This is a background paper I prepared to get ready for the Toronto Meetings  session on "Time and Nike." (For the Toronto 2000 presentations please press here).  For TWO Calls for Papers - Journal Special Issues - press here

First, Nike's narrative is outside of time, beyond the flow of time so that what Nike claims to be is at odds with its own auditors' reporting (press here for 13 January 1997 Ernst & Young Audit Report). The Greek goddess myth of Nike, the winged victory narrative is itself timeless, but that narrative is coming into contact with the material conditions of Nike work.  If Nike's narrative of corporate-self is out of sync with time, its spin machine (both with reference to the winged goddess and to claims to reform) is outside time itself. The mythic goddess narrative is subject to strategic changes in image.   

Second, Nike's narrative, is "out of time" in the sense that NGO and media responses to a Nike story happened in accelerated time, an instant response, one to the other. Nike's strategic narrative is changing more rapidly over time. It is not the same narrative as a decade ago, and is more different each day. Nike's narrative is "out of time" in the way kids are becoming "anti-Nike" because they do not want to wear the shoes their parents way. What was hip for parents is not so hip for kids. In 1998 the Nike "coolest brand" index for kids fell from 52% to only 40% cool. Skateboarders won't wear Nike because their parents do.  And Adidas is making a comeback by being the "anti-Nike" choice.  Swoosh is perceived as 'establishment, so the underdog, Adidas, saw a 98% increase in sales (Carty, 1999). Candie Women's Shoes is running ads by MTV star Jenny McCarthy that shout "Just Screw It" (Solomon, 1998; Carty, 1999).  And New Balance is making most of its sneakers in the U.S. which is counter to Nike's claim that it is economically impossible. Plus while Nike spends $750 million on ads and endorsements, New Balance spends only $4 million. 

I shall argue along with Carty (1999) that consumers are becoming increasingly ambivalent about Nike's message of (hyper) competition and victory at all costs.  Consumers are beginning to see a dark side to the Nike image, that goes beyond its labor practices.  Nike is moving from "rebel" to just plain "bully" in the minds of too many consumers.  But labor is also an issue. Nike-sponsored research reveals that concern over labor conditions is an issue coming up in focus groups for girls as young as 12 (Carty, 1999: 65). And as the "poster boy of globalization" Nike is smack in the middle of the post-WTO protest over the marriage of post-industrial capitalism and postmodern culture. In this marriage consumption of desire drives the post-industrial production. Nike is not only a virtual network company with 450 sub-contract producers it is a network of distributor and endorsement contractors (from sports starts, Footlocker and other outlets, to universities). 

We know more about the virtual core and its three-tier networking of producers than we do about the networking of Nike distribution. In the production network, Nike's semi-periphery consists of S. Korea and Taiwan where workers are better paid but whose production is limited to high tech sneaker components.  The second tier is more peripheral, the less developed mass-production partners of China and Indonesian factories (managed by S. Korean and Taiwanese managers). In the third-periphery the cheapest labor of Thailand and Vietnam, again managed by the S. Korean and Taiwanese (semi-periphery) makes the lowest cost shoes with the least sophisticated technology.  Nike has been exceedingly resistant to tamper with what it views as a perfect virtual organization of core and three tiers of peripheral partners (See Carty, 1999 for excellent analysis of this system). In the 3-tier system of subcontracting, the subs take the risks of pricing labor and materials when they sign Nike pre-purchase agreements.  Nike makes quick changes by canceling, transferring, or initiating contracts to meet fashion trends.  Nike is also able to avoid dependency on any host-country (although most of the subcontractors are aligned with some huge producer-conglomerates). 

Indeed the frequent "bad news" accounts of Nike sub-factories is easily explained.  The militarism and authoritarianism of Korean and Taiwanese (as well as Chinese) managers is separated from the mild Confucianism beliefs of their workforce. Tales of abuse are no surprise.  Less investigated is way in which Nike negotiates with its subs.  When a sub agrees to a Nike contract, there is no margin provided to the sub to pay for things like health, training, safety, and ecological ideals.   When Nike requires this or that concession about safety or minimum wages from the subs Nike keeps costs paid for the shoes too low for subs to pay for these items.  The sub has little choice but to squeeze the workers for more hours at less pay in order to finance the changes Nike is advertising. Nike is able to advertise itself as a steward of social justice and the environment while not contributing to what subs must pay out to accomplish these realities. 

