A hegemonic model of crisis communication: truthfulness and repercussions for free speech in Kasky v. Nike.

This study utilizes the hegemonic model of crisis communication to critically analyze the ideological implications of Nike's sweatshop labor crisis that culminated in the Kasky v. Nike court case. This groundbreaking case merits further examination and, informed by Gramsci's notion of hegemony, reveals the underlying ideological struggle present in the Nike crisis: a struggle for voice, power, and free corporate speech. Activist voices opposing sweatshops, Nike's defenses, and eventually, the legal decisions of the U.S. court system constituted competing voices in these ideological struggles over what is acceptable or right corporate behavior. This hegemonic struggle influenced standards for international labor, public relations efforts that misrepresent facts, and consideration of corporate public relations as free or commercial speech. This hegemonic model of crisis communication, unlike previous theories, recognizes the dynamic struggle between voices with various levels of power and the important ideological implications resulting from competing voices in crisis communication.

Keywords: crisis communication; hegemony; Gramsci; Nike; sweatshop; image restoration; Kasky v. Nike; freedom of speech; commercial speech

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In 2003, a negotiation between competing corporate and legal sides of the Nike crisis over standards of corporate honesty ended (for the short term) when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the principle that, at least in California, public relations practitioners must be truthful in their communication with the public. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review an earlier California decision that held Nike broke the law when Nike public relations personnel misrepresented the truth in their denials that Nike employees in developing nations were mistreated. This was an important landmark decision and seminal event in business communication crisis management.

This study proposes a hegemonic model of crisis communication that offers important implications for business communication because the Nike case represents a major shift in the legal protection extended to corporate speech: Responses to accusations concerning business practices are not protected by the First Amendment (in California), and misrepresentation of the facts in such cases is a violation of California law. The crisis also has other important ideological implications: Some standards of right action by corporations were reified, and some standards were redefined (such as what labor practices are acceptable). It is also one of the first organizational crises in which Web sites and the Internet played a determining role. More important, an analysis of the competing voices in the Nike crisis presents an opportunity to use the hegemonic model of crisis communication, to understand how competing voices struggle in the dynamic process, and to establish and maintain dominant ideology (i.e., what is right, just, or acceptable).

Analysis of the controversy surrounding Nike's business practices is not new. A long line of research and publications by the mainstream media and by the academic community about Nike as a multinational corporation establishes the importance of Nike as a seminal, landmark case study of business communication. As a case in point, a few years ago, the Association for Business Communication's annual student writing contest developed a case around Nike. Study of Nike's past and current problems deserves continued attention and merits reflective consideration because Nike stands as one of the most controversial and crisis-ridden corporations from which much can be learned.

Our purpose here is to add to extensive research on the Nike case by developing the hegemonic model of crisis communication and offering it as a critical theoretical lens to explain crisis communication. Concepts taken from Antonio Gramsci's work on hegemony and ideological struggle--such as the social negotiation of reality (public debates over the facts) and hegemonic struggle for dominant ideology (public debate about what is right or acceptable by voices with varying degrees of power)--inform our development of this theoretical model.

This study proposes a conceptual critical framework, which we call the hegemonic model of crisis communication, that helps explain the process of how various voices speak to these concerns--the activist voices speaking out against sweatshops, the responses of Nike as the accused organization, and eventually, the legal decisions of the court system. Use of the hegemonic model of crisis communication can help explain how organizational crises erupt, how they are facilitated in the press, how they are answered by corporations, and how they are fought out in the courts. The negotiation of acceptable standards of corporate image restoration discourse in the Nike case (an ideological struggle) is the case study for this research, but we hope that an understanding of Nike's sweatshop and free speech crisis can lead to the identification of general patterns of crisis communication that can be applied to other organizations as well.

This study employs a close textual analysis of the media texts, legal texts, and commercial texts in order to identify how each of these sets of texts, or voices, constructed their own social reality and how the voices competed with each other. Bound up in this process of reality construction are Gramsci's concepts of hegemony (the struggle to establish and maintain a dominant ideology), the subaltern or subpolitics (those with little power), consent (when subaltern yield power to those above them), common sense (that which is collectively deemed right and which is also termed false consciousness), and ideology (truth).

NIKE. HONESTY. AND CRISIS COMMUNICATION

Significant research into various business transactions of Nike has already positioned Nike as a seminal case study of U.S. business tactics here and in developing nations. Stabile (2000) examines the "sneaker wars" and the gang violence controversy surrounding the wearing of Nike shoes and reviews the PUSH crisis when Nike came under criticism for targeting certain audiences by race, age, and socioeconomic level. Knight and Greenberg (2002) note Nike's efforts to present itself as a socially responsible organization but also highlight its inability to answer its critics on sweatshop allegations; in fact, they argue that the very prominence of the Nike organization makes it a target of activist groups, whom they term subpolitics. Sellnow and Brand (2001) present a more theoretical analysis of campaign communication--in their case study of Nike CEO Phil Knight's May 12, 1998, speech about Nike's efforts at globalizing its products. In their analysis, Sellnow and Brand apply Benoit's image restoration model to examine model and antimodel rhetorical strategies, which shift blame away from the organization and onto the industry.

Another line of research has yielded business insights and business lessons by focusing on the Kasky v. Nike (2000) and the Nike v. Kasky (2003) lawsuits. E. L. Collins, Zoch, and McDonald (2004) detail the allegations that led to the lawsuits, review the Kasky v. Nike lawsuit, and note the significance of this case for defining corporate commercial versus free speech. Ki (2004) examines the Nike v. Kasky lawsuit and concludes that Nike's responses should be considered free speech and should not have been sanctioned. Business Ethics: Corporate Social Responsibility Report magazine explains why the Nike v. Kasky suit could undermine the accurate reporting of corporate crisis situations (www.business-ethics.com/nike_vs_kasky).

This continued attention to Nike by both the mainstream press and academics demonstrates the continued interest in understanding organizational crises and in developing good crisis communication strategies to respond to them. This study focuses on models of crises in order to understand organizational crisis situations and further explore the struggle over what corporate behavior is ideologically acceptable.

A review of some crisis communication theories and models reveals the need for a more descriptive, culturally based model of corporate crisis to complement the current, mostly prescriptive linear models of corporate crisis. Two seminal crisis models often referenced in the literature and in textbooks are Fink's (1986) precrisis/crisis/postcrisis model and Barton's (1993) detection/prevention/containment/recovery/learning model. Both are mostly linear models that prescribe the steps an organization should follow to manage a crisis situation.

More recent work in crisis theory also maintains this focus on linear, prescriptive models of crisis management. Not surprising, most of this established and more recent crisis research also shares the perspective that the organization has the primary power to control its crisis management strategies and its communication. For example, Coombs (2004) uses attribution theory, the categorization of kinds of crises, history of the organization, and factors that cause crises in order to demonstrate how the organization can manage and control a crisis; in the end, the focus is on a prescriptive, linear model of crisis and the role of the organization. Stephens, Malone, and Bailey (2005) replicate and extend Coombs's prescriptive stages-of-a-crisis model to suggest how message strategies developed by the organization can effectively reach their intended stakeholders.