Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea

Coca-Globalization

Previously Published Works Robert J. Foster 2002 Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea. 1997 Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. Edited Volume. (paper edition) 1995 Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands.

Coca-Globalization Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea Robert J. Foster

coca-globalization Copyright © Robert J. Foster, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60386-8 ISBN-10: 0-230-60386-6 Hardcover: ISBN-13: 978-0-312-23871-1 ISBN-10: 0-312-23871-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foster, Robert John, 1957– Coca-globalization : following soft drinks from New York to New Guinea / by Robert J. Foster. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-312-23871-1 — ISBN 0-230-60386-6 1. Commerce—Social aspects. 2. Cola drinks—Social aspects. 3. Consumers—Social aspects. 4. Culture and globalization. I. Title. GN450.F67 2008 306.4—dc22

2007026773

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: February 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my father and the memory of my mother

This page intentionally left blank

Contents List of Figures Introduction: Cola Connections and Worldly Things

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4

Part 1 Soft Drinks and the Economy of Qualities The Social Life of Worldly Things: Commodity Consumption and Globalization Glocalizing Coca-Cola: The Multilocal Multinational Corporation Qualifying Products: Trademarks, Brands, and Value Creation A Network of Perspectives: The Meanings of Soft Drinks in Papua New Guinea

Part 2 Globalization, Citizenship, and the Politics of Consumption Chapter 5 Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship Chapter 6 Shareholder Activism: Consumer Citizenship inside the Corporation Chapter 7 Pouring Rights: Politics, Products, Agency, and Change Conclusion: Product Networks and the Politics of Knowledge Notes References Index

viii ix

3 33 75 99

149 187 211 229 241 251 269

Figures I.1. I.2. 1.1. 1.2. 2.1 2.2 2.3. 2.4. 3.1. 4.1. 4.2. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6. 5.7. 6.1. C.1.

Partui Bonaventura, Tanga Islands, Papua New Guinea (PNG), April 2000 Bottle shop, Tanga Islands, Papua New Guinea, April 2000 Agnes, Southern Highlands, Papua New Guinea Kaipel Ka, Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea Postcard image of a Huli dancer at the 1987 Port Moresby Show Dancers at the 2006 Goroka Show Cover of Time, May 15, 1950 Bottling plant, Lae, Papua New Guinea, April 2000 Atlanta, GA: Exhibits and galleries at the old World of Coca-Cola Alphonse Hega’s winning entry for the 1998 Coca-Cola PNG national calendar competition Alphonse Hega’s second entry for the 1998 Coca-Cola PNG national calendar competition New York, NY: Protestors at annual shareholder meeting of The Coca-Cola Company, 2002 New York, NY: Protestors at annual shareholder meeting of The Coca-Cola Company, 2002 Antiwar protest, Anglet, France, March 2003 Insertions into Ideological Circuits, Coca-Cola Project, 1970, by Cildo Meireles Carpenters and coffin, Teshie, a suburb of Accra (Ghana), January 2004 Lighthouse II by Chris Woods Album cover of Dispepsi, by Negativland™ Student protest, Yale University, March 31, 2004 Chennai, India, June 2005: Billboard with picture by Sharad Haksar

xi xii 9 15 45 45 48 54 82 132 133 151 152 172 177 179 181 183 203 230

Introduction

Cola Connections and Worldly Things n May 3, 2000, Douglas Daft, then freshly appointed chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, delivered an address to the Chief Executives’ Club of Boston titled “Globalization: Connecting with Consumers.” In his address, Daft outlined the company’s plan for riding what he called “the second wave of globalization” (2000, 606). This second wave formed in the mid-1990s; it followed a wave of consolidation, centralization, and standardization in which The Coca-Cola Company, under the leadership of CEO Roberto Goizueta from 1981 to 1997, aggressively promoted its flagship product as a universal beverage. According to Daft, “The very forces making the world more connected and more homogeneous are simultaneously triggering a desire to withdraw, pull the shades and safeguard whatever is uniquely local” (2000, 606). The necessary response to this backlash, Daft pronounced, is to think locally and to act locally—to develop new regional brands customized to local tastes and to push marketing decisions and managerial accountability down to the local level. Such a general program, specifically enhanced by a marketing alliance with America Online (AOL), the ubiquitous Internet content provider, would allow The Coca-Cola Company to revitalize its traditional mission of “connecting with consumers one at a time,” virtually or otherwise, around the world. On May 3, 2000, I visited my friends in Tanga, a cluster of small islands in the far eastern part of Papua New Guinea (PNG). I started fieldwork in Tanga in 1984 as a graduate student in cultural anthropology. New Guinea inhabits a place in the Western imagination as the last unknown; it is what Clifford Geertz (1988, 75) once called “the paradigm elsewhere.” The article I read en route to Tanga in Paradise, the in-flight magazine of Air Niugini, was thus characteristic. The author described the elaborate mortuary rituals performed in the Tabar islands, located just to the northeast of Tanga. He extolled the virtues of this hard-to-reach place for venturesome tourists seeking escape from the hallmark features of modern civilization: “There are no phones here, no electricity, no running water, no Coke and

O

x

Introduction

no Pepsi.” The underlying fiction was familiar enough: increasing distance from “modern civilization” can be measured by decreasing availability of creature comforts, including brand-name cola-flavored soft drinks. But the claim would not in any case pertain to Tanga, the colonial history of which had thoroughly entangled the approximately 6,500 people who call the islands home in a local version of global modernity (Foster 1995). I stayed, after all, in the area of the islands known as Taonsip, named after the Australian city of Townsville in Queensland, where Tangan men worked on sugar plantations in the 1880s. Returning for the first time since 1992, I was met at the bumpy grass airstrip by Partui Bonaventura, my longtime host and patron, and led back to his hamlet for a meal of welcome (see Figure I.1). Somanil Funil, my close friend and collaborator, was absent, attending a feast held to acknowledge his work as a carpenter in building a trade store and bottle shop for one of Tanga’s few small business operators (see Figure I.2). Later that night, Somanil appeared, apologetic and somewhat inebriated from the party held in his honor. He greeted me with visible emotion, and invited me and the other men present to continue celebrating with him. He pulled a pint-sized bottle of dark rum from a net bag and carefully placed it on the table; then, one by one, he pulled out three 300-milliliter glass bottles of Coca-Cola: mixers. I do not mean to suggest that the presence of soft drinks in Tanga was new; in 1984, I used to buy cold Cokes from a now defunct trade store run by the Catholic mission. However, on the last night of my brief visit in 2000, I did witness something that I had never before seen in these islands: a Pepsi commercial. As a fundraising event for the local community school, a video night had been organized. Dozens of school age children and a smaller contingent of adults of all ages poured into a gated enclosure on a perfect moonlit evening to watch a motley assortment of offerings—Space Hunter, Jeremiah Johnson, Moses and Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits (deliberately shown late in the program, after the younger children had fallen asleep). The worn cassettes were played on a television monitor hooked to a VCR and powered by a noisy diesel generator. The dusk to dawn marathon began with a compilation of music videos by Papua New Guinean pop bands, a stream of highly stylized song and dance routines almost invariably staged on a beach. Just before the tape ended, a brief promo for Pepsi-Cola, a sponsor of the recording company that produced the music, filled the monitor. Attractive young Papua New Guinean men and women cavorted together on screen in a speeding motorboat. In the audience, the adults clucked and the teenagers whistled at the spectacle. As the commercial’s upbeat jingle finished, the warm night air moved to the

Introduction

xi

hissed sounds of children enunciating the word “Pepsi” or practicing their English by reading aloud the mellifluous slogan, “It’s Pepsi in PNG.” What is to be gained by juxtaposing Douglas Daft in Boston and myself in Tanga, by bringing the corporate agenda of a transnational soft drink company into the same frame of reference as the social lives of rural Papua New Guineans? Two conceits must be recognized from the start. First, many popular accounts of globalization now begin with an anecdote about American media icons such as Madonna or Rambo appearing on T-shirts in strange, faraway places—a gently shocking combination of us and them, modernity and tradition; a piece of the center washed up in the periphery. These anecdotes, demonstrations of the global reach of contemporary communication networks, sometimes ominously portend a homogenous global culture, and sometimes coyly celebrate the cultural capacity of people to domesticate foreign imports. My point is neither to predict cultural homogenization nor to defend local distinctiveness; it is merely and more modestly to observe connections, to admit that Douglas Daft is indeed connected to me and my Tangan friends by a particular economic good or commodity, though in ways that are not equally apparent or apparently equal to all of us.

Figure I.1. Tanga Islands, Papua New Guinea, April 2000. Partui Bonaventura stands before the ceremonial men’s house associated with the matrilineage that he leads. He wears around his neck a plastic insulated carrier for six-packs of soft drinks. I received the carrier as a promotional gift while attending the annual shareholder meeting of Coca-Cola Amatil in Sydney. I gave the carrier to Partui, who used it as a purse for everyday personal items such as betel nut, tobacco, and money.

xii

Introduction

Figure I.2 “St. Veronica’s Trade Store and Liquer Outlet Bottle Shop, Kalu Village.” Bottles of Coca-Cola were sold at this village trade store.

Second, it has been the conceit of many Coca-Cola officials, not to mention many business writers during the 1990s, that The Coca-Cola Company represents a paradigm for doing global business and thus, as Daft asserted, “Coke’s story now has something to say to everyone doing business in the global arena” (2000, 606). This may be true (see, e.g., Nolan 2000), but it is not my purpose to adjudicate the issue. The story of CocaCola speaks to me because it opens up a window on world-historical processes that are now glossed as globalization, processes that include not only business operations in a world market, but also cultural, political, and environmental processes that most people experience without leaving home, in smaller scale settings. And these settings include the towns and villages of Papua New Guinea, a country of extraordinary cultural and linguistic diversity, in which people have only recently oriented themselves, by choice and necessity, to a network of connections that define an enlarged world.1 Many of these networks are held together by commodities, not only raw materials such as minerals and hardwoods extracted for export from PNG, but also ordinary imported consumer goods such as rice, soap, and soft drinks: commodity connections. It is entirely relevant to my purposes, then, that Douglas Daft said of CocaCola that “we are a relationship company” (“Enjoy the Relationship” 2000); for globalization is above all about relationships, what John Tomlinson (1999) calls “complex connectivity.” Complex connectivity has both an

Introduction

xiii

objective and subjective dimension. Objectively, complex connectivity refers to the empirical linkages being established among diverse and physically separated people through movements of capital, media, and, of course, people themselves—migrants, tourists, refugees, anthropologists. Subjectively, complex connectivity refers to the ways in which these linkages are imagined by the people involved, the way in which an individual person’s phenomenal world is extended—or foreshortened. Now it is important to say that such complex connectivity is not wholly unfamiliar or unprecedented to Papua New Guineans or people anywhere else for that matter. Indeed, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the foundational ethnographic account of Melanesia, is all about the objective and subjective dimensions of complex connectivity. These connections are defined by kula transactions—the slow circulation of shell valuables around a ring of islands spread out in space, and the fantasies of widespread fame and renown enabled or frustrated by distant exchange partners. But it is equally important and entirely fair to say that the sort of complex connectivity entrained by the global diffusion of branded commodities is a more recent feature of social life in Papua New Guinea as elsewhere. (It is therefore also relevant to my purposes that Daft referred to Coca-Cola as not only a relationship company, but also a “brand building enterprise” [“Enjoy the Relationship” 2000].) Focusing on a specific category of commodities, soft drinks, and especially on one particular brand of soft drinks, Coca-Cola, thus enables me to describe linkages of extensive if not worldwide scope; linkages between a variety of actors—corporate officials, marketing personnel, consumers, and consumer activists: the network held together, more or less, by a commodity in motion. This focus also enables me to take up particular perspectives within that shifting web of linkages, perspectives from which the connections are often perceived and perforce experienced differently. Soft drink perspectives on globalization—the title, coincidentally, of the talk about first-wave globalization given by Roberto Goizueta in April 1989 that Douglas Daft hoped to update in May 2000. &* The available literature on Coca-Cola (and to a much lesser extent, on Pepsi-Cola) is vast, varied, and rich. I have consulted it frequently and gratefully in writing this book. It includes the lively and informative corporate histories of Mark Pendergrast (1993), Frederick Allen (1994), and Richard Tedlow (1990), as well as the sharply critical account of the world’s soft drink duopoly by J. C. Louis and Harvey Yazijian (1980). All of these books

xiv

Introduction

discuss the overseas operations of the American corporate giants behind these global commodities (see also Watters 1978). The literature also includes the insightful and timely narratives of business writers such as Thomas Oliver (1986), David Greising (1997), and Constance Hays (2004), and the insider stories of former and current executives such as Roger Enrico (1986) and Sergio Zyman (1999; see also Backer 1993). And, of course, it includes the annual reports, news releases, house publications and pamphlets, and official Web sites of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, as well as voluminous trade literature (e.g., Beverage Digest and BevNET.com), business news coverage of the beverage industry, and business school case studies. And I have not yet mentioned the mountain of published material and on-line sources that value, in every sense of the word, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola products and related paraphernalia as highly desirable collectibles (and there is a small scholarly literature that discusses such collecting; e.g., Slater 2000, 2001). Is there anything more to be said about these companies or their products? Aficionados and fans of Coke and Pepsi will find here a very selective treatment of corporate histories, one that emphasizes the era beginning with World War II, and a very partial treatment of corporate practices, one that emphasizes marketing and, in particular, advertising. In effect, this book is similar to Humphrey McQueen’s The Essence of Capitalism (2003), which chooses examples from the history and practices of The Coca-Cola Company in order to chart the changing features of capitalism over the course of the long twentieth century. I use a similar strategy for identifying and examining different dimensions of contemporary globalization. I call the method “extended apt illustration.” That is, I offer the single example of soft drinks in order to trace cultural, economic, and political aspects of globalization—the cross-cultural consumption of branded commodities, the business operations of transnational corporations, and the new forms of corporate and consumer citizenship taking shape in and against these operations. My overall goal is to describe in a combination of historical, ethnographic, and journalistic terms a particular instance of complex connectivity, of the actually existing and variously imagined linkages among people and things unevenly distributed across large swathes of space and time. In this regard, I draw on my own research and that of other anthropologists in Papua New Guinea, a country frequently and wrongly assumed to be, depending on the mood, either innocent or bereft of consumer commodities. The book is thus secondarily a contribution to the emerging post-village anthropology of PNG. Accordingly, readers might appropriately situate this book within the recent outpouring of writings that seek to recover connections in world

Introduction

xv

history through commodities; current fascination with border-crossing, long-distance mobility has prompted numerous investigations into the social and spatial lives of things (Jackson 1999). This detective work is not restricted to specialists. Consider, for example, the spate of popular books devoted to tracking through historical time and geographical space such different commodities as cod and salt (Kurlansky 1997, 2002), potatoes and diamonds (Zuckerman 1998; Hart 2002), coal and tobacco (Freese 2003; Gately 2001). It is as if renewed interest in the sociospatial life of stuff—in following tangible, ordinary things such as glass, paper, and beans (Cohen 1997)—has emerged as a therapeutic defense against the alienating specters of globalization. These tracking exercises—much like the juxtaposition of Douglas Daft in Boston and myself and my friends in Tanga—also say something about how anthropologists are going about their craft these days. Like many other scholars and citizens, anthropologists are looking for a handle on globalization. How is it possible to study the quick and complex movements of people and things, ideas and images, money and microbes across the face of the planet? How is it possible to get a sense of the ways in which people living in locations distant from each other are becoming increasingly connected—or increasingly disconnected—as a result of such movements? These are surely questions of method as well as theory. Anthropologists have been accustomed to extended participant observation in one place—to settling themselves in one spot and getting to know really well the people living there. Without abandoning this very useful method, what else might be done to register the fact that more and more, the lives people lead in any one place are shaped by events and circumstances unfolding elsewhere? How can anthropologists contribute to an understanding of action at a distance—one of the frequently identified characteristics of contemporary globalization (see, e.g., Giddens 1990)? One response to these questions has taken the form of research designed around paths, chains, and networks—research that quite literally follows its object (Marcus 1995), objects that include commodities in motion. Anthropologists have recently been constructing the networks that emerge through the movement of things as different as used clothes (the tenth largest export item from the United States to sub-Saharan Africa) and human organs (one of the many illicit goods that circulate in underground, border-crossing markets) (see Foster 2006 for a review). Some of this work builds on earlier studies by world systems theorists mapping the commodity chains through which natural resources and plantation harvests move from the third world to the first world. In anthropology, perhaps the best-known example of such a study is Sidney Mintz’s

xvi

Introduction

now classic history of the transatlantic trade in sugar, Sweetness and Power (1986). (Mintz’s work is in many ways a source of both information and inspiration for my understanding of the transnational soft drink industry.) Much of this work similarly builds on previous studies by cultural geographers and rural sociologists that have followed the movement of agricultural products from farm fields to suburban supermarkets to family tables. One anthropologist has even tracked the movements of Atlantic bluefin tuna: On the docks of a fishing village in Maine, Japanese buyers inspect the latest catch, checking current market prices by cell phone and arranging to ship the tuna overnight by plane from Boston to Tokyo, where it will be certified as premium grade and then flown back to New York for sale as sushi in upscale restaurants (Bestor 2001). These tracking exercises serve at least two related purposes. First, they make visible the sometimes obscure and often-unanticipated networks through which everyday objects of consumption move, thereby mapping the linkages between people and places that define the social organization of globalization. I hasten to add that these linkages are not always symmetrical (indeed, they often presume gross asymmetries and inequalities). Nor do these linkages extend everywhere; they vary enormously in density and intensity—some people and places are fully connected to the grid, others just barely so. Nor are these linkages stable, let alone permanent. Tracking exercises thus help to resist any temptation to think of globalization as a “spreading ink stain” (Whatmore and Thorne 1997, 287), that is, as a steadily accelerating “flow” of everything and everyone across the face of the planet. Second, these tracking exercises make it possible to comprehend perspectives that people in one place might have on people in another place as a result of their being aware of each other’s inclusion in the same translocal commodity network. In other words, it becomes possible to trace out a network of perspectives in which, for example, Maine fishermen alter their work habits to suit what they imagine to be the tastes and preferences of Japanese tuna connoisseurs. Or, to take a different kind of example, a network in which residents of Belize watch a satellite broadcast of the Miss Universe pageant, convinced that their national representative will not win because the standards of international beauty contests conflict with their own local standards of beauty (Wilk 1996). A network of perspectives of this sort communicates something of the ways in which people’s awareness of who they are and what they are doing is conditioned by their understanding of other people’s awareness of who they are and what they are doing. This expanded condition is perhaps what some commentators

Introduction

xvii

define when they say that globalization entails a heightened relativization of consciousness. I offer these brief remarks about current anthropological preoccupations as background to the story I am about to present, namely, some of the results of my own tracking and following of soft drinks—especially the two branded soft drinks, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. Why these soft drinks? Because they are some of the few truly global commodities and, moreover, commodities closely associated with fears and anxieties about how globalization might lead to a universal (unmistakably American) monoculture. Coke and Pepsi are heavily advertised; thus their meaning and image move along with their material ingredients through different paths within the same complex commodity network. And, finally, they are some of the few global commodities available and affordable to people in Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific country where I have done most of my fieldwork for the past twenty years. PNG is often regarded by many Americans as the sort of place one knows about mainly from National Geographic—the final frontier of remote and isolated tribes. It is less often imagined as an independent nation-state of nearly six million people struggling with a range of depressingly familiar problems, from urban unemployment exacerbated by structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the alarming spread of HIV/AIDS. From this sobering perspective, Papua New Guinea is obviously not a world apart, but part of a world connected in complex and changing ways—connected at least in part by the circulation of commodities: worldly things such as Coke and Pepsi that bear traces of their simultaneous existence elsewhere, over and beyond one’s immediate horizons. &* When I first went to Papua New Guinea, I quickly grew accustomed to enjoying refreshing drinks of Coca-Cola in every city and town I visited as well as at the Tanga mission trade store. It was an uncanny experience, and not only because my drink came in returnable glass bottles of the sort that had almost vanished from retail outlets in the United States. Coke in PNG tasted different, largely, I think, because it was (and still is) sweetened with cane sugar. But it also tasted wonderfully familiar. Drinking Coke in PNG reminded me, in a profound bodily way, of drinking Coke as a boy, growing up in Brooklyn in the almost forgotten days before high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—complex connectivity, through time and space, to be sure. A professional stranger in a strange land, I took comfort in an experience of home that was—strangely enough—provided by the consumption of a

xviii

Introduction

worldly thing; a commodity jointly qualified by its producers and its critics as, for better or worse, quintessentially global. Or perhaps not so strangely, given that eliding the distinction between home-sweet-home and the world at large has been one of the most prominent and explicit features of The Coca-Cola Company’s marketing rhetoric for several generations. In this book, I examine how both producers (including, especially, marketers) and consumers make, or fail to make, a worldly thing at home (or make themselves at home with a worldly thing). I pay particular attention to the strategies by which soft drink companies sought to establish relations of trust with consumers, especially in the wake of World War II when The Coca-Cola Company began its massive overseas expansion. I treat this trust (or confidence) as a function of successfully embedding a product in a set of localized social relations. Put differently, I treat this trust as an index of alignment in perspectives—perhaps temporary, perhaps accidental—between producers and consumers; that is, between agents mobilized in a network by the singular intention of selling a product and agents mobilized in the same network by multiple intentions of acquiring and using a product. Such an alignment, in turn, implies a conjuncture of qualifications, a working relationship between the producers and consumers (not to mention marketers), who, with different aims and means, qualify or attribute significance to a product (Callon et al. 2002). In this sense, the creation of trust is a corollary of the creation of value, the process by which various agents together evaluate a product in both semiotic and commercial terms. Value creation thus involves more than the labor of producers; it requires the (evaluative) work of consumers as well. Value creation occurs as a product circulates through the multiple hands of both producers and consumers. Likewise, the extraction of surplus value requires more than deploying the labor power of wage workers; it also requires capturing the use values attributed to products by consumers—a process achieved in part through the legal apparatus of copyrights and trademarks, which protects brands as the abstract property of corporations or other private owners. I argue that the process of value creation understood in this way helps make sense not only of how brands ideally connect persons (consumers) with things (products), but also how the management of this connection opens up possibilities for political action on the part of both corporations and consumers. On the one hand, corporations can and do invest in “corporate citizenship” as a strategy for enhancing their reputations and thus the attractiveness of their brands to consumers (not to mention employees and investors). On the other hand, consumers use the commercial value of their brand loyalty to lobby corporations for a variety of goods and services, the delivery of which was once presumed to be the obligation and

Introduction

xix

function of elected governments in promoting social welfare. The result is a distinctively non-democratic though not always negative form of contested governance in which consumers use their market role to act as citizens while corporations use their resources to act like states. What is at stake in this sort of politics? This book extends an apt illustration of soft drinks and soft drink corporations to flesh out and develop the key terms and interrelated ideas thus far and about to be invoked. They include making worldly things at home, embedding and reembedding commodities, qualifying products and the economy of qualities, commodity or product networks and networks of perspectives, trust and confidence, value creation and consumption work, and corporate citizenship and the politics of consumption. These terms and ideas recur throughout the chapters that follow, beginning with the comparison in Chapter 1 of two films that use Coca-Cola beverage containers to symbolize, respectively, the global spread of a Western monoculture and the resilient creativity of local culture in the face of such a spread. I interpret these films as shorthand for two common views of globalization that regard each other as antithetical but share a similar romantic attitude. As an alternative to this limited choice, I propose to use Coca-Cola soft drinks as symbols of an uncertain process of global connection in which people everywhere, including Papua New Guinea, give meaning to ordinary consumer commodities—though rarely under circumstances of their own devising. This process is uncertain, I suggest, because products themselves are uncertain; they are things in motion, never finally finished and always open to requalification as they pass from one set of agents to another through the network that their very movement traces and holds together—or not (Callon et al. 2002). Commodities are thus mutable, and this mutability has been most clearly recognized by anthropologists who regard consumers as agents capable of appropriating commodities for ends not imagined by producers. But this mutability is not infinite, a limitation on consumption most clearly recognized by political economists who highlight the structural inequalities of complex connectivity, including basic inequality of access to consumer commodities. The roles of worldly things and commodity consumption in globalization might be considered analogous. That is, some commodities connect people and places in a network of social relations stretched over space and through time; they disembed social relations from more localized social settings. But at the same time, these commodities can be reembedded in localized settings or domesticated, and the long-distance relations they entail thus rendered a hidden and natural aspect of the local scene. This process of disembedding and reembedding implies the mutability not only

xx

Introduction

of commodities, but also of home. This process of home making, then, also defines an everyday form of contemporary globalization. I suggest further in Chapter 1 that reembedding worldly things in local contexts often requires the establishment of impersonal trust or confidence, an implicit confidence that appears largely in the breach. Such breaches of confidence—for example, in the case of a product recall or a consumer boycott—make visible both the network of agents connected by the product and the disjunctions between the perspectives of these agents. Yet, even without such breaches, worldly things imply a complex network of perspectives, a web of connections in which people’s perspectives on products and on themselves are conditioned by their perspectives on other people’s perspectives. In fact, it is possible to understand the creation of value as a function of managing the exigencies of such a network of perspectives. For instance, it is by aligning the perspectives of consumers with those of their own that agents on the supply side of worldly things capture the value of consumers’ appropriation and use of a product—a complicated way, perhaps, to unpack the notion of “brand loyalty.” Such alignments are never guaranteed, of course, and it is one of the perpetual goals of advertising and marketing to secure such alignments. Chapter 2 opens with a discussion of the overseas expansion of The Coca-Cola Company during and after World War II. This expansion— which included the first appearance of the company in New Guinea—was among other things an exercise in “glocalization” (Robertson 1995), in localizing a globally uniform product or combining universalism with particularism, homogeneity with heterogeneity. The tensions involved in this exercise surface in the rhetoric of a well-known wartime ad campaign that publicized Coca-Cola as the “global high-sign,” and also featured a telling image of first contact between New Guinea islanders and U.S. Navy personnel. The war produced an uncanny experience (not unlike my own) for many American soldiers who encountered Coca-Cola bottles—disembedded artifacts of home—in the trenches of Europe and on the beaches of Pacific islands. After the war, the company explicitly attempted to fashion itself as a local business wherever it operated, such that all consumers everywhere would recognize Coca-Cola as an artifact of their home, however worldly a thing it might be. This attempt involved not only adjusting advertisements to various local sensibilities, but also using the franchise system of independent bottlers to reembed the product in local social relations (as well as local supply chains). But the attempt gave way in the 1980s to a new globalizing impulse, one that involved the consolidation of bottlers and the emergence of global advertising. This impulse yielded, in turn, to a rediscovery of

Introduction

xxi

the local as Douglas Daft assumed leadership of the company in 2000. Thus, the postwar history of the company reflects the same sort of tensions as the global high-sign campaign, shifts in emphasis on universalism and particularism triggered by crises and opportunities in managing the local image of a worldly thing. To some extent and almost ironically, these shifts can be understood (and are understood in corporate rhetoric) as calibrated responses to what Coca-Cola negatively symbolizes for many people: fickle consumerism. That is, these shifts represent attempts on the part of the company to stay connected, as Daft might put it, with the constantly changing interests and perspectives of consumers, indeed, to keep the perspectives of the producers aligned with those of consumers and thus sustain confidence in the brand. Chapter 3 roughly traces the processes through which soft drinks are qualified and requalified, processes in which control over the meaning of the product figures centrally. As Ponte and Gibbon note, “The management of quality may be also seen as a question of competition and/or cooperation between actors in the same value chain, each one having only partial access to—and control of—information on the product” (2005, 2–3). The asymmetries among agents in this process—company officials, marketing firms, and ordinary consumers—are most clearly demonstrated with regard to the policing of trademarks. Over the course of its history, The Coca-Cola Company has employed formidable legal and financial resources to restrict how logos, images, and brand names can be used. This effort has been justified on the grounds of securing the trust and goodwill of the consumers whom it subjects to a monopoly over the means of producing meaning. At the same time, however, the company has sought to know, if not actually stimulate, the qualifications of its products by consumers in order to present its own qualifications in a proprietary form of advertising recognizable to consumers—that is, in order to stay connected. The tensions built into this double-sided project of constraining and cultivating semantic creativity define the practice of generating and appropriating value. The company explicitly attempts to insert its products into as many contexts of consumption as possible; contexts already saturated with biographical significance, such that the lives of consumers add qualifications to Coca-Cola rather than, as the slogan asserts, Coke adding life to the experiences of consumers. These qualifications accrue to a product that company officials insist belongs to consumers, but in legal fact belongs to the company as abstract property. The process of qualifying and requalifying soft drinks again engages the question of how corporate agents—specifically, marketing and advertising agents—perceive and manage the problem of localizing global commodities.

xxii

Introduction

Chapter 3 discusses the attempts of Coca-Cola advertisers to represent the product and identifies an oscillation between emphases on local particularities and on translocal generalities that parallels the shifts in business plans discussed in Chapter 2. In Chapter 4, I draw upon the anthropological research done by myself and my colleagues to outline the network of perspectives involved in marketing, advertising, and consuming soft drinks in Papua New Guinea. I make no claims for PNG being a typical case of anything. On the contrary, it is a country where the introduction and use of worldly things—specifically, branded global consumer goods—are new and uneven, more than usually uncertain and far less studied anthropologically than, say, myth, ritual, and kinship. Nevertheless, by outlining such a network of perspectives, it becomes possible to demonstrate how and where the product qualifications of different agents converge with and diverge from each other. That is, it becomes possible to demonstrate the alignments and disjunctions that give product networks their dynamic and unfinished character and to intimate how people’s sense of themselves and others—their cultural identity, their status as modern or traditional, their claims to independence—are conditioned by the movements of worldly things. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 discuss at length how convergences and divergences in product qualifications have recently come to take on the character of a political contest. On the one hand, public relations specialists more and more seek to qualify corporations as socially responsible citizens, an effort often justified to shareowners in the name of enhancing the public reputation and thus market value of brands. Annual citizenship reports are issued and social responsibility links added to company Web pages. On the other hand, activists more and more target companies with highly visible brand images (and thus vulnerability to negative publicity) and qualify them as inadequately attentive to good labor and environmental practices. That is, consumer citizens attempt to regulate corporations directly, through market interventions rather than through legislative processes. These attempts have become widely associated with the positions and tactics of the socalled anticorporate globalization movement. A politics of products thus takes the form of a trial of qualifications in which corporate citizens and consumer citizens pursue rival strategies for managing the business of value creation. I identify some of the tensions built into the notion of corporate citizenship by examining the rhetoric of The Coca-Cola Company’s annual citizenship reports, suggesting how the company’s initiatives rarely stray far from advancing its primary and legally mandated goal of increasing returns to shareowners. This goal requires scrupulous attention to the