Nike's expatriate program manages the liaison between Beaverton R&D and Asian factory sites. And it serves as a means of policing subs. But little action has been noted.   

We know less about the networking of the distributors, coaches, players, teams, leagues and universities. Through the 1980s and 1990s Nike moved away from the jogging and workout market ind into the leisure and sports commodification market.  The endorsement machinery of Nike is well publicized.  What is less analyzed is the relation between the images of the celebrity endorsees and Nike's brand image.  Nike is clearly substituting Tiger Woods for Michael Jordan. But whereas Tiger Woods in Nike ads is a black athlete, his roots are 1/4th white as opposed to only 1/8th Black, and is also 1/8th American Indian as well as 1/2 Asian. Further Nike's promotion of "bad boy" sports celebrities is being tempered by the more mild-mannered image of Tiger Woods.   

Nike is postmodern in the sense that it is the salience of signs and symbols of postmodern culture that drive the distribution and consumption of its products. And it is a consumption of images not products that makes it postmodern.  It is post-industrial in terms of being anti-bureaucratic (except for its contracts), highly flexible (in sneakerization brands) and virtual in its centered (Beaverton executive core) and tiers of peripheral manufacturers and distributors of its images.  Nike is postmodern in the cultural significance of commodity drives, cultural symbolism, and life style marketing. As Best and Kellner (1991: 15) describe it, it is a part of the postmodern culture of instant gratification and hedonism. Nike is Baudrillardian as an example of consumer capitalism mixed with postmodern culture that exhibits not only hyperreality but implosion of production and consumption, and the domination of social life by spectacle. Finally, Nike is postmodern in the resistance movements it has crystallized, with a fragmented mix of interests and affinity groups spanning the 1st and 3rd world (See Carty, 1999 for an excellent dissertation on this topic). 

Nike is Out of Time - Being "out of time" in both senses is putting pressure on Nike. Nike is re-narrating itself from Nike goddess of victory (T1), away from Nike "Just Do It" competitor, to "I Can" images of verifiable action.

My critical postmodern reading of "Time and Nike" narration is the need to reconnect Nike and Time.  The lag between a Nike "bad news" story and a Nike spin on that story is instantaneous, but so is the activist and media spin of it.  Nike is not a complete break in time, it is more a weakening of time, like a Salvadore Dali clock. 

Nike is in trouble. It has recycled ideals of non-conformity, irreverence and even revolution to build an engine of desire in support of its post-industrial production. But the image is over-exposed, and it is being tainted by "bad news" from the worlds of labor, sports, and university. Nike is a study in postmodern politics, "the emergence of new social movements and the transformed configuration of modern social change" (Carty, 1999: 6). There continues to be a networking of 1st and 3rd world groups to resist Nike's model of global capitalism. This includes resisting sweatshops, sports endorsements, and sole source university contracts (e.g. those with clauses that prohibit university employees from speaking out against Nike or even refusing to wear the logo). It is a networking of affinity groups, protesting everything from over-consumption, unfair ad practices at the Olympics, to sports contracts that re-image a high school student into a Nike celebrity. 

Time Out - It costs more to re-narrate, to spin another deconstruction of the opponents story than it does to make the changes in the labor practices. Each deconstructs the other at a more instant time cycle of event, spin, counter-spin, counter-counter-spin. Each spin barely has time to announce itself before the iterative deconstructions fall into an intertextual web. Spinning counter stories to bad news in accelerated time, gets more and more costly in the post-WTO postmodern climate of interest and affinity group networks of protest. The Nike opposition network is accelerating their spin-cycle time by rallying 1st and 3rd world NGOs and activists to deconstruct whatever Nike says, and Nike is spending $750 million to fight it.  I think this explains why last year Nike began to just make the changes in labor practices. Nike's web site in recent months is changing faster than a baby's diaper. It is becoming cheaper just to do it than to say you are doing it.  It is cheaper just to install OSHA changes, ISO14000 compliance, and micro economic loans for Asian female workers at 450 subcontract factories. 

Nike's narrative of time is being called into answerability in the post-WTO epoch. Believability of Nike's image as a friend of labor, sports, and environment is being called into question. Nike's answers to those question has created a media frenzy, as antagonists and apologists consume air time and print space.  

