not trust (Scherer and Jackson 2008, 198). ...
... It involved the researcher undertaking observational and interview research for a week in 2015 at a professional AFL club in Australia, based on the sampling logic provided by Yin (2013), that a case study should be selected on its ability for replication of theory. Based on the anecdotal and scholarly evidence that sports organisations are using digital media platforms for certain purposes (Scherer and Jackson 2008;Yanity 2013) and that sports organisations are limiting access with an aim to publish content on those platforms (Coombs and Osborne 2012;Grimmer and Kian 2013;Suggs 2015), a professional AFL club in Australia was deemed an appropriate place to explore the research question. The AFL is Australia's leading major sports code based on broadcast rights figures; its latest deal was worth AUD$2.5b ...
... Media Manager 3 noted that they couldn't "trust" the mass media to understand a story as well as an athletes own organisation, which echoes the quotes of an allblacks.com staff member in Scherer and Jackson's (2008) study. This is an interesting thread, which indicates that from the perspective of the managers within this sports organisations, traditional media are not to be trusted with the ability to tell stories, their core business, and again highlights an ongoing thread of conflict between the sports media and sports organisations (Hinds 2012;Hutchins and Rowe 2009). ...
Article
Full-text available
Sports organisations’ recently acquired ability to deliver their own news — through social and digital platforms— represents a potential paradigm shift in the once symbiotic relationship between sports organisations and the media that cover them. While sports organisations once needed the media to deliver their messages, they now have their own media. This study examined the impact of sports digital and social platforms, such as websites, Twitter and Facebook, on sports journalism through 37 interviews with public relations staff in Australian sports organisations and one targeted case study in a professional Australian Rules Football club competing in the Australian Football League (AFL) in Australia. It found that while public relations staff in Australian sports organisations still value traditional media coverage, they also signalled that their own platforms were increasing in value as distribution channels. The case study of the professional AFL club found that the club selectively chose to distribute some stories on their own platforms instead of through traditional media. These stories were not simply delivered on the club’s own platforms, but the public relations staff actively framed the narrative of these stories for strategic benefit. These results have significant implications for sports journalism, as it suggests the rapid development of sports organisations’ social and digital media platforms has the potential to irrevocably alter the once symbiotic relationship between sport and media.
... I have been truly blessed that such a diverse group of gifted individuals chose to work with me as a Supervisor. While undoubtedly modest in comparison to some scholars located in larger institutions, the diversity and extent of work by, and collaborative publications with, postgrad students is truly humbling (Anderson & Jackson, 2013;Beissel, 2015;Chang, Sam & Jackson, 2015;Cody & Jackson, 2016;Gee & Jackson 2010, 2011a, 2011bGrainger & Jackson, 2000John & Jackson, 2011;Kobayashi, 2012aKobayashi, , 2012bLeBlanc & Jackson, 2007;Piggin, Jackson & Lewis, 2007, 2009a, 2009bSam & Jackson, 2004, 2006Scherer & Jackson, 2007;2008a, 2008b, 2010Silk & Jackson, 2000). ...
... The circuit provides a useful framework and system for exploring the production, representation, consumption and regulation of media commodities. Through a range of collaborative projects we have used the model to explore projects on Sport, Culture and Advertising (Jackson & Andrews, 2005), Corporate Nationalism (Jackson, 2001(Jackson, , 2004Jackson, Batty & Scherer, 2001;Jackson & Hokowhitu, 2002;John & Jackson, 2011;Scherer & Jackson, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, media violence (Grainger and Jackson, 2000;Jackson and Andrews, 2004), and the sport-alcohol-nexus (Cody & Jackson, 2016;Gee & Jackson, 2010, 2011Gee, Jackson & Sam, 2013;Jackson, 2014;Wenner & Jackson, 2009). Beyond this research, largely by coincidence and good fortune, I have been able to collaborate on a range of other topics including sport mega-events, sport diplomacy and foreign policy (Esherick, Baker, Jackson & Sam;Jackson & Haigh, 2008; 2009) sport policy (Piggin, Jackson & Lewis, 2007;2009a;2009b;Sam & Jackson, 2004;2006;) sport migration and citizenship (Chang, Jackson & Sam, 2015;Chiba & Jackson, 2006;Lee, Jackson & Lee, 2007) and match-fixing (Tak, Sam & Jackson, 2017). ...
... Bourdieu (1984) coined the term 'cultural intermediaries' as a catch-all for producers of symbolic goods, including journalists and workers in PR, advertising and marketing. Scherer and Jackson (2008) limit their usage to those directly 'embedded' with the national team in producing the New Zealand rugby website allblacks.com. In Ireland, however, there is a case for viewing rugby journalists as cultural intermediaries with limited objective distance. ...
Article
Full-text available
Although graduates of elite Irish fee-paying schools are disproportionately represented in the Irish men’s national rugby union team, Irish international games are among the most popular on Irish terrestrial television, signifying rugby’s growth as a spectator sport in Ireland. This article examines the role of Irish print, broadcast media and related publications in popularising elite-level Irish rugby. Employing a principally Bourdieusian theoretical perspective it analyses how media representation obscures the significance of class background and elite schooling in facilitating players’ individual and collective social advancement and material gain prior to, in and beyond rugby careers. One is by highlighting players’ relatability and transcendence of class privilege as the antithesis of the popular Irish caricature of an arrogant, privately educated former schools rugby player, Ross O’Carroll Kelly. The second is the displacement of class, in media representations, onto narratives, and performances, of regional and stylistic variety that are contained within an all-encompassing, inclusive conceptualization of ‘middle Ireland’.