Introduction

xxiii

credibility of the brand—more a source of value than the material components of the company’s beverages—both now and in the future; that is, attention to the cultivation of trust and goodwill on the part of consumers. This requirement to attach consumers to brands and vice-versa opens up certain possibilities for consumer-citizenship, for pursuing civic ideals through political consumerism. Some of the best known tactics of such political consumerism involve attempts to subvert the language and media of consumerism through “culture jamming” and “ad busting.” Think, for example, of the numerous parodies and permutations of such familiar idioms as the Nike swoosh and the trademarked script of Coca-Cola. While acknowledging the sheer creativity of these tactics, I also question their political efficacy in defining an alternative to the very consumerism that they criticize. While perhaps the best known form of political consumerism is the boycott, I also review forms of positive political consumerism that have emerged around soft drinks, especially shareholder activism, which has enjoyed a steady boost since 2001. I discuss shareholder resolutions, introduced at the annual meeting of The Coca-Cola Company in 2002, which dealt with recycling of plastic bottles, health care for workers in Africa, and workplace violence in Colombia. These resolutions demonstrate the capacity of consumer citizenship—like that of corporate citizenship—to exceed the territorial boundaries of a single nation-state and to catalyze action that might otherwise be impossible within the framework of national government. The resolutions also demonstrate some of the real limitations of consumer citizenship, perhaps most of all the irreducible inequality in the resources available to corporate agents and consumer agents pursuing different agendas. These agents are indeed connected by a brand-name product, but the connections are usually, if not always, manifestly asymmetrical. Chapter 7 focuses on debates over the sale of soft drinks to children in schools. These debates raise two important points. First, they show how local and national struggles over the regulation of soft drink sales recapitulate larger scale struggles over the World Health Organization’s definition of global dietary guidelines. In all cases, the interests of transnational corporations and whole industries (such as the sugar industry) run up against the interests of advocacy groups and ordinary parents trying to monitor the health and nutrition of children. Second, these debates show that, while consumer issues can effectively mobilize networks of concerned citizens, without the assistance of government—without bringing the state back in—such mobilizations are unlikely to produce their desired outcomes. Consumer citizenship and political citizenship, then, must be seen not as alternatives to each other but instead as aspects of each other. They should be viewed as

xxiv

Introduction

complementary dimensions of a civic engagement appropriate to a world of commodity networks that make it impossible to distinguish between local and global and difficult to define the limits of complex connectivity. In conclusion, I briefly relate an incident of alleged copyright infringement associated with the operations of The Coca-Cola Company in India, where international attention has been given to local protests about corporate restrictions on access to water. I initiate this discussion not in order to determine the substance of charges made against the company, charges against which the company has offered its own public defense (interested readers can consult the references provided in the text). Rather, this discussion enables a final return to the question of commodity futures, broadly understood. I refer not only to the future of water—perhaps one of the most urgent challenges facing the planet in the twenty-first century—but also the future of value. That is, I return to the linked questions of how and for whom the value of commodities is created. These questions prompt, in turn, a consideration of how a politics of consumption might both make visible and reconfigure the product networks through which people everywhere provision themselves, with greater and lesser degrees of satisfaction, knowledge, and control. &* The research for this book has unfolded with major fluctuations in intensity over a period of ten years, in a variety of settings, and with generous support from institutions, colleagues, and friends. I can effectively describe elements of the research process by acknowledging and thanking—no doubt inadequately and incompletely—the many individuals and organizations who contributed to it. My inquiries in Papua New Guinea took me into the small world of commercial mass media, where I benefited from informal interviews with John Taylor, then CEO of EM TV, the nation’s only broadcast television service. He allowed me access to personnel in the station’s advertising department and provided videotapes of EM TV-made station breaks. I benefited from other opportunities to meet and interview people who worked for and/or owned and managed marketing and advertising firms in PNG. Andrew Johnston of Pacific View Media was particularly generous in giving me time for interviews, access to his studio, staff and archive of television advertisements, and a grounded sense of the multi-author creative processes involved in making advertisements for the Papua New Guinea market. Phil Sawyer of HRD (now HRD/Savi) also furnished me with his insights as well as the results of some of the only market research on media

Introduction

xxv

consumption conducted in Papua New Guinea. Mark Foster and Steve Landon shared with me their experiences of working in advertising and marketing in PNG and elsewhere. Richard Dellman, owner and manager of Advantage Studios in Port Moresby, talked with me about the history of commercial media in PNG and some of the challenges involved in finding and developing talent for making radio jingles and television advertisements. Tony Adah and Stella Inimgba of the Creative Arts Faculty at UPNG shared their views of radio and television media production in PNG. Peter Aitsi, then general manager of PNG FM, provided me with useful background information on radio marketing in PNG (as well as a unique opportunity to record a public service announcement). Justin Kili, a popular veteran radio personality in PNG and then deputy general manager of PNG FM, also shared his perspectives on commercial media. Anna Solomon, then editor-in-chief at Word Publishing, met with me on several occasions to discuss print media in PNG and also introduced me to the advertising staff of Word’s newspapers, The Independent (now defunct) and Wantok. I also learned much from conversations with Sorariba Nash and David Robie, both then members of the journalism program at the University of Papua New Guinea. My inquiries in PNG likewise took me into the small world of soft drink marketing. Stan Joyce, then marketing manager at SP Holdings Ltd. (now South Pacific Brewery), answered all my questions about the work of marketing and advertising beer and Pepsi products in PNG. Ian Boas, then the main media coordinator for Coca-Cola Amatil in PNG, spoke with me about strategies for hosting special marketing events and developing innovative marketing practices. David Lane, technical operations manager for Coca-Cola Amatil, gave me and my anthropological colleagues Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz a tour of the production facilities in Lae as well as an extensive interview about a range of issues from maintaining quality control to satisfying local tastes and preferences for soft drinks. The consumer side of the soft drink product network in PNG, as elsewhere, is much more diffuse than the supply side and correspondingly more difficult to study up close. My collaborations with students at the University of Papua New Guinea were instrumental in this regard. I thank all the journalism students who participated in the survey of soft drink consumption habits in 1997 and the fourteen students who participated in lengthy interviews on their own personal consumption practices in 2000. I also thank Linus Digim’Rina and Baulon Maibala for facilitating these interviews and helping recruit respondents to the survey. I am grateful for the opportunity to talk with Dan Kakaraya, then executive director of the Consumer Affairs Council (PNG) and Eileen Lloyd, consumer education and public relations

xxvi

Introduction

officer, who supplied me with copies of publications of the South Pacific Consumers Protection Programme. Access to published and unpublished materials in PNG was made possible by the PNG National Research Institute, with which I was affiliated during three separate research trips. I thank Colin Filer for his help and advice and Michael Laki for arranging a research visa. I also thank John Millet for permission to consult materials at the library of the Institute of National Affairs in Port Moresby and for discussion about commerce and business operations in PNG. In the United States, my research was greatly advanced by an extended visit to the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta. There I was able to consult in-house publications of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, including magazines such as The Red Barrel, Coca-Cola Overseas, and Panorama. In addition, I was able to consult the Mark Pendergrast Research Files in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). These collections gave me access to rare copies of publications of The Coca-Cola Company, as well as to the rich interview and background materials used by Mr. Pendergrast in writing his landmark history of The Coca-Cola Company. My thanks go to Mr. Pendergrast for making these materials available and to the staff of MARBL for handling my requests. In Washington DC, I was fortunate to be able to consult the Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. I thank John Fleckner, Mimi Minnick, and Wendy Shay for facilitating my use of the collections at the Archives Center, and for arranging an extended loan of materials from the Marlboro Advertising History Collection for use in teaching my undergraduate course on culture and consumption. At the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library, Suzanne Bell, Vicki Burns, and the friendly staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department have been extremely helpful in acquiring materials from other collections. I have benefited from the help and advice of numerous individuals in tracking down materials connected with issues taken up in this book, such as the debate over selling soft drinks in schools. Lauren Crabtree and Taro Nettleton provided useful research assistance. Lisa Soccio introduced me to the work of Negativland, whose Mark Hosler spoke with me about the group’s work, and Cynthia Foo told me about Superflux. Marilyn Anderson drew my attention to the newspaper article that supplied the epigraph for Chapter 1. Writing with Derya Özkan about the advertising launch of Cola Turka greatly enhanced my own soft drink perspectives on globalization. Scott MacWilliam, longtime friend and advisor on the commercial history of PNG, sent me a copy South Pacific Brewery: The First Thirty Years

Introduction

xxvii

and otherwise shared his enormous knowledge of business enterprises in PNG. Eric Hirsch, Jan Hoeksema, Maryann McCabe, Cildo Meireles/ Galerie Lelong, Mike O’Hanlon, Nancy Sullivan, Holly Wardlow, and Chris Woods/Diane Farris Gallery kindly provided images. Janet Berlo thoughtfully alerted me to the striking quilt by Otesia Harper, and Richard Sorensen and Leslie Greene of the Smithsonian American Art Museum arranged permission to reproduce the cover image. Material support for the research that led to this book has been generously provided by the National Endowment for Humanities and the College of the University of Rochester. I have also benefited from the hospitality and intellectual companionship of Mark Busse and Claudia Gross, who hosted me on trips to Port Moresby; and Deborah Gewertz and Fred Errington, who invited me to visit them during their fieldwork in Wewak and later at Ramu Sugar Ltd. A large portion of the book was written and revised while on sabbatical at the University of Chicago, where I was welcomed as a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology. My thanks to John Kelly for arranging this affiliation. I especially thank John Kelly and Martha Kaplan for opening up their home to me without reservation. John Comaroff gave me use of his library study, for which I am grateful. In Rochester, Tony and Penny Carter lent me their farmhouse for some quiet thinking and writing; Ro Ferreri gave me stalwart administrative support and Mike Ferreri assisted in producing the images; and all my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology indulged my unusually expansive interest in soft drinks. I thank Mark Pendergrast and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on the manuscript. Numerous audiences have responded constructively to presentations of the material in this book. I thank especially Stéphane Breton for making it possible for me to share my material with seminars at the École des Hautes Études in Paris and to benefit from conversations with him. Jonathan Friedman, Maurice Godelier, and André Iteanu provided insightful comments. Pierre Lemonnier and Pascale Bonnemere graciously hosted my visit to the Center for Research and Documentation on Oceania (CREDO) at the University of Provence and shared their experiences in PNG. I thank Nancy Fried Foster for her unequivocal support, calming advice, and judicious editorial suggestions, and for making it possible for me to be away from home doing research while she cared for our children and family affairs. Finally, I thank my friends and extended family in Tanga for their assistance, understanding, and encouragement over the last twenty years. Without Partui Bonaventura and Somanil Funil, my world would be immeasurably smaller.

This page intentionally left blank

Part 1

Soft Drinks and the Economy of Qualities

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

The Social Life of Worldly Things Commodity Consumption and Globalization Take this sweet dew from the earth, Take this honey. It will help you on your way. It will give you strength on your path. —Burial prayer uttered by a Mayan mother offering her dead child a last sip of Coca-Cola, Magdalenas village, Chiapas, Mexico, 1975 (Smith 2005)

ention Coca-Cola and Papua New Guinea in the same breath and you might very well elicit a reference to The Gods Must Be Crazy. In the opening scenes of that enormously popular 1980 film, a Coke bottle tossed from a passing airplane lands amidst a band of hunters and gatherers (the !Kung, or San) living in the Kalahari Desert, whom the voice-over describes as perhaps “the most contented people in the world” (for a critical discussion of the film, see Gugler 2004). At first, the Coke bottle is happily and cleverly used as a new tool for accomplishing a variety of familiar tasks such as curing snakeskins and pounding roots and vegetables. The “thing” is used expressively as well as instrumentally—to make music and to print designs on barkcloth. But the found object soon becomes the singular focus of disruptive desire, causing jealousy and dissension among the hitherto harmonious band and eventually provoking an anti-Edenic act of violence. Most of the remainder of the film concerns the efforts of one man, !Xi, to return the bottle to the gods by taking it to the edge of the world. !Xi’s journey ludicrously entangles him in the political and personal antics of other, ethnically and ethically distant South Africans. In the end, however, !Xi duly redeems both himself and the bottle, gently dropping the latter off a majestic cliff into the blanket of clouds shrouding the earth far below.1

M

4

Coca-Globalization

The film’s romantic, superficial anti-establishment rhetoric no doubt accounted for its appeal to middle-brow audiences in the United States, where in 1984, it became “the biggest foreign box office hit in movie history” (Gugler 2004, 78). Brand Coca-Cola reliably plays its designated role as the icon of a modern social life—urban, regimented, and consumerist— that many viewers might find unsatisfying or sterile. As the preeminent modern commodity, then, the Coke bottle introduces confusion into a primitive economy of sharing: anxieties and strife over possessiveness, private property, and the end of balanced reciprocity. The Coke bottle is an evil thing and bodes only misfortune for !Xi and his people, a threat to their traditional way of life posed by an encroaching alien modernity. Indeed, a threat that the bottle itself begins to carry out seemingly of its own accord. Commodity fetishism rears its ugly head. The Coke bottle in this view is not only an evil thing but also a worldly thing, and worldly in a double sense. First, the bottle links an isolated group of people into the world at large, the global consumer culture for which Coca-Cola serves as an insistent abbreviation. Second, the bottle acculturates the innocent to the guilty pleasures of materialism, the sensual and sinful enjoyment of material things, an enjoyment that, in order to be maximized, requires a kind of antisocial selfishness or unchecked greed. The cosmology invoked here is thus dualistic. On one side: tradition, sociality, spirituality; on the other side: modernity, egocentrism, materialism. In this instance, the side of tradition is valued over that of modernity and wielded as an instrument of social reform in which the other teaches us a lesson. Like other post–World War II cinematic critiques of modern times, including the apocalyptic fantasies Dr. Strangelove and On the Beach, The Gods Must Be Crazy deploys Coca-Cola to symbolize a hollow civilization ruled by crass commercial instincts. Compare this symbolism, then, with the imagery of another film in which references to Coca-Cola also play a prominent role in orienting the narrative. The Cup (1999) tells the story of how the youthful residents of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery-in-exile, located in the foothills of the Himalayas, attempt to satisfy their wish to watch televised World Cup soccer. The film opens with a contrast between the elegant writing of a mani stone, inscribed with prayers, and a dented red can of Coca-Cola, bearing its own unmistakable script. Young monks kick the can around the courtyard in a game of soccer. The appearance of a stern older monk, Geko, scatters the players. Geko picks up the abandoned Coke can/soccer ball and brings it to the rooms of an eccentric, prediction-dispensing lama, whom Geko knows will appreciate the object.

The Social Life of Worldly Things

5

The camera pans over the altar in the lama’s rooms, full of small oil-burning lamps, some of which have been fashioned out of empty Coke cans. Like The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Cup invokes well-worn dichotomies— east/west, sacred/profane, spirituality/materialism, modernity/tradition— but only in order to dissolve them. The Coke can first appears as matter out of place, mammon in the temple, a disturbing sign of how American commercial culture has penetrated the earth’s farthest corners. Yet the Coke can never actually appears as a can of Coke; it appears first as a soccer ball and then a candleholder, turned to other uses by the residents, ultimately transformed from a profane instrument of sociality into a vehicle for the sacred. Here then is the possibility of domestication, of incorporating the foreign into the familiar (not only the Coke can, but the game of soccer, too) in such a way that the monks become no less themselves for doing so. This possibility is the very same one held out momentarily to !Xi before the Coke bottle exerted its evil effects. In the monastery, however, the possibility is successfully sustained. The monks do not succumb to a standard global modernity, but instead produce their own vernacular version—they make a worldly thing part of their world. &* These two films tell two different moral stories about commodity consumption in general and the consumption of worldly things in particular. The Gods Must Be Crazy suggests that such consumption ought best be resisted and rejected, since its consequence is nothing less than a fall from grace. Presumably, then, the preferred course of action is to preserve the integrity of one’s enclaved world, to subordinate material needs to social and spiritual ends, to embrace simplicity—in short, to live like a monk. But not like the monks portrayed in The Cup; these monks see no necessary contradiction between their devotions to the Dalai Lama and World Cup soccer. Commodity consumption for these monks—including consumption of satellite television broadcasts and glossy foreign sports magazines—is a means to enhance old identities and to imagine new ones, to locate themselves uneasily in a borderless community in addition to— rather than instead of—that of Buddhism. Thus the film’s young protagonist and chief soccer enthusiast, Orygen, explains to a newly ordained young monk, a refugee from Tibet suffering homesickness: “I have no home. This is all I care about.” Orygen, however, admits his allegiance to the French national team because France is “the only country that loyally supports Tibet,” the homeland that Orygen never knew.

6

Coca-Globalization

These two stories about commodity consumption conjure competing but complementary visions of globalization understood in cultural terms. The first story is a dystopian vision of what Jonathan Friedman calls “strong globalization . . . the production of similar kinds of subjects on a global scale” (1995, 78), subjects who interpret the objects and images that circulate in the world uniformly; subjects upon whom one and the same interpretation is imposed. It is this vision of strong globalization that incites widespread alarm among people who lament the victory of a new global monoculture and the loss of indigenous and ancient cultural diversity. This perspective is explicit, for example, in the comments of David Suzuki, a well-known Canadian environmentalist, as reported in an Australian newspaper (Spinks 1999): If you go to Papua New Guinea, from one little valley to the next you’ve got a totally different people speaking a different language with different customs. . . . New Guinea is the best example of diversity that you can get. And cultural diversity is the key to our survival because we adapt to different places and to different ecosystems and we develop a culture that is suited to the places where we live . . . You go to the deepest parts of Papua New Guinea or Africa or South America, the kids are rocking around in Adidas shorts, they’re wearing Nike running shoes, they’re listening to Madonna on their Sony transistor and they’re drinking Coca-Cola. We’re monoculturing the planet . . . Even the diversity that exists between Holland and Germany and France and England and Canada—those differences are being over-ridden by this global culture.

In this view, the relentless homogenizing force of an American-led global monoculture is conveyed mainly through the mass consumption of universally available branded commodities, and there are no more universally available and more recognized commodities than Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. The story of The Cup, by contrast, is a story of “weak globalization,” which “entails that the local assimilates the global into its own realm of practised meaning” (Friedman 1995, 78). This view of globalization assumes only a global field of reference, access to which is variously afforded (e.g., by communications technologies) to a variety of localized communities. There is no further assumption that all communities everywhere, or all members of all communities, will attribute the same meaning to objects and images circulating globally—including branded commodities such as soft drinks. Even such a standardized global form as McDonald’s restaurants can be invested with significance that varies from one sociocultural setting to another. In East Asia, for example, McDonald’s restaurants become local institutions, transformed through the agency of

The Social Life of Worldly Things

7

consumers into leisure centers, after-school clubs, and meeting halls (Watson 1997). The globalized field of reference thus generates, rather than eliminates, cultural heterogeneity. This vision of weak globalization has certain anthropological advantages. Above all, it does not mourn the “loss of culture,” mainly because, like most anthropologists, it regards culture as constantly in motion, a changing historical and social process, rather than as inert, a static assemblage of traits or customs. More specifically, this view of weak globalization recognizes two aspects of commodities and commodity consumption that are crucial to my discussion of soft drinks. First, it implicitly adopts a definition of objects and images that foregrounds their mutability and neverquite-finished character. Callon et al.’s (2002, 197) definition of a product—which I use implicitly throughout this book—is apposite: “A product . . . is an economic good seen from the point of view of its production, circulation and consumption. The concept (producere: to bring forward) shows that it consists of a sequence of actions, a series of operations that transform it, move it and cause it to change hands, to cross a series of metamorphoses that end up putting it into a form judged useful by an economic agent who pays for it. During these transformations its characteristics change.” In other words, the product is a variable, a contingent outcome of negotiations—even conflict—around the qualification of commodities (see Ponte and Gibbon 2005). This process of evaluation, of qualifying and requalifying products, unfolds at all moments in the life or career of product—design, manufacture, marketing, use, recycling, and so forth. But at certain moments, the qualities of a product are stabilized; the product becomes a “good,” its list of qualities closed and fixed, at least temporarily. Second, the vision of “weak globalization” recognizes that consumers are just as active as any other economic agent—designers or advertisers, for example—in qualifying products. As Callon et al. (2002, 201) put it: “There is no reason to believe that agents on the supply side are capable of imposing on consumers both their perception of qualities and the way they grade those qualities.” Accordingly, the product, understood as a sequence of transformations or as a process of qualification and requalification (cf. Munn 1977), links consumers into the different networks coordinating all the agents involved in production, design, etc.—agents who most likely never encounter each other face-to-face or even know of each other’s existence in precise terms: “The product singles out the agents and binds them together and, reciprocally, it is the agents that, by adjustment, iteration and transformation, define its characteristics” (Callon et al. 2002, 198). Hence the product implies a dynamic “economy of qualities,” an economy in

8

Coca-Globalization

which tradable goods in the market are defined by the qualities attributed to them in successive qualification and requalifications, including those enacted by consumers.2 These two insights are crucial, and will be developed presently in regard to the notions of commodity consumption and globalization. But I first want to be careful to avoid one possible interpretation of the contrast between “weak globalization” and “strong globalization.” The difference between these two visions of globalization often motivates a split between the sentimental pessimism of dependency theory—the rest as victims of the West—and the simple optimism of cultural pluralism—of celebrating alternative modernities in which received orientations organize tastes and preferences for images and objects coming from exogenous sources. If the former denies all agency to the non-Western peoples it laments, then the latter risks obscuring the complex ways in which heterogeneity can be recruited within a homogenizing project. It also risks obscuring the inequalities among different economic agents bound together by a product—inequalities not necessarily in qualifying products, but in determining which products are available for qualification in the first place as well as when they are available and to whom. This distinction involves what Mintz called the difference between inside meanings and outside meanings; the multiple meanings that various users give to a product as opposed to the significance of a product for “the history of colonies, commerce, political intrigue, the making of policy and law” (1986, 167). Mintz cautioned that considerations of both kinds of meanings are necessary for anthropological analyses of commodities (see Chapter 3). Eliding the difference effectively discounts how, for both participants in and observers of globalization, pessimism and optimism regularly shade into each other. I suggest, then, another view of commodities and globalization. In this view, the image of soft drinking Papua New Guineans portends a vernacular modernity conceived as the creative adaptation by which people make themselves, but under circumstances not entirely of their own choosing. Neither alarmist nor celebratory, this view is open and uncertain. The hope is that such creativity will not be completely eclipsed by the struggle to contend with the unavoidable features of global modernity—capitalist markets and bureaucratic states, for example; the fear is that it will. What one wonders about and refuses to take for granted is the meaning attributed to the Pepsi bottle or the can of Coke by consumers in Papua New Guinea or anywhere else. At the same time, however, one never forgets that meaningful projects of appropriating foreign commodities are themselves encompassed within social relations among people separated not only by physical distance but also by interests and resources, cultural as well as

The Social Life of Worldly Things

9

economic. The qualifications of consumers in Papua New Guinea, as elsewhere, are tied into a more or less extensive network of agents through whose qualifying hands the product-in-process or commodity-in-motion has already passed. This view of uncertainty can be brought to bear upon a particular image from the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, an image of a woman by the name of Agnes eating steamed rice from a Coke can (see Figure 1.1). According to the anthropologist Holly Wardlow (personal communication), Huli-speaking women fill empty soft drink cans with rice and water, stop up the opening, and carry the cans when visiting other women. The cans are heated over a fire and the rice cooks, providing a quick meal while away from home. Thus Huli women have analogically extended a culinary technique once widespread in island Melanesia, but rarer since the displacement of bamboo tubes by aluminum pots; they have appropriated the can for use within a familiar social context. More generally, the Coke can is appropriated into a set of local cultural dispositions and practices that preexist and even shape the reception of new consumer goods. Here then is cause for optimism: the Coke can has been reclaimed as a tool for sociality, a creative substitute for previously available tools. The can-cum-rice cooker reminds us of the terms that anthropologists use to apprehend the creative adaptations regularly encountered as participant-observers in the lives of people across the planet: hybridity, creolization, and even an old favorite,

Figure 1.1 Agnes, a Huli woman, poses with a can of cooked rice. Photograph by Holly Wardlow.

10

Coca-Globalization

syncretism. All these tropes point with modest good cheer to emergent forms of culture, to something new and different resulting from the blending of hitherto separate elements (for thoughtful reviews of the problems associated with these terms, see Tomlinson 1999; Friedman 1995; Mintz 1995). These tropes underscore the agency of Papua New Guineans—not the agency of rational choice, but the agency of symbolic action or inside meaning-making. At the same time, however, the very presence of the imported Coke can and the imported rice bespeak the sort of changes in work (new forms of wage-labor) and diet (new sources of sugar, salt, and fat) that have accompanied the expansion of a market economy in Papua New Guinea—not to mention the reach of transnational food and beverage corporations. Cheap foreign foods of dubious nutritional value rival, if not displace, domestic foods and become available in even the most remote areas of a remote country (see Chapter 4). The can as rice cooker thus also reminds us of the institutional dimension of complex connectivity, the structures of capitalist social relations and exigencies of outside meanings through which even “weak globalization” is effected. This sort of reminder often generates pessimism, since capitalist social relations are asymmetrical, if not outright exploitative. This pessimism, in turn, often leads back to an alarmist view of ineluctably creeping commodification and global monoculture. The challenge for anthropologists considering the relationships among globalization, commodity consumption, and culture is to hold world historical structures and contingent, creative agency—as well as pessimism and optimism—in tension with each other. On the one hand, anthropologists ought to make it impossible to read the meaning of a Coke can or Pepsi bottle as an automatic and unambiguous icon of the West (or the United States), understood as either purveyor of cultural imperialism or bearer of liberating consumer choice. On the other hand, it is also incumbent upon anthropologists to trace out the chain of social relations, extensive in space and time, within which perspectives on commodities take shape—the networks of economic agents conditioning the possibilities for making meaning and for imbuing or qualifying products with significance (cf. Friedman 1995, 87). How are we to think about both commodity consumption and globalization in order to meet this challenge? Interlude: Commodity Consumption and Globalization as Dialectical Processes I first of all want to expand and supplement the idea of an economy of qualities by proposing that commodity consumption and globalization

The Social Life of Worldly Things

11

can usefully be theorized in parallel terms. That is, consumption and globalization can be taken to describe analogous and often overlapping dialectical processes. In the case of consumption, a process of “objectification and appropriation” exposes the mutability of commodities, symbolically as well as materially. In the case of globalization, a process of “disembedding and reembedding” exposes the mutability of localized social settings or “homes”—their openness to the effects of absent as well as physically present agents. It is through these twin processes, I suggest, that people produce meaning, for themselves and for others, and variously entangle locally situated lifeworlds in social relations stretched across space and through time. The Mutability of Commodities: Objectification, Appropriation, and Commodity Biographies The dialectics of commodity consumption have been most thoroughly appreciated and laid out in the work of the anthropologist Daniel Miller. Miller’s (1988) key innovation has been to regard consumption as a form of labor or work: practical activity in which people meet an object world that confronts them as external and foreign and through which they fashion objectifications of themselves as social beings recognizable to themselves and to others. Miller thus resolves the existential dilemma of Marx’s alienated worker, but in the realm of consumption rather than production. It is through consumption work that people—often denied the opportunity to do so in their employment—project and contemplate themselves in an object world of, at least in part, their own making. For example, Miller (1989) has ethnographically demonstrated how the residents of London public housing variously transformed their standard-issue kitchens through diverse strategies of decoration. The degree to which residents effectively customize their kitchens correlated with their sense of positive belonging as a resident of the housing complex; residents who had barely altered their kitchens tended to be the most estranged from their social and physical surroundings—the least “at home,” so to speak. For Miller, then, everyday commodity consumption in industrial societies flush with massproduced goods holds the possibility of personalizing impersonal objects through acts of deliberate appropriation. Such acts of appropriation raise questions about the nature of self-fashioning when well-known, deeply-branded commodities are put to more than usual use. Nancy Callahan, for example, attracted attention when she transformed her Florida home into what some people call “the Coca-Cola house” by lining her kitchen with Coca-Cola wallpaper and filling the rooms with Coca-Cola paraphernalia of all kinds—furniture, plates, dolls,

12

Coca-Globalization

and even a restored vending machine. Passersby who observe the CocaCola bottle-shaped mailbox sometimes stop and knock on the door, asking to buy something. “‘No, this isn’t a store,’ Callahan beams. ‘This is my home’” (“Soft Drink Collection a Big Hit” 1999). Thus the line between intimate domesticity and impersonal marketplace disappears as items associated with perhaps the most global of global commodities become the comforts of one woman’s home. The results are not unambiguous: what are we to make of the convergence between Nancy Callahan’s self-cultivation and the marketing of the world’s most valuable brand? What or whom does “the Coca-Cola house” objectify? And for whom? The observation that impersonal commodities are frequently personalized has been theorized in other ways. It is entailed, for example, in the classic opposition between commodities and gifts and the observed transformations of the former into the latter. The most impersonal commodity can be turned into a personal gift, and vice-versa. Commodities, by this account, have histories, or, as Kopytoff (1986) puts it, biographies. That is, the meaning of a commodity must always be understood in terms of the different social contexts through which the commodity might pass during its life. This notion of a commodity biography clearly resonates with the claim that a product is the contingent outcome of a constant process of qualification and requalification (Callon et al. 2002). François Girard’s 1998 film, The Red Violin, is nothing less than an epic if fictional account of gift and commodity transformations in which a single exquisite violin furnishes the material vehicle for unfolding the dramas of its various owners over hundreds of years. These dramas put the violin in the context of world-historical events ranging from the Protestant Reformation to the Cultural Revolution. The film culminates with the efforts of an expert appraiser, sensitive to the accumulated history of the violin, to rescue the instrument from being auctioned—to prevent the significance of a unique object encrusted with a rich social life from being expressed generically as a price. Successful in his efforts, the appraiser presents the violin to his young daughter, extending its life as a gift from parent to child and thus realizing at last the intention, tragically frustrated centuries earlier, of the violin’s original maker. Commodity biographies can be traced retrospectively if not always predicted, and such tracings will reveal odd mutations and even pleasing ironies like those achieved in The Cup. Hence the following item from the Sydney Morning Herald (Richards 1993), one of the rare reports besides this one that speaks simultaneously of Coca-Cola and Papua New Guinea. During World War II, the New Guinea islands were the site of a Coca-Cola bottling plant, the glass bottles shipped from the United States (see Chapter 2).