Nike still fights NGO and activist demands for living wages. Last year Nike spent $750 million in ads and endorsements to erect its narrative image to consumers and investors as a progressive virtual core doing design and marketing while 450 subcontractors did production in highly desirable working conditions.  My estimate is that for $80 million Nike could pay a living wage to half a million Asian workers, who are mostly female between 15 and 22 years old (See What Nike Shoes Cost). Asian workers making Nike products in Vietnam, China and Indonesia make only $1.60, $1.75 and $2.46 per day, respectively (press here). Paying less in endorsements and in 1,000 full time Nike PR employees would easily allow half a million works to move from legal minimum wage to slightly above poverty wage levels. 

Nike in terms of kairos appears to rearticulate (renarrate) its strategic posture at highly opportune moments that are just in time, by apparently retrospectively grasping together its public images in sequentially reinvented labor and ecological practices (Ricoeur's narrative emplotment).  These narrative reinventions have had lasting and persuasive appeal to customers and investors and have led over time to quite recent important and positive changes in corporate practices. My thesis is the kairos of time (the time to adapt a narrative) is being condensed. Nike has taken measured actions that are viewed quite differently in terms of time, cause and effect order, and agency by various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).  The NGOs in post-WTO epoch are able to mobilize critiques and deconstructions of Nike narratives almost as fast as Nike can create them. To many NGOs Nike's kairos, is not just narrative retrospective sensemaking it is proactive spin control mixed with disinformation campaigns to stretch time as far as possible before making any substantive changes to Asian subcontract factory working conditions, monitoring entanglements and wage increases.  

In brief, Nike is caught up in three interconnected undecidabilities in its every quickening renarrations of time and Nike: double characterization, cause and effect order, and agency indeterminacy (Boje, 1999a).

1. Double characterization of time - This is the conflict between linear and non-linear logics of time. NGO and Nike storytelling is possessed by a "double logic," presenting its plot as a linear sequence of events which is prior to and independent of the other non-linear perspective on the events, and, at the same time, asserting each says they have captured the other in a devious plot structure. In "double logic," for every report of Nike exploitation, there is the distinct possibility that the story of the event is an exaggeration or even a fictitious tale by an activist. And for every Nike press release there is the counter-story of exaggeration of what can or will be accomplished next by Nike.

2. Cause and Effect Order -Nietzsche (1956/1887: 209-210) asked does cause lead to effect? Does effect lead to a search for cause? Or in chains of reinterpretation is cause-effect invented to impose our will on time? When Nike embarks on a new strategy, various storytellers, including Nike, retrospectively ascribe causes.

3. Agency Indeterminacy - If Nike changes its policy, did the activist antics bring this about, or was it the agency of Nike, becoming the caring and ever-enlightened capitalist?

Our three undecidabilities are examples of Derrida’s (1985: 32) "double interpretation," ways that make the separation of subjective story from objective empirical chronology impossible. 

Part 1. Double Characterization of Time - Nike promotes "Nike Index" to legitimate the appropriateness of its overseas practices. The Nike Index contends Nike is the change agent of economic development in the Third World (Nike Web, 1998):

In simplest terms, the Nike Index tracks a developing economy’s economic development by Nike’s activity in each country. Economic development starts when Nike products are starting to be manufactured there (Indonesia, 1989; Vietnam, 1996). The economy hits the second stage – development at a level where per capita income indicates labor flowing from basic industries like footwear and textiles to advanced industries like electronics and cars (Hong Kong, 1985; Korea, 1990); and an economy is fully developed when Nike has developed that country as a major market (Singapore, 1991; Japan, 1984; Korea, 1994).

The Nike Index became the legitimating narrative to charges that Nike was a nomadic MNC, roving the earth for cheap labor and despotic governments that turned the other way when it came to labor and environmental law enforcement. Nike's spin is that it is a catalyst to economic development for first Japan, then Taiwan and S. Korea, and more recently Indonesia, Vietnam, and China.  Nike had produced most of its sneakers in S. Korea and Taiwan since the early 1970s. When wages rise, Nike downsizes, closes most plants, and moves along.

As democratic reform and labor organizing came to S. Korea and Taiwan in the late 1980s Nike move most of its production to Indonesia in 1988. The linear narrative of the Nike Index was called into question with the Asian economic crisis of 1997.  The veracity of the Nike Index narrative came under strong challenge for three reasons. First, many of the Asian nations doing Nike manufacturing were at the center of the collapse.  Second, as Nike down-sized its labor force and moved from Korea and Taiwan to Indonesia, Vietnam, and China --- it is not clear how adding to unemployment benefited the first or second stage economies. Third, Nike has argued since the 1970s that it is not economically feasible to pay Asian sneaker workers above a country's minimum wage. As Dusty Kidd responded to CBS when told Bata, a Canadian shoe company has paid well over the minimum wage since 1990 in Indonesia said "Simple economics tells you that just cannot be true" (Ballinger, 1997: 8, 16).  Phil Knight (1992) continues to argue that Nike pays the "best wages available" (Ballinger, 1997: 13). 