... This has made it easier for in-house reporters to argue for a place in the field. While early work on inhouse production found commitment to a commercial role (Scherer & Jackson, 2008), more recent studies have found in-house reporters making stronger claims to journalistic identity (Mirer, 2019;Yanity, 2013). ...
Article
This paper explores how in-house sports reporters—those who write for team- and league-branded websites—locate themselves within the sports media production complex. It builds from perspectives on professionalism that view it as a dynamic process of defining boundaries and building relationships between systemic stakeholders. The interview data presented here find that in-house reporters accentuate professional similarities to beat reporters and use this identity to build unique roles in sports organizations’ corporate structures. This push to define themselves as a distinct job category within the constellation of sports media professions speaks to the active work occupational groups engage in, and is reshaping the media system. The paper argues for a broader reconsideration of professional definitions, actors, and relationships within the sports media system as digital technology and other changes have altered preexisting relationships.
... In discussing their own work, American in-house reporters' meta-journalistic discourse has tried to align their work with common understandings of independent journalism. Where in-house content producers for New Zealand's Rugby Union saw their role as supporting the commercial mission of their employer (Scherer and Jackson 2008), these team employees rejected the idea that this was part of their job Yanity 2013). The earliest hires for American team media came directly from newsrooms, such as when the National Football League's Cincinnati Bengals hired a newspaper reporter who had previously covered the team, or the company that operated Major League Baseball's 30 team websites started hiring reporters to produce news for their websites (Jenkins 2000;Pells and Newberry 2009;Perez-Pena 2009). ...
Article
Full-text available
Sports leagues and teams have entered the media industry, producing news content about themselves for broad consumption. The content producers behind these stories still largely position themselves as journalists, despite their lack of independence. They do so by engaging in boundary work, a process in which professional authority is won by enlisting other stakeholders in recognizing an occupational group’s jurisdiction over a societal task. While much of the debate over in-house reporting focuses on acceptance within the journalistic community, readers are also an important and underexplored stakeholder. This textual analysis of reader response to in-house coverage of athlete protest suggests that fans may respond to this content in ways that contest the commercial mission of a team website. As such, readers may be drawing their own boundaries in a media system with in-house content producers, and scholars should explore these questions.
... The results revealed preferences for suppressing news on gay athletes as well as a strong favor for a gendered division of labor. In another instance, Scherer and Jackson (2008) conducted interviews with New Zealand Rugby Union, revealing the institutionally prescribed and culture-laden practices, ideologies, and symbolic frameworks that constructed "Allblacks.com" as a digital sporting spectacle. ...
Article
Full-text available
With the understanding that the mass-participated mechanism of social media has led to an evolved lens of gatekeeping, this study incorporates the framework of digital gatekeeping to examine activities of Internet Research Agency (IRA) bots in the Twitter sphere of the National Football League anthem protest. To do so, the investigation employed data of IRA bots released from Clemson University. We conducted analysis by approaching bots’ gatekeeping activities from three perspectives: the overall behavioral patterns, the discourses and underpinning ideologies, and communicative tactics to sustain attention on Twitter. The results revealed that the majority of tweets came from the right trolls and left trolls. Meanwhile, the activity level of the bots displayed high sensitivity to emergent political events. Importantly, the two types of bots orchestrated a gatekeeping agenda that propelled antagonistic, hyperpartisan politics. The right-wing trolls’ tweets, in particular, propagated pro-White, malicious propaganda infiltrated with fake news. The results yield meaningful implications for digital gatekeeping, social media’s complex roles in knowledge production related to athlete protest, and sport’s engagement in broader political struggles in today’s mediated culture.
... During his two decades at Otago, Jackson supervised and co-authored publications with some notable graduate students, all of whom have gone on to successful and highly productive careers in the subdiscipline. Included in this group are Michael Silk (now a Professor at the University of Bournemouth) (Silk & Jackson, 2000), Jay Scherer (University of Alberta) (Scherer & Jackson, 2008a;2008b;2010;, Michael Sam (University of Otago) (Sam & Jackson, 2004;2006;, Roger LeBlanc (Université de Moncton) (LeBlanc & Jackson, 2007), Sarah Gee (Massey University) (Gee & Jackson 2010;2011a, 2011b, Joseph Piggin (Loughborough University) (Piggin, Jackson & Lewis, 2007, 2009a2009b), Lynley Anderson (Anderson & Jackson, 2013), Koji Kobayashi (Lincoln University), Ik Young Chang (Korea National Sport University) (Chang, Sam & Jackson, 2015), Adam Beissel (University of Maryland), Andrew Grainger (Grainger & Jackson,2000), and Alistair John (John & Jackson, 2011) . ...
Article
Full-text available
The subdiscipline of the sociology of sport heralded its arrival on the international scene with an agreement in Geneva in 1964 to establish an International Committee for Sport Sociology (ICSS), and the setting up of this committee took place in Warsaw the following year. Over the past 50 years the subdiscipline has grown significantly and New Zealand has certainly featured prominently. In this article, we (a) provide a general overview of some of the early scholarly writing on sport that pre-dated the subdiscipline, (b) discuss how the field emerged within and between physical education and sociology, (c) highlight the social significance of sport in Aotearoa New Zealand, before (d) tracing the past and present state of the sociology of sport in this country, and finally (e) consider the future challenges facing the field both globally and locally.