The Social Life of Worldly Things

13

Today, thousands of old discarded contour design bottles can be found on one of these islands, Emirau, northwest of Tanga in New Ireland province. A Sydney businessman visited Emirau in 1991 looking to start a commercial fishing industry and subsequently arranged with the islanders and an Australian Rotary club to restore the bottles and make them available to international collectors. The bottles were brought to Sydney, washed, boxed, and put on sale at thirty-two dollars each for a clear bottle, sixtynine dollars for a pair, one clear and one green. Money derived from the sale of the bottles was earmarked for a trust fund set up to establish a community power source on Emirau, and ultimately to launch a pilot fishing project. Bottles decommoditized as debris become recommoditized as collectibles—paradoxically valuable because they have been, like debris, removed from market circulation. The notion of commodity biographies clarifies a point that is relevant to a discussion of worldly things such as cans and bottles of Coca-Cola. Namely, the meaning of a commodity must be construed in terms of its prior, historically accumulated meanings. This sort of accumulated meaning becomes most salient when we think of family heirlooms like photographs or jewelry, objects that link the present to the past and future by connecting their current owners with a lineage of long dead and yet unborn owners, the individual personalities of whom adhere to the heirloom. One need only watch a few episodes of the hit public television program Antiques Road Show (or read Malinowski’s classic work on kula exchange) in order to gauge how deeply felt are the stories that ascribe such meaning to inherited objects. But even modest souvenirs can perform the same function. A mass-produced tea towel from Niagara Falls denotes not necessarily bland commercialism, but a potentially singular experience, a particular time and place suffused with personal significance and charged with positive affect. Not only must the meaning of individual commodities be understood in terms of prior, accumulated meanings, but also whole cultural categories of economic goods must be understood in terms of historically sedimented values. This necessity becomes especially acute when we think about cross-cultural consumption or the meanings that commodities take on in new cultural contexts—the sorts of situations that regularly occur today in places like Papua New Guinea. It is in these contexts, especially, that people confront objects as external and foreign, variously available for appropriation. Timothy Burke (1996), for example, has insightfully discussed the ways in which “toiletries” such as Lifebuoy soap and Pond’s lotion first made available to Africans in postwar Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) became meaningful as consumer items in terms of aesthetic and hygienic

14

Coca-Globalization

concepts already in place. Vaseline, Burke notes, was purchased in large quantities without any prodding by the manufacturers, largely because it satisfied local demand for substances used to coat the body after washing, thus reinventing a precolonial practice. Indigenous evaluations or qualifications turned an economic good originating exogenously into a desirable product. But not all imported consumer items were seen as equally interesting; put differently, not all items were equally susceptible to cultural reclamation, sometimes because they were seized upon by particular groups as means of status differentiation (as with skin lighteners). Different commodities thus have different histories and require different accountings, both of prior meanings that shape their reception and of the competing supply-side interests that promote their production and consumption (for two examples, see Mintz 1986; Roseberry 1996). Burke’s work poses a general question about the ways in which consumption happens as a mundane practice, whether in the hinterlands of southern Africa or Papua New Guinea, or in other parts of the world such as India or China opening up to new streams of foreign commodities: how and how well does meaning travel? Historians have alerted us to the ways in which the meanings of commodities have changed over time. CocaCola, for example, was once imbued with the values of the work ethic, a capacity to restore labor power, before it became a master symbol of the consumerist ethic, a pause for self-indulgence. Sociologists such as Callon et al. (2002) as well as geographers (e.g., Cook and Crang 1996) have pointed out how the meanings of products change at different points along the commodity circuit or in the process of (re)qualification. Anthropologists, by the same token, have become more interested in and sensitive to the ways in which the meanings of things change from one cultural setting to another (Appadurai 1986; Howes 1996). One anthropological approach to the meaning of commodities moving across borders has thus been to adopt the perspective of the end user, or consumer, and thereby learn how that consumer ultimately endows the commodity with meaning. This approach has been particularly appealing to anthropologists working in Melanesia for reasons that Rena Lederman explains with respect to Mendi people of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea: “The Mendi we know do not see [consumer] objects in the same way as we see them: their purposes supplied for us . . . In our objects, they perceive multiple possibilities for satisfying needs the manufacturers never imagined . . . They use safety pins as earrings in place of blades of grass and combs made out of umbrella spokes instead of bamboo . . . women we know reuse the plastic fibres of rice bags, rolling them into twine with which to make traditional

The Social Life of Worldly Things

15

net bags” (1986, 8). Consumer objects thus become remade locally—not only the objects themselves, but their brand imagery as well. Consider the following image (see Figure 1.2) of Kaipel Ka, a part-time sign-painter who lives in the Wahgi Valley of highlands Papua New Guinea. Consider not his Coca-Cola shirt, but instead the war shield that he decorated with the handsome logo of South Pacific Export Lager and the more modest logo of SP Bia (South Pacific Beer), the domestic brew. The image comes from Michael O’Hanlon’s remarkable book, Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands, a catalogue published by the British Museum in conjunction with an exhibit that O’Hanlon curated. The caption next to that image says: “Kaipel Ka sometimes fought alongside his maternal kin and so decorated his own shield with the South Pacific beer logo otherwise used on theirs” (O’Hanlon 1993; Plate 14).

Figure 1.2 Kaipel Ka poses with a war shield that he painted. Photograph by Michael O’Hanlon, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University.

16

Coca-Globalization

Kaipel Ka’s shield demonstrates how juxtapositions some might regard as unexpected point to another reality, another set of cultural principles at work. Here is O’Hanlon’s (1993, 68) account: Kaipel’s own explanation of his use of the SP design was that he had been asked by senior men to incorporate a representation of a beer bottle on the shield, to make the point that “it was beer alone which had precipitated this fighting.” (The war followed the breakdown of negotiations for compensation after an inebriated Senglap [clan] man had fallen from a Dange [clan]owned vehicle.) Rather than including a picture of a beer bottle, Kaipel decided instead to make the point by using the SP design as a whole. At one level, then, this design parallels those that express regret. At another level, there is also something appropriate in the use of beer. Beer drinking is often a “group” matter, just as warfare is. As Marie Reay observes (1982:164) “Clansmen fight together; they also drink together.”

Thus O’Hanlon makes the point that the shield design signals another reality, a set of alternative principles for thinking about and representing corporate associations. My point is that this “other reality” is the sociocultural context into which both the general activity of beer drinking and the specific image of the SP Export logo are appropriated. Neither the activity nor the image here comprise intrinsic features of wholly new contexts; they are instead adapted to familiar and prior contexts of warfare, as close inspection of Kaipel Ka’s design suggests. The actual official logo of SP Export presents one bird of paradise; Kaipel Ka’s shield depicts two birds. O’Hanlon again: “‘Raggiana bird of paradise war’ is the term for the most bitter type of conflict. The fact that a pair of birds . . . was represented . . . was also suggestive, since pairing is a characteristic Wahgi practice, and the groups who fight ‘Raggiana bird of paradise’ war are listed in pairs” (O’Hanlon 1993, 69). Thus one of O’Hanlon’s friends interpreted the shield in intelligible local terms as a warning that the war between Senglap and Dange clans was in danger of escalating to bird of paradise proportions. For Kaipel Ka, the beer design was neither an instance of creeping monoculture nor an ironic combination of global and local, strange and familiar elements. It was, from his perspective, an artifact of his world, wholly intelligible in terms of a given set of cultural conventions. This approach to cross-cultural consumption has been taken by Nicholas Thomas (1991) in his historical study of the ways that Pacific Islanders engaged the material culture of European traders, missionaries, and explorers during their initial encounters. Thomas also looks at how Europeans engaged the material culture of Pacific Islanders, appropriating artifacts as

The Social Life of Worldly Things

17

museum pieces or curiosities and ascribing to them their own meanings as evidence of the unequal status of primitives and moderns in the evolutionary order. Thomas’s strategy reminds us that cross-cultural consumption is a multi-directional process or, to anticipate, that meanings and qualifications are being generated by all the agents assembled in a network of production, distribution, and exchange, a commodity or product network. Anthropologists recognize that the meanings of consumer goods such as soft drinks are subject to cultural transformation. David Howes, for example, emphasizes the “mutability of the commodity form” (1996, 4), and makes use of the notion of creolization to explain this mutability: “What the concept of creolization highlights, in other words, is that goods have to be contextualized (given meaning, inserted into particular social relationships) to be utilized, and there is no guarantee that the intention of the producer will be recognized, much less respected, by the consumer from another culture” (1996, 5–6). The same, of course, could be said of consumers who “share” a culture with a good’s producers, the people who live next door to the executives that market and advertise soft drinks. In any case, foreign imports of all sorts are subject to creolization, including the best known and putatively universal in meaning. Disneyland in Japan thus becomes something manifestly unlike Disneyland in the United States, a reflection of specifically Japanese cultural concerns with “making the exotic familiar and keeping the exotic exotic,” the latter “to the point of effectively denying” that Disneyland has been domesticated at all and thus paradoxically affirming a sense of Japanese cultural uniqueness (Brannen 1992, 219; see MacDougall 2003 on Barbie dolls). The Mutability of Home: Disembedding and Reembedding The term “globalization” is commonly understood to indicate the circulation of people, money, images, and ideas across the planet along multiple paths that, although extensive, do not extend everywhere (Appadurai 1996). For example, globalization unevenly distributes opportunities for new encounters with commodities, including worldly things. Such encounters potentially affect people’s sense of their place in the world; they precipitate awareness at some level that familiar features of one’s “home” are not in fact “unique to that locale and part of its ‘organic development’ but, rather, features that have been ‘placed into’ the locale by distanciated forces” (Tomlinson 1999, 107). Encounters with worldly things might thus prompt apprehensions of complex connectivity, experiences of connection (or disconnection), and an attendant shift in one’s horizons, of one’s sense of future and present possibilities. Of course, just as impersonal commodities

18

Coca-Globalization

can be appropriated as aspects of an individual’s own personhood, worldly things can be “domesticated” or re-placed. The more completely commodities of exogenous origin are assimilated to a new social setting—perhaps they do not even strike anyone as foreign or out-of-place—the more such settings conceal social relations acting at a distance, much as Marx argued that all commodities conceal the social relations of their production. Thinking this way about how everyday commodities condition one’s sense of being “at home” (or not) situates the activity of consumption within a larger set of processes of time-space transformation. It is this time-space transformation that Anthony Giddens sees as the central feature of the modern world. Giddens defines modernity in terms of four “institutional dimensions”—capitalism, industrialism, organized and extensive surveillance (especially the political control of the nation-state), and industrialized military power (1990, 55–78). Each of these dimensions is interdependent, though not reducible to any other dimension, nor are the dimensions all equivalent: “The emergence of modernity is first of all the creation of a modern economic order, that is, a capitalist economic order” (Giddens and Pierson 1998, 96). For Giddens, capitalism “is the most significant driving force of change” (Giddens and Pierson 1998, 97). What matters most in Giddens’s theory of modernity, however, is neither the relative weight of each institution nor when or where any one institution is or was present or absent, but, rather, how this complex of institutions facilitates and presumes changes in routine social life. It is this dynamic process—primarily, a shift in the social organization of timespace—that helps us to think of globalization, including the global spread of modernity, as a dialectical process analogous to the dialectics of objectification and appropriation entailed in consumption work. How so? Giddens attempts to grasp the dynamics of modernity through the concepts of “distanciation” and disembedding. Time-space distanciation refers to the “stretching” or coordination of social relations across time and space, such that, for example, persons distant in time-space can be controlled or supervised by a superordinate authority. That is, both time and space become abstracted from context and separated from each other; for example, mechanical clocks and standardized time zones detach time from locality. This “emptying of time” allows and fosters an “emptying of space,” a “separation of place from space” and thus relations between people who occupy different and distant physical settings of interaction (Tomlinson 1999, 52). Put more generally, distanciation refers to the way in which locally situated lifeworlds become saturated with distant social influences and events. As Tomlinson puts it, modern locales express “the disembedding of social activity from contexts of presence” (1999, 54).

The Social Life of Worldly Things

19

Disembedding refers more specifically to “abstract systems,” mechanisms that disembed or lift out social relations from localized contexts of interaction and stretch them out or restructure them across indefinite spans of time-space. Such mechanisms include “symbolic tokens,” such as money or written records, and “expert systems,” the technical knowledge of anonymous others (experts) upon which people depend in going about their day-to-day lives. Disembedding mechanisms enable the spatial and temporal expansion of state administrations (nation-states) and commodity and labor markets (capitalism); they endow a locale with the “curious reality” of a chain store: “it is present in the physical sense of course, but it subsists as an entity in a web of relations that are not present; a substantive part of the store’s being is absent” (Cassell 1993, 28). The metaphor is apposite, inasmuch as branded commodities of the sort typified by CocaCola—worldly things produced by unknown people in unknown places— are good examples of symbolic tokens that enmesh spatially distant locales in a web of relations: the network of agents singled out and bound together by a product (Callon et al. 2002). By this account, then, distanciation and disembedding render locally situated lifeworlds “phantasmagoric” (Giddens 1990, 19), inhabited by living but absent people and present but dead or congealed labor. Yet most people do not live in permanent existential crisis, or even in intermittent awareness of the extent to which they inhabit a “web of relations that are not present.” For Giddens, this fact signifies the importance of “trust” in modernity—the way in which routine activities such as eating and drinking require people’s trust in abstract systems. In this sense, distanciation and disembedding are above all a matter of faceless (not always conscious) commitments, a bargain with modernity: “This ‘bargain’—‘governed by specific admixtures of deference and skepticism, comfort and fear’ [Giddens 1990, 90]—is a way of coping with forced reliance on abstract systems” (Tomlinson 1999, 57). But the matter can be put differently. Not everyone makes the same bargain with modernity because abstract systems are always subject to the effects of “re-embedding,” that is, the steady efforts of human beings—embodied and physically located—“to make themselves at home in the modern world” (Tomlinson 1999, 62; quoting Berman 1983). In other words, modernity describes an active dialectical process—“an ongoing relation between distanciation and the chronic mutability of local circumstances and engagements” (Giddens 1991, 21–22). It is this ongoing relation that enables globalization to be understood as a dialectical process of disembedding and reembedding. As Tomlinson (1999, 61) notes: “There is therefore always a ‘push-and-pull’ between ‘disembedding forces’ of [globalizing modernity] and countervailing ‘re-embedding forces’ coming from

20

Coca-Globalization

localities.” The spread of global modernity and the local fashioning of vernacular modernities necessarily imply each other. It is, as I have suggested, the creativity of reembedding that tends to capture the attention of anthropologists looking at cross-cultural consumption, perhaps because such reembedding defamiliarizes everyday commodity culture for Western audiences. Hence the appeal of a film like Trobriand Cricket to a generation of anthropologists and their students; for the film celebrates the colorful localization of a missionary-imported game by Papuan islanders intent on promoting their own home-grown ideas about fair play (see Foster 2006). Thus, too, the appeal of an article like the one by Tod Robberson that appeared on January 31, 1994, in the Washington Post, titled “When It Comes to Cola in Southern Mexico, Pepsi’s the Rite One.” Robberson reports how Tzeltal Mayan elders in Tenejapa undertake a monthly day of fasting in which they enter into conversation with God. The ceremony requires the elders to imbibe poch, a rum-like liquor made from corn, and, as a chaser, Pepsi-Cola. While no one could explain to Robberson how Pepsi became part of the ritual, everyone seemed to insist that only Pepsi—no other beverage, and especially not Coca-Cola— will do. Similarly, Robberson notes, nearby Tzotzil Mayan worshippers at a Catholic church in San Juan Chamula offer soft drinks—mostly Pepsi, but Coke and Squirt, too—to their favorite saints by waving bottles over dozens of lit candles and chanting in the Tzotzil dialect. There, Matt Moffett reported, the Indians were told by religious leaders that the gas in soft drinks “expels evil spirits and purifies the soul.” Or, as one Indian is said to have told an anthropologist: “When men burp, their hearts open up” (Moffett 1988; see also Belew 2003; Pilcher 2002). Robberson’s conclusion about the cola wars taking on “social and political dimensions beyond the wildest dreams” of American corporate executives is no doubt justified. Both Robberson and Moffett also make it clear that these creative acts of reembedding unfold within a definite set of power relations that link local cola consumption to diverse national and transnational networks. Moffett, for instance, noted that the local Pepsi distributorship was in the hands of Salvador Lopez Castellanos, a political and religious strongman appointed cacique (chief or boss) by the then ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Lopez Castellanos, known as Tushum to the Indians, was one of a handful of ambitious young Indians chosen by the PRI as protégés, taught Spanish in order to dominate contacts with outsiders, and encouraged to sponsor important religious festivals at home in order to gain prestige. Tushum controlled not only the business life but also the political life of the village.3

The Social Life of Worldly Things

21

In the 1970s, opponents to Tushum’s regime were jailed and expelled from the village. Hundreds of these outcasts fell in with a small group of Protestants, converted by evangelical missionaries who first arrived from the United States in the 1940s. Religious conversion thus became entangled with political protest and the declaration of commercial independence.4 Similarly, Robberson observed that in Tenejapa, the Pepsi bottling concession was held in 1994 by the town’s PRI mayor, Sebastian Lopez. Lopez reportedly made Pepsi “a virtual form of currency,” mandating its use in compensation payments for various crimes and misdemeanors. Robberson also noted that in the nearby village of Winikton, members of a small leftist party dedicated to the downfall of the PRI demonstrated their political commitment by adopting Coca-Cola as “the unofficial village beverage.” It thus comes as less of a surprise, perhaps, that the downfall of the PRI eventually came with the election as president of a former Coca-Cola executive, Vicente Fox. The same points about reembedding commodities and the mutability of home can be made with another Mexican example—from metro Philadelphia. According to a report by Gaiutra Bahadur in the Philadelphia Inquirer (posted on http://www.philly.com, October 7, 2003), customers at Camden’s San Lucas Restaurant—many of whom migrated from the region of Puebla—prefer to accompany their meals with green tinted bottles of Coca-Cola imported from Mexico. The imports cost more than the product bottled in the United States, but Mexican customers and business owners insist that the Mexican Coke tastes better, perhaps because like the Coca-Cola I drank in Papua New Guinea, it contains sucrose instead of corn syrup. One restaurant owner from South Philadelphia thus claimed that non-Mexican patrons even request the green glass bottles: “They say it’s like old times in the U.S.” Mexican customers reconnect with a home far away—a home in which Coca-Cola is clearly not alien or foreign—and non-Mexican customers reconnect with a home distant in time, each by means of the same worldly thing. Yet, the article notes, this connection is not guaranteed: “The North American Free Trade Agreement has meant that cans of Coke are cropping up south of the border, and the caffeinated concoction made in Mexico sometimes contains cheaper corn syrup just like its American counterparts.” Strong and weak forms of globalization, outside and inside meanings, thus evolve in uneasy tension with each other. Thinking about globalization in terms of the dialectics of embedding therefore requires a double focus—on the political and economic (institutional) relations that mediate the movement of commodities, locally and translocally, and on the ways in which situated agents engage these movements; on outside meanings as well as inside meanings; on the objective

22

Coca-Globalization

dimensions of complex connectivity as well as the subjective dimensions. Put differently, using worldly things as a vehicle for studying globalization multidimensionally requires tracing a commodity or product network— the network bound together by a particular product’s movement through successive “trials of qualification” (Callon et al. 2002) or “tournaments of value” (Appadurai 1986). How can this be done in the case of branded soft drinks? Commodity Chains and Networks of Perspectives One way of addressing this question would be to turn to the already established study of commodity chains, that is, the linked processes through which land, labor, and tools are brought together in the production of some consumable good. Such studies—which tend not to regard consumption as anything more than the end of the chain—are strongly identified with the sociological tradition of world systems theory developed by Immanuel Wallerstein. Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986, 159; quoted in 1994a, 17) thus define a commodity chain as “a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity.” In this view, any commodity chain holds a total amount of appropriated surplus value—a total amount that is unevenly distributed along the entire chain. In fact, this uneven distribution of value practically distinguishes the periphery of the world system from the core, where surplus value is accumulated. But the study of global soft drink commodity chains must begin by admitting that what moves along them is, above all, meaning. The observation is not new. Bill Backer, the creative force who devised the “Things Go Better With Coke” and “It’s the Real Thing” campaigns, once noted that “the product of the Coca-Cola Company is not Coca-Cola—that makes itself. The product of the Coca-Cola Company is advertising” (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 148; see Backer 1993). The contrast between the simple material composition of soft drinks—sugar and water—and the elaborate qualifications imputed to these drinks is jarring. From the beginning, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were primarily marketing companies with huge advertising budgets devoted to manufacturing meaning for brown sugar water. William Durkee, a marketing vice president, used to insist that Pepsi-Cola was a marketing organization, not a sales organization, claiming that even the secret concentrate for making soft drinks was not sold to bottlers, but instead simply ordered as needed (“New Marketing Plan” 1959). Put differently, it is the brand—its imagery and associations— rather than component parts or outsourced handiwork that makes its way

The Social Life of Worldly Things

23

along transnational soft drink commodity chains. Accordingly, the study of soft drink commodity chains must give due consideration to consumption— to the qualifications that consumers actively and variously ascribe to brands and branded commodities. Such a strategy not only places “quality issues at the heart of an understanding of how global value chains work,” but also highlights how “there is no ‘universal’ understanding of quality” (Ponte and Gibbon 2005, 7). Miller (1997) makes this point well in his observations about the local(ized) meanings of Coca-Cola for consumers in Trinidad, part of a larger ethnographic study of how soft drinks are produced as complex symbolic formations. Miller’s overall aim is to expose the articulations among the production, distribution, and consumption of specific commodities within a single national site. But he also recognizes the obvious applicability of his approach to multisited research on the transnationally extensive commodity chains characteristic of capitalism right from the start (see Mintz 1986). The method here is one of self-conscious fetishism, a sustained focus on things rather than people or, more precisely, a focus on people—marketing managers, advertising agents, diverse consumers— whose own orientation is to things as meaningful, qualified forms. Accordingly, Miller describes the way in which consumers bring their own understandings to bear upon soft drinks as well as the way in which soft drinks acquire symbolic attributes (or qualities) through supply-side processes such as branding, marketing, and advertising. An important finding of Miller’s study is that the conceptual categories through which advertisers and marketers understand soft drinks do not always match up with those used by consumers. For example, whereas producers think about soft drinks in terms of colas and flavors, consumers think about “sweet drinks” (indeed, perhaps even regard soft drinks as liquid sweets) in terms of an opposition between red and black. This opposition engages images of ethnic distinctions between African Trinidadians and Indian Trinidadians, images that in no way map predictably on to patterns of actual consumption. Unlike Callon et al. (2002), Miller does not assume that consumption always or even ideally requires a match between the evaluations or qualifications of producers and consumers. On the contrary, like Burke with regard to Vaseline, Miller demonstrates the productivity of such misrecognition; that is, he shows ethnographically that there is no such match in the case of Trinidadian red and black “sweet drinks.” A mismatch in qualifications between producers and consumers, however, does not preclude the product from assembling a network that includes both sets of agents. People still buy and consume the stuff.

24

Coca-Globalization

Miller’s ethnography, like the newspaper articles about soft drinks in Mexico, demonstrates that the outcome of consumption work is never certain; that is, it is never certain on whose terms (or qualifications) commodities will be made at home, if at all. But it is always in the interest of producers and marketers at least to know if not wholly control the terms for making products available for appropriation. This interest especially motivates the purveyors of worldly things to engage in deliberate projects of “localization,” of guiding the personal appropriation of a product by culturally diverse consumers worldwide with a more or less invisible hand. Consumption is under these circumstances a potential site of conflict since consumers must work with or against the localization or domestication strategies of corporations and their advertising agents (see Chapter 2). By the same token, corporations must work with or against relationships between people and things that have evolved historically before corporations arrived on the scene and that sometimes remain well beyond the reach of a corporation’s consumer research and hence marketing knowledge. The struggle is not restricted to cross-cultural situations. The CocaCola Company has itself given us perhaps the greatest example of mismanaging relationships between persons and things—the infamous decision to change the formula of Coca-Cola and to remove the old product from the market place. Consumer outrage at this decision has been well documented (see Oliver 1986; Pendergrast 1993). My point is simply to identify a moment in an ongoing process when the company’s desire to put its product in more hands—to create more relationships and to enlarge its threatened share of the U.S. cola market—blatantly contradicted the qualifications of many consumers for making themselves feel at home with a worldly thing. Some disappointed consumers felt that the decision to change Coke’s formula was a breach of personal trust: “My Dearest Coke: You have betrayed me,” began one bitter lover’s letter to the company (Pendergrast 1993, 364). But this accusation also highlights Giddens’s claims about the centrality of impersonal trust in the process of reembedding, about the way in which routine activities like eating and drinking today require people’s confidence in “abstract systems,” mechanisms that disembed or lift out social relations from localized contexts of interaction. Confidence or impersonal trust becomes exposed only in its breach, sometimes with significant financial consequences. Consider the well publicized contamination scare in Belgium—perhaps a rare instance of mass sociogenic illness (Nemery et. al. 1999)—in which hundreds of people (in a country recovering from a scandal over dioxins found in meat and dairy products) developed vague constitutional symptoms that they associated with drinking

The Social Life of Worldly Things

25

Coca-Cola. The result was one of the largest consumer product recalls in history, a charge of $103 million to the second-quarter earnings of Coke’s bottling operation (Coca-Cola Enterprises, Inc.). Millions more were spent on a “Coke’s Back” public relations campaign—beach parties, rock concerts, and free handouts as well as the appearance of Coke representatives in grocery stores to speak directly with consumers—all to restore implicit trust in the world’s most famous brand.5 Breakdowns in confidence can be thought of as disjunctures in perspective; just as in personal trust relations, a mutual inability to align one’s perspective with that of the other.6 Accordingly, we can also think of a commodity chain or the network that takes shape around a product as a network of perspectives. This notion of a network of perspectives—which derives from the work of Ulf Hannerz (1992a, 1992b)—is especially useful in tracing the commodity chains of worldly things such as soft drinks, in which the meanings of brands figure so centrally. Hannerz has gone further, suggesting that we use the metaphor of networks to describe the cultural economy of globalization; in other words, that we create a sociology of diffusion by tracing the various relationships—or social networks— through which ideas and images (meanings) circulate. These networks include not only enduring personal relationships sustained through new non-mass media technologies such as fax and e-mail, but also impersonal encounters with mass media, commoditized popular culture and educational systems, and fleeting interactions with sundry transnationally mobile individuals—tourists, migrants, and even anthropologists. We might thus think of culture as distributed through either a single large and complex network or, perhaps, a global network of networks. The latter possibility makes it clearer how the differential distribution of culture takes shape as lived experience. I quote Hannerz at length on this point: It becomes increasingly obvious that the individual’s perspective, the individual’s share or version of socially organized meaning, is in large part a product of his network experience, and that the greater variety and the less density there is in ego-centred networks, the more different perspectives will be. . . . Individuals’ perspectives, then, come to consist of the conceptions which they have come to construct or appropriate for their own use, as it were, but also of their perspectives on other perspectives—their approximate mappings of other people’s meanings (1992a, 42–43, my emphasis).

Under such conditions, people are aware of others whose perspectives they do not share, and know that they do not share. This is one way to describe the phenomenon of relativized consciousness and heightened reflexivity— or the awareness of spectral relations that Giddens notes—frequently associated with globalization.

26

Coca-Globalization

Hannerz’s notion of a “network of networks” recalls John Tomlinson’s characterization of globalization as “complex connectivity”: “the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences that characterize modern social life” (1999, 2). Like Hannerz, Tomlinson encourages a sociology of diffusion, a mapping of interconnections that might highlight the linkages that draw people into complex connectivity. Both Tomlinson and Hannerz are mindful, moreover, that such linkages vary in density; that globalization generates blockages as well as flows: “Few would dare claim that the complex connectivity of globalization currently extends in any profound way to every single person or place on the planet, and speculation on its spread must surely be tempered by the many countervailing trends toward social and cultural division that we see around us” (Tomlinson 1999, 10). Such cautions are particularly pertinent when we take up the network perspectives of people living in out-of-theway places like Papua New Guinea—out of the way not because they are “still” isolated, but rather because complex connectivity can create new exclusions at the same time as it makes possible new inclusions. In PNG, for example, commercial mass media might stimulate people to imagine exciting possibilities for fashioning themselves and their homes while economic restructuring might deny them access to the consumer goods necessary to realize their agency and desires (see Chapter 4; cf. Schein 1999; Mills 1997). The hopeful promise that Miller (1987) sees in consumption work to deliver the antidote for alienating wage-labor presumes, after all, a basic equitable distribution of material resources that the “complex connectivity of globalization” hardly ensures. Hannerz’s notion of a network of perspectives can thus supplement Callon et al.’s (2002) idea of a product network in apprehending the social organization of a transnational soft drink commodity chain—a chain that includes people with a variety of perspectives on how to embed soft drinks in local contexts (or not). These perspectives take in, as Hannerz points out, perspectives on other people’s perspectives, the imagination of other people whose perspectives are not shared, and known to be not shared. Multisited ethnographies of commodities in motion are well equipped to demonstrate these disjunctions. For example, Cook and others’ (2004) innovative story of a papaya commodity chain demonstrates how UK consumers might be aware of the tropical sources of the specialty fruit they buy, but remain ignorant of the harsh circumstances under which the fruit is produced. Jamaican papaya growers might know the metropolitan destinations of their products, but remain ignorant of the circumstances that determine fluctuating market prices or the reasons why their produce is rejected by buyers.

