Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism. - Review - book review

Challenge, March, 2000 by Edward Chase

LaFeber's all but total focus on Jordan leaves the personal side of Nike founder and impresario Phil Knight's story rather skimpy. This is disappointing, since Knight serves to exemplify the corporate transnational genius, not Jordan, as the book's title suggests. Only the coincidence of timing accounts for Jordan's role: His basketball stardom happened to coincide timewise with (1) the communications revolution of the new postindustrial information age, (2) just as Phil Knight was building Nike into a multibillion-dollar transnational Goliath. Colossal advertising campaigns are what accounted for Nike's multibillion-dollar sales. Knight's business accomplishments are described, but LaFeber is an economist, not a novelist, so one gets the sense that luck rather than personality or Einsteinian brainpower played a major role in Knight's triumphs, like stumbling upon Swoosh name and logo.

For a time, Knight became something of a public villain in the media when the word surfaced about exploited, impoverished Asian sneaker laborers, and especially after the news stories of black teenagers' thefts and murders. The contrast between Jordan's life and the plight of his fellow blacks--one of every four men in prison, on parole, or on probation, every third child in poverty, 40 percent of its men functionally illiterate--acted to sully Jordan's and Knight's images.

Knight persevered, unwavering. In the 1980s and 1990s he launched unprecedented new advertising campaigns in overseas markets. Nike sales doubled between 1987 and 1989 to $1.7 billion. And now women were buying as many Nike shoes as men. LaFeber's account of this growth of advertising in the 1980s and 1990s is an instructive high point of his book--and a sobering one. A new age was dawning, claims LaFeber, not just an expansion of the old multinational system. He notes that in 1980 the average American was exposed to 1,600 advertising commercials each day. "A decade later, it was about three thousand." In the new age, global corporate expenditure on advertising came to $120 annually for every person on earth. Commercial television ignored national boundaries--Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls basketball games could be seen in ninety-three nations by the 1990s. It was the new technology, DBS, the "direct broadcast satellite" launched into orbit originally by NASA, that did the trick. DBS was soon taken up by pri vate companies launching their own satellites, made profitable by selling advertising. Cables, now fiber-optic, that can carry hundreds of channels, carried the commercials right into our individual homes. Besides Phil Knight, media barons such as Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch and transnationals like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner created satellite-cable networks oblivious to geographical boundaries. Essayist Flora Lewis characterizes this postindustrial information age phenomenon as the unsettling "loss or disappearance of time and space." A new age indeed.

The concept of American cultural imperialism has entered the op-ed lists. Now critics in France, Germany, indeed all Europe, and intellectuals on each continent deplore American commercialism, mindless consumerism, the vulgarity and triviality of American pop culture. LaFeber notes, for example, that in film, television, and video sales, "in 1993 Americans made $4 billion more from Europeans than European films, television and video sales earned from the Americans. By 1996 the gap shot up nearly 50% to almost $6 billion" and rising.