... The critical analysis in this article focuses on (1) how the cultural intermediaries from Conductor imagined and conceptualised female hockey fans as a target audience; (2) a comparative analysis between the creative strategies in the production of the ''Inside the Warrior'' campaign with characteristics of female narratives (e.g., soap operas) to attract a female audience; and (3) the accommodation of resistance to the stereotypical representations of gender in the ''Inside the Warrior'' campaign by the cultural intermediaries. Such an analysis aligns with the burgeoning body of literature on the cultural production of sports advertising that examines the role of advertising practitioners and other cultural intermediaries in mediating between producers and consumers (e.g., Gee, 2009;Gee & Jackson, 2012;Goldman & Papson, 1998;Jackson, Batty, & Scherer, 2001;Kobayashi, 2011Kobayashi, , 2012Scherer, Falcous, & Jackson, 2008;Scherer & Jackson, 2007, 2008a, 2008b. This study is not concerned with the actual work routines or labour processes of the cultural intermediaries, but ''the role [they] play in imagining and constituting specific (ideal) 'market segments' and incorporating them into advertising strategy and end-products (advertisements)'' (Cronin, 2004, p. 357). ...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigates the unique association between female hockey fans, dominant conceptions of gender in sport, and the role of cultural intermediaries in the cultural production of media texts. In particular, it focuses on the National Hockey League’s “Inside the Warrior” advertising campaign created by marketing agency Conductor (for the relaunch of the League after the 2004-2005 lockout), that was, in part, envisioned for and marketed to target female audience. Using insights revealed through in-depth semistructured interviews with two cultural intermediaries, the critical analysis in this article focuses on how the cultural intermediaries from Conductor imagined and conceptualised female hockey fans as a target audience, engages in a comparative analysis between the creative strategies in the production of the “Inside the Warrior” campaign and characteristics of female narratives to attract a female audience, and discusses the accommodation of resistance to the stereotypical representations of gender in the “Inside the Warrior” campaign by the cultural intermediaries. These insights serve to highlight the hegemonic position of cultural intermediaries and the disjuncture between the encoding by producers and the interpretation by consumers and fans.
... websites have yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. In recent years, these avenues for communication have grown increasingly sophisticated in their methods of reaching the consuming public (also see Scherer & Jackson, 2008). As shown below, Brainage.com, ...
... Advertising, in particular, is increasingly regarded as a strategic medium for analysis because of its pivotal role in linking production with consumption in the circuit of culture (Du Gay, 1997;Jackson, Andrews, & Scherer, 2005;Scherer & Jackson, 2008). In particular, analyses of sponsorship (as part of a wider promotional culture) are often located within studies of the institutions and organizations (such as football leagues, clubs and governing bodies) that produce the texts and images on which these articulations of identity then depend (Duncan & Aycock, 2009;Palmer, 2009). ...
Article
This article synthesizes the main themes and research agendas that have been explored in studies of sports-associated drinking. It identifies four themes in which sport and alcohol come together: (a) the commercial economy; (b) social practices and cultural identities; (c) crime and violence; and (d) health behaviors. The article highlights the paradoxical and contradictory nature of the sport-alcohol nexus, especially in relation to health behaviors and crime and violence, where sport is both a context for and a “solution” to health damaging and criminal behavior. The article also argues for the contribution that studies of sports-based drinking can make to the sociology of sport and alcohol use more broadly, particularly with regard to applying new theoretical perspectives such as “calculated hedonism” and “casual leisure” to drinking in sporting contexts. It also extends our analysis of the beer-sport-gender “holy trinity” to considering drinking by women as well as among less traditional forms of masculine identities.
... Sport sociologists are just beginning to examine the ways in which the Internet has been used for social resistance and social movement projects (Millington & Wilson, 2010;Plymire &Forman, 2000;Scherer & Jackson, 2008;Wilson, 2006Wilson, , 2007. Although some authors describe "anti-jock" cybergroups that critique hypermasculine sport cultures (e.g., Wilson, 2002) and suggest that the action of sports-related social movements is enhanced by their use of the SKIRTBOARDER NET-A-NARRATIVES 5 Internet (e.g., Knight & Greenberg, 2002;Lenskyj, 2002;Sage, 1999), no feminist work has yet examined gender constructions and social movements in cybersport (Wilson, 2007). ...
Article
Full-text available
By creating and posting their own stories on the Internet, sportswomen are able to challenge the persistent, sexist, mainstream and alternative (skateboarding) media (re)presentations of female athletes. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of 262 posts of the Skirtboarders’ blog – a Montreal-based, Canadian female skateboarding crew’s Internet project – explores the ways in which a group of sportswomen circulate alternative discourses of femininity. In these (re)presentations, the Skirtboarders embrace various femininities and, at the same time, reject binaries (male/female) without explicitly claiming a feminist agenda or attaching themselves to other oppositional discourses. This indicates a third-wave feminist sensibility. The Skirtboarders reproduce some normative discursive fragments commonly found in media (re)presentations. Furthermore, they post links to mainstream and alternative media coverage of their crew, which at times reflects the ‘problems’ of historical media coverage (sexualization, marginalization and trivialization). However, most of their online productions portray them as polygendered skaters (action shots, skating activities and lifestyle) and are thus radically different. The Skirtboarders’ discursive portrayals of female skateboarders are therefore uniquely alternative to other media (re)presentations but at the same time, paradoxical.