The Social Life of Worldly Things

27

Let me illustrate this point by contrasting the perspective of Douglas Daft on consumer relations outlined in the Introduction with the perspective of Elizabeth Solomon (a pseudonym), a fifty-four-year-old Papua New Guinean, former teacher at a Christian mission-run elementary school. Solomon grew up and now lives again in rural Morobe Province. But she came in April of 1997 to Port Moresby, the capital city of PNG, to provide daycare for her daughter and son-in-law’s children. Participating in a survey on soft drink consumption (see Chapter 4), Elizabeth Solomon reported: I encourage my grandchildren, 5 and 4 years old, to drink fruit juice. I don’t think Coke and Pepsi are good for the children’s health. It contains acid which is not good. I’m an ALANON member and I think that Coke gives out bubbles like that of beer, SP [South Pacific brand beer]. So, I think it contains some alcoholic acid. . . . If I list all the soft drinks, I would put Coke last [among her favorites]. I do not like Coke because Coke makes you burp like beer the men drink. Coke has the same color as beer and some spirits. . . . Coke is associated with men, and men are usually drunkards.

For Elizabeth Solomon, thinking about soft drinks is bound up with thinking about the uncertain future of her family and former students. Asked what came to mind when she heard the word Pepsi, she replied, “I usually imagine how my children are getting on. This is especially for young people who will get hooked with white man’s culture and forget what and how I taught them to be. Simply—how my children will survive trying to imitate a white man’s culture.” Thinking about Coke and Pepsi leads Elizabeth Solomon to think about “white man’s culture” in general (see Bashkow 2006). No one will confuse her soft drink perspective on globalization with that of Douglas Daft, despite perhaps a shared concern with the tastes and preferences of the world’s young consumers. What strikes me, however, is not so much the difference as its presupposition: both Douglas Daft in Atlanta and Elizabeth Solomon in Port Moresby occupy positions within the same “commodity-scape” (cf. Appadurai 1996). That is, these two individuals are indeed connected by a product, a brand-name commodity, though each imagines and qualifies both these connections and the commodity itself in radically discordant ways. Their different locations within the global soft drink commodity-scape clearly afford different perspectives. Elizabeth Solomon declines to appropriate and thus to see herself in soft drinks. She refuses to embed soft drinks in her most intimate domestic relations; they remain for her an alien object, a worldly thing with which she does not feel at home.

28

Coca-Globalization The Value of Worldly Things

The fact that worldly things such as Coca-Cola circulate within spatially extensive commodity chains exposes their brand owners to the sort of problem created by the Elizabeth Solomons of the world. What happens if the perspectives of global brand managers (in one place) and consumers (in other places) do not align with each other?7 Consumers might nevertheless purchase and use branded commodities, as do apparently Trinidadian consumers of Coca-Cola, but for reasons that remain inaccessible or opaque to brand managers. But consumers might also remain indifferent or even hostile to a brand image that seems appealing and appropriate from the perspective of the brand’s managers. This mismatch in perspectives is now seen by some advertising experts—experts who seek the implicit trust of brand users—as a direct threat to the future viability of the brand (and the profits that the brand generates for its owners). This perceived threat, in turn, reveals something about the main source of value of certain worldly things—a source that lies not in productive labor, but, rather, in consumption work. Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, has addressed the threat of mismatched perspectives and hence disconnections in the consumer/brand relationship in his book, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, and on his Web site, http://www .lovemarks.com. According to Roberts, “brands have run out of juice,” and the challenge is to find an idea that will “take brands to the next level of evolution.” For Roberts, that idea is Lovemarks. Roberts tells potential clients that anything can be a Lovemark. Indeed, he makes his pitch by way of examples that include the Tide brand of laundry detergent, the educational institution known as Cambridge University, and the European nation-state of Italy. Lovemarks require, in effect, the reinvention of people, products, services, and institutions as “super-evolved brands,” all of which possess the following characteristics: Lovemarks connect your company, your people, and your brands; Lovemarks inspire loyalty beyond reason; Lovemarks belong to your customers; Lovemarks are the ultimate premium profit generator. The idea of Lovemarks implies that the value of a branded object therefore derives from, minimally, two sources. On the one hand, there is the labor of the producers. Looked at from this angle, consumer-goods commodity chains often present cases of extreme commoditization. The labor of some of the producers in the chain—assembly workers in apparel sweatshops, for example—is, above all, generic (unskilled) and cheap. Various tactics ensure that this labor stays generic and cheap, from physical coercion of

The Social Life of Worldly Things

29

the workers themselves to threats to relocate plants to countries with an even cheaper and more docile labor force. Indeed, the very location of these plants as well as their working conditions are often shrouded in secrecy; here truly is Marx’s hidden abode of production. The operation of this segment of the value chain accomplishes the almost complete detachment of the producer’s personality from his—more likely, her—product (see Mauss 1925). This is one point in the commodity chain where value creation—surplus value extracted from wage-laborers by employers— takes place. The second source of value creation involves the reattachment of the alienated product to another personality, that is, to the consumer. It is this reattachment that is achieved through branding. I hasten to add that branding involves more than the labor of the special workers who design logos and fabricate ad campaigns (labor that is better compensated—less generic and more skilled—than that of assembly workers). Branding also involves the work of consumers, whose meaningful use or qualification of the purchased products invests these products with the consumer’s identity. Such meaningful use is integral to successful brands. It is never a guaranteed outcome, of course, but when it happens, the persons of consumers animate branded things as much as vice-versa. Put differently, the persons of consumers enhance the value of brands. In effect, consumers transfer control over aspects of their persons to corporate owners of the brand, who defend their brands legally as protected intellectual property (see Coombe 1998 and Chapter 3). This is another point in the commodity chain, then, where value creation in the form of extracted or appropriated surplus labor—consumption work—takes place. My evaluation of consumption work here diverges from that of Miller. For Miller, consumption work represents a positive form of human creativity in industrial societies, practical activity through which individuals can singularize or appropriate anonymous commodities and thus pursue the project of self-fabrication manifestly denied them in the realm of production. My aim, by extension, is to emphasize how this activity of appropriation is itself vulnerable to appropriation, that is, to capture by the various agents of branding. Market research, including commercial ethnography, now plays a significant role in this process of capture or reappropriation—a process which can be seen as an organized attempt to short circuit the possibility of using commodities in ways for which they were neither designed nor advertised, to regulate the possibilities of qualification. Consumption work, the realization of specific use values in specific contexts, thereby becomes a potential source of value for brand owners. One small but telling example: Kevin Roberts’s Saatchi & Saatchi, an agency well known for its use of

30

Coca-Globalization

ethnographic consumer research, developed an ad campaign that embedded Tide detergent in narratives and images of kinship meant to reflect the diversity of American families. In one spot, a mother expresses her concerns about the relationship between her two sons, born more than a decade apart, by talking about her obligation to keep clean and bright a cherished shirt given to the younger boy by his older brother (Zuckerman 1998). The impersonal commodity thus becomes a gift that mediates a relationship of fraternal love. This two-sided process of value creation—extreme commoditization on one side and the appropriation of consumer qualifications on the other—informs Roberts’s vision of an advertising agency that puts “relationships and customers right at the centre.” Roberts explains that Lovemarks elicit both high love and high respect from consumers; in this regard, they are the opposite of “basic commodities” such as iron or sand that command low respect and low love. Lovemarks entail “mystery, sensuality and intimacy”; they tap into the biographical, sensual, and emotional experiences of consumers. Creating Lovemarks therefore requires inserting products into stories that shape people’s relationships, such as the story of little Isabella Alexus, so named because she was born in her parents’ luxury automobile. Creating Lovemarks involves tapping into the dreams of consumers, as well as the sensory pleasures that consumers derive from products and services. Creating Lovemarks requires establishing a relationship of trust with consumers, of empathy, of positive emotional response bordering on passion. Creating Lovemarks, in short, means making love. Here, then, is a succinct and plain statement of my claim that surplus value is created through appropriated consumption work, that is, the emotional attachment beyond reason of consumers to certain brands—the brands successful enough to be called Lovemarks. The fact that many consumers lack a perspective on the perspective of the producers of consumer goods arguably facilitates both the qualification of brands with meaning by consumers and the appropriation of such meaning by brand owners. Such gaps in knowledge are, of course, a feature of “imperfect” markets in general and long distance trade in particular. Appadurai has speculated that “culturally constructed stories and ideologies about commodity flows” intensify and proliferate “when the spatial, cognitive, or institutional distances between production, distribution and consumption are great” (1986, 48). The mythologies that surround Melanesian cargo cults—secret knowledge about the source of goods produced elsewhere (see Lattas 1998)—provide an extreme if familiar anthropological example. Similarly, a globalized commodity chain implies a network of not only production and exchange, but also of perspectives—a network

The Social Life of Worldly Things

31

of people’s perspectives on other people’s perspectives. Gaps or disjunctions in these networks of perspectives play a role in the creation of value (and the achievement of Lovemarks). For example, the creation of value for “exotic” fruits often hinges on the capacity to shape and exploit the distribution of knowledge among farmers and field workers in the hidden abode of production and distant corporate buyers and consumers in the well-lighted offices and aisles of supermarkets. Granted, disjunctions of perspective in commodity networks are neither new nor exclusive to capitalist markets. But what might be a distinctive feature of world capitalism today is the kind of politics, enabled by a revolution in information and communication technologies, that takes these disjunctions as both its object and means. How might thinking about commodity chains in terms of networks of perspectives encourage a form of globalized labor politics that takes shape as a politics of knowledge? This is a question that I consider at length in Part 2 and again in the Conclusion.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

Glocalizing Coca-Cola The Multilocal Multinational Corporation In short, when you’re fundamentally in the relationship business, trust is the essential first condition. —Douglas Daft, 2003 Summary Annual Report of The Coca-Cola Company

Glocalization: At Home in the World y most accounts, multinational corporations and their successors, transnational corporations, figure prominently in the history of worldshrinking changes associated with economic globalization. In some accounts, they loom very large. Miyoshi (1993), for example, emphasizes the hypermobility and placelessness of transnational corporations; unanchored to any locality, these legally fictitious persons are represented as free to roam the planet in search of cheap labor and raw materials, loyal only to shareowners demanding the highest rate of return on their capital (see also Barnet and Cavanaugh 1994). The challenge presented by this rootlessness to the integrity of territorial nation-states comprises, in this view, one of the distinctive features of the current era of political globalization. (This view of footloose corporations and weak states has been seriously challenged. See Hirst and Thompson 1996; Sassen 1996.) By many of the same accounts, transnational corporations are also central causes and consequences of cultural globalization; they figure centrally in the alarmist discourse of a coming global monoculture. Promoting the spread of particular branded commodities—Marlboro cigarettes, Levi’s jeans, and McDonald’s french fries—as well as general values of materialism and individualism, these corporations are alleged to be among the principal agents shaping a uniform, universal, and hollow consumer(ist) culture (see Sklair 2002; Ritzer 2004). The Coca-Cola Company obviously deserves careful attention with regard to such claims about corporate

B

34

Coca-Globalization

monoculture. It was among the first consumer-oriented, brand-invested multinationals and it remains at the start of the twenty-first century a master symbol of corporate global culture. However, its home-grown franchise system (also used by Pepsi-Cola in the United States and abroad) distinguished it from the more familiar vertically integrated multinationals of the early and mid-twentieth century. This decentralized system, moreover, was instrumental in reembedding Coca-Cola overseas, in mediating the tension between its American origins and international presence. It was an important part of the process by which a worldly thing has been made— even if not finally or under all circumstances—a homely thing. Materially speaking, Coca-Cola has always embodied the world. Its well-known secret formula mixes ingredients of almost globally extensive provenance—from the Peruvian coca leaves to the Chinese cinnamon (cassia) to the African kola nuts (see Gootenberg 2004 for a political history of the company’s importation of coca leaves to the United States).1 Symbolically speaking, however, the brand has not always been so cosmopolitan. For many people, inside and outside the United States, Coca-Cola is pure Americana, an icon of essential U.S. national culture. This perceived national(ist) character of Coca-Cola has historically both helped and hindered the expansion of The Coca-Cola Company outside the United States. Company officials and advertisers have accordingly made deliberate efforts to manage the meaning of the brand, sometimes stressing its identity as American, other times identifying it with universal values. The economy of qualities has, in other words, required different strategies of evaluation at different moments and in different settings. At the same time, company officials have always loudly insisted that however far-flung its operations, The Coca-Cola Company is always and everywhere a local business. How did The Coca-Cola Company attempt to localize a distinctively American drink in foreign contexts? This question invites further consideration of the more general “global-local problematic” (Robertson 1995, 29): how are we to think of the “relationship” between “the global” and “the local”? Roland Robertson has sensibly argued that we ought not to view globalization and localization as polar opposites or construe “the local” as both preexisting “the global” and asserting itself against “the global.” He asks us, as I have, to avoid debating globalization in terms of a false choice between homogenization (“the global”) and heterogenization (“the local”) and instead to pay attention to the “ways in which homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies are mutually implicative” (1995, 27), or put otherwise, to the simultaneity and interpenetration of “the global” and “the local,” the universal and the particular. This social condition, the intensification of which characterizes modernity, is what Robertson refers to as

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

35

“glocalization.” Robertson furthermore points out that there are many different practical modes of glocalization, some of which—as in the strategies of contemporary global marketers of products ranging from McDonald’s lamb burgers in India to Gillette Lady Sensor Excel razors in Japan (Maynard 2003)—involve “ongoing, calculated attempts to combine homogeneity with heterogeneity and universalism with particularism” (1995, 27). Although the words “glocal” and “glocalization” became a part of trendy business jargon in the 1980s, the concerns that these words denote were already apparent to officials of The Coca-Cola Company. Since the 1930s, but especially since World War II, these officials used both institutional and ideological means to define their product as simultaneously local and global. In retrospect, it is possible to detect periodic shifts in emphasis. During the immediate postwar period and into the 1960s, the concern to localize Coca-Cola products tempered the urge to foreground their increasingly global presence. From the 1970s and into the 1990s, an explicit globalism dominated company rhetoric and policy. With the appointment of Douglas Daft as CEO in 2000, the company announced a renewed concern with the local, a withdrawal from an aggressively singular global strategy of marketing and a heightened sensitivity to multiple local differences in tastes and preferences. This new or revived concern for the local also implied a significant reorganization of corporate structure, a decentralization of decision-making intended to make operations more responsive to fast changing local situations. The global diffusion of Coca-Cola, and soft drink consumption more generally, can thus be understood in terms akin to the dialectics of disembedding and reembedding (Chapter 1). A particular consumer item was lifted out of its home social context and inserted into new and different localized social contexts, which thereby became enmeshed in a spatially extensive commodity network. Put differently, a particular product was qualified in such a way as to bind new economic agents into a longer network (Callon et al. 2002). In order for such reinsertions to be successful, a certain amount of trust or confidence needs to be generated.2 From the supply-side, reembedding is all about confidence and familiarity, about enabling consumers to make themselves feel at home with new consumer goods. For a multinational corporation selling one product in one package worldwide (which The Coca-Cola Company did until around 1960), the marketing question then becomes one of how to recognize and even exploit local social and cultural diversity—how, in other words, to be multilocal. This marketing question is equally a question of global culture—a question of how local diversity comes to be not only recognized as “already there,” but also imagined, organized, and constituted (by corporate executives and

36

Coca-Globalization

their assistants, for instance) in terms of a common translocal framework (see Mazzarella 2003). Richard Wilk’s (1995) insightful comments about “global structures of common difference” are directly pertinent. If there is an emerging global culture, Wilk argues, then its main feature is not bland homogeneity, but rather organized diversity (see Hannerz 1992b). The new global cultural system actually promotes rather than erases difference, but difference expressed in a standardized vocabulary that renders “wildly disparate groups of people intelligible to each other” (Wilk 1995, 130). Like certain versions of contemporary American multiculturalism, difference gains legitimacy precisely because of its uniform manifestations. That is, the celebration of particular kinds of (usually commodified) difference— say, in food, dress, or music—entails the suppression of other kinds, say, in moral and political values or concepts of personhood. Robertson’s notion of glocalization is equally apposite, because it likewise draws our attention to how cultural particularities are often articulated in universal forms. Thus Robertson aptly invokes the example of the nation-state, repeating Anderson’s (1983) observation about the modular nature of this sort of imagined community: “Much of the apparatus of contemporary nations, of the national-state organization of societies, including the form of their particularities—the construction of their unique identities—is very similar across the entire world” (1995, 34). Indeed, Orvar Löfgren (1989) has been able to define an international grammar of nationhood in which unique identities are all expressed in similar terms of distinctive flags, anthems, museums, airlines, sports teams, and so forth. But one might as well invoke Marx’s paradoxical commodity form, that is, the double-sided existence of a commodity as always commensurable with all other commodities (exchange-value) yet singular and variable in its uses (use-value): organized diversity. How, then, did The Coca-Cola Company attempt to localize a distinctively American drink in foreign contexts? In this chapter, I address the question through a discussion of how the company used its franchise system of bottlers to expand overseas and to create trust and goodwill in new markets. This discussion rehearses the story of how Coke went to war (see, e.g., Brands 1999), that is, how World War II provided the occasion for The Coca-Cola Company’s decisive overseas expansion and, incidentally, the first contacts between the inhabitants of New Guinea and carbonated soft drinks. I focus in particular on the extensive wartime print advertising campaign that identified Coca-Cola as “the global high-sign.” I then review how the company’s emphasis on self-localization gave way to a period of aggressive globalism, followed by a rediscovery and reiteration of itself as an always local business. In the next chapter, I will discuss more fully how

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

37

trust and goodwill were created through brand building, especially through advertising; in this chapter I give more attention to bottling operations and business plans. Both chapters thus address the ways in which various company officials and their agents measured and managed the balance between what they understood as universal and particular factors involved in international markets; that is, how they “glocalized” consumption of carbonated soft drinks, above all Coca-Cola. Disembedding Coca-Cola: Soft Drinks in the South Pacific Although The Coca-Cola Company has traditionally and mainly sold its famous concentrate and syrup to independent bottlers and fountain customers, the company took an early and active interest in opening up and developing foreign markets. Coca-Cola was bottled outside the United States as early as 1906 with the opening of a plant in Havana, but expansion into overseas markets began in earnest in 1926 when legendary Coke President Robert Woodruff established a foreign department. By then, company technicians were developing a way to condense syrup into a more easily shipped powdered concentrate without sugar (Pendergrast 1993, 172). Plants lacking easy access to cane sugar were able to use beet sugar, for which Woodruff had commissioned an international team of scientists to develop a refining process (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 47). The following year, Woodruff formed The Coca-Cola Export Corporation to replace the foreign department, planning to build facilities worldwide to manufacture concentrate (by 1972, the company had twenty-eight such principal plants [“How Coke Runs a Foreign Empire” 1973]). Only the secret flavoring ingredients (“7X” or “Merchandise 7”) and extracts of kola nuts and decocainized coca leaves (“Merchandise 5”) would then have to be exported (Pendergrast 1993, 188). In 1930, more than sixty bottling plants operated in twenty-eight different countries (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 47). At the outbreak of World War II, The Coca-Cola Company had established small and scattered overseas operations in South America, Australia, and Asia—the Shanghai bottling plant was first to reach the mark of ten thousand gallons of syrup—as well as in Canada and Europe. In some places, its presence was already strong: twenty-eight plants bottled CocaCola in Germany and nine more were under construction (Bell n.d., Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 25, item 7). Nor did the war interrupt the transformation of the company into a multinational business (even or especially in Germany; see Pendergrast 1993, ch. 13). On the contrary, this transformation accelerated when the company arranged with the U.S. government and military to supply Coca-Cola to the 15 million men and

38

Coca-Globalization

women of the American armed services wherever they happened to be (Brands 1999). This joint venture between state and market actors reproduced an alliance that had helped to expand consumption and to subsidize production of sugar in the eighteenth century (rum rations to British sailors; Mintz 1985, 170) and tobacco in the twentieth century (cigarette rations to U.S. soldiers; Schudson 1984, 186). Sixty-four “emergency” bottling plants were assembled, shipped, installed, and operated in six active theaters of war; in addition, approximately one thousand portable soda dispensers and ice makers (“jungle units”) were used to service troops in the Pacific theater where bottling was not feasible. A total of 248 technical observers (TOs), Coca-Cola Export Corporation employees attached to the armed forces, carried out the massive project with the active cooperation of military personnel (see Weiner 2002). It was these TOs who first brought carbonated cola drinks to what was then the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. The TOs in New Guinea established two main bases of operation in the second half of 1944 (see Bell n.d., Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 25, items 4–6; Bell’s 1966 interview with Paul Madden, Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 25, item 2). In Finschhafen, on the north coast of the large island of New Guinea, TOs first serviced jungle units with syrup imported from Australia and the United States. By the end of the year, they had set up a syrup factory with equipment and sugar shipped from Australia, and concentrate shipped from the United States in one-gallon glass jugs. The factory operated from December 26, 1944, to July 1945, producing as much as 1,760 gallons a day and 37,000 gallons in one month. From Finschhafen, the syrup was shipped in five-gallon glass jugs and refurbished 30-gallon wooden barrels. By February 1945, TO Paul Madden could write from Finschhafen to readers of TO Digest: “The per capita consumption figure at the present rate would make most U.S. cities very envious. It’s about 175—not bad for the jungles, huh?”3 In Manus (Admiralty Islands), islands to the north and east of mainland New Guinea made famous by Margaret Mead, the TOs established the first bottling plant in the Pacific theater. Ten jungle units had been installed in the Admiralties, site of an enormous U.S. naval supply base, before the end of 1944. Bottling machinery arrived in October and bottling began by the new year. The equipment reportedly performed efficiently: “The unit was rated at 300 bottles of Coca-Cola per minute, but the Manus bottling speed ran as high as 375 bottles per minute—with an average of 350 bottles, and a daily output of between 6,000 and 6,500 cases per day [sic]” (Bell n.d., Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 25, item 4). The Manus factory supplied Navy ships leaving for battles farther north as well as pilots making

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

39

runs from the Philippines. After the war, the equipment was purchased for the renewed operations in Sydney, where Coca-Cola had been unavailable to civilians since 1942. While vast amounts of Coca-Cola were produced and consumed in New Guinea, it remains unclear how much reached the hands of local people. One TO, writing from the island of New Britain in August 1944, observed, “I haven’t seen many future ‘Coca-Cola’ drinkers at either place except our own Army boys. The natives are few and far between.” But, as the remark makes clear, TOs were imagining local people as future consumers and New Guinea as a new market, even if in a patronizing way. Hence another TO’s account of one New Guinea man’s first contact with a Coca-Cola: Let me tell you of an amusing incident that happened yesterday. A FuzzyWuzzy native was passing by the plant. Guess his curiosity got the best of him because he cautiously looked in the doorway. I happened to see him, so trying to use the sign language and a little pigeon [sic] English I offered him a drink of “Coca-Cola.” At first he was a little skeptical and reluctant but after a little persuasion he sniffed at it, stuck his tongue in it and then drank it down rather fast. He belched, the gas went up his nose and brought tears to his eyes. He was a scared native for a few minutes. So now it can be said that we have sampled and opened up a new outlet—the Fuzzy-Wuzzy market.4

In a November 1944 article for The Red Barrel, a monthly Coca-Cola Company publication, Lt. Ray Geiger explained with less levity to readers that his wartime experience in New Guinea had revealed to him hitherto unknown “business frontiers.” Geiger confessed to being positively impressed with the trading skills of the natives, as well as their “quickness to catch-on to all of the white man’s ways.” From his perspective, the war was hastening a natural evolution from backwardness to “civilized living” (even if the war itself called into question the very value of “civilization”): Regulation army shorts are appearing everywhere on natives who previously wore loincloths only. They take to cigarette smoking as naturally as though it were an institution as old as ours. They are perfectly willing to discard the teeth-staining betel nut chewing of former days for tobacco and even chewing gum. Many of them have been taught basic automobile mechanics, and several of them are already excellent drivers. They like movies and CocaCola, and are making some gestures toward assuming a cleanliness which they had not understood until now (Geiger 1944, 5).

No fear of a global monoculture here. On the contrary, Geiger’s vision of the future populated New Guinea with avid consumers of tobacco and

40

Coca-Globalization

gum, automobiles and movies, soap and Coca-Cola. It is a vision that defines entrance to the modern world in terms of mass consumption, a way of life epitomized by the consumption of Coca-Cola. The war, despite its undeniable ravages, was in this view hastening the inevitable by bringing the possibility of modern living to parts of the globe that would not otherwise have had such an opportunity for many generations. Such seemed to be the conceit too of much of Coca-Cola’s national advertising in the United States during the war, advertising that promoted Coca-Cola as symbolic of a way of life and incorporated the words “the global high-sign” into the familiar red disc logo (see Wrynn 1996). A different ad in this distinctive campaign notably appeared on the back cover of sixteen issues of National Geographic Magazine between August 1943 and February 1946. These ads depicted American service personnel drinking Coca-Cola in public and domestic settings in the United States (e.g., train depots, luncheonettes, and living rooms at Christmas) and in a variety of contexts abroad, often with foreign nationals, from Ireland to the Philippines. Sixty years later, the ads with their colorful detailed illustrations are highly desirable collectibles and can easily be found for sale on eBay and other sites on the World Wide Web. In some of the advertisements, the way of life symbolized by Coke was identified as unambiguously American. For example, one of the ads, set in Italy, represented the soft drink as a distinctively American custom: One of the interesting things that impresses people overseas about the American fighting man is his friendliness among his fellows. Everywhere they see Americans bringing with them their customs and home-ways— their own brand of open heartedness. Have a Coke, foreigners hear the G.I. say when he wants to be friendly, and they begin to understand what America means. For in this simple gesture is some of the essence of Main Street and the family fireside. Yes, the custom of the pause that refreshes with icecold Coca-Cola helps show the world the friendliness of American ways.