A second example of the double characterization of time is Nike's switch from "Just Do it" to "I Can" time. The famous "Just Do It" slogan is being retired and even the Swoosh icon is being purged from corporate letterhead. The new campaign is "I Can." "Just Do It" is being linked in recent times to hyper-competitiveness, to the bullying sports teams and universities into sole source contracts, to violating the sense of fair sportsmanship in Olympic games advertising, etc.  

Examples of Nike "Just Do It" sports image problems:

"I Can" - The point is that the image-remake from "Just Do it!" to "I Can" is from a sports bully image to a kinder and gentler one.  "I Can" is a different ethos for Nike, one about getting along, and not competing to win at all costs.

However, making an effort to get along is not Nike's style, and runs contrary to the foundational spirit and ethos of Nike Corporation" (Carty, 1999: 61-62). 

If your brand image is associated with unfair labor practices and sports bullying you stand to lose a lot more than you might gain. It is costly for Nike to reconstruct such an image to keep its lucrative university sole source provider and endorsement contracts. The Winged goddess of Victory was crafted by the Greeks for particular reasons, and was re-imagined by Nike Corporation in the 1970s and again in the year 2000. Nike fought with the god, Zeus, in her battle against the Titans, and in Greek art she is sometimes represented as winged and carrying a wreath or palm of victory. But what is the meaning of victory?

Some have said that Victory is the fine result which is achieved in accordance with the aim pursued. So, for example, crushing the enemy is Victory for the general, obtaining good and abundant food from the land is Victory for the farmer, and reestablishing a patient to health is Victory for the physician. Similarly, whoever has a chief aim will, as the general, the farmer and the physician, attempt to achieve the finest result, and this one he will call Victory, considering it the sweetest thing of all. And Victory being so irresistible sweet, everybody wants her to stay, and that is why the wingless Nike was conceived, so that she never would fly away.

However, the glory of Victory has been related to the value of the aim pursued. So if the aim of the general were to betray his own army and lead it to destruction, and that of the farmer to starve the community by demanding arbitrary prices, and that of the physician to poison his patient, although by achieving their aims they would still be obtaining victories, these would, at the same time, be respectively called treason, greed and murder, in which no glory is to be found. And that is why it may be said that no lasting pleasure arises by gaining Victory for such things, for treason provokes hate, greed causes contempt and enmity, murder calls for revenge, and all of them give birth to fear and suspicion, which become the wreath of those victories. So, what is called the prize of Victory has been thought to be paramount, Victory itself tasting differently depending on what has been defeated, either good or bad things (press here).

In sum, the double characterization of time comes from the collapse of post-industrial capitalism and postmodern consumer culture.  Activists and NGOs are asking this collapse of time be unraveled. As Jameson theorizes, this movements seeks to note the continuity of postmodern capitalism to more Victorian capitalism, as well as to note the discontinuities (i.e. the emergence of new aesthetic tastes). In a media-saturated global economy, separating out labor conditions from consumption patterns (i.e. labeling where goods are made and the conditions of their work) is a difficult challenge. 

If Nike were to rely on methodology used by our critics -- most recently, Global Exchange and its release of a report on factories in China -- we would be rightly crucified by the public for shoddy research and an inappropriate sampling technique. Setting up a card table outside a factory gate, asking leading questions, and then issuing a "report" on Nike factories -- without any conversation with Nike or its factory management, never mind requesting a factory visit -- is not research. It is campaigning under the guise of research. The China report is the best example extant of how not to do independent monitoring, and a perfect illustration of why Nike chooses a responsible third party (in China, that party is Price Waterhouse) to look at factories in depth and with some precision.

Another Example of cause & effect order - "Because the goddess, Nike was victorious, the company is suggesting that people who buy their tennis shoes will fly faster on the track and court and will be winners too. Notice how their logo resembles the wing on the statue of Nike" (press here). 