... My early work focused on the role of the media in constructing forms of national identity (Jackson, 1994(Jackson, , 1998a(Jackson, , 1998b(Jackson, , 1998c(Jackson, , 2004. Highlighting how one's own biography influences one's work, my migration from Canada to New Zealand reinforced an emerging interest in global media and its impact on identity formation (Jackson & Andrews, 1999), and this led to interrelated projects on Sport, Culture and Advertising , Corporate Nationalism (Jackson, 2001(Jackson, , 2004(Jackson, , 2013]; Jackson, Batty & Scherer, 2001;Jackson & Hokowhitu, 2002;John & Jackson, 2011;Scherer & Jackson, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, and, more recently, Sport, Alcohol and Promotional Culture (Gee & Jackson, 2010, 2011Wenner & Jackson, 2009). ...
Article
Full-text available
This essay highlights the unique and intimately interrelated nature of the relationship between communication and advertising by providing a selective overview of communication about and through sport within the context of promotional culture. While advertising and marketing of sport leagues, teams, celebrity athletes, and commodities are important, this treatment focuses on how the advertising industry has come to dominate contemporary social life, and why “sport” is such an important channel of communication within promotional culture. The article (a) outlines the emergence, nature, and social significance of advertising; (b) offers a framework for analysis based on the circuit of commodification and communication model that emphasizes the context and complex interrelationships between particular moments in commodification processes; (c) discusses a current research example examining sport, globalization, and corporate nationalism; and (d) considers directions for future research.
Article
Full-text available
Team-and league-operated media play a growing role in the sports media system. Few have looked at how audiences perceive the credibility of in-house content, which regularly mimics traditional sports journalism. An experimental analysis finds that even among fans, independent media content is rated more credible than that produced in-house. Fans view stories accusing their team of wrongdoing as biased even as they find them credible.
Article
Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom ended with the 2008 global financial crisis. There followed a series of severe ‘austerity’ budgets and public service pay deals involving cuts in public service provision and employment reform. These were accompanied by approving Irish media narratives of atonement for Celtic Tiger ‘excess’ and, more recently, of corresponding ‘recovery’ through collective and individual discipline and entrepreneurial endeavour. This article focuses on the interplay between Irish media narratives of austerity and recovery and constructions of gender, class and national identity in representations of rugby players as celebrities. It explores how elite players have been presented as exemplary of the neoliberal management of physical and economic risk, and how the repeated focus on successful struggles with diet and injury and post-career educational and business investments highlights their optimizing of the physical and social capital afforded by celebrity status. The emphasis on discipline and ‘smart’ economic management chimes with the hegemonic political and media discourse of ‘no alternative’ government austerity, and with economic recovery through individual acceptance of responsibility.
Article
Full-text available
Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom ended with the 2008 global financial crisis. There followed a series of severe ‘austerity’ budgets and public service pay deals involving cuts in public service provision and employment reform. These were accompanied by approving Irish media narratives of atonement for Celtic Tiger ‘excess’ and, more recently, of corresponding ‘recovery’ through collective and individual discipline and entrepreneurial endeavour. This article focuses on the interplay between Irish media narratives of austerity and recovery and constructions of gender, class and national identity in representations of rugby players as celebrities. It explores how elite players have been presented as exemplary of the neoliberal management of physical and economic risk, and how the repeated focus on successful struggles with diet and injury and post-career educational and business investments highlights their optimising of the physical and social capital afforded by celebrity status. The emphasis on discipline and ‘smart’ economic management chimes with the hegemonic political and media discourse of ‘no alternative’ government austerity, and with economic recovery through individual acceptance of responsibility.
Article
This article contributes to an emerging body of research that examines the transformation of sport, journalism and media practice in the digital era as part of what Raymond Williams has called the ‘long revolution’ of communications, culture and democracy. In so doing, we explore how Canadian sports journalists have attempted to make sense of, and negotiate their roles within, the practice of convergent sports journalism and the ascension of new online journalism values in the Postmedia Network. We examine the institutionalization of 24/7 digital sports departments within which Postmedia’s sports journalists labour to produce a continuous flow of coverage of major league sport – at the expense of local amateur events and women’s sport – to secure a digital audience commodity of male readers. We also explore Postmedia’s embracement of outsourced labour and production processes that have further altered the work routines of sports journalists and have undermined quality standards. Finally, we underscore how the expansion of the digital promotional networks of major league sport has contributed to the ongoing historical erosion of the status and influence of sports journalists in the sports–media complex and has spurred the rise of derivative analytical and opinion-driven content.
Article
This article explores the construction of U.S. nationalism through the branding strategies of Under Armour, a sportswear company which has achieved prominence in the U.S. marketplace and has a growing international profile. By examining their organizational synergies with the NFL, Zephyr technology, and the Wounded Warrior Project, and through a critical reading of the militaristic, philanthropic, nationalistic and masculine dimensions of their Freedom initiative, I illustrate how Under Armour has strategically sought to appeal to the heightened nationalistic tendencies of the post-9/11 United States. A central contention throughout the paper is that Under Armour's brand development techniques, as mobilized predominantly through their website, offer important theoretical and empirical insights regarding the production, circulation, performance, and embodiment of post-9/11 cultural politics.
Article
In this paper we argue that sport media research would be enhanced by: (a) engagement with the audience research tradition, including "third generation" audience studies that emphasize relationships between viewer interpretations of media and everyday social practices; and (b) the adoption of multimethod research approaches that are sensitive to contradictions and complexities that exist in media consumption. To support this argument, we reflect on the benefits of a multimethod research design used in a recent audience study conducted by the authors on youth interpretations of media and performances of masculinity in physical education (Millington & Wilson, in press). These benefits include: enriching researcher understandings of social/cultural contexts; illuminating social hierarchies; and revealing lived contradictions. We conclude with reflections on epistemological issues and suggestions for future audience projects.