This advertising strategy simply continued the company’s longtime effort to identify itself as “the national drink,” an effort that grew in intensity around the time of massive immigration to the United States between 1908 and 1919 (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 101). The success of such product qualification—of effectively identifying Coca-Cola and America—was evident in the plain fact that the whole project of supplying the U.S. armed forces with Coke enjoyed a self-evident plausibility. What might have drawn fire as gross business opportunism if not outright profiteering instead impressed many observers as admirable patriotism. It was apparently only

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

41

a small minority of critics who asked, “What do they think this war is—the cause that refreshes?” (Pendergrast 1993, 201). The ultimate success of nationalizing Coca-Cola also manifested itself dramatically, sometimes poignantly, in the testimonials of soldiers serving overseas (see Weiner 2002). These testimonials often equated Coca-Cola with America by identifying the pair as precisely what the soldiers were fighting to defend. Col. Robert L. Scott, author of God is My Co-Pilot, thus pointed to his thoughts of “America, Democracy and Coca-Colas” as the motivation to “shoot down my first Jap” (cited in Pendergrast 1993, 211). But these testimonials also expressed a symbolic equation of Coca-Cola with “home”—home remembered in terms less encompassing and more intimate than those of political ideologies. For example, “to have this drink is just like having home brought nearer to you; it’s one of the little things of life that really counts. I can remember being at Ponce de Leon Park, watching the [Atlanta] Crackers play baseball as I filled up on Coca-Cola and peanuts. It’s things such as this that all of us are fighting for” (Pendergrast 1993, 210). Wartime ads also described The Coca-Cola Company’s project as bringing home to soldiers overseas (“a bit of America that has travelled ‘round the globe,” as one ad put it). Conversely, the ads depicted uniformed soldiers on furlough telling stories of distant lands in “the old neighborhood soda fountain.” The oddity of a cold Coke in Manus was juxtaposed with the oddity of a uniformed combat pilot sitting at the lunch counter of the corner drug store. People and things, army captains and Coke bottles, seem to have traded places. The encounter with Coca-Cola in unfamiliar surroundings—not just European cities, but foxholes on South Pacific islands—surely reinforced the association between Coca-Cola and America. But it also evinced astonishment at the massive delocalization involved—the disembedding of homely matter from its familiar context and the stretching of social relations over vast distances. Indeed, some of the wartime testimonials can be read as confessions of shock and awe at the possibility and extent of this “distanciation”: “The crowning touch to your Christmas packages was the bottled Coca-Cola. How did you ever think of sending them? To have it here and turn up the bottle and see ‘Ronceverte, W. V.,’ on the bottom was an added thrill” (Pendergrast 1993, 210). This disembedding of the local— and its reembedding in wholly new settings—was comforting and estranging at the same time—the kind of experience American tourists report today when they stumble across a Pizza Hut in Karachi. One striking material embodiment of this ambivalence took shape in the men’s room of a Navy officer’s club in the New Hebrides (today the Pacific island nation of

42

Coca-Globalization

Vanuatu): “Hundreds of Coke bottles embossed with local franchises’ locations were embedded, bottom out, in the concrete urinal wall, with varicolored lights behind them providing an eerie glow to a continual wash of water.‘It was something to see,’ one nostalgic veteran recalled.‘People came from long distances “just to piss on the old home town”’” (Pendergrast 1993, 212). The kind of “eerie” delocalization represented by syrup factories and bottling plants in New Guinea—the “phantasmagoric” saturation of immediate locales with remote people and places—potentially unsettled the national meaning of Coca-Cola. This semantic instability appears as a subtle ambiguity that runs through the wartime global high-sign advertisement campaign. While many of the ads asserted the identity of CocaCola with America, other ads suggested that Coca-Cola was symbolic of universal values, values recognized everywhere albeit in locally diverse ways. Accordingly, the injunction to “Have a Coke” could be translated into other languages, language itself thus understood as an arbitrary system of nomenclature applied to an independently (and universally) apprehended reality. The text of one ad, for instance,“translates” Coca-Cola into Chinese as “Good winds have blown you here.” It further observes: “In far off places, when Coca-Cola is on hand, you find it cementing friendships for our fighting men. China knew Coca-Cola from Tientsin to Shanghai, from Hong Kong to Tsingtao. To Chinese and Yank alike, Have a ‘Coke’ are welcome words. They belong with friendliness and freedom. From Atlanta to the Seven Seas, Coca-Cola stands for the pause that refreshes—has become a symbol of good will among the friendly-minded.” In this sense, having Cokes might be an American way of making friends, but friendship itself is not exclusively American; hence the capacity of Coca-Cola to insert itself into social contexts almost everywhere, as already demonstrated in China before the outbreak of World War II. Put differently, the semiotic qualification and celebration of Coca-Cola as “the global high-sign” was double-sided. On the one hand, Coca-Cola was sold overseas, not just in the United States; when American soldiers met up with it abroad, it reminded them of home. On the other hand, the fact that Coca-Cola was sold overseas implied that it is not exclusively American; its availability outside the United States bespoke its appeal to universal tastes and values. (The red disc in the global high-sign ads thus sometimes displayed the word Coca-Cola superimposed on silhouettes of North and South America and, sometimes, on silhouettes of Australia and Asia or of Africa and Europe.) The global high-sign campaign thus signaled a transitional moment in the history of The Coca-Cola Company, a transition from being a national company to a multinational or global

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

43

company—a transition not only in business operations, but also in selfperception. It also signaled how globality was to be conceived, namely, as multilocality: a diversity of local places and customs organized within a common framework of agreed upon values. This vision of globality—what Friedman (1992) calls utopian internationalism—was in accord with the postwar order to be ushered in by the newly created United Nations, an order of formally equivalent sovereign nation-states (Kelly and Kaplan 2001).5 It is today likewise in accord both with certain liberal and relativist versions of multiculturalism and with the strategies of marketing global brands of soft drinks in diverse locales such as India (Mazzarella 2003) and Papua New Guinea (Foster 2002). One meaningful consequence of investing Coca-Cola with qualities of ubiquity and universality was to render the absence of Coca-Cola as symbolic of radical difference and invidious distinction. The logic at work here emerges from a comparison of two global high-sign ads set in the South Pacific. In the first ad, set on a beach in New Zealand, an American army sergeant, a New Zealand soldier, and a Maori man in a loincloth stand together in front of a house adorned with Maori carvings. The caption at the top of the add translates “Have a Coke” into Maori as “Kia Ora (Good Luck).” This assertion of linguistic equivalence is mirrored in the illustration. The Maori man holds a bottle of Coke in one hand while pointing with the other hand to a tattoo on his bare chest. The New Zealand soldier holds a bottle of Coke in each hand while the American sergeant uses both of his hands to pull open his shirt, revealing a large tattoo not unlike that of the Maori man. Cross-cultural friendship—the deep similarity that lies under superficial differences—triumphs. The second ad pictures an encounter outside a military post exchange (PX) between Seabees, members of the U.S. Navy Construction Battalions (CBs), and several native men of the Admiralty Islands (Manus), site of the Pacific theater’s bottling plant. The natives carry hourglass drums; they wear loincloths and feathers. One native man stares in pop-eyed amazement at a field radio, presumably emitting the sounds of voices. The Seabees, all white men, sit and lean on heavy construction equipment; they look on smiling. Like the dark-skinned natives, they are shirtless. But unlike the natives, the Seabees are drinking Coca-Colas. The asymmetry of the ad is remarkable; it is the only one in the entire “global high-sign” series where the Americans alone drink Coca-Colas. V. Dennis Wrynn, in his commentary on the ad in Coke Goes to War, thus notes that “The boys may be chatting, but they aren’t giving away their Cokes” (1996, 76). Undoubtedly, the New Guinea ad draws on contemporary American and older colonial racist assumptions and imagery, much like the TO’s

44

Coca-Globalization

account of the “Fuzzy Wuzzy” Coke consumer. Similarly, the unflattering comparison between the Maori and Manus natives recapitulates a longstanding distinction between noble bronze Polynesians and savage black Melanesians (see Thomas 1989). The ad represents a denial of coevalness—the refusal to recognize plainly that American soldiers and New Guinea natives occupy the same world at the same time. Thus, the remarkable confession of one TO, who recounted his meeting in 1944 with a Manus man “running in the jungle”: “He stopped and said, ‘Me Christian.’ I said, ‘Good,’ then he said ‘Me Lutheran.’ I replied “So am I.’ Boy, was I embarrassed.” Here, the recognition of connection—of complex connectivity—and the inability to deny coevalness alters the TO’s affective understanding of his own place within a network of perspectives. But the New Guinea ad also brings to the surface a latent association of Coca-Cola with modernity, a global modernity figured in terms of mass consumption on the one hand and far reaching communication technologies on the other. This was the global modernity depicted at home for National Geographic readers and embodied by the white American men who were promoting it to dark-skinned natives ‘round the globe. From now on, it would be possible to imagine the absence of Coca-Cola as shorthand for the absence of modern civilization and therefore the presence of primitive ways. This assumption would hold true whether the absence of Coke was implicitly derided, as in the Seabees ad, or explicitly romanticized, as in The Gods Must Be Crazy. Here, too, is the origin of a whole genre of photographs that juxtapose images of the primitive, either stark naked or garbed in anything but Western clothes, with branded containers of carbonated soft drink. Thus a 1957 issue of Panorama, Pepsi-Cola International’s glossy public relations magazine, could contrast the modern metropolis of Manila with the ancient rice terraces of Banawe in northern Luzon, home of the Ifugao “tribesmen,” whose “way of life has remained unchanged for centuries.” The resolution of this contrast, however, appears in the form of a picture of an Ifugao man quaffing a bottle of Pepsi. The caption reads: “Pepsi-Cola is a modern aid to pleasant living.” Ten years later, a picture of a New Guinea man dressed in the ceremonial splendor of face paint and feathers, brandishing a can of Coke, graced the cover of Coca-Cola Overseas, Coca-Cola Export’s own publication and counterpart to Panorama. This image of the resplendent soft drink–swigging native still enjoys currency in postcolonial Papua New Guinea (e.g., on souvenir postcards [See Figure 2.1] and in travel photographs [see Figure 2.2]), despite the fact that consumption of food and drink is sometimes regarded locally as inimical to the ritual purposes and practices signaled by ceremonial dress.

Figure 2.1 Postcard image of a Huli dancer at the 1987 Port Moresby Show. Photo by Marsha Berman. Printed by Wirui Press, Wewak, Papua New Guinea.

Figure 2.2 Dancers at the 2006 Goroka Show. Photograph by Jan Hoeksema.

46

Coca-Globalization

Indeed, the image often represents soft drink consumption as a positive sign of cultural strength—irrefutable evidence of the capacity of Papua New Guineans to honor their traditions while at the same time becoming modern. Such is the self-proclaimed position of soft drink bottlers in Papua New Guinea, who have provided corporate sponsorship for numerous cultural exhibitions such as the annual Port Moresby Show (see Chapter 4). The show is something like a grand county fair that features both traditional dance competitions and rock concerts in a self-conscious blend of the indigenous and the exogenous, the old and the new. Hence one newspaper advertisement promoting the 1995 Port Moresby Show that featured a color photo of three bare-breasted young women, dressed identically in ceremonial garb, raising bottles of Pepsi to their lips in a single choreographed motion. Next to the photo appeared these words: “PEPSI. The favourite drink of Papua New Guineans is once again proud to be associated with the 1995 Port Moresby Show. Come celebrate this year’s festivities and drink to the occasion with Pepsi. PEPSI. The Choice of a New Generation. The Choice of all Papua New Guineans” (Post-Courier, June 7, 1995). In this self-satisfied view, the combination of Pepsi and Papua New Guinea is a matter of choice—a choice by which a new generation of Papua New Guineans define themselves as both traditional (local) and modern (global).6 The encounter with global modernity is here envisaged in elite cultural nationalist terms, even if articulated by a transnational corporation; the result is not Western monoculture but a distinctive national culture made out of the best features of diverse local traditions and global commodities. This national culture is recognizably distinctive, however, only because it is comparable to other national cultures within a “system of common difference” (Wilk 1995). Thus the rationale behind such recent national entries into the global system of soft drink differences as Russian Cola and Cola Turka (from Turkey; see Özkan and Foster 2005). Coca-Cola was thus qualified and understood during World War II as a worldly thing. Its association with America was never, of course, erased; America itself was understood to represent a modern world order that transcended national distinctions. Coca-Cola Overseas happily reprinted an article from a 1953 Brazilian business magazine in which the author asserted that “‘Coca-Cola’ is a symbol of new commercial methods, of a new American civilization, a new order of ideas, of a complete overthrow of the gloomy concepts of a dark, mouldy past” (“As Others See Us” 1954). Here it is Coke rather than its competitor that symbolizes a new generation, indeed, progress itself: “‘Coca-Cola is progress. It spreads comfort throughout Brazil. It is against barefootedness, against malaria and yellow

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

47

fever . . . against corrupt politicians, against bad roads and against gangsterism.” To be against Coke, then, was to be for a life of premodern, if not downright primitive conditions. Reembedding Coca-Cola: The Franchise System At the end of World War II, the overseas business of The Coca-Cola Company was expanding rapidly. Twenty-nine of the sixty-four “emergency” bottling plants were still active, serving the armed forces in occupied Germany and Japan. Three hundred and fifty-four bottlers operated outside the United States in 1948, compared with 1,056 domestic bottlers, but J. F. Curtis, president of the Export Corporation, predicted that within five years the number of foreign bottlers would exceed the domestic total: “In the past year we have added 76 new bottlers in 28 countries. Moreover, we are now processing more than a thousand serious inquiries about Bottler’s Agreements from 118 countries or geographical units” (1948, 5). It is hardly surprising, then, that by 1950 the global reach of Coca-Cola—its manifest destiny as a multinational corporation—had become a topic of public interest. A famous Time magazine cover article represented the company’s overseas spread as a form of benign empire, a confident sign of U.S. postwar leadership: “To find something as thoroughly native American hawked in half a hundred languages on all the world’s crossroads from Arequipa to Zwolle is still strangely anomalous, somewhat like reading Dick Tracy in French or seeing a Japanese actor made up like Abraham Lincoln. But it is reassuring. It is also simpler, sharper evidence than the Marshall Plan or a Voice of America broadcast that the U.S. has gone out into the world to stay” (“The Sun Never Sets on Cacola” 1950 [see Figure 2.3]). The consternation confessed by the Time article springs from the recognition that something as “native American” as Coke could be stripped of its national identity and assimilated into multiple local contexts. But that very possibility was the explicit objective of The Coca-Cola Export Company’s policy of multilocalism. The goal was to make Coca-Cola an integral part of people’s everyday lives wherever they might be, to weave the product into the “pattern and customs of every land,” as one recurring metaphor would have it. Indeed, Pendergrast (1993, 480n) reports that by the mid1950s, the word “export” in the subsidiary company’s title had become an unwanted reminder of the drink’s American origin and company officials discussed changing the name. Already by 1950, a third of The Coca-Cola Company’s profits came from “foreign” business, and only one percent of Coca-Cola Export employees (a total of six thousand in 1948; Curtis 1948) were American. Thus, the story of Coca-Cola’s expansion overseas is as

48

Coca-Globalization

Figure 2.3 Cover of Time, May 15, 1950. TIME Magazine © 1950 Time Inc. Reprinted with permission.

much one of deliberate localization or planned domestication as it is one of imperial conquest. The Coca-Cola Export Company had no doubts about the key to its localization strategy: the franchise system. From 1948 and through the 1950s, a simple and consistent message was broadcast through the pages of Coca-Cola Overseas, Export’s in-house magazine for owners and managers of bottling operations worldwide, namely, that Coca-Cola is local to the community that bottles it. An early, elliptically titled editorial, “ . . . local business,” presented the official vision of the franchise system at work: Since 1886, when Coca-Cola first made its appearance, the Company has remained primarily the manufacturer of the syrup, or concentrate. It operates only a certain few bottling plants in various parts of the world, and these

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

49

for pioneering purposes. The bottling of the product has remained primarily what it always was—the enterprise of independent businessmen residing in the community and operating with their own capital. The retailing of the product is strictly the business of hundreds of thousands of dealers—shopkeepers, small merchants, vendors. The profit structure of Coca-Cola is such that the dealers receive the largest share, the bottlers the next largest and the Company the smallest share (Coca-Cola Overseas, October 1948, p. 1).

More importantly, Export Company officials would invariably point out, the establishment of a local Coca-Cola bottler necessarily creates a demand for other local businesses to supply the bottler with everything from sugar and glass to packing cases, delivery trucks, and uniforms. Or, as Time parroted in its 1950 cover story, “In all countries where it is bottled, Coca-Cola stimulates local industry; virtually all the coolers, bottles, cases, uniforms and advertising material used in foreign countries are made outside the U.S.” Local bottlers were thus engines of economic growth for local communities, a central node in a web of community enterprises. Export Board Chairman (and former postmaster general and chairman of the Democratic National Committee) James Farley summarized the gospel he preached numerous times as Coca-Cola’s preeminent ambassador in a speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Dayton, Ohio: “Just as in Dayton, so in any city wherever ‘Coca-Cola’ is bottled throughout the world, the ‘Coca-Cola’ bottling plant is an integral part of the community. The economic force upon the community is measured in terms of wages and salaries paid to employees, investments made in buildings, trucks, bottles and cases, as well as payments made for services supplied by others. It matters little that the pay envelope may contain francs, ticals, pounds, shillings and pence instead of dollars” (Farley 1954). The franchise system accordingly founded a “business commonwealth” that apparently contradicted the easy equation of large-scale efficiency with monopolistic exploitation. In a 1949 Coca-Cola Overseas article, Thurman Arnold, former head of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, could proclaim that The Coca-Cola Company epitomized a “business concern which was putting money into outlying communities and increasing the wealth of independents, instead of exploiting them.” The company thus reflexively qualified its product with a partial and partisan representation of the network that the product brought into being and bound together. As a testament to the capacity of the franchise system to localize CocaCola, the company celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in Italy in 1977 with an advertising campaign that reportedly averred: “Coca-Cola in Italy is Italian. It is a collection of small businesses, Italian businesses. The product

50

Coca-Globalization

is produced in Italy, by Italians, in factories built by Italians and is then distributed and consumed by Italians. And it has been so for half a century” (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 154–55). Nothing new here. Pepsi-Cola International, formed in 1954, used the same strategy to market its products overseas during its own massive postwar expansion. A Printer’s Ink article from 1958 explained the procedure: “To show natives of a particular country how Pepsi’s plant is benefitting them, ads are run that say, ‘Glass, sugar, caps, you produced all of them and more for Pepsi-Cola’ or ‘How drinking Pepsi makes your country grow.’” The copy of another ad, picturing personnel, declares: “Meet your neighbors who work for Pepsi-Cola.” Like the rival Coca-Cola Export Corporation, Pepsi-Cola International oriented its marketing—its qualification of product—to one principal end: “the integration of product with customers in the country of their origin” (“How Pepsi-Cola is Marketed Overseas” 1958). It is worth noting that strains of this promotional rhetoric can be heard in Peter Nolan’s (2000) more recent argument about the opportunities available to small businesses in developing countries for linking up with “external firms” such as The Coca-Cola Company. Nolan claims that these businesses are able to compete largely because of their low labor costs in supplying the Coca-Cola system with “a vast array of locally purchased goods and services” that include everything from carbon dioxide and paper cups to plastic crates and umbrellas (Nolan 2000, 17).7 Indeed, Nolan describes the procurement activity of the company and its bottlers as “a massive system of inter-relationships with a myriad of connected businesses” (1999, 44). (Callon et al. [2002] might describe this activity as the source and outcome of an extremely long network bound together by a product.) If fortunate—and able to meet the exacting quality standards of the company—a small business might “progress up the value chain” in partnership with a company, like The Coca-Cola Company in the 1990s, hell bent on global expansion. Nevertheless, Nolan also makes it abundantly clear that the vision of highly localized and decentralized supply chains once conjured up as part of the company’s marketing magic no longer reflects the current realities of purchasing practices. The establishment of Global Procurement and Trading has allowed the company and its bottlers to benefit from the economies of large volume purchases and guarantees of homogeneous product inputs reliably supplied at the same high level of quality worldwide, thus “providing a common consumption experience across all countries” (Nolan 1999, 45). Not surprisingly, then, fewer and fewer suppliers provided inputs to the Coca-Cola system during the 1990s, and concentration and consolidation within the industries producing these inputs (cans, glass containers,

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

51

components for polyethylene terephthalate [PET] bottles, trucks, accountants, advertisements, etc.) proceeded at a rapid clip. For example, by the end of the decade, only three giant global companies accounted for 70 percent of world can output (Nolan 1999, 50). Rapid innovation in technologies, moreover, stimulated by the competition among suppliers to enter the Coke system’s value chain, has also taken its toll on local suppliers to local bottlers. For example, the high transport costs associated with glass usually ensured that bottlers purchased containers from local suppliers. But with the ascendance of alternative, light weight packaging materials, starting with cans in the 1960s and plastic containers subsequently, the survival of small producers was doomed. In short, the concentration and consolidation in the various industries supplying inputs to the Coca-Cola system proceeded apace with concentration and consolidation in other locations of the product network or value chain. On the one hand, the company launched a major effort under CEO Roberto Goizueta to reduce the number of bottlers within the system (see Chapter 3). On the other hand, customers for the system’s output, themselves launched on projects of growth and expansion, sought the “close inter-relationship between producer and retailer” basic to “efficient consumer response” (Nolan 1999, 69; see Chapter 3). Giant retail outlets such as supermarkets and the megastores of Wal-Mart, the largest retailer and private employer in the United States, pursued price advantages through a strategy of seamlessly integrating their own efficiently monitored supply chains with those of major suppliers (see Dicker 2005; Chapter 3). Similarly, customers of The Coca-Cola Company’s fountain products—including McDonald’s, the company’s largest single global customer, and the Universal Cinemas chain of movie theaters—sought to coordinate closely their expansion and development with that of their supplier—The Coca-Cola Company and its bottlers. The soft drink franchise system was not predicated upon altruism, of course; its usefulness in opening up new foreign markets was apparent whenever Coca-Cola met resistance from local beverage industries. For example, when the Export Corporation encountered difficulty reestablishing its operations in postwar France, its lawyer “suggested signing bottling contracts with wine, beer, fruit juice, and soft drink interests. That way, he said, ‘we will bore into the enemy from within’” (Pendergrast 1993, 243–44; see Kuisel 1993). (In Japan, Coke’s well-connected bottling partners included Kirin Brewery [Pendergast 1993]; Pepsi expanded through Europe in the 1950s in alliance with Schweppes in England, Perrier in France, and Heineken in the Netherlands [Louis and Yazijian 1980].) Similarly, the franchise system afforded the Export Corporation protection

52

Coca-Globalization

from expropriation. In a 1973 Business Week article that explained the decentralized structure of the Export Corporation’s global operations, then CEO of The Coca-Cola Company J. Paul Austin observed: “It’s a franchise business. If they nationalize the assets they’re nationalizing their own people.” But as Louis and Yazijian (1980) point out, the franchise system itself lowers the probability of expropriation inasmuch as it strengthens ties between Coke and local governments. (In a 1991 interview, E. Neville Isdell, current CEO but then in charge of Coke’s operations in Africa, claimed that “Our bottler in Ethiopia is the government. It’s 100% owned by the government” [Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 2, item 14]). At the same time, the system provides any necessary detachment from the illegal or unethical activities of unscrupulous bottlers (such as stronghanded anti-union tactics in Guatemala during the 1970s; Louis and Yazijian 1980, 185; Frundt 1987). Coca-Cola bottlers demonstrated their citizenship in local communities not only by supporting economic activity, but also by sponsoring cultural events, especially sporting events. The June 1954 issue of Coca-Cola Overseas describes how almost five thousand students from seventy different schools toured the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Adelaide, Australia, over a period of seven weeks: On arrival the children were taken step by step through the bottling operation and then given ice-cold “Coca-Cola.” They were shown the film “Refreshment Through the Years,” and given a copy of the booklet “The Romance of Coca-Cola” and a souvenir pencil. Headmasters and teachers encouraged the pupils to describe in writing their visit. Pen and pencil sets were offered as prizes by the bottler for the best essay written each week.

This strategy of citizenship-through-sampling is still very much in evidence in new markets like that of Papua New Guinea, where the bottler, Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA), is not locally owned (see Chapter 4). Put otherwise, the Coca-Cola bottler is keen to create the sort of confidence and goodwill necessary for Papua New Guineans, like consumers everywhere, to reembed Coca-Cola in their everyday lives.8 The Coca-Cola Company adapted itself to overseas markets in other ways as well, introducing Fanta Orange in Italy in 1955 five years before finally offering a line of fruit-flavors in the United States (Pendergrast 1993, 244). Fruit-flavored soft drinks provide a wedge for opening up newer markets to Coca-Cola, which appears to be something of an acquired taste. John Hunter, president of the Coca-Cola Pacific Group in 1991, admitted that “in some of the newer markets . . . initially we do

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

53

better with Fanta Orange and a range of flavors and with Sprite because generally there has been a local soft drink industry that has been built around flavors. It takes a while for new consumers who have not experienced Coca-Cola to accept and get used to the taste” (Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 29, item 13). Hunter explained that it is easier for new consumers to “get into the soft drink culture with flavors than it is with Coca-Cola” (a lesson that former CEO Douglas Daft liked to say he learned the hard way in Indonesia). This is especially true if there is no refrigeration available: “A Fanta Orange or Sprite tastes better warm than does a Coca-Cola.” Hence the introduction of Coca-Cola into new markets requires the development of what Hunter called “an ice cold culture,” a tradition of drinking beverages ice cold. Accommodations to local markets nevertheless took place within a general effort to make a product that would look and taste invariably the same the world over. This effort entailed both standardized procedures for manufacturing the drink and participation in a corporate culture that transcended local, national, and regional differences. According to the 1950 Time magazine article, this culture was formulated and dispensed in the training of “field men” in charge of sales promotion who in turn educated foreign bottlers. Training involved, among other activities, a two-week stint at the central production school in Atlanta and time spent working in U.S. plants at every job involved in bottling. In the field, sales promotion men not only advised bottlers on the design of plants and machinery to purchase, but also on how driver-salesmen ought to present themselves and their products to retail clients. The management of meaning—of brand image—was precise and deliberate, creating an orientation to the product itself that bordered on unabashed commodity fetishism. At a 1954 convention of bottlers assembled for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Coca-Cola in Germany, the audience heard a gigantic Coca-Cola bottle speak from the center of the stage: “I am the object of your strivings; the hub about which everything on this day of celebration rotates . . . I am not just a commodity, I am unique of my kind. I am ‘Coca-Cola,’ vigorous with life and more than a mere shape” (“25 Years of ‘Coca-Cola’ in Germany!” 1954). The company’s culture of quality control was still very much on display during a visit that I made in April 2000 with two colleagues to a CCAowned plant in Lae, Papua New Guinea (see Figure 2.4; see Errington and Gewertz 2004 for an account). And this culture exerted direct and powerful effects on the local portion of the product network, for the sugar used in all the company’s products made and sold in PNG then came from the canefields of Ramu Sugar Ltd. (RSL), just a two-hour drive away. This arrangement had grown out of a general policy of import substitution and

54

Coca-Globalization

Figure 2.4 Coca-Cola Amatil bottling plant in Lae, Papua New Guinea, April 2000.

a specific monopoly granted to RSL by the PNG state which, after 1997, gave way to a scheme of heavy but gradually decreasing tariff protection for the domestic sugar industry. By the end of the 1990s, CCA’s purchases of sugar from RSL—the only sweeteners used in PNG-made products of the company—accounted for as much as 25 percent of RSL’s total production (Errington and Gewertz 2004, 228). Nevertheless, the relationship between RSL and CCA was often troubled by questions of quality. During our visit, David Lane, technical operations manager for both of CCA’s plants in PNG, expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of RSL’s mill-white sugar. He claimed that mill-white sugar, as opposed to refined sugar, adversely affects the taste and color of soft drinks, especially the color, which is crucially important in drinks like Sprite that require crystal clarity in the liquid. RSL sugar was simply not, in Lane’s opinion, up to the rigorous standards of The Coca-Cola Company—despite efforts on the part of CCA to use special filters (see Errington and Gewertz 2004, 229). Yet, Lane readily admitted that he had not received any complaints from PNG consumers. Instead, his concerns seemed to be motivated by both the dictates of company inspectors and his own personal craft ethic, according to which he favored the high quality

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

55

and reduced profitability associated with using heavily taxed refined white sugar imported from Australia. In the past, according to Errington and Gewertz (2004, 228), CCA had used threats to import Australian refined sugar (itself much cheaper than PNG’s domestic sugar) to extract expensive concessions from RSL in upgrading the quality of its product. Lane similarly explained the transition from glass bottles to cans and plastic bottles as a function of quality control.9 He noted that glass bottles were often returned in poor condition—“burned and with buai [chewed betel nut] in them”; chips and cracks meant the bottles were unfit for reuse. This transition, however, further delocalized the product network or supply chain. CCA imported its cans from New Zealand and its “preforms” for plastic bottles from Australia (since late 2002 from Visy Industries, which purchased CCA’s plastic bottle manufacturing facilities when CCA decided to sell non-core assets). These preforms were heated and molded into the trademarked contour shape by an impressive high-speed blowing machine produced by the French company, Sidel, which at the time produced “about 70% of the global output of PET blowers for the Coca-Cola system” (Nolan 1999, 54). In 2000, the bottles still in use by CCA in PNG (at the Port Moresby plant only) were likewise imported (from the Philippines, along with crown seals or caps); a small local manufacturer had existed in Lae up until about 1990. Besides the cardboard cartons for boxing aluminum cans, very few of the inputs (besides sugar and water) for the company’s products in PNG were made locally. The Lae plant produced its own syrup (and carbon dioxide), but it imported the concentrate from Australia (although the batch being used at the time of our visit inexplicably came from Swaziland). The elimination of returnable glass bottles, moreover, removed Coca-Cola products from a street-level informal economy in which individual entrepreneurs collected and redeemed empty containers for the small deposit. This entrepreneurial spirit has, however, apparently adapted to new circumstances. Thus the Courier Mail of Queensland, Australia reported on March 18, 2004, that two PNG men had been charged with stealing ten million aluminum can lids, worth almost three hundred thousand Australian dollars, destined for Coca-Cola Amatil’s Lae plant. The lids were allegedly taken from a storage depot in Lae by the operations manager and passed on to a senior staff member at PNG Recycling, presumably for export to Brisbane.10 As Ponte and Gibbon (2005) point out, the management of quality by actors in the same product network or value chain can be a matter of contestation as much as one of cooperation. Lead firms such as the Coca-Cola system of bottlers or the mammoth retailer Wal-Mart can use their purchasing

56

Coca-Globalization

power to define quality standards and perforce to govern other actors in the network. Big buyers can demand that their suppliers conform to these standards or else forfeit business, thus stimulating competing suppliers to find ways (technological or otherwise) to meet quality standards at the lowest possible cost to buyers. Tariffs and taxes, of course, make the achievement of such “control at a distance” (Ponte and Gibbon 2005) more difficult for buyers. Thus, Errington and Gewertz describe the uneasy relationship between CCA and RSL at the start of the new millennium: “The present arrangements between CCA and RSL are clearly provisional. RSL knows that as soon as it becomes politically feasible and economically advantageous, CCA will import refined sugar from elsewhere. Certainly, RSL’s well-being is not central to CCA’s perception of its own long-term interests” (2004, 232). This description amounts to neither the “business commonwealth” envisioned in The Coca-Cola Company’s early overseas marketing rhetoric nor the hopeful opportunities presented by “the global business revolution” extolled in more recent analyses of the company’s operations in developing countries (Nolan 2000). It instead conforms more closely to what Bakan (2004) represents as every normal corporation’s “pathological pursuit of profit and power” (see Chapter 5). Cultural Sensitivity as Micro-Marketing An important part of the Export Corporation’s effort to coordinate its “loose and sprawling confederation of more or less independent industries” (“The Sun Never Sets on Cacola” 1950) involved keeping Coca-Cola advertising within definite guidelines. A bottler shared his advertising expenses with the Export Corporation on a decreasing scale for the first five years. The Export Corporation distributed catalogues that illustrated “point of purchase” signs in full color and provided copy in several different languages. Information for local carpenters on how to frame and mount the signs was also included. The goal was double: quality and uniformity. In a December 1948 Coca-Cola Overseas article, Joseph Rintelen, assistant advertising manager for the Export Corporation wrote, “Nobody seeing this catalogue will fail to realize that in any production of advertising material he may undertake locally, he will have to aim high to meet the requirements with regard to quality in design and execution and to produce the kind of material that is representative of Coca-Cola. It is felt that the catalogue will not only be a great incentive in this respect, but it will also make an important contribution toward uniformity throughout the world in basic point-of-purchase material.” The home office of the Export Corporation also supplied managers abroad with pattern campaigns for