Nike weakens time by re-narrating cause and effect, by spinning a narrative of consumption that masks inquiry into the material conditions of production.  Nike is gatekeeper between postmodern culture and post-industrial realities of work. This is also related to the third double logic, who has agency in all this?

Part III. Agency Indeterminacy -  "We're just buyers; we don't control what goes on in the factories" was the Nike response till 1992(See Ballinger, 1997: 10-12). The reaction of Nike to NGO and media commentary on Nike's subcontractor labor practices in the 1970s and 1980 was one of agency-denial.  "We don't make the shoes." Or as Neal Laurldsen, Nike VP for Asia put it "We don't know the first thing about manufacturing. We are marketers and designers" (Clifford, 1992; Press for Change, 1995). In short, Nike claims that it is not the responsible agent for any labor problems. NGOs in the early 90s pushed Nike to take more responsibility for agency by stressing that Nike set the terms of the contracts.  When Nike demands that contractors implement wage, health or safety changes, the subcontractors respond by raising daily production quotas, forcing workers to speed-up and to stay overtime without pay (its voluntary time) to complete quotas or forfeit via fines either a half or full day's pay. This practice stretches time by stretching the workday for no increase in wage (See Karl Marx Das Kapital, Chapter 10, The Working Day for similar ways of stretching work time).  

The U.S. Congress reacting to Indonesian press stories of human rights violations (appearing since 1989 in the press) issued a 1992 Human Rights Reports to the U.S. Congress charging the sneaker industry was "the pernicious influence" was "out-of-control".  Nike's response was to draft a Code of Conduct (and Memorandum of Understanding) for its subcontractors.  This was a revision of the agency indeterminacy narrative. But through 1996, Nike did not claim any agency accountability beyond "having" a written code for subs to follow.

In 1996, denial of agency was still the official storyline. Dave Taylor, Nike's VP of production, said, for example, "We don't pay anybody at the factories and we don't set policy within the factories, it is their business to run" (Press For Change, 1996). 

NGOs kept up the campaign to move agency accountability from having written codes to enforcement of the code. This redefinition of agency was actively resisted. Donna Gibbs, Nike's director of corporate communication in response to an Amnesty International query said "They're basically asking us to get involved in an arena that is not our place to get involved. We're not political activists. We're a footwear manufacturer" (Press for Change, 1996).  Carty, 1999: 317) points out the relationship between Time and Nike narratives: 

Though Nike has used this line of reasoning to dodge responsibility, dismissing problems as being created by subcontractors, MNCs [Multinational Corporations] like Nike do, at least indirectly, control the conditions in their subcontractors' factories. As argued by labor activists, to stay in business, a subcontractor must accept the timeline set by the MNC and accept the price the MNC is willing to pay per shoe, and when the MNCs squeeze the subcontractors, the subcontractors squeeze the workers (Campaign for Labor Rights, 1997).

Another example, at Nike’s September 22, 1997 stockholders meeting, Philip Knight (1997) adds to the indeterminacy, as he recognizes one NGO, "Global Exchange" by name in his speech to shareholders:

But there are certain extremist organizations that we simply cannot have reasonable dialogue with, and one of those extremist organizations is Global Exchange which had a press conference today where they announced that they were issuing some report. I would suggest to you the timing is not a coincidence and it’s not really a report—what it really is is a publicity stunt.

These strategies served for another year to counter demands by shareholders and NGOs to implement independent monitoring, including NGO monitoring of Nike overseas factories. But, shortly after the 1997 stockholder meeting, a major Ernst and Young audit report of labor and environment practices in a Vietnam factory making Nike shoes became front-page news. The undecidability questions took on agency, consensual agreement on causality, and the double logics no longer held much popular appeal. In response, Nike and CEO Phil Knight has begun to implement, what are by this time, documented changes in some of its labor and environmental practices.

Postmodern Nike Time - Nike Time is a strange set of fragments, combing ancient Greek goddess mythic time, with the pre-Taylorized piece rate time and motion of Asian sneaker production and postmodern identity consumption of floating sign systems. The goddess Nike is bought and sold in the postmodern culture marketplace while the time of piece work is unnoticed by consumers. The Nike sneaker is postmodern simulation, where consumers do not distinguish between Greek winged goddess and the copy "Swoosh goddess."  The Swoosh is a copy for which no original ever existed (Jameson, 1984: 66). The Swoosh is a copy of a copy.  The spectacle of sports competition is stitched onto sneakers by Asian females working in factory conditions that Karl Marx critiqued in 1867. As Nike applied its competitive values in university contracts, the sportsmanship and fair play of Nike came into play.  Now confronted with a bully sports and a bull labor dual image, Nike is retiring the Swoosh in favor of "I Can."  