Article
Purpose – To discuss the history and relevance of audience research as it pertains to sport and physical culture and to demonstrate an approach to doing audience research. Design/methodology/approach – A step-by-step overview of a study conducted by the authors is provided. The study examined ways that groups of young males in a Vancouver, Canada, high school interpreted images of masculinity in popular media, and ways these same youth performed masculinity in physical education classes. We reflect on how studying interpretations (using focus groups) and lived experiences (using participant observation and in-depth interviews) in an integrated fashion was helpful for understanding the role of media in the everyday lives of these youth. We also describe how the hegemony concept guided our data interpretation. Findings – We highlight how, on the one hand, the young males were critical of media portrayals of hegemonic forms of masculinity and, on the other hand, how these same males attempted to conform to norms associated with hegemonic masculinity in physical education classes. We emphasise that our multi-method approach was essential in allowing us to detect the incongruity between youth ‘interpretations’ and ‘performances’. Research limitations/implications – Limitations of audience research are discussed, and the epistemological underpinnings of our study are highlighted. Originality/value – The need for audience research in physical cultural studies is emphasised. We suggest that researchers too often make claims about media impacts without actually talking to audiences, or looking at what audiences ‘do’ with information they glean from media.
Article
Although New Zealand exists as a small (pop. 4.3 million), peripheral nation in the global economy, it offers a unique site through which to examine the complex, but uneven, interplay between global forces and long-standing national traditions and cultural identities. This book examines the profound impact of globalization on the national sport of rugby and New Zealand's iconic team, the All Blacks. Since 1995, the national sport of rugby has undergone significant change, most notably due to the New Zealand Rugby Union's lucrative and ongoing corporate partnerships with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas. The authors explore these significant developments and pressures alongside the resulting tensions and contradictions that have emerged as the All Blacks, and other aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity, have been steadily incorporated into a global promotional culture. Following recent research in cultural studies, they highlight the intensive, but contested, commodification of the All Blacks to illuminate the ongoing transformation of rugby in New Zealand by corporate imperatives and the imaginations of marketers, most notably through the production of a complex discourse of corporate nationalism within Adidas's evolving local and global advertising campaigns. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2010. All rights reserved.
Article
In 2011, New Zealand rugby fans erupted in celebration as the All Blacks narrowly defeated France to win the Rugby World Cup - the team's first title since New Zealand hosted the inaugural tournament in 1987. In the years between these victories, the sport of rugby has been radically transformed from its amateur roots to a professional, global entertainment 'product'. This book explores these developments and focuses initially on the New Zealand Rugby Union's key deals with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and global sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s. The new pay-per-view era has curtailed the traditional 'viewing rights' of rugby fans to have live, free-to-air access to All Blacks test matches on public television. Adidas, meanwhile, has relentlessly commodified aspects of national heritage and indigenous identity in pursuit of local and global markets while exploiting labour in developing countries. Escalating merchandise costs and ticket prices have, at the same time, pushed the sport further out of the reach of ordinary New Zealanders. All of these issues, however, have not gone uncontested, and the authors argue that rugby remains a contested terrain in the face of a new set of limits and pressures in the global economy.
Article
This paper explores the links between corporate nationalism and glocalization by examining Nike's strategy of representing "the nation" within advertising campaigns in "Asia". Drawing from interviews with advertising practitioners, this study offers two key findings: (a) sporting national identities are represented through a multilevel process of negotiations among various institutions and individuals; and (b) local cultural intermediaries play a central role in encoding and circulating the advertisements due to complex creative labor processes, symbolic struggles, and local sensibilities. Overall, the study illuminates the context of advertising production as the "multiple regimes of mediation" (Cronin, 2004) through which representations are negotiated and articulated under specific social relations, cultural codes, and conditions of production.
Article
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between psychological ownership and fandom, through a case study of a Japanese football team and its fans. Extending McCracken's model, we set research five questions. In-depth interviews were undertaken with 16 fans categorized into two groups, fans (n = 9) and super fans, members of organized groups (n = 7). The interview protocol was semi-structured. Thematic coding was employed, which is designed to enhance comparability between plural groups. The findings indicated that cultural and individual meanings were transferred to the team brand and fans linked the meanings through their own rituals, which shaped psychological ownership and fan identity. Moreover, this paper contributes to sport management scholarship by indicating that psychological ownership is conceptually different to team identification.
Article
If sport scholars are going to contribute to a critical (inter)national dialogue that challenges "official versions" of a post-9/11 geo-political reality, there is a need to continue to move beyond the borders of the US, and examine how nationalistic sporting spectacles work to promote local military initiatives that are aligned with the imperatives of neoliberal empire. In this article we provide a critical reading of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's nationally-televised broadcast of a National Hockey League game, colloquially known as Tickets for Troops. We reveal how interest groups emphasized three interrelated narratives that worked to: 1) personalize the Canadian Forces and understandings of neoliberal citizenship, 2) articulate warfare/military training with men's ice hockey in relation to various promotional mandates, and 3) optimistically promote the war in Afghanistan and the Conservative Party of Canada via storied national traditions and mythologies.
Article
Social developments and related dynamic relationships connected with the sports–media complex is a recurrent focus of sociological investigation. However, in explaining developments in the relationship between sports associations and media organizations the specific structure of power relations between them and other related organizations is often given primacy. We argue that this negates how changes in people’s social habitus – how people think feel and act – are interconnected with and critical to such explanations. Consequently, in this article we apply the theoretical frame of figurational sociology to demonstrate how the gradual development and expansion of specialist communications and media functions in a national sports organization were impelled by several intertwined social processes, including changes in people’s social habitus. Our empirical case study is based on one of the largest sporting and cultural organizations in Ireland, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). We explain how the GAA felt compelled to increasingly deploy a range of communications, media and marketing specialists in the struggle for media space and as a means to engage, understand and connect with the more nuanced tastes of Irish ‘youth’.