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

57

local newspaper and magazine advertising. Rintelen (1955, 20) described the 1956 pattern campaign as the most comprehensive ever, consisting of “more than fifty basic advertisements which can be used as they appear or can easily be adapted to other sizes and shapes and any language desired.” Adaptable art, copy, and layout made it possible to run local variations of a single ad by simply translating the text and, where necessary, photographing native models in the same general pose or situation. Pepsi-Cola International also implemented a program of coordinated international advertising as part of its overseas expansion during the 1950s. Franchisees received copies of the five-volume Pepsi-Cola Encyclopedia of Advertising, which communicated general policy advice on selling such impulse items as soft drinks, and particular tips for improving radio spots, such as making good use of the Pepsi-Cola jingle. Pepsi-Cola International supplied overseas bottlers with an “advertising and sales promotion manual” from which to order materials. These materials included “mats for use in newspapers and magazines, commercial announcements for radio, television and movie houses, outdoor posters and special aids, such as balloons with the Pepsi trademark and official Pepsi-Cola uniforms for driver-salesmen and plant personnel” (“With New Delhi Operating” 1956). In countries such as Brazil and Mexico, where restrictions banned the import of point-of-purchase signs and finished artwork from the United States, local businesses furnished advertising materials. Bottlers were advised that the materials in the manual had proven successful in other markets and were urged to make only necessary changes, all of which were subject to approval by Pepsi-Cola International. In the late 1950s, these materials were organized worldwide around the theme of friendship—“The Refreshment of Friendship,” “The Drink of Friendship”—an adaptation of the “Be sociable” ad campaign then running in the United States. While the overall theme was coordinated by Pepsi-Cola International, and financing was provided on a cooperative basis, franchisees assumed responsibility for placing advertisements locally as a way of coping with variations in different beverage markets. In this regard, Pepsi-Cola International endorsed the use of local ad agencies or branches of international agencies. By contrast, The Coca-Cola Company during the same period integrated its advertising with one agency, McCann-Erickson. The use of uniform and pattern advertising (discussed further in Chapter 3) rested upon the philosophical anthropology of utopian internationalism, frequently articulated in the pages of Coca-Cola Overseas, which proposed that people are fundamentally alike. A 1949 editorial titled “ . . . first citizens” proclaimed, “If there are any differences between people, they are primarily surface differences . . . What appear

58

Coca-Globalization

to be differences in local customs are actually parallel solutions to the same problems.” Beneath superficial difference lay a common humanity, a shared set of aspirations and values. Direct appeal to these aspirations and values enabled the Export Corporation to assert, “Our headquarters may be in the United States of America, but our ‘home’ is everywhere throughout the world” (“ . . . an adventure in friendship” 1950). This approach to cultural difference underpins “glocalization”; it envisions diversity as organized within a common universal framework. Thomas Friedman, the well-known syndicated journalist, has championed just this sort of “glocalization” as a laudable form of multilocalism in which “people everywhere feel some stake in how [globalization] impacts their lives” (1996). Citing the franchise system of McDonald’s as an effective instrument for localizing a global company, Friedman asserts that “to the extent that US-origin companies are able to become multi-local, able to integrate around the globe economically without people feeling that they are being culturally assaulted, they will be successful.” Thus, in order to avoid culturally assaulting the people of Japan, McDonald’s renamed Ronald McDonald, its company mascot, Donal McDonald, “because there’s no ‘R’ sound in Japanese.” As James Cantalupo, head of McDonald’s International, explained to Friedman: “Cultural sensitivity is part of it too. There is no ‘Euroburger’ . . . We have a different chicken sandwich in England than we do in Germany.” What sort of cultural sensitivity is this? Glocalization here unfolds within the framework of organized diversity shared by political organizations such as the United Nations and televised spectacles such as the Miss World beauty pageant and the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. We once again meet, as Richard Wilk (1995) argues, the dominant organization of global culture today. Cultural difference is recognized, but rendered comparable—a difference in flags or foods, dress or folklore. Difference, in other words, is recognized on one condition, namely, that everyone is different in the same ways; local content fills globally distributed forms. For some people—such as the French farm union leader, José Bové, who attacked a McDonald’s being built in the small rural town of Millau and became an icon for protestors disrupting the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle—such recognition empties difference of all meaning. It disguises among other things the degradation of food quality and the economic marginalization of small producers (state subsidized or not) by transnational agribusiness. From this perspective, minor variations in chicken sandwiches do not constitute the sort of differences that, in Friedman’s words, democratize globalization. Nor do they represent the kind of

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

59

differences that a genuine sensitivity to cultural diversity—as opposed to a strategy of micro-marketing—not only tolerates but also cultivates. Disembedding, Again: The Globalization of Markets and Roberto Goizueta’s Vision After a decade of furious expansion in the 1950s, Pepsi-Cola International Ltd. operated in the same fashion as Coca-Cola Export, though on a smaller scale. By 1956, its regional offices employed some 190 persons overseas to facilitate the sale of concentrate to local bottling plants (“With New Delhi Operating” 1956); in countries such as Brazil and Britain with restrictions on importation, Pepsi set up subsidiaries to manufacture concentrate. Pepsi outsold Coke in two important and large markets—Mexico and Venezuela. By 1963, 279 mostly franchised bottling plants operated in 101 countries (compared with Coca-Cola’s 776 plants in 115 countries), up from sixty-seven plants in thirty-one countries in 1950 (“Pepsi Ad Push” 1963). In 1958, 40 percent of Pepsi’s total sales were foreign. Under Donald Kendall’s leadership, foreign sales tripled and foreign profits quintupled from 1957 to 1963. When Kendall moved from Pepsi’s international operations to assume the position of president in 1963, the Pepsi-Cola Company seemed poised to rival The Coca-Cola Company globally in the coming years. Indeed, Kendall seemed to anticipate the vision of soft drink globalization now more commonly associated with former Coke CEO Roberto Goizueta. For example, Kendall erased the distinction between Pepsi’s separately headed domestic and international operations and put in place a “one world, one market organization.” He established a dozen “profit centers,” each with a vice-president solely responsible for revenue performances, but Kendall also established a single central marketing staff that reported to him. He observed—again, in 1963, long before the globalization of markets became a buzz-phrase—that “the product is the same around the world; only the marketing conditions and needs differ” (“Shake-up at Pepsi” 1963). Just before taking over as president, Kendall saw an overseas future for Pepsi: “On the horizon, we see a continuation of expanding markets overseas, stronger economies and less rigid trade regulations. This suggests future international contributions that will possibly equal or exceed income generated by the domestic company” (“Pepsi Ad Push” 1963). However, after Pepsi-Cola merged with Frito-Lay in 1965 to form PepsiCo, Inc., domestic beverage sales, driven by the high intensity cola wars in the United States, would always outpace foreign sales. In 1982, a major

60

Coca-Globalization

accounting scandal in the Philippines and Mexico prompted a withdrawal from international operations (Sellers 1994). By 1997, despite an aggressive attempt to reinvest in and overhaul international operations in the early 1990s, foreign sales accounted for about 30 percent of PepsiCo’s beverage earnings, which in turn accounted for only about a third of PepsiCo’s total earnings from snack foods, beverages, and restaurants. PepsiCo’s future apparently lay in snack foods more than soft drinks, despite the fact that it was the world’s second largest soft drink company in 1999 with 21 percent of the global volume in carbonated soft drinks. This was not the case for Coca-Cola. By 1966, Coca-Cola President J. Paul Austin was able to tell Dun’s Review that “a few years ago we were an American company with branches abroad. Today we’re a multinational business” (Weiner 1966). Forty-five percent of The Coca-Cola Company’s volume derived from overseas sales. By the early 1970s, the structure of The Coca-Cola Export Corporation was even more decentralized than that in place at the end of World War II. The world was divided into four zone offices (Japan became its own special zone in 1972), each of which was in turn divided into areas, and areas divided in turn into regions (a single large country or two to three smaller countries). Regional managers— natives, or at least someone who “speaks the language, knows the culture, and understands the local laws” (“How Coke Runs a Foreign Empire” 1973)—were free to select bottlers, choose new products for introduction and define personnel policies to fit local circumstances. But the magnitude of Export’s operation had increased considerably. Ninety-nine percent of its employees, including its CEO, were still non-Americans, but these employees now numbered twelve thousand. In 1972, Coke’s overseas operations generated earnings of $104 million—55 percent of the parent company’s total earnings but on only 40 percent of its total sales. More importantly, overseas earnings were growing at twice the rate of domestic profits. Austin foresaw the day when 75 percent of Coke’s earnings would come from abroad; at the end of the twentieth century, it was 80 percent (on 70 percent sales volume), more than $3 billion. The increasing importance of Coca-Cola’s overseas operations to the company, coupled with labor unrest and rocky relations with several foreign governments, prompted the move of Export’s headquarters from New York to Atlanta in 1972. But the main signal of a corporate shift away from decentralized multilocalism to centralized globalism came later, soon after Roberto Goizueta assumed leadership of The Coca-Cola Company in May 1980. According to David Greising, Goizueta inherited a company with “no coordination, no central planning, no strategic thinking” about its global ambitions: “Decisions under Austin, [Goizueta] believed, were made on a

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

61

purely situational basis, with no central direction or judgment parameters from headquarters. In Europe alone, Coke was pursuing three totally separate strategies in different countries . . . There was no effort to take advantage of Coke’s huge potential economies of scale” (1998, 74). The first opportunity to exert such an effort—to increase The Coca-Cola Company’s control over how its products were bottled and marketed around the globe—presented itself to Goizueta in 1981. John Hunter, then newly appointed head of the company’s Far Eastern region, persuaded Goizueta to invest $13 million in Coke’s ailing Philippine bottler, the San Miguel Brewery. The CocaCola Company would both buy 30 percent of the bottler and run the operation by joint agreement. The strategy was a huge success, regaining Coke’s two-to-one lead over Pepsi within two years. More importantly, the strategy served as a blueprint for what eventually became known as Goizueta’s “anchor bottler” program.11 This program developed at the same time that Goizueta sold The Coca-Cola Company’s non-beverage related holdings—acquisitions of shrimp farms and water purification technology picked up in the 1960s when the company became a truly ungainly conglomerate. Goizueta’s divestments, which provided capital for the anchor bottler scheme, culminated in 1989 with the final sale of Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Columbia was the one non-beverage acquisition that Goizueta himself had made with the goal of putting Coke’s domestic earnings on par with its international profits. The sale of Columbia signaled Goizueta’s realization that the international market was the future of the company, a future that required greater involvement of The Coca-Cola Company in its operations abroad. The anchor bottler program called for The Coca-Cola Company to take minority ownership of low performing but high potential bottlers and to provide expertise in bottling and marketing to local management (as well as provide Coca-Cola executives to the bottler’s board of directors). Demand on the company’s own capital outlays were to be kept to a minimum; capital outlays for bottler investments had to promise a 20 percent return before they would be approved. Goizueta explained that the strategy would not transform the bottling system: “Our goal is not to become a major player in bottling, but to facilitate a stronger and more efficient independent bottling system” (Greising 1998, 148). Yet, it was precisely the consolidation of Coke’s bottling system that marked Goizueta’s business plans from the mid-1980s onwards. In the United States, weak bottlers were purchased, refurbished, and sold to stronger bottlers in a process dubbed “refranchising.” Two large bottling systems, covering 38 percent of the United States population, were purchased and spun off as Coca-Cola

62

Coca-Globalization

Enterprises, with The Coca-Cola Company retaining 49 percent ownership of stock. Outside the United States, The Coca-Cola Company entered into major multinational joint ventures with bottling partners. In the UK, CadburySchweppes agreed to form a joint venture with Coke for bottling, canning, and distributing soft drinks. On the continent, bottling operations were upgraded and consolidated, West Germany’s 160 “tiny fiefdoms” reduced to sixty “well-capitalized and well-run operations” (Greising 1998, 174). In emerging markets, such as Eastern Europe and the Pacific (including Papua New Guinea), Coke relied on Australia-based Coca-Cola Amatil, an international bottler in which Goizueta invested $500 million in 1989—a 60 percent stake in the company. In effect, Goizueta “Coca-colonized” the international bottling system, replacing what was once a radically multilocal operation with a form of “centralized decentralization”: “strong local bottlers, but with controlling authority emanating from Coke’s central headquarters, as a means of coordinating strategy and enforcing standards” (Greising 1998, 173). By 1999, according to the company’s annual report, only 27 percent of its worldwide unit case volume was produced and distributed by independently owned bottlers, compared with 58 percent by bottlers in which the company had a noncontrolling ownership interest and 15 percent by controlled bottling and fountain operations. (PepsiCo pursued a similar strategy of consolidation somewhat later, raising ownership positions—via joint ventures and outright acquisitions—in its bottling network outside the United States from 15 percent in 1989 to 40 percent in 1994. By 1999, consolidation of manufacturing and distribution had resulted in the creation of four anchor bottlers, in which PepsiCo held minority stakes, that accounted for 75 percent of U.S. volume.) Goizueta fancied himself leading The Coca-Cola Company into the “post-conglomerate era,” a time when companies operated a core business while making financial investments in and exerting managerial influence on related industries. The Coca-Cola Company had been stripped down to its core business, indeed, to its core brand. Motivating this strategy was a particular vision of both the world and the place of Coca-Cola products in the world, a vision of global commodity networks in which, more than ever, it was possible, even mandatory, to capture economies of scale by treating the planet as a single market. This vision is captured in the pronouncements of Goizueta and one of his main supporters, the powerful investor Warren E. Buffett. Buffett, who spent over a billion dollars buying Coke stock after the 1987 market crash, believed that, unlike Hershey bars, consumption of Coca-Cola could grow without limit: “People are going to drink eight servings of something every day, and history shows that once

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

63

people are exposed to it, and I’m living proof, they like drinking it” (Greising 1998, 177). Eight servings of something every day: here is an impersonal, homogenizing, almost dehumanizing rhetoric that foregrounds concerns with increasing “share of stomach” and comparative per-capita consumption rates. It is a particular soft drink perspective on globalization, the title of an address Goizueta made in 1989 to the Town Hall of California in Los Angeles, a perspective that at the time disproportionately shaped the network of perspectives associated with Coca-Cola’s global commodity chain. In his address, Goizueta listed some of the reasons why companies such as his own ought to think in terms of a single global marketplace: rising disposable income around the world; the decreasing average age of the world’s population outside the United States and Europe; and the increasing ease with which the world’s markets could now be reached. Most importantly, Goizueta noted, contrary to critics of Coca-colonization and American cultural hegemony, the world’s consumers have taken advantage of their newfound economic and political freedom to pick and choose the products that they find most appealing. In so doing, Goizueta suggested, consumers themselves, through countless individual acts of appropriation and tireless consumption work, have internationalized certain products, including Coca-Cola. Goizueta’s point was in many ways my point, namely, “that people around the world are today connected to each other by brand-name consumer products as much as by anything else” (1989, 361). But whereas I regard the nature and significance of these connections as an open question, Goizueta already saw them as plain evidence of what Theodore Levitt—an influential Harvard business professor—called the convergence of consciousness “towards global commonality and modernity, cosmopolizing preferences and homogenizing consumption” (quoted in Goizueta 1989, 361).12 Thus Goizueta informed readers of The Coca-Cola Company’s 1991 Annual Report of Levitt’s main conclusion: “In many important ways, the world’s markets are also becoming more alike. Every corner of the free world is increasingly subjected to intense and similar communications: commercial, cultural, social and hard news . . . Tokyo, London, New York and Los Angeles resemble each other today far more than they did 25 years ago, in large part because their residents’ tastes in consumer products have converged.” Levitt contended that “convergence of consciousness,” driven largely by the globalization of media, produces in effect “heteroconsumers”: “People who’ve become increasingly alike and indistinct from one another, and yet have simultaneously varied and multiple preferences” (Levitt 1988, 8). He would thus understand and probably

64

Coca-Globalization

endorse the plans announced in 1999 by PepsiCo to market a guarana soft drink in 175 different countries (http://www.guarana.com/news.html). Guarana, a concentrate of fruits from the Amazon, is often considered Brazil’s national drink. But in Levitt’s view of globalized markets, there is no reason why it would not necessarily appeal to “heteroconsumers” everywhere. To Roberto Goizueta (1989, 361), Levitt’s argument made good sense of the big brute fact with which he impressed his Town Hall audience: “Nearly half of all soft drinks sold around the world are our products. 560 million times a day, consumers in more than 160 countries refresh themselves with Coca-Cola, diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite and our other soft drinks. No other company sells half as much.” Cultural deterrents to consumption of CocaCola carbonated beverage products—especially the “core four” brands enumerated—were never insurmountable; with appropriate modifications, a strategy of making these products available, affordable and acceptable (i.e., associated with good times and good feelings) ought to succeed universally (see Pendergast 1993, 376–77; see Chapter 3 for more on “the three As”). It is this sort of vision of the world that allowed a transnational corporation to see potential in the small PNG market for soft drinks. (In 1995, PNG had a population of about 4.2 million, of which CCA estimated that it serviced 3.5 million.) When CCA acquired the bottling operations in PNG (see Chapter 4), its director of overseas operation, Russel Phillips, said, “The acquisition presents us with a further opportunity to grow our bottling business. On a per capita basis, consumption of soft drinks in PNG is just 10 litres per year, compared with Australia’s per capita consumption of 98 litres per annum” (Coca-Cola Amatil 1991). The implication, then, is that there is a potential 88 liters (at least) of Coca-Cola consumption per head per year that has not been tapped in PNG. This implication is a conceit—an approximate mapping of other people’s meanings—that recapitulates the assumptions of Lieutenant Geiger’s World War II vision of a someday nation of gum-chewing, soap-sudsing Papua New Guineans. Coca-Cola executives seemed to imagine all the markets that they were moving into in the early 1990s in much the same way. It is not so surprising to learn that Roberto Goizueta, doing the math of per capita consumption and total population, imagined Indonesia as “soft drink paradise—200 million people, nearly all of them Muslims forbidden to drink alcohol,” exclaimed one Business Week article (Clifford et. al. 1997, 78). It is, perhaps, more surprising to learn that Goizueta applied the same calculations to the U.S. market. Consider the following anecdote that

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

65

Goizueta used to open his 1996 address to shareowners (taken from The Coca-Cola Company’s home page on the World Wide Web): The other day, after I spoke to a group of engineering students at my alma mater, one of them asked me a simple question: “Which area of the world offers The Coca-Cola Company its greatest growth potential?” Without hesitation, I replied, “Southern California.” They all laughed, thinking I was trying to be funny. So to drive home the point, I shared with them one very interesting fact. The per capita consumption of bottles and cans of Coca-Cola is actually lower in the southern part of California than it is in Hungary, a country which is one of our supposedly “emerging” markets, while the U.S. is supposedly a “matured” soft drink market. The students went silent for several seconds. I’m sure they had never before pondered our virtually infinite opportunity for growth.

The universe of Coca-Cola’s business as imagined by Goizueta is limitless—at least for all practical purposes. And it is this vision of potential infinite growth—of people as generic vessels into which more product can be poured—that drove the company’s massive capital investments in new Asian and Pacific markets, including the relatively small market in PNG. But even with this investment, Coca-Cola was merely getting started on a very long road; for as Goizueta informed his fellow shareowners, “We have become increasingly mindful of one undeniable fact—the average human body requires at least 64 ounces of liquid every day just to survive, and our beverages account for not even 2 of those ounces. For every person on this planet, consuming at least 64 ounces is not an option; but choosing where those ounces come from is.” Coca-Cola, Goizueta assured his fellow share owners, is “resolutely focused on going after the other 62.” 13 So, for example, although by 1991 the Coca-Cola system had over six million pieces of sales equipment, the company and its bottlers undertook a new drive to install vending machines, coolers, and fountains throughout the United States in all the places—laundromats and beauty parlors—where Coke was absent. Fortune magazine observed that the company had taught the world a lesson: there is no such thing as a “mature market” (cited in Nolan 1999, 56). It would be wrong to dismiss Goizueta’s pronouncement as simply the overblown rhetoric of annual corporate reporting. US News and World Report could point out that by 1985, Americans drank more soft drinks than tap water—43 gallons per person as opposed to 39 gallons (Bronson 1985). Indeed, per capita consumption of tap water in the United States dropped from 269 liters in 1965 to 178 liters in 1982. Clairmonte and

66

Coca-Globalization

Cavanagh, in their book Merchants of Drink: Transnational Control of World Beverages, claim that “an unalterable feature of corporate beverage strategy is and will remain the sustained campaign against tap water,” the only beverage still overwhelmingly within the public sector. Hence they imagine the potentially infinite growth in soft drink markets in terms that Goizueta would no doubt have eschewed: “Whereas tap water constitutes only a quarter of US liquid consumption, it still embraces more than fourfifths in the periphery. This gigantic economic divide between developed and developing world highlights the vast potential market that is up for grabs by the TBCs [Transnational Beverage Conglomerates]” (1988, 27). From this perspective, the global expansion of soft drink consumption is a war against tap water or, more accurately, the transformation of tap water from an end product to an ingredient, a “wholly subordinated input” into higher priced commercial beverage product lines (including, of course, branded bottled water). From this perspective, too, it comes as little surprise that in 1998, it was not Americans who led the world in annual average consumption of Coca-Cola products, but rather Mexicans—at 412 eight-ounce servings per person (1998 Annual Report of The Coca-Cola Company). Similarly, a 1998 report on the expansion of Coke and Pepsi into the new markets of the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe remarked, “One of the big potential growth areas is in branded sparkling water which is in much demand in a region with insufficient or poor quality drinking water” (Partridge 1998). A Coca-Cola spokesman in Bogota put it plainly enough: “Per capita consumption is much higher in cities where the drinking water isn’t of good quality” (Johnson 1999).14 Goizueta’s vision of infinite growth can only be realized by one measure: increasing market share. Increasing market share can only be attained by taking share away from other beverages (juices, milk, water, tea, beer)— a matter of marketing—or by taking share away from other competitors, a matter of corporate seizures as well as marketing. Hence the move from multilocalism to globalism entailed aggressive attempts to absorb other brands of soft drinks within the range of The Coca-Cola Company’s products. This effort, often stalled by antitrust legislation, continued under Goizueta’s successor, Douglas Ivester, and culminated in December 1998 when the company acquired the Cadbury Schweppes beverage brands— including Schweppes, Dr. Pepper and Canada Dry—in more than 160 countries outside North America. (The acquisition was blocked as anticompetitive in several Western European countries as well as Mexico and Australia; similarly, the company’s second bid for the popular French brand, Orangina, was struck down by the French government in November 1999; see Hays 2004 for details).

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

67

By the end of the Goizueta era at Coca-Cola, the company had triumphed handily over its rival Pepsi-Cola in just about every market outside the United States—a market share of 48 percent compared to Pepsi’s 17 percent. In Venezuela, the one Latin American country where Pepsi outsold Coke by far, Pepsi’s local bottler—eighteen plants owned by the powerful Cisneros Group of Companies—abruptly entered into a joint venture with Coca-Cola in 1996. (PepsiCo sued Coca-Cola and won $94 million in damages from an international arbitration court [Hays 1998a]). In Peru, Inca Kola—a yellow, lemon grass–flavored drink regarded by some as a distinctive accompaniment to local “criollo” cuisine—was acquired by The CocaCola Company. The company had returned not only to India in 1993, which it had departed in 1977 when pressed by the newly elected socialist government to transfer technology that included Coke’s secret formula of ingredients, but also to the Middle East in 1994. By 1999, it had regained regional market leadership from Pepsi, which once had 95 percent share of the market for carbonated soft drinks (“A Report from the Middle East” 1999). In Papua New Guinea, the acquisition of Schweppes brands by Coca-Cola forced their bottler, South Pacific Brewery, which also bottled Pepsi-Cola and its brands, to give up the soft drink franchise altogether.15 At the start of the new century, then, Coca-Cola enjoyed an almost uncontested monopoly on soft drinks in PNG (almost, since Pepsi products imported from Australia are still available in some supermarkets). CocaCola was clearly the winning member of the international soft drink duopoly. If there were any challenges to its future preeminence, they appeared to be coming not from Pepsi-Cola as much as from emerging consumer preferences for noncarbonated, nonalcoholic beverages. Becoming Post-Global: Trust and Anti-Trust As The Coca-Cola Company moved into the twenty-first century, a revived rhetoric of multilocalism displaced Goizueta’s vision of unitary global growth. The new rhetoric foregrounded customers (including bottlers) and consumers rather than shareowners. Douglas Daft, the Australian who, after a period of crisis for the company, succeeded Goizueta’s number two man and hand picked successor, Douglas Ivester, thus drew on his long experience managing Coke’s business in Asia, especially Japan. Daft put it bluntly: “People don’t buy drinks globally. You can’t pander to similarities between people: you have to find the differences” (McCarthy 2000). Reflecting on the irreconcilably different meanings of bottled waters to Europeans and Americans, Daft observed, “You can’t apply a global standard of measurement to consumers because it reduces everything to the lowest common denominator” (Hays 2000a). Here, then, was a return to

68

Coca-Globalization

the recognition of local differences reminiscent of the old Export Corporation’s approach in the 1950s, an apparently bold recognition that differences are perhaps radical, but which in actual practice treats them as minor variations responsive to micro-marketing. The practical correlate of Daft’s worldview is “Think locally, act locally” (McKay 2000a). This axiom means giving decision-making authority to local managers, especially the authority to introduce new products attuned to local tastes and to develop some of the hundreds of smaller local brands already owned by Coke, such as the popular Indian cola, Thums Up, and the Peruvian drink, Inca Kola. Daft recalled his own difficulty attempting to launch a new carbonated tea in northeast China in 1999, months behind its rivals: “We had the formula, we had the flavor, we had done all the tastetesting, but Atlanta kept saying ‘are you sure?’” (McCarthy 2000). Daft planned to back away from Goizueta’s one-product, one-world strategy and instead to treat Coca-Cola as a multibranded drinks company with a fat portfolio of beverages, carbonated and non-carbonated—juices, teas, coffee, and water. The effort was to be supported by four new research and development centers—“innovation centers”—opening worldwide. By May 2000, Daft could point proudly to the new Fanta Wildberries—“conceived, developed, and produced in Germany”—as a compelling example of thinking and acting locally. Based on the taste of a popular German dessert, Wildberries sold a million cases within a month of its introduction (Daft 2000, 607). Fanta Wildberries represents exactly the sort of glocalizing and micro-marketing that passes for sensitivity to cultural differences among some business analysts. Daft’s model for Coke’s future appeared to be Japan’s present day soft drink market, where 20 percent of Coke’s profits are made on only 5 percent of its total sales volume. In Japan, two thirds of revenue derive from canned coffee and tea; Coke has a portfolio of over 200 brands, the biggestselling of which is not Coca-Cola but Georgia Coffee, a sweetened, milky coffee drink; and the pace of change is frenetic. John Hunter described the market in 1991: Each and every year, particularly in the soft drink season in the summer in a market like Tokyo you can get between 600 and 800 new product package introductions in the summer period. Some of these people only gear up to be there for the 3 or 4 months of summer then they disappear for the rest of the year. A few of them stick through the year but the Japanese dealer and the Japanese consumer has always been intrigued by something new, something fashionable. There is a great demand for a variety of products to offer consumers in Japan. (Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 29, item 13)

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

69

It was his experience in Japan that allowed Daft to envision a day when Coca-Cola sells more than two thousand beverage products around the world (Foust 2000).16 The product diversification championed by Daft was underwritten by appeals to localism phrased in the idiom of cultural difference. In announcing a major organizational realignment of The Coca-Cola Company—a “realignment” that entailed cutting six thousand jobs or 20 percent of the worldwide workforce—Daft said, “The world in which we operate has changed dramatically, and we must change to succeed. This realignment will better enable the Company to serve the changing needs of its customers and consumers at the local level and ensure that Coca-Cola complements the local culture in every community where it is sold” (The Coca-Cola Company 2000). By this account, the impetus for corporate change springs from customers and consumers themselves; the company merely responds to shifting local circumstances: “No matter where we operate around the world, we’re a local business. Our success depends on our ability to make billions of individual connections each day in every community around the world. With the pace of change in global markets increasing every day, we have to redouble our efforts to remain close to the customers and consumers we serve” (The Coca-Cola Company 2000). The rhetoric is more than vaguely reminiscent of J. Paul Austin’s earlier version of multilocalism. Likewise, the restructuring undertaken by The Coca-Cola Company can equally be understood as an attempt to manage the fragile relations of trust or confidence necessary for reembedding Coca-Cola in lives led locally. In the wake of the company’s aggressive efforts at acquisition and growth, which ran afoul of regulators in France, Italy, and Australia as well as the European Commission, the company reported a new sensitivity to “consumer democracy.” A New York Times article, pointing out how the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle dramatized hostility to the perceived arrogance of global corporations, quoted Carl Ware, head of Coke’s newly created global public and governmental affairs team, “Consumer democracy is becoming more and more of an issue. We have to address it on a local basis” (Hays 2000a). Accordingly, the company gave renewed attention to its role as a valued citizen wherever it operates—exactly the concern so paramount in the pages of Coca-Cola Overseas during the 1950s. Daft told reporters that he might offer Coke’s “extensive distribution network in India to take polio vaccines into rural areas on the government’s behalf ”; and Ware looked at similar schemes in Africa where Daft professed awareness of “the need to address the AIDS issue” (Liu and EdgecliffeJohnson 2000; see Chapter 5). These projects bespeak the fundamental

70

Coca-Globalization

demand placed on global consumer-goods companies to maintain political goodwill by localizing themselves—and by not provoking fears of monopolistic antitrust violations. It is as if the delocalizing, disembedding globalism of Goizueta’s era had gone too far, insufficiently counterbalanced by deliberate and persuasive processes of relocalization and reembedding. Other kinds of trust are at stake in the process of reembedding, which, when put at risk, expose the fragility of globalized consumer practices (see Chapter 5). In Belgium, the scare about contaminated cans of Coca-Cola (see Chapter 1) led to the largest product recall in company history. More to the point, the inability of the company’s CEO, Douglas Ivester, to assess the situation and to preserve the public’s goodwill toward the product eroded one of the company’s most valuable intangible assets. Ivester’s initial response to the unfolding crisis was regarded as aloof and indifferent, even unapologetic; it was one of several precipitating causes of his sudden resignation as CEO. Trust in the company and the product was jeopardized at a time when growing concerns about the safety of mass-market foods and beverages were becoming salient public issues. These concerns were, among other things, anxieties about dietary delocalization, about the increasing consumption of products that come from distant and unknown origins. Metropolitan concerns about contaminated beef in the 1990s resembled the concerns about Stork margarine in colonial Rhodesia (see Chapter 1). Fears about the ingredients of food products and about the conditions under which food products were grown, processed, and packaged catalyzed deep doubts about the health costs and alleged benefits of globalization. Managing the dialectics of disembedding and reembedding now presents unprecedented challenges to The Coca-Cola Company. As company officials rushed to restore and consolidate trust in Europe and Africa, they put trust at risk in their own backyard. Daft’s decentralizing decision to cut 2,500 employees at the company headquarters—nearly one half of all employees—shocked Atlanta. One analyst noted that the shock was more psychological than economic, but that is precisely the point. A Wall Street Journal article reported how the layoffs had turned Atlanta into a veritable mill of rumors, including speculation that the dismantling of three flagpoles outside the company’s downtown headquarters signaled that “Coke had turned against Old Glory” (McKay 2000b). To the extent that companies and their products appear disembedded from local contexts, they risk their “individual connections” with “individual consumers,” provoking hostility, frustration, and despair. The New York Times reported reactions to the news of the layoff: “One woman, who also insisted on anonymity, wiped a tear from her face as she left the office. ‘These are people’s lives,’

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

71

she said” (Hays 2000b). At the same time, Wall Street investors expressed their own sense of betrayal at the news that the company planned to let key bottlers reduce their inventories of concentrate, an implied overstatement of earnings growth in previous years. Andrew J. Conway, a beverage analyst for Morgan Stanley, asked, “What’s to stop them from doing it again?” (Hays 2000b).17 Conclusion: The Global-Local Problematic What are the implications of this selective and cursory history of The Coca-Cola Company’s overseas operations for telling the story of economic and cultural globalization at the start of the twenty-first century? First, the history belies any master narrative that suggests a unilinear evolution from Fordism to flexible accumulation; in other words, from vertically integrated, high volume “core corporations” to high value “enterprise webs” or shifting networks of various suppliers coming together on a contingent and temporary basis (Reich 1992). If anything, the history of The Coca-Cola Company’s bottling operations describes a movement in the opposite direction, as the company sought, especially in the 1980s, to consolidate its vast network of independent bottlers. But the plans that Douglas Daft outlined as he assumed the role of CEO in 2000 suggested a step back from centralization and top-down decision making within the company—surely not a return to the time of “tiny fiefdoms,” but at least to a situation in which more autonomy would be granted to local managers. Daft’s plans suggested that the company’s evolving organization was a response to the exigencies of disembedding and reembedding its products. That is, rather than an efflux of some underlying logic to the capitalist mode of production, company business plans emerge out of an ongoing effort to insert its products into lives led locally, to make these products familiar to consumers and worthy of consumer confidence. At one historical moment, franchising was the most effective means of accomplishing this goal, especially outside the United States (where the company did not have to charge its bottlers a fixed price for syrup and could thus escape a severe constraint of the original contracts signed between the company and its domestic bottlers). At another moment, this goal seemed attainable without having to sacrifice the economies of scale afforded by consolidation and centralization. At present, the company is struggling with the possibility that the challenge of reembedding might be met only by producing non-carbonated beverages, including water—beverages apparently more in line with changing (or preexisting but unsatisfied) local tastes and thus more in line with the perspectives and qualifications of consumers.