With Nike's winged goddess of victory there is a loss of historicity with Greek past and with the Olympic games of Ancient Greece. There is some strangeness in time passing from Greek Olympics sports to Nike's corporate world of sports.  The blurring of historical time by Nike allows it to push a narrative that purports to be timeless while continuing to edit the images to fit the culture of postmodern consumption and the workplace of post-industrial capitalism. 

Nike, I think, does not want customers to distinguish or contrast past, present, and future time. Consumers in NikeTown consumption cathedrals are in a space that refuses historicity.  It is a Disney theme park for sports consumers.  Techno futurist shoe construction is combined with images of the winged goddess and modern images of global capitalism (Nike the virtual organization with a core of loyal employees and a a periphery of Asian workers). Images float in NikeTown in displays, banners, portraits of the sports icons, and in video loops. Like the casino, there is no sense of the passage of time.  NikeTown is postmodern architecture, a time and place where consumers can not get their bearings.  Is this a museum to sports, a mall shop, or a place to shoot hoops?  It is the ultimate hyperspace of postmodern consumption. 

Nike has moved to the 24/7 time of the cyber mall, where Nike is narrated day and night.  It is simulated shopping, outside any "real" time.  

Nike in NikeTown and in Cyber Mall is fragmented moments of time, just a succession of present moments, quick as laps on a stop watch. 

Nike escapes time.  It escapes the groups of NGOs and activists using the Internet and street theater to protest sweatshops. Nike is the poster child of globalization, representing to these activists all the inherent evils of global capitalism and postmodern image consumption. Nike is the symbol of the way time is organized in global capitalism.  Nike is the virtual organization. Nike-Time is no longed connected to work-time or to natured time.  It is the NGOs and activists that keep bringing up the differences in Asian work time and consumer time. 

And in the planetary reach of the world wide web, activist networks are globalizing at nearly the corporate order they oppose (L.A. Kauffman, July/August, 2000 Utne Reader: p. 14).

For Nike time has accelerated. No long the goddess time of Athens, not something tied to seasons, the movement of planets, or to cycles of day and night. 

Paul Ricoeur's theory of Narrative and Time integrated Augstine's theory of time and Aristotle's theory of narrative.  But, this integration did not anticipate the schizophrenic and fragmented conditions of Time and Nike.  In the one sphere there is the efficiency and stability of time in post-industrial production and in the other the implosion and hyperreality of time in postmodern culture. And in between them is Nike. Nike narrative weakens time in ways that stand outside Ricoeur's theory. Nike weakens the telos of time (e.g. Nike Index) but is not able to break free of time due to the resistance of networks of NGOs and activists bridging 1st and 3rd world. Across that bridging flows images Nike would prefer consumers and investors did not see. The images juxtapose predatory capitalism time with hedonistic postmodern culture in unflattering ways. 

Here and there Nike dissolves time. Nike is able to manipulate fleeting postmodern cultural aesthetics and has managed to overload cyber and billboard space with images that float. Nike is the culltural organ of symbolic capital accumulation. Many of its images are full of irreverence, dissent, and rebellion against discrimination and exploitation of women and minorities. Nike dominates the marketplace of cultural forms, erecting identities as fast as life styles proliferate. But the irony of paying big bucks for status symbols of the middle class is wearing thin. As is the irony of promoting progressive values of women and minorities in its advertising, while refusing to be answerable to the contradictions of its overseas labor practices.  Finally, the crisis of over-saturation of the Swoosh brand has introduced new "anti-Nike" forms of desire as well as competition for that desire. 

In the end we can say that Nike compresses time, saturating popular culture with Swoosh images and various slogans.  In the accelerated arena of sneakerization fashion, the sign systems for each market segment are not able to cover the feet of global post-industrial capitalism. An irony really, because what is so post-industrial about quotas and piece work in sweatshop conditions? 

Nike's inter-firm networks of producers and distributors is key to its continued corporate success.  But even more key is the ability of Nike to re-narrate just in time to avoid having its image inscribed by resistance to the global capitalism it has come to symbolize. After all, Nike does mobilize a culture industry to encourage consumption of a form of industrial capitalism that many consumers prefer not to imagine.