Article
This article examines the corporate re-imagining of ‘the nation’ by focusing on the representation of Japanese school sporting culture, bukatsu, through Nike advertising in Japan. Bukatsu serves an important site for the analysis of cultural globalization because it is located not only at the global–local nexus but also at the intersection of Japanese traditional principles, youth culture and sporting practice. Using a multiple-method approach including contextual and textual analyses, along with interviews with advertising personnel, the article reveals that values, experiences and identities of the local cultural intermediaries play a key role in reflexive, yet subjective, incorporation of bukatsu lifestyle within a television commercial in Japan. Thus, it is argued that the subjectivity and reflexivity of the local cultural intermediaries need to be considered as key constituents for representation of national identity within the discourse of corporate nationalism. Overall, the article highlights the complex, interdependent and reflexive relationship between the global and the local by examining links between the ‘glocal’ advertising representation and Japanese sporting identity within the ‘circuit of culture’ (du Gay et al., 1997).
Article
In this article we examine the recent debate over the continued role of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in airing National Hockey League (NHL) games on its iconic television show, Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) . Specifically, we outline the heightened competition between the CBC and private networks for the most desirable sports rights in the context of the explosive growth of subscription television. We then review how the CBC was, in the face of this competition and to the surprise of many commentators, able to secure a new contract with the NHL in 2006. We argue here that, while Canada's public network will never again have the place in Canadian life that it had in the early days of television (Rutherford, 1990), HNIC remains an important investment because it acts as a critical promotional platform for the public network, as well as providing a sizeable revenue stream that subsidizes the network's other programming. We will also argue that providing free-to-air broadcasts of the sport that matters most to Canadians is an issue of cultural citizenship, and thus an important part of the mandate of a public broadcaster, and a matter of national interest.
Article
Full-text available
This study examines how global forces are shaping local indigenous cultures with a particular focus on the relationship between global capitalism, new media technologies, and transnational advertising. Concentrating on Mäori culture and identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the authors examine a contemporary political debate related to indigenous culture and intellectual property rights. Specifically, the study explores the politics of identity associated with global sports company Adidas and its use of the traditional New Zealand All Blacks haka as part of a global advertising campaign. A key feature of the analysis is the controversy surrounding a lawsuit filed by a Mäori tribe claiming compensation for the commercial use of its culture. Overall, the study highlights the problem of maintaining and protecting cultural spaces where indigenous identities can be constructed and affirmed.
Article
Full-text available
This essay provides an in-depth examination of a contextually-specific case study of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi's production of a recent television commercial for adidas's sponsorship of New Zealand's iconic rugby team, the All Blacks. Through interviews with representatives from adidas, the New Zealand Rugby Union, and Saatchi & Saatchi, and analyses of industry documents, the commercial is located within a range of interrelated cultural, economic, technological and institutional conditions of production. The analysis reveals the complexity of the processes and practices through which the commercial was encoded with dominant cultural meanings and representations employed to communicate a complex televisual discourse of corporate nationalism and spectacle at the global-local nexus.
Article
Full-text available
Article
Full-text available
This article evaluates Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural production in terms of its effectiveness for understanding contemporary media production. I begin by outlining the main features of Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, with an emphasis on the potential advantages of his historical account over other, competing work. In particular, I stress the importance of his historical account of ‘autonomy’ and of the emphasis on the interconnectedness of the field of cultural production with other social fields. I then draw attention to two major problems in the work of Bourdieu and others who have adopted his ‘field theory’ for the media: first, that he offered only occasional and fragmented analyses of ‘large-scale’, ‘heteronomous’ (to use his terms) commercial media production, in spite of its enormous social and cultural importance in the contemporary world; second, that Bourdieu and his key associates provide only a very limited account of the relationships between cultural production and cultural consumption. In this latter context, I briefly discuss recent debates in cultural studies about cultural intermediaries. I refer to examples from recent media production to provide evidence for my arguments. The article argues that, as practised so far, Bourdieu’s field theory is only of limited value in analysing media production. However I close by discussing the potential fruitfulness of research based on a dialogue between, on the one hand, field theory’s analysis of cultural production and, on the other, Anglo-American media and cultural studies work on media production.
Article
Numerous media commentators have deemed the sexual harassment locker room incident between Lisa Olson and the New England Patriots to be an embarrassing case of mismanagement. Our analysis challenges this popular assumption; we argue that the event represents an overt manifestation of male power by means of sexual violence against women. The response to Olson suggests that in an era where women’s entry into sport has challenged men’s exclusive hold on that domain, the locker room, like the playing field, must be understood as contested terrain. For men to maintain control over the terrain of the locker room, the female sportswriter must be displaced from her role as authoritative critic of male performance and reassigned to her “appropriate” role of sexual object. In light of the importance of sport, and the status of the locker room as an inner sanctum of male privilege, the incident between Olson and the Patriots was not mismanaged at all but, in fact, handled effectively.