72

Coca-Globalization

Second, and related, Robertson’s global-local problematic—the elusive balance between sameness and difference—is now and has long been an explicit preoccupation of company executives (and their marketing arms). This preoccupation is, above all, an exercise in imagination—of how corporate officials imagine the consumers they seek (as “markets,” for example) and of how these officials imagine how these consumers imagine themselves. At stake is whether consumers will recognize a worldly thing as a homely thing, a thing with which to be at home. Since World War II, this exercise has swung like a pendulum between the two poles of a commercial anthropology that subscribes to notions of both cultural difference and the unity of the human species. Market globalizers—such as Theodore Levitt (and Roberto Goizueta)—have a strong interest in emphasizing the latter notion. Local advertising agents—such as the Bombay office studied by Mazzarella (2003)—have a vested interest in promoting the former notion, constructing anthropomorphic commodities such as “the Indian consumer,” intimate knowledge of which can be sold to transnational companies. The result is a much observed compromise, a form of global culture as organized diversity—“common systems of difference” (Wilk 1995)—in which cultural particularities are simultaneously recognized and rendered comparable as so many variations on a single general theme (food, music, clothing, and so forth). Both of these implications point to a rich irony. Coca-Cola—the quintessential symbol of consumer culture for some of the harshest critics of consumer culture—is the product of a company that understands itself as threatened, at varying levels of intensity, by consumerism. Consumerism implies fashion, constant change and innovation, the existence of active self-fashioning individuals whose consumption work takes the form of a reflexive search for novel opportunities of self-expression through commodities. Consumerism, then, generates potential difficulties for a company that loses touch with the perspectives adopted by consumers on themselves and perforce on the company’s brands and products. Put differently, consumerism generates crises of mediation—moments when a consumer’s taken-for-granted use of a medium (such as a branded soft drink) gives way to an apprehension of the medium as both familiar and strange, intimate and distant (Mazzarella 2004)—like the moments described by World War II soldiers encountering familiar Coke bottles in horribly unfamiliar places. In such moments of heightened self-consciousness, the medium risks becoming perceived as externally imposed—as other and not self—and thus resisted and rejected. The qualifications of a product on the supply side diverge from the qualifications made by consumers on the demand side. Global flows of commodities expose and multiply these

Glocalizing Coca-Cola

73

moments. It is thus the management, if not avoidance, of such moments that marketing and advertising undertake—the project of aligning perspectives within the network of perspectives, at least to the degree that the medium is taken up again, its use continued, and the work of consumption reproduced. This irony returns us, inevitably, to the question of commodity culture or, specifically, the meanings of soft drinks.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

Qualifying Products Trademarks, Brands, and Value Creation We are who we are because we are all things to all people all the time everywhere. —Ira “Ike” Herbert, former chief marketing officer for The Coca-Cola Company, addressing Coca-Cola salesmen, 1990 (quoted in Pendergrast 1993, 398)

ven before Roberto Goizueta arrived on the scene, it was apparent to Coca-Cola officials in the early 1970s that the company had too many bottlers in the United States, though the number had dropped to eight hundred from a high of over twelve hundred. The old fifty-mile radius territories granted to franchises were woefully inefficient at a time when tractor trailers cruising along superhighways could distribute the output of high-speed bottling and canning lines throughout whole states. Interstate supermarket chains such as Safeway, moreover, preferred not to negotiate with “multiple local bottlers offering different services and prices” (Pendergrast 1993, 310). Small bottlers faced many other problems in the 1970s, such as deep discounting and the turn toward one-way (nonreturnable) packages (see Louis and Yazijian 1980, ch. 19). A new Bottler Consolidation Department was thus formed in 1971 by The Coca-Cola Company to effect mergers and sales. Put in the theoretical terms introduced earlier, we can say that the space-time of soft drink production and distribution was rapidly changing. Bottling and retail sales became less localized; a reduction in time necessary for manufacturing and distribution prompted a new economy of spatial scale. These changes seemed to be reflected in a “relentless longterm drive to lightweighting” the packaging of the product (Nolan 1999, 19). The weight of the aluminum can, since its introduction, has dropped by 40 percent: “The side-wall of an aluminum can is already just fourthousandths of an inch thick: ‘If we made the can any lighter it would be an aluminum bag’ (Coca-Cola Company official)” (Nolan 1999, 52). The

E

76

Coca-Globalization

weight of plastic bottles has dropped by 20 percent. Put metaphysically rather than existentially, we can say that a consumer’s relationship to the product became potentially less personal and more impersonal, no longer mediated through a social relationship with the local bottler or corner grocer. “Gradual consolidation and internationalization of packaging production” (Nolan 1999, 19) resulted in identical containers without a local imprint. The can of Diet Coke that a friend of mine brought to me from India is barely distinguishable from the one I might purchase from the vending machine at my office. It would be no longer possible to construct the sort of urinal found in the New Hebrides Navy Officer’s Club—or to imagine Coca-Cola as a hometown product. This kind of disembedding of soft drinks from local contexts posed anew the problem of trust. That is, trust in the product had to be generated less through goodwill toward local bottlers and suppliers, and more through trust in the product itself, specifically, trust in the brand. This latter sort of trust had to be created through marketing, something in which The Coca-Cola Company had engaged massively and successfully since the last decade of the nineteenth century. My point here, however, is that the shift in the burden of trust from bottler to brand bespeaks a larger economic shift associated with conditions of globalization as experienced in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, a service economy has largely replaced a manufacturing economy. On the other, less value is added to many consumer goods in the act of production than in the act of marketing or branding. Economic value no longer derives merely or mainly from creating products, but instead from creating consumers for particular brands. In this shift, the value of signs— logos and brand images—increases, often fantastically, beyond the value of a material product: a sneaker or shirt made in an Asian factory and sold in an American mall contains pennies worth of labor and a dollar’s worth of material, but often tens of dollars’ worth of signification—in design, advertising, and branding not to mention “consumption work” (see Chapter 1). As Rosemary Coombe puts it, “today it is no longer the production of goods but the production of consumers to produce demand that is fundamental to profit expansion and a strategic site for corporate investment” (1998, 56). Looked at from this angle, the vast commodity chain that connects The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta with its individual consumers everywhere appears to have anticipated the present moment of value creation. For what travels along that commodity chain more than anything else is meaning. Unlike other beverage commodity chains—wine, for example—that move a finished product, distinguished by provenance, to distant destinations, the

Qualifying Products

77

Coca-Cola commodity chain moves one ingredient (the concentrate) to local producers (even if “less local” than in the past). I simplify, of course; not only does the concentrate itself contain numerous ingredients (from vanilla to extracts of kola and coca) that move along spatially extensive chains, but the local producers themselves coordinate a web of supply chains that furnish bottles, cans, cartons, and so forth (Chapter 2). Nevertheless, I stress the importance of the meaning of the finished product—in the forms of the trademark and the brand—that moves along the chain. The market value of this meaning cannot be overestimated. One guess put the value of the Coca-Cola trademark in 1967 at three billion dollars (Palazzini 1988, 24). The 2005 Interbrand / Business Week survey listed Coca-Cola as the world’s most valuable brand, worth an estimated sixtyseven billion dollars, 64 percent of the company’s market capitalization. Hence the apocryphal story said to circulate at marketing conferences: “Gathering together the staff from several plants, a senior Coca-Cola executive is reported to have declared that the company could lose all its plants, lose all its staff, lose its access to the source of its raw materials, lose its capital and its accounts, but as long as it had this (lights shine on a display board greatly enlarging the famous red and white script), it would be possible to walk into a bank and receive sufficient credit to replace the entire global infrastructure” (Coombe 1998, 56). Of course, the process of making meaning—of qualifying product—is always fluid and sometimes explicitly contested. Not everyone, moreover, has access to the same resources for qualification, for ascribing and fixing meaning. This is all the more true in a world of commoditized, legally protected signs—trademarks, logos, brand names, and so forth. In such a world, it is crucial to ask, with Coombe, about the prospects for communicating meaning in an open and democratic style (see also Lessig 2004). Is there a concentration in fewer hands of the means for making meaning similar to the concentration of the means of production that Marx saw in industrial capitalism? More specifically for our purposes, has a concentration in the means for ascribing meaning to soft drinks advanced in tandem with the consolidation of soft drink bottlers? I will address these questions briefly in the rest of this chapter and reengage them again in the concluding chapter. Usually, these questions are taken up, when they are taken up critically, with regard to media access. For example, many scholars and activists rightly worry about the effects of increasingly large mergers of global media corporations in restricting access to information and censoring information to which access is still available (Mattelart 1991; Barnet and Cavanagh 1994). While this line of analysis is crucial, I intend here to follow a different path. I will look at

78

Coca-Globalization

three elements in the ongoing process of qualifying products, that is, making meaning for and with commodities: policing trademarks, creating brand imagery, and, finally, interpreting the imagery and using the product. This strategy involves looking at soft drinks from the perspectives of three different but connected sets of agents, variously situated within the far-flung product network through which meaning moves. They are company officials, advertising agents and company marketing managers, and consumers. I will concentrate specifically on how The Coca-Cola Company has represented itself and its products outside the United States. In the next chapter, I will describe—as a particular and unusual instance of a general and ordinary process—how marketers and consumers in Papua New Guinea have fashioned and received these representations. The Power of Presence: Trademark Visibility Intensive marketing has been a longstanding feature of The Coca-Cola Company, a service provided to bottling franchisees and retail customers alike by the parent company. An important feature of this marketing activity has been to make the Coca-Cola trademark—the name of the drink written in the famous Spencerian script—highly visible on point-of-purchase signs and on billboard posters in busy public locations. For example, as early as 1913, the company spent almost $1.2 million on advertising material that included five million lithograph metal signs ranging in size from 6’ x 10’ to 5’ x 8’ (Tedlow 1990, 53). An October 1954 Coca-Cola Overseas article, “Advertising Coca-Cola in Sweden,” describes how the launch of locally bottled Coke was accompanied by an advertising program that effectively saturated the landscape with reminders to drink Coca-Cola. The large billboards (10’ x 20’) were at the time “the first and only ones in Sweden” and “by their uniqueness helped to make people more conscious of the fact that ‘Coca-Cola’ itself is unique.” (The article also claims success for the advertising program in reembedding Coca-Cola: “These posters, American subjects with Swedish lettering, look perfectly at home in the local scene.”) In addition, the company sought prestigious locations in which to display its trademark, from Times Square to Piccadilly Circus to the Ginza. As Roberto Goizueta characteristically put it, “Coca-Cola must always be represented in ways that perpetuate—as well as symbolize—its status as the most powerful trademark in the world” (quoted in The CocaCola Company 1988, 1). It is hardly surprising, then, that The Coca-Cola Company has vigorously defended its trademark from the get-go. Ever since Asa Candler took full possession of the company in 1891, he assiduously policed the

Qualifying Products

79

trademark against hundreds of imitators that threatened “Coca-Cola’s credibility as an effective medicine” (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 32). In 1916, 153 impostors (including Coca-Kola and Coke Ola) were struck down in court; by 1926, one business journalist counted more than seven thousand cases of trademark infringement (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 32; Tedlow 1990, 54). One of these cases, against the Koke Company of America, was litigated before the Supreme Court. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the majority in support of Coca-Cola, stressed that “the name now characterizes a beverage to be had at almost any soda fountain. It means a single thing coming from a single source and well known to the community” (cited in Tedlow 1990, 55). McQueen (2003, 173) points out that Holmes, by effectively identifying the single product with the trademark, turned Coca-Cola into a symbol that stood for itself—self-referential to the point that company lawyers long discouraged any extensions of the Coca-Cola name, such as to the new product introduced in 1963 as TaB rather than Diet Coke, which debuted almost twenty years later. Justice Holmes’s decision makes it plain that at the heart of trademark defense lies the issue of trust or the goodwill of the community. Trademark law was a form of protection against confusion on the part of the consumer, a guarantee that a distinctive product emanated from a distinctive single source. This guarantee was of paramount importance to companies selling products regionally or nationally; generating trust was essential to the successful spread of national brands (like Nabisco) and national retailers (like Sears Roebuck and other mail-order companies) at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States. Hence the advertising slogans that Candler deployed against his competitors: “Get the genuine,” 1906; “Get what you ask for and see that you get it,” 1910; and “Ask for it by its full name—then you will get the genuine,” 1913 (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 32). Generating trust in this fashion involves a contested process of meaning making, a concerted effort to render a product distinctive and to control its mark of distinction against all competitors. There are at least two ways of understanding this process. The first way is to interpret trademark legislation as one of the pillars of (consumer) democracy. Edward Rogers, an “eminent authority on trademark law,” made this argument in a 1948 Coca-Cola Overseas article titled, “Democracy and Trade-Marks.” Rogers claimed that goodwill requires distinction; without a distinguishing mark, people are unable to identify the merchandise to which experience has favorably predisposed them. The marks, then—trademarked devices and logos, but also brand names— embody the goodwill invested in them; they are visible or materialized goodwill, “the tendency to buy again an article which has given satisfaction

80

Coca-Globalization

in the past.” Therefore, Rogers concludes, goodwill is property, a valuable business asset which must be protected by protecting the mark that symbolizes the “individuality” and “reputation” of a manufacturer. Without distinguishing and protected marks, people will be unable to make truly free choices among competing merchants of variable repute: “Individuality, which is democracy, is not possible otherwise.” The second way to interpret trademark legislation is to see it as a potential threat to democracy, specifically, a threat to free speech. Rosemary Coombe, anthropologist and legal scholar, persuasively develops this argument by noting that making meaning is always a social process; the meaning of a trademark or brand (its “reputation” or public “goodwill” toward it), is produced by the ongoing response of consumers to that trademark or brand. Meaning—the distinctive connotations of a mark—emerges out of an interactive process that encompasses consumption work, the dialectics of objectification and appropriation (Chapter 1). Meaning is, despite corporate rhetoric to the contrary, not solely produced by the manufacturer. Market researchers routinely acknowledge this condition when they incorporate the words and associations of phone-surveyed and focus-grouped consumers into advertisements projected back to the very same consumers. The goal of such exercises is to align the perspectives of producers and consumers within a product network or, put otherwise, to ensure mutually compatible product qualifications on the part of both consumers and producers (see Callon et al. 2002). Consequently, when trademarks and brands are treated as forms of (intellectual and industrial) property, a sleight of hand takes place in which the mark’s owner is regarded as the exclusive creator of the mark’s meaning: “The old rationale of preventing consumer confusion over competing market goods has yielded to the current rationale of protecting from ‘dilution’ or ‘misappropriation’ the integrity of a set of positive meanings which have been ‘created’ by the trademark owner’s investment . . . The trademark owner is viewed as a ‘quasi-author’ who ‘creates’ a particular set of meanings attached to a mark by investing time, labor and money, thereby justifying expansive rights in a mark” (Aoki 1994, cited in Coombe 1998, 61). In many instances, the “quasi-author” is, perhaps appropriately, a quasi-person—the legally fictitious person otherwise know as the (limited liability) corporation (see Bakan 2004). The public therefore suffers a double injustice. On the one hand, the trademark owner appropriates a measure of surplus value from the public’s consumption work, reaping the commercial value of meanings (semiotic values) that accrue to a mark through the active imaginations and generative practices of consumers. And there is no doubt that corporate

Qualifying Products

81

officials see this commercial value as belonging exclusively to The CocaCola Company. Hence Roberto Goizueta’s proclamation: “At its core, The Coca-Cola Company really was just one thing: a trademark. The word Coke, the fancy script, the unique bottle, the red disc logo all emanated from the trademark. Coke’s soft drinks themselves each had unique recipes. But their real value in the marketplace came when The Coca-Cola Company lent its name to the products” (cited in McQueen 2003, 186). On the other hand, the public is denied free access to the very meanings it has created. Expansive property rights increasingly legitimate “corporate control over mass-media-disseminated cultural forms” (Coombe 1998, 74; see also Lessig 2004). In a commodity culture, these forms circulate with enough currency to provide people with everyday idioms of expression and resources for metaphorical creativity—the media that, as Emile Durkheim once noted of totems, make “society imaginable and intelligible to itself in the form of external representations” (Mazzarella 2004, 346). Think, for example, of Andy Warhol’s famous silk-screened images of mundane consumer goods, including bottles of Coca-Cola. Or think of how advertising slogans—“Where’s the beef?” or “It’s the real thing”—permeate everyday speech contexts unconnected to the slogan’s origin. Restricting the use of these means—as when, for example, The CocaCola Company threatens artists for use of its trademarked imagery (Coombe 1998, 181; see Conclusion)—“stifles dialogic practice in the public sphere, preventing us from using the most powerful, prevalent, and accessible cultural forms to express alternative visions of social worlds” (Coombe 1998, 42).1 Coombe’s argument suggests how the policing of trademarks can function to limit choice and competition, again despite the contrary claims of corporate apologists. For example, The Coca-Cola Company used worldwide trademark litigation to deter the growth of rival Pepsi-Cola until dropping all suits in 1942 (Pendergrast 1993, 196). More recently, the company unsuccessfully attempted to use trademark law to defend itself against one of the unplanned consequences of economic globalization: a boom in gray market entrepreneurs exploiting price differences and lowered international trade barriers. Thus Canada’s Supreme Court recognized the right of Mushi Pradhan to buy thousands of cases of Coca-Cola wholesale each week in Canada and ship them to Hong Kong and Japan where, even after transport charges, he was able to sell the cases at a profit.2 Coca-Cola’s lawyers had argued that Pradhan’s unsupervised shipping and handling outside official distribution channels could hurt the quality of the product and thus injure the reputation of the brand and the company (“Gray Marketer Beats Coke” 2000).3

82

Coca-Globalization

Coombe’s argument, moreover, points directly to how, in a globalized commodity culture where the value of signs often exceeds that of their referents, control over meaning is vital to the interests of corporations: “Through the mass media, the sign increasingly replaces the product itself as the site of fetishism; the focus of commodity fetishism shifts from the product to the sign values invested in products by corporate imagery and marketing’s structure of meanings” (Coombe 1998, 56). From athletic shoes to blue jeans to microchips, it is the exchange value of images that matters. The circulation of mass-mediated cultural forms—logos and trademarks, for instance—thus poses serious challenges to corporate control over value creation, specifically, over the capacity to generate rents. This challenge is especially clear when these cultural forms migrate from their original commodity context. On the one hand, The Coca-Cola Company sponsors these migrations. Consider, for example, the gift shop of the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta (see Figure 3.1), where it is possible to buy at premium prices all sorts of items (pencils, refrigerator magnets, candy tins, etc.) adorned with Coca-Cola trademarks. On the other hand, these same trademarks appear on inexpensive beaded purses sold by street vendors in

Figure 3.1 Atlanta, GA: The old World of Coca-Cola, where exhibits showcased “the rich heritage and global reach of Coca-Cola.” A new and enlarged building, estimated to cost one hundred million dollars, opened on May 24, 2007, at a site near the Georgia Aquarium. Photograph by Maryann McCabe.

Qualifying Products

83

New York’s Chinatown. Whereas the former merchandise is “licensed” by the company, and perhaps thereby made more attractive to certain collectors of “authentic” Coca-Cola memorabilia, the latter is not licensed. But this lack of a license surely makes the beaded purse no less attractive to those buyers who regard it not as a “fake” or “counterfeit,” but rather as a resource for metaphorical creativity, a tool for self-fashioning through the dialectics of appropriation and objectification. This insight about the value of signs prompts a revision of Sidney Mintz’s (1985) discussion of “inside” and “outside” meanings in the consumption of worldly things—in his case, sugar. Mintz treats outside meanings as structural power, that is, the imposition of constraints on the ability of people to generate inside meaning—the symbolic and personal significance of particular commodities, their role in everyday domestic life. For Mintz, these constraints are above all questions of supply, of whether commodities are made available to consumers who, in turn, are or are not allowed to consume them under certain circumstances, at certain prices. Thus, U.S. service personnel were able to imbue Coca-Cola with strong sentiments of god and country during World War II, but only within the structural constraints imposed by the joint venture of The Coca-Cola Company and the U.S. government (which exempted the company from sugar rationing and granted it a near monopoly on military bases). Coombe’s argument, by contrast, suggests that structural power also entails the capacity to impose constraints on the mutability of commodities, that is, on the ability of consuming agents—or consumption workers—to create “inside meaning.” Her claims are echoed by the authors of several recent books that critique intellectual property regimes as not only repressive of creativity, but also antidemocratic (e.g., Lessig 2004; see Vaidhyanathan 2005). Fights over copyrights, patents, and trademarks—for music, pharmaceuticals, and software, for example—are increasingly characteristic of economic globalization; corporations seek to defend and extend their control over sources of commercial value opened to wider access by new digital technologies and international disagreement over the definition of intellectual property rights. Just as with its flexible franchising arrangements, The Coca-Cola Company was a pioneer in its relentless attempts both to establish exclusive property rights over the “materialized goodwill” of its consumer base and to regulate how these consumers qualified and requalified the product and its imagery. Nevertheless, the entailments of structural power are internally contradictory—or at least problematic in the case of marketing soft drinks, since The Coca-Cola Company explicitly seeks to stimulate the creativity of “inside meaning making” as part of its brand-building enterprise. Callon et

84

Coca-Globalization

al. (2002) similarly note the tension between a producer’s desire to render the consumer’s purchasing behavior automatic and the risk posed to the producer by losing touch with the motivations of a consumer whose behavior has become unreflective and routine. Hence, the boundary demarcating “inside” from “outside” meanings becomes ever more difficult to define. The erasure of this boundary signals the ultimate sign of a brand’s success—indeed, the achievement of a Lovemark or, from the perspective of the supply side, a perfectly qualified product. Its continual shifting, however, often signals the agency of consumers. Encountering a product branded in their own image, consumers revise their strategies for attributing meaning (or use-value) to their consumption or, changing their self-image, even reject the product altogether and thereby precipitate for the brand owners a crisis of mediation. The Power of Presence: Product Ubiquity Throughout its history, The Coca-Cola Company has attempted to extend the power of presence not only through trademark visibility, but also through product ubiquity. In a 1923 speech to bottlers, Harrison Jones, vice-president and director of sales, urged his audience “to make it impossible for the consumer to escape Coca-Cola” (cited in Tedlow 1990, 34, original emphasis). Jones favored a program of intensive distribution that would make bottled Coca-Cola available in contexts that ranged from barber shops and construction sites to hospitals and pool rooms. This same program was encouraged by the Sales Promotion Department of the Export Corporation. In a 1948 Coca-Cola Overseas article, Frank Harrold reminded readers that availability equals sales. He said, “To be constantly available, Coca-Cola must be present 24 hours a day wherever people are, whatever they are doing. They must find Coca-Cola where they shop and move about, where they live, where they work, where they spend their leisure time, where they go to school.” Harrold insisted that Coca-Cola was an “impulse item”: if it is available, it is bought; if unavailable, it is forgotten. Product ubiquity, however, served ends deeper and more enduringly psychological than mere impulsive satisfaction of thirst. In a 1988 CocaCola Company pamphlet, The Power of Presence, Don Keough (then COO), explained that product ubiquity underlay the “special relationship” of Coca-Cola to the consumer: “Coca-Cola is there. It is there throughout life. It is at home. It is with every youngster as he or she grows up in whatever economic circumstances. It is at camp, whether it is a YMCA camp, a Boy Scout camp or a luxurious camp for the children of the wealthy . . . The name, Coca-Cola, is in front of every pair of eyes, every day, everywhere.”

Qualifying Products

85

In other words, product ubiquity ensures that Coca-Cola will become an element of people’s individual biographies, an omnipresent witness to and participant in the distinctive formative experiences of all consumers. Personal memories of summer camp will be intertwined with memories of Coca-Cola, the universal commodity thus becoming a prop for the particular narratives through which individual consumers actively produce their own pasts. The company’s 1999 Annual Report is explicit about the colonization of inside meaning involved here, admitting that “consumer emotions, memories and values” are, after all, more powerful than the brand itself. The text asserts, “Life is a series of special moments, and each is an opportunity for Coca-Cola to add its bit of magic. We’re using hundreds of new ways to tap into these opportunities and generate refreshing, genuine consumer experiences that reinforce a single moment that consumers share all around the world: Coca-Cola.” While the text suggests that CocaCola adds magic to people’s lives, it is equally clear that people’s lives— physically embodied and locally situated—are being recruited as the affective means for enchanting a global commodity. Such is the value-creating potency of consumption work. This recruitment hinges on a jump in scale—from the global to the personal. That is, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola brand soft drinks are not simply found almost everywhere. Their ubiquity is part of the self-image of these commodities, which in this respect differ significantly from other internationally marketed consumer goods, such as Wrigley’s chewing gum or Pampers disposable diapers. Coca-Cola officials, in particular, understand that the appeal of the brand lies in its capacity to impress consumers as being both globally extensive and intensely personal, there and here, at the same time; it is this peculiar capacity that makes Coca-Cola a worldly thing. This scale-jumping relationship was built into the design of the World of Coca-Cola Las Vegas, a retail exhibit that attracted about one million visitors each year until its closure. As does the larger World of CocaCola in Atlanta, the Las Vegas attraction displayed Coke’s ubiquity through such devices as a video montage of international television commercials. Likewise, the Las Vegas exhibit also included a video theater that showcased different stories of how the global brand became part of the specific biographies of real-life individuals. These stories portrayed a couple that met at a Coca-Cola memorabilia auction and married at the World of Coca-Cola and an Indiana veteran who carried a Coke bottle with him through World War II and kept it on his fireplace mantel. The show ended with an invitation to the audience to type their own Coca-Cola stories on computers outside the theater; in the first three weeks of the exhibit, 1,800 people obliged (Rosenfeld 2000).

86

Coca-Globalization

I suspect that the 1,800 Coke stories furnished company marketers with useful raw material for reflecting brand Coca-Cola back to its consumers. This sort of managed consumer appropriation complicates any easy celebration of the way in which impersonal commodities are transformed into tokens of personal significance (see Carrier 1990 for another example). Put differently, company officials think seriously about the problem of reembedding. An interview with Jeff Dunn, then Coke’s North America Group president, begins by recalling the halcyon days before Coca-Cola consolidated its North American bottling system, when hundreds of small-town bottlers dotted the landscape. He said, “When you were a kid, perhaps you got your Coke by plunging a hand into the icy water of a store cooler, or perhaps by sliding the bottle neck-first from a stacked-slot vendor. What was the first thing you’d do to ‘bond’ with your fresh acquisition? Most likely, you’d tilt the bottle base to your eyes to see which local swatch in Coke’s nationwide quilt had birthed the thing” (Dawson 2000). The imagery here is marvelous—it is the language of social intimacy and kinship, of sensuously connecting with a newborn family member, of sentimentally recognizing a local community member (the Coke bottler). For Dunn, the marketing challenge facing The Coca-Cola Company—Douglas Daft’s “relationship company”—is how to “reestablish family-level connections” or, as the article suggests, “to recapture some of the depth of those traditional ‘hometown’ relationships.” Put differently, the challenge is how to enlist consumer agency in localizing—personalizing and embodying— a very worldly thing Let me offer my own family story. While waiting in one of many long lines of cars for the British Columbia Ferry that would transport us from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island, I could not help noticing the strategically placed vending machines making cold Coca-Cola products available to hot tourists—product ubiquity. It was only after a while, however, when I studied the receipt for our ferry fare that I noticed the advertisement printed on the reverse,“Always Refreshing, Always Coca-Cola” in red letters on either side of the red disc logo—the power of presence. In the end, despite entreaties from two young sons, we refreshed ourselves with some bottled water (a local brand) from the trunk of our rental car. But The Coca-Cola Company had nonetheless managed—even without a sale—to entwine its presence with my experience and infiltrate my memories of our family’s summer vacation. As Ira Herbert, former chief marketing officer for The Coca-Cola Company, observed: “[Coke] has insinuated itself into the lives of people to a point where it has become—you know, it’s there” (1996, 8). Keough and Dunn’s observations explain how, from the company’s perspective, making Coca-Cola part of people’s lives involves inserting the

Qualifying Products

87

product into new and more contexts of consumption, contexts already laden with meaningful associations supplied by consumers themselves—a radical project of reembedding. This perspective was openly championed in the 1997 annual report, which included double-page pictorial spreads of how the strategy might be implemented. One especially ominous spread featured a scenic overlook with a vast American southwestern desert stretching into the background and two viewfinders and a water fountain in the foreground. The picture was labeled, “BECAUSE: some fountain drinks are easier to find.” At the bottom right of the picture, next to the red disc logo, the following words were printed: “In many places, it’s easier to find a water fountain than a Coca-Cola. That’s why we continue to strengthen our distribution system. We’re working hard to make our products an integral part of any landscape so they are always within easy reach.” Other spreads suggested that the company sought to turn “coffee breaks” at the office into “Coca-Cola breaks,” and to replace tea with Coca-Cola as the preferred beverage of consumers in China, “that country of 1.2 billion people.” The baldness of the suggestion that Coca-Cola ought to replace water, tea, and coffee did not escape scrutiny by Adbusters, a magazine dedicated to anticonsumerism, which merely noted that the annual report offered insight into Coke’s “global marketing strategy and corporate culture” (Winter issue, 1999; see Chapter 5). The suggestion, however, was a logical outcome of the marketing philosophy that characterized most of Roberto Goizueta’s years as the head of Coke (as well as the few years of his loyal assistant and immediate successor, Douglas Ivester). That philosophy consisted of three As: acceptability, affordability, and availability. The achievement of these three conditions would effectively reconfigure the space-time of soft drink consumption. That is, consumers could insert breaks—pauses that refreshed—into their daily routines at any time and at any place, especially outside the home. Or perhaps more accurately, consumers could append pauses that refreshed to other activities—recreation, work, commuting, and so forth. In this way, Coca-Cola consumption would advance a double trend that Mintz (1986) saw as definitive of modern food habits: the move away from fixed meals to interval eating (snacks) and the increase in consumption of food and beverages prepared outside the home, whether eaten in restaurants or as “take-out” at home. The predictably absurd conclusion of this trend has been foreshadowed by Coke’s “Occasion-Based Marketing” strategy. This strategy, according to a vicepresident of consumer marketing at Coca-Cola USA, “connects when and why consumers drink with how they shop for [drinks]” (Wellman 1999, 79). In other words, shoppers might be persuaded to purchase a

88

Coca-Globalization

twenty-ounce bottle of Coke as they enter a supermarket; they would sip the soft drink as they navigate the aisles and, in between sips, rest the bottle in their “cart caddy,” “red cup holders bearing the Coca-Cola logo” (Wellman 1999, 80). It thus becomes possible to consume Coca-Cola, and to advertise it to one’s fellow shoppers, while in the very act of shopping for Coca-Cola, or to “shop refreshed” as the marketing program was called. Goizueta’s marketing philosophy was in some ways a corollary of his overall vision of limitless growth in consumption of soft drinks (see Chapter 2). (The 1997 annual report also proclaimed, “This year, even as we sell 1 billion servings of our products daily, the world will still consume 47 billion servings of other beverages every day. We’re just getting started.”) The conceit here was that the product—as long as it was available and affordable (and first made locally acceptable through sponsorships and sampling)—would effectively sell itself. Indeed, one of Coke’s top marketing chiefs from 1978–86 and 1993–98, Sergio Zyman, regarded the “three As” philosophy in similar terms. He referred to the premise of the three As as “the Field of Dreams theory of marketing: if you build the distribution system and make a product available, people will buy it” (Zyman 1999, 135). For Zyman, such a plan only works as long as there is no competition; once a competitor enters the scene, it is necessary to motivate consumers to buy your brand, to recognize your brand as distinctive. Such is the nature of competition in the economy of qualities. This necessity, in turn, requires thinking globally and acting locally; that is, it requires recognizing that consumers in different regional and national markets are different, and that experience with local markets—an ability to speak to local consumers—is required to execute centralized business strategy (Zyman 1999, 193ff).5 And this recognition means finding ways to persuade local consumers to adopt your product (instead of finding ways to create products adapted to local tastes, as Douglas Daft would later insist). So, for example, Zyman could boast that he adjusted Coke’s advertising in Middle Eastern markets to the temporal rhythms of Ramadan: “If you’re fasting and can’t drink during the day, the last thing you would want to see is a nice, inviting ad about how refreshing a Coke would be” (1999, 107). Micro-marketing thus doubles as cultural sensitivity. Advertising Global Commodities Locally Zyman’s boasting raises a question: How has The Coca-Cola Company historically managed locality in its advertising, attempting thereby to connect with its worldwide consumers and to make its products meaningful? The question is of interest beyond what I have already suggested with regard to

Qualifying Products

89

the World War II global high-sign campaign; for advertising, although often a small part of the marketing mix, is one of the most public and dramatic instances of managed mediation—of the deliberate production of external representations through which a society makes itself imaginable and intelligible to itself. Michael Schudson (1984) has thus provocatively called advertising “capitalist realism,” the distinctive genre through which the values of capitalism—including fundamental assumptions about personal and social worth—are rendered natural as a way of life (even as consumers might vigorously deny the truth of the claims made in any given ad). How, then, did company officials think about and execute the management of mediation through advertising in postwar circumstances of rapid and extensive international expansion? In 1956, The Coca-Cola Company integrated its domestic and international advertising with McCann-Erickson, an agency that had previously handled international promotions for Coke. McCann-Erickson was, like Coke, multinational in its operations; by 1971, 61 percent of its profits came from overseas; one of Pepsi International’s agencies, J. Walter Thompson, likewise drew 52 percent of its profits from overseas (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 177). The move signaled a gradual increase in the worldwide coordination of advertising for Coca-Cola, an increase that culminated in the global campaigns of the 1990s. Marcio Moreira, a longtime McCannErickson creative director with responsibility for Coke’s international advertising, divides the history of international advertising into three phases (Moreira n.d.) The first phase, exemplified by the pattern advertising catalogues described in Chapter 2, Moreira calls the “brown envelope era.” In this phase, U.S.-made advertisements were examined after they had been produced, and those advertisements thought to travel well were shipped overseas for use with little or no modification. Alternatively, ads were produced locally using the theme line then current in the United States. In other words, Coca-Cola ads throughout the world were either identical to or slight variants of the ads designed for the U.S. market (recall the case of the Swedish billboards). The advertising thus reflected the bland form of multilocalism to which the Export Corporation committed itself, that is, a form of multilocalism in which difference was seen as superficial, as minor variation on the putatively universal values represented by modern American society. Moreira (n.d.) dates the beginning of the second or “multicultural” phase of international advertising to the late 1970s, a response to the everincreasing importance of the company’s international business. This phase was characterized by a deliberate effort to “centrally develop advertising aimed at the international markets, as opposed to simply franchising U.S.

90

Coca-Globalization

advertising to the international markets” (O’Barr 1989, 4). By the 1970s, Pepsi International, according to Louis and Yazijian, was already moving toward a “strategy of centralized management and decentralized execution” by creating a pool of commercials shot in various locations around the world: “[A] catalog of thirteen reels would be distributed to J. Walter Thompson offices throughout the world, which would then snip and cut commercials tailored for their particular markets and needs” (1980, 167). While one reel might contain action or sports shots, another might show couples in love. McCann’s own in-house history (Alter 1994, 189) suggests that efforts to think globally began as early as 1963, with the launch of the “Things go better with Coke” campaign. This campaign implemented the “One Sight, One Sound, One Sell” theory of advertising, the notion, according to McCann’s newsletter, that “wherever an advertisement for Coca-Cola appears, it will bear a strong ‘family’ resemblance to every other advertisement for Coca-Cola” (Alter 1994, 190). Don Kendall was pursuing the same strategy around the same time at Pepsi, but with limited success. Alan Pottasch, a global marketing strategist for Pepsi International, explained in an oral history interview that the reality of Pepsi’s modest market share sometimes conflicted with the bold claims of its advertising: As a matter of fact, the whole concept of the Pepsi Generation was not particularly successful overseas. Don Kendall very much wanted it—and believed in One Sight, One Sound, One Sell universally—and we tried and wherever it did make sense we did use it. We frequently used the music and put other lyrics to it. But the concept of generation—the Pepsi Generation— only works where it’s somewhat believable, where your total sales in the country, whatever country, are sufficiently great to make that believable. If you are in a very meager position, to try to name a whole generation after your product doesn’t make much sense at all. You’re in the Hires Root Beer Generation . . . (Pottasch 1984)

The Coca-Cola Company rarely worried about its “meager position” in any market, domestic or overseas. When the 1969 “Real thing” campaign was launched, the approach to integrated marketing and design covered not only ads, but vehicles, vending equipment, and delivery uniforms. McCann recognized that satisfying this “need for ‘universality’ in selling concepts” (Alter 1994, 194) required input from people around the world: “Sometimes creative people just needed to be brought together physically to solve multinational advertising problems” (Alter 1994, 195). In 1979, McCann created the InterNational Team based in New York, a unit of international creative directors formed to “create, develop and produce

Qualifying Products

91

multicultural advertising” (O’Barr 1989, 6). With Moreira as its head, InterNational Team took on Coke as its first and largest permanent account. InterNational Team produced pattern advertising as before—ads that could either run in different local markets or serve as blueprints for local executions. But the ads were thought to be based on universal ideas such as “first love” or “friendship” (Moreira 1991), ideas that putatively transcended particular times and places; by contrast, ideas regarded as too local or too topical were thought to be inappropriate. Similarly, the look of the ad (costumes, props, settings) was designed to avoid local references, such that viewers in Hong Kong would not see Chinese people, but rather worldly young people who look like themselves—dressed similarly, dancing to the same music, and living the same lifestyle. Moreira claimed that he initially sought to cast the ads with people whose physical features would work well everywhere—a middle-of-the-road Mediterranean look; black, blonde, and Asian people were not cast. Later on, for the sake of plausibility, these more “extreme looks” were built into the ads, not as a gesture of tokenism, but as an attempt to add universality and ubiquity (Moreira 1991). InterNational Team, as Moreira described it, operated with an implicit philosophical anthropology that posited a deep human similarity beneath the manifest diversity of cultures and localities. (In this sense, it hardly contradicted the implicit social science of marketing, which rests on a universal idea of perpetually needy individuals; see Applbaum 2004). It was in some ways a return of the happy ethnocentrism of wartime advertising. But in other ways it was not. For example, Moreira admitted that Coke’s international advertising drew on Western—not American—values; he claimed, however, that these values were, like blue jeans, no longer exclusive to Western societies. They were part of an emergent global culture, a world characterized by such an exchange of people from country to country that the issue of accurately portraying distinctive ethnic types for different local markets would soon be irrelevant (Moreira 1991). InterNational Team of course recognized that, in some instances, their ads would require modifications because of legal reasons (e.g., local content laws) or cultural conventions (e.g., about displaying women’s bodies). In some cases, ads were explicitly designed with room to insert local content (sports or foods) in cut-and-paste fashion. In other cases, the central idea or theme of the ad might need modification, as when the theme of “You can’t beat the feeling” was changed to run in Japan (in English) as “I feel Coke.” All of these modifications were imagined, however, as flexible accommodations to ultimately minor impediments in communicating the universal associations of brand Coca-Cola with summer fun and youthful

92

Coca-Globalization

social situations. Thus it was deemed possible to project one point of view, one tone of voice, and one personality through different executions of Coke ads to different audiences around the world. The anthropology at work here was at once a weaker and stronger version of the multilocalism of Coke’s 1950s international advertising. On the one hand, it was self-consciously less ethnocentric: ads were deliberately created for non-American audiences, by non-American creative directors. On the other hand, the ads were deliberately less local due to their attempt to depict ideas and situations imagined to be timeless and translocal. Put differently, the uneasy balance between the particular (local) and universal (global) in pattern advertising since World War II was tipping more and more toward the side of the global. Moreira (n.d.) claimed that this balance was decisively upset in 1991, when a third or “global” phase of Coke advertising began. In this phase of advertising, the premise was that all executions must work everywhere; tolerance for local exceptionalism was very low. From the point of view of phase two “multicultural” advertising, global advertising ran the risk of falling into the “lowest common denominator category” (Moreira 1991), a violation of the conviction expressed by John Bergin (a long time creative director of first Pepsi and then Coca-Cola advertising). Bergin observed, “If it works well everywhere, it is unlikely to work exceptionally well anywhere” (Bergin ca. 1991). The move toward “global” advertising in Moreira’s sense was bound up with the increasingly influential notion of “the global teenager” (not to mention the frenzied merger and consolidation of worldwide networks of advertising agencies during the 1980s). A 1996 article in Beverage World by Jim Lawrence (CEO Pepsi International, Asia, Middle East, and Africa) lays out the Theodore Levitt-like assumptions about converging tastes lurking behind this notion: “We at Pepsi and the global village having [sic] been brought together by the vast worldwide improvements in communications, media and technology. Teenagers are, for Pepsi-Cola, the occupants of the global village of greatest importance. They are brought together by common experiences, common interests and they’ve now developed their own worldwide language and voice. Media, such as MTV and the Internet help to bring them together as well” (“The Thirsty Global Village” 1996). Participation in a globalized mediascape of music, fashion, and extreme sports has thus created a worldwide market segment; teenagers in Japan, India, and the United States share more common experiences and interests with each other than they do with adults in their own countries of origin. Nevertheless, Lawrence cautions, local differences have not been totally effaced: “While brand Pepsi certainly is global, we absolutely do not consider our audience to be a single homogeneous global generation. Rather,

Qualifying Products

93

at Pepsi, we identify global marketing priorities with shared brand values. These, then, must be interpreted and expressed in a relevant way in the different regional markets. Therefore, we need to strike the right balance between international and local” (“The Thirsty Global Village” 1996). A concern for managing the balance between local and global emphases still exists, but the precedence of the global is apparent. Hence Lawrence’s announcement of a new global alliance with MTV—“the first choice of media of the global teenager”—and with international celebrities such as Andre Agassi, Cindy Crawford, and Claudia Schiffer. Such a strategy is not without risk; globalized images may provoke localized responses on the part of competitors, including not only local (or indigenous) competitors. In India, for example, The Coca-Cola Company spoofed Pepsi’s glamorous spots by targeting Indian teens with customized promotions and ads for Sprite, a clear lemon-lime flavored soft drink. According to an article in Advertising Age International on the localization of marketing for multinational companies, the ads showed “a youth who appears to be immune or indifferent to Pepsi’s ads and clearly opts for a Sprite instead. The text runs: ‘Sprite quenches your thirst. The rest is all rubbish.’” Nonetheless, this “local” response to Pepsi’s “international” spots is itself thoroughly inflected by global thinking—a reflex of the move toward global advertising in two respects. First, the ad was a variant of Sprite’s own international ad campaign, “Obey your thirst,” which ostensibly criticizes all things superficial and blares in self-contradictory (or knowingly ironic) terms that image is nothing. Second, as Venkatesh Kini, senior brand manager for Sprite at Coca-Cola India suggests, the ad appeals to the same vision of adolescence that informs the notion of “the global teenager”: “Sprite is positioned at teens and young adults in the process of establishing their own identity” (Chawla 1999). Herein lies another anthropology. The possibility of using one strategic message executed the same way everywhere presupposes the particular way in which advertising agencies imagine the global teen. In this view, teenagers the world over constitute a distinct oppositional subculture—a bounded society with its own language, rituals, and behavior, fortified against adult intervention. Although this subculture might assume various manifestations from country to country, it is always organized by a set of universal themes. These themes capture the conflicts that all teens experience in struggling to develop and form identities. For example, teens struggle to achieve autonomy and independence from their families. This assumption is explicit in the following description of how The Coca-Cola Company markets its Mr. Pibb brand soft drink to young teens: “Mr. Pibb appeals to 12-to-15 year olds who are

94

Coca-Globalization

just gaining independence from home and looking for things to call their own. Mr. Pibb enables them to have an uninhibited, fun and unconventional attitude because it has the sweet, refreshing bold taste they need to express their independence” (from the company’s Web site, cited in Girard 2004). But at the same time, teens yearn to belong to another community, a community of peers. This conflict appears behaviorally as a combination of authority-defying risk taking on the one hand, and rigid conformity to peer group conventions on the other. Dressed in the uniform of their peer group, teens experiment with sex and drugs in a manner that marks and effects separation if not rupture from their parents.6 The advertising anthropology of the global teen is a perverse inversion of Margaret Mead’s provocative conclusion in Coming of Age in Samoa that adolescence, understood as a period of stormy (sexual) rebellion, is a culturally specific condition, not a natural stage of human development. If there is any recognition of the possibility of ethnocentrism—of projecting a middle-class American definition of the teen years on the rest of the world—then it is explained away by claiming that global youth culture after all originates in the United States. And the recent work of anthropologists lends some support to this claim, or at least to the claim that the very idea of “teenager”—of “youth” as a distinctive social category—is being taken up as a novel collective identity by young adults in places as removed from each other as Papua New Guinea (Gewertz and Errington 1991) and Nepal (Leichty 1995). But the advertising anthropology of the global teen makes another presupposition. Namely, that the global teen’s struggle for identity is expressed and resolved through commodity consumption. So, for example, the Indian teen who rejects Pepsi for Sprite enacts an idealistic rejection of adult hypocrisy in favor of the authenticity and sincerity of youth (sub)culture, membership of which is symbolized by his (not her) consumption decision. Accordingly, sales pitches can position teen products ranging from shampoo and chewing gum to yogurt and soft drinks as solutions to socio-psychological developmental conflicts that cross cultures and transcend geographic locales. In any case, not all advertising executives embraced the notion of the global teen—or of global advertising in its most extreme version of single executions designed to run everywhere. This resistance might well be expected on the part of advertising agencies with worldwide networks that distinguished themselves on the basis of the local knowledge and expertise available to them. John Bergin, who handled the Coke account at McCannErickson during the 1980s, protested on other grounds. He told his successor in 1992, “I pray harder that we resist with all of our might the high-intensity focus on the so-called ‘global teen.’ That ‘kid’ will kill Coca-Cola” (Bergin

Qualifying Products

95

1992a). Bergin felt that it would be a mistake to position Coca-Cola as a kid’s drink, since people outgrow kid’s drinks. More importantly, he expressed reservations over the extent to which global theme lines could be used without local modification: “I am not so much afraid of how translators will struggle with our line or mangle it, but of how bland and trite our line will have to be to be meaningful to so many different people” (Bergin ca. 1991). Nevertheless, it was Bergin himself who helped develop Coke’s global campaign theme, “Always,” which ran from the mid- to late 1990s. As a tag appended to other descriptors—always new, always real, always there, always you—Bergin thought the theme met the double challenge of travelling well and saying something specific about brand Coca-Cola. But in his vision of the campaign’s execution (which was not, in the end, adopted), the local and personal quality of global Coca-Cola was to be underscored. Thus, for example, Bergin suggested a series of ads in which travelers abroad—a Taiwanese Little League team in America, an American Little League team in Japan, an American exchange student in Rome—would experience wonder and comfort in seeing illuminated Coca-Cola signs so far away from home. Indeed, Bergin emphasized that the brand had become “a symbol of home to people who are far away from home” (Bergin 1992b). In effect, Bergin revamped the World War II global high-sign campaign, divesting it of its Americo-centrism; instead of American soldiers, all the world’s citizens would now see home reflected in the familiar trademark. Coca-Cola, in this soft drink perspective, had effectively embedded itself as a natural and taken-for-granted feature of the landscape everywhere. The conceit is perhaps warranted. James Watson (1997, 23) notes that the status of McDonald’s as “official food service partner” to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta was not only due to corporate clout: “Athletes from around the world were familiar enough with McDonald’s fare to accept it without question, thereby avoiding potentially disastrous encounters with strange foods.” The industry debate over global advertising versus multilocal advertising continued into the new millennium. Proponents of the former argued that in addition to the cost efficiencies involved, new forms of bordercrossing direct-satellite media encourage standardized branding. Proponents of the latter argued that cultural and linguistic differences still matter and that it is in these irreducible differences that one must find marketing motives. Maintaining the balance between global and local also continued to preoccupy soft drink marketing managers, and the pendulum continued to swing between the two poles. At PepsiCo, the aggressive global teen campaign known as “Generation Next” was deemed “too youth-centric and

96

Coca-Globalization

edgy” (Kramer 1999a). A new domestic campaign, “Joy of Cola,” featuring a lip-synching little girl with Shirley Temple looks, promised broader age appeal and a more upbeat mood; while outside the United States, the new tag line “Ask for More” was introduced in 1999. At The Coca-Cola Company, with the ascension of Douglas Daft as CEO, the shift was “away from worldwide campaigns towards more locally tailored work” (Hatfield 2000). But that shift seemed to have begun even before Daft took over. In a 1999 interview, then chief marketing officer for Coca-Cola, Charles Frenette, told Advertising Age (Kramer 1999b): We’ve got to reconnect with consumers every day—that is our fundamental marketing challenge. While there are 6 billion people out there in the world, we can’t treat them as a homogeneous set. Even though globalization is knocking down borders and allowing for the free flow of goods and services, and money is moving around rapidly, people still have an identity based on myth and mystery and superstition and folklore. We saw that people are almost universally looking for comfort, connection, achievement, vitality. But when you dig deep and understand the nuances around how it manifests itself, it is significantly different.

Frenette here promises to upend the anthropological wisdom that guided Coke’s advertising—both multilocal and global—since World War II: similarity is superficial; difference is what lies deep below. Radical relativism seems to displace enlightened universalism, postmodernity eclipses modernity. Even so, Frenette inverts but does not change the terms of the dominant anthropology. Marketing a global commodity locally—making products meaningful to an imagined world of diverse consumers— remains a calculation of similarity and difference. Nor does Frenette challenge the modernist assumption of an individual self actively constituted and reconstituted through reflexively monitored consumption, especially consumption of branded commodities. That assumption is, after all, the bedrock of “capitalist realism” (Schudson 1984). &* Frenette’s comments allude to the extensive use made by soft drink marketers of consumer research, including the ethnographic research of anthropologists. In this sense, company officials engage the meaningmaking capacities of consumers quite differently than in their roles as trademark police. As trademark police, company officials attempt to suppress the semantic generativity of consumers, limiting the ways in which consumers can creatively appropriate and ascribe new meaning to

Qualifying Products

97

brand-name commodities. As market researchers, however, company officials attempt to identify and even stimulate this creative activity and to fold it into to their own efforts to make commodities meaningful through branding and advertising. For example, Sergio Zyman (Frenette’s predecessor) claims that the “Obey your thirst” campaign for Sprite grew out of interviews with “heavy users” of the product who cared little about the drink’s lemon-lime flavor but stressed how Sprite “reflected their own attitude, which was a bit cheeky or unconventional” (Zyman 1999, 92). Hence the marketing decision to position Sprite not against other lemon-lime drinks, but against Pepsi, well known for its consistent advertising appeals to the unconventional. Consumers—global teens, in this case—thus confront recycled images of their own idiosyncratic usages in the mass marketing of soft drinks. From the point of view of company officials, qualitative research enables marketers to be relevant, “to depict real life” as Charles Frenette put it (Kramer 1999b), and thus to (re)connect with consumers. Qualitative research enables producers to qualify products with attributes that consumers recognize—or ought to recognize—as their own. Regardless of its efficacy, the use of market research as an instrument to uncover, appropriate, and re-present the meaning of consumer commodities illustrates the intensive recursiveness of social life in this era of globalization. Through such recursiveness or reflexivity, “culturally informed ‘local’ actions can have globalizing consequences” (Tomlinson 1999, 24). The individual actions of a small group of people—teenage “heavy users” at a suburban Los Angeles skateboard park, for instance—are linked with the lives of distant, unknown others watching TV in Mumbai or New Delhi. Such is complex connectivity.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

A Network of Perspectives The Meanings of Soft Drinks in Papua New Guinea To the expatriate executives of Shell, we Papua New Guineans are working very hard to take our place in the modern world . . . We want the world to know that we are civilised and decent and can survive anywhere on this planet . . . Don’t treat us like primitives. —From a 1995 letter to a PNG newspaper in reference to a television ad for Shell gasoline

arketing officers for soft drink corporations regularly declaim themselves in trade journals and business magazines; they even write books expressing their points of view. By contrast, the points of view of consumers themselves are more elusive, qualitative research notwithstanding. Do consumers encounter in heavily marketed and advertised soft drinks recognizable images of themselves (even if “realistic” in the highly stylized way that Schudson attributes to capitalist realism)—images that reinforce their decisions to purchase certain brands? Or do they confront alienated versions of themselves that provoke resentment or, given the inevitable gap between generic image and particular reality, frustration? Or, perhaps, indifference? When these questions are posed in the course of debating globalization, and especially with regard to Papua New Guinea, they ineluctably lead back to the two opposing views represented by The Gods Must Be Crazy and The Cup. That is, the issue ultimately concerns the efficacy of consumption work: are people able to domesticate the global commodities they use (consume) locally, and, if so, on whose terms? The answer to this last question is rarely unambiguous—despite the predilection of anthropologists to line up on the side of The Cup and to celebrate “the resilience of ‘local’ cultures against some of the exaggerated claims that have been made in the name of globalization” (Jackson 2004, 165). That the spread of worldly things such as Colgate toothpaste and Omo laundry detergent betokens a threat to local cultural resilience in Papua New Guinea is the premise of a 1996 film, Advertising Missionaries. The

M

100

Coca-Globalization

film documents the activities of a travelling theater troupe employed by a marketing firm, HRD, based in Port Moresby. The troupe operated in PNG through the 1990s and was still operating, though on a reduced scale, in 2000 (Phil Sawyer, personal communication). It visited some of the most inaccessible rural areas of the country, areas that, in the early to mid-1990s, were beyond the reach of most commercial mass media. Portraying a mildly dysfunctional family, the troupe performs humorous skits to demonstrate the nature and uses of brand-name consumer goods, including Coca-Cola soft drinks. In the memorable skit that opens the film,“Child” introduces “Uncle” to Coca-Cola. Uncle asks, “What is it?” He expresses wonder and confusion at both the bottle and can held before him—a reaction that recalls the World War II Coca-Cola advertising image of Manus islanders stupefied by a short wave radio (Chapter 2). The audience of Southern Highlanders— men and boys, but no women or girls—laugh at Uncle’s shock and surprise at the popping sound made when the can is opened, and at Uncle’s ignorant gesture of placing the bottle cap—the “eye of the bottle” (ai bilong botel in Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea’s main official lingua franca)—over his own eye. Eventually, Uncle is persuaded to drink from the can. He rolls his eyes with obvious delight, and then obeys Child’s exhortation to “down” the entire can in a single gulp, a rowdy style of imbibing often associated with men’s alcohol consumption. The audience responds with hoots and laughter, and the camera lingers on one young man in the crowd, gulping his own bottle of Coke in apparently playful imitation of Uncle. But what sort of imitation do we have here? The narrative thrust of Advertising Missionaries laments the incorporation of “remote” and “traditional” populations into the global market of and for consumer goods. Like The Gods Must Be Crazy, it suggests that this sort imitation is a regrettable emulation of foreign ways that portends negative consequences. In so doing, however, the film runs the risk of identifying the audience of Southern Highlanders with the character of Uncle—with a person utterly ignorant and thus wholly innocent of consumerism’s enticements. And Southern Highlanders are surely not that, as the image of Agnes drinking Coke and eating steamed rice obviously attests (see Figure 1.1). When the skit portrayed in the film is understood as belonging to a genre of auto-orientalizing performances of the transition from savagery to civilization reported widely in PNG (Kulick and Willson 1992; Errington and Gewertz 1995; Young 1997; Knauft 2002), then it becomes clear that other concerns are at work. The skit offers up to an ostensibly out-ofthe-way audience the image of a man—Uncle—who is truly marginal, a “country bumpkin” (bus kanaka in Tok Pisin) who does not even know

A Network of Perspectives

101

what a Coke is. Uncle thus at once dramatizes and deflects a fear, an anxiety that what ought to be taken for granted (something as banal and routine as carbonated soft drinks) is not, and that in not taking it for granted, one’s exposure as not modern is publicized. Like the hoary ethnic joke about the bus kanaka who “cooks” his tinned mackerel by tossing the unopened can into the fire, the skit enacts and exorcises discomfort. That is, the skit enables audience members to distance themselves from their own not-so-distant past in the form of Uncle’s uncomfortable relationship to material signs of “development.” The skit unfolds as “an acute semblance of progress” fashioned out of “the opposition between local constructions of tradition or history and those of being or becoming modern” (Knauft 2002, 106). But the performance is potentially discomforting for the audience, inasmuch as it leaves a lingering question: Is Uncle