Article
This paper presents an ethnographic study of the Canadian Television Network's (CTV) production of the 1988 Winter Olympic ice-hockey tournament. Interview data and media documents are analyzed to uncover how CTV strategically employed hockey as a spectacle of accumulation to boost ratings, expand market positioning, and to attract sponsors while blocking media competitors. At another level of understanding, ethnographic observations of the televisual labor process provide insights into how Olympic broadcasting constitutes a form of mediated communication or a spectacle of legitimation. Observations illustrate how the crew remade the live sporting event into a series of select cultural images. The manufacturing of Olympic images is revealed to be a social process that reproduces select systems of meaning, reinforces particular modes of media production, and strengthens monopolistic network relationships.
Article
Through an ethnographically oriented case study at the 1998 Commonwealth Games, the analysis accounts for the complexities and nuances that realignments in political, economic, and social life create for televised sport professionals. The analysis addresses the mediations of, and the interactions between, the host broadcaster (Radio Television Malaysia) and one "client" broadcaster (Television New Zealand). Specifically, the paper focuses on the conditions of production, the production practices, and the meanings embodied within the product that flowed to New Zealand.
Article
The analysis of televised sport production has largely ignored the conditions that frame cultural production and the ways in which broadcasts are constructed. Rather, scholarly discussions of televised sport production have been based on the text that goes to air. Given substantial realignments in political, economic, and cultural spheres brought about by the proliferation of a global media, it is argued that a textual perspective is inadequate if a thorough understanding of the complexities of televised sport production is to be attained. Rather, to appreciate the intricacies involved in cultural (re)production, scholars need to address the ways in which interactions among influential actors impact the process of reproducing sport for television. This paper investigates the conditions of production and the labor processes involved in reproducing a major sporting event. Using ethnographic data collected at the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games in Malaysia, the ways in which micro and macro institutional processes interacted to frame the reproduction of the Games are assessed and discussed.
Article
Using original research materials of in-depth interviews with community network development workers, multimedia and graphic designers, public authority managers, and a number of case studies (a Bangladeshi Electronic Village Hall, Manchester Multimedia and Networking Centre, the Manchester Community Information Network, and Virtual Manchester) this article traces out the views of interviewees on the trajectory of community and civic net provision in the city. Sources of discontent were found in: commodification of local civic nets, a prevalent middle-brow approach to web page design, the influence of ‘cultural intermediaries’ in and on publicly funded telematics and multimedia software development agencies, the impact of an entrepreneurial ethos in local authority policy formation, and pedagogic and patronizing attitudes towards local communities on the part of local area net development agencies. The article argues that, alongside structural corporate ICT power and the technological and scientific ICT R&D professions, these problems have a telling impact on the nature of civic and community net development. As well as criticism of the prevailing nature of city nets, the article more positively prompts a call to local authorities to adopt a form of ‘critical regionalism’ in order to put the control of civic nets back with the communities they are supposed primarily to be aimed at. This means empowering community ICT nodes, involving them directly in the development process, and moderating the impact of corporate ICT and cultural intermediaries within publicly funded ICT agencies. Given the renewed role for local governance in conditions of globalization such policies would aid the development of thriving and viable local community networks.
Article
Issues pertaining to the production and consumption of corporate websites and online games remain relatively unexplored. This study examines the cultural production of a free, downloadable rugby game and parallel website for Adidas's sponsorship of the New Zealand All Blacks entitled `Beat Rugby'. Produced by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington to articulate the Adidas brand as globally cool, the promotional apparatus targeted a specific niche of Adidas's company-wide target market known as the `jeeks': male, sports-loving and computer literate 12—20-year-olds. More than 43,000 participants downloaded and played in the three-month tournament with the winners, the virtual 15 All Blacks, flown to New Zealand to meet their `real' counterparts. The game and electronic community facilitated a range of consumption and communication experiences for a transnational audience of post-fans in a branded environment which was monitored by the cultural intermediaries at Saatchi & Saatchi on behalf of their client.
Article
During the late 1970s, thousands of—in many cases legal—Samoan immigrants were systematically evicted from New Zealand shores. Today, however, “Samoans” are an integral part of New Zealand's national rugby team, the All Blacks. Although this may, perhaps, be interpreted as evidence of a more progressive racial climate in contemporary New Zealand, this article argues that the All Blacks, in fact, serve to obfuscate the cultural politics of race and nation embodied in, and played out through, the game of rugby. In particular, the article examines the parallels of the exploitation of Samoan industrial and athletic labor, how the public discourses that surround players of Samoan descent raise increasingly complex questions of national eligibility and allegiance, and finally how newdiasporic affiliations such as the Pacific Islanders rugby team may provide an opportunity to build on an emergent “Black Pacific” culture that transcends the boundaries of nationality and nationalism.
Article
This article explores the peculiar passions of football (soccer) fandom. Autobiographical in tone, it meditates at once on the personal dimension of fandom and larger theoretical concerns—the love for the Liverpool Football Club and postcolonialism belong to the same broad conversation. The article maps the process by which a fan in apartheid South Africa develops a deep and lasting relationship with an English football club; it demonstrates the arbitrariness of fandom and the importance of narrative (sports journalism) to long distance fandom; it explores how race and fandom complicate each other. It shows, most importantly, how fandom overcomes the debilitations of distance, the lack of technology, through a singular kind of imagination.
Article
This essay presents the findings of research that examined the work practices of a selection of Australian Internet sport journalists, employed within either independent sport sites or those connected to a traditional print media parent company. The results are divided into three main categories – nature of the medium, work practices and self assessment – and in each it is clear that the work of Internet sport journalists differs from their print media colleagues in particular. Specifically, the Internet is a converged medium in which immediacy and interactivity influence both its content and its structure. Internet sport journalists, far more than their print media colleagues, are dependent on content from wire services and in the main engage in a role similar to a sub-editor, in which they edit material and prepare it for publication, rather than produce content in the manner of a conventional reporter. Finally, Internet sport journalists, like sport journalists in general 20 years ago, suffer from a poor reputation among their colleagues, particularly because the Internet is a new and unknown medium and thus, in the main, neither tested nor trusted.
Article
This article argues that the apparent rise to dominance of global sports media systems, such as that being constructed by Rupert Murdoch, is simply the beginning of a more complex process in which those systems are conjoined with telephony and computer networks to provide a new array of choice for the sports consumer. In turn, that raises the opportunity for individual consumers to take more control of their consumption patterns through their potential control of the technology. The extant media blocs are trying to rein in that freedom by taking over the new technology. The contest for control, among other things, means that sports groups' previous alliances with media blocs, and the associated income, may be at risk. This struggle for site control has global implications and offers a unique opportunity to change the face of sports consumption.
Article
Social Text 20.3 (2002) 177-188 Since the events of September 11, we have seen both a rise of anti-intellectualism and a growing acceptance of censorship within the media. This could mean that we have support for these trends within the general population of the United States, but it could also mean that the media function as "public voices" that operate at a distance from their constituency, that both report the "voice" of the government for us, and whose proximity to that voice rests on an alliance or identification with that voice. Setting aside for the moment how the media act upon the public, whether, indeed, they have charged themselves with the task of structuring public sentiment and fidelity, it seems crucial to note that a critical relation to government has been severely, though not fully, suspended, and that the "criticism" or, indeed, independence of the media has been compromised in some unprecedented ways. Although we have heard, lately, about the abusive treatment of prisoners, and war "mistakes" have been publicly exposed, it seems that neither the justification nor the cause of the war has been the focus of public intellectual attention. Indeed, thinking too hard about what brought this about has invariably raised fears that to find a set of causes will be to have found a set of excuses. This point was made in print by Michael Walzer, a "just war" proponent, and has worked as an implicit force of censorship in op-ed pages across the country. Similarly, we have heard from Vice President Richard Cheney and Edward Rothstein of the New York Times, among several others, that the time to reassert not only American values but fundamental and absolute values has arrived. Intellectual positions that are considered "relativistic" or "post-" of any kind are considered either complicitous with terrorism or as constituting a "weak link" in the fight against it. The voicing of critical perspectives against the war has become difficult to do, not only because mainstream media enterprises will not publish them (most of them appear in the Guardian or the Progressive or on the Internet), but because to voice them is to risk hystericization and censorship. In a strong sense, the binarism that Bush proposes in which only two positions are possible—to be for the war or for terrorism—makes it untenable to hold a position in which one opposes both. Moreover, it is the same binarism that returns us to an anachronistic division between "East" and "West" and which, in its sloshy metonymy, returns us to the invidious distinction between civilization (our own) and barbarism (now coded as "Islam" itself). At the beginning of this conflict, to oppose the war meant to some that one somehow felt sympathy with terrorism, or that one saw the terror as justified. But it is surely time to allow an intellectual field to redevelop in which more responsible distinctions might be heard, histories might be recounted in their complexity, and accountability might be understood apart from the claims of vengeance. This would also have to be a field in which the long-range prospects for global cooperation might work as a guide for public reflection and criticism. 1. The Left response to the war currently waged in Afghanistan has run into serious problems, in part because the explanations that the Left has provided to the question, "Why do they hate us so much?" have been dismissed as so many exonerations of the acts of terror themselves. This does not need to be the case. I think we can see, however, how moralistic anti-intellectual trends coupled with a distrust of the Left as so many self-flagellating First World elites has produced a situation in which our very capacity to think about the grounds and causes of the current global conflict is considered impermissible. The cry that "there is no excuse for September 11" has become a means by which to stifle any serious public discussion of how U.S. foreign policy has helped to create a world in which such acts of terror are possible. We see this most dramatically in the suspension of any attempt to offer balanced reporting on the...
Article
This article raises some critical questions about cultural intermediaries as both a descriptive label and analytic concept. In doing so, it has two main aims. First, it seeks to provide some clarification, critique and suggestions that will assist in the elaboration of this idea and offer possible lines of enquiry for further research. Second, it is argued that whilst studying the work of cultural intermediaries can provide a number of insights, such an approach provides only a partial account of the practices that continue to proliferate in the space between production and consumption. Indeed, in significant ways, a focus on cultural intermediaries reproduces rather than bridges the distance between production and consumption. The paper focuses on three distinct issues. First, some questions are raised about the presumed special significance of cultural intermediaries within the production/consumption relations of contemporary capitalism. Second, how 'creative' and active cultural intermediaries are within processes of cultural production is discussed. Third, specific strategies of inclusion/exclusion adopted by this occupational grouping are highlighted in order to suggest that access to work providing 'symbolic goods and services' is by no means as fluid or open as is sometimes claimed.
Article
The phytochemical composition of passionfruit juice (PFJ) was hypothesized to have valuable anti-cancer activity, and this was tested in a BALB/c 3T3 neoplastic transformation model. A higher concentration of PFJ compared with a lower concentration was effective in reducing the number, size, and invasiveness of transformed foci. When incubated with another mammalian cell line, the MOLT-4, PFJ was unable to alter the cell cycle kinetics while at the same time was successful in inducing the activity of caspase-3, an enzyme that commits the cell to apoptosis. This suggests that phytochemicals found in PFJ were able to produce the changes in transformed foci due to apoptotic mechanisms rather than by a reduction in cell proliferation. These beneficial results were achieved at levels that could theoretically be attained in the plasma after consumption of the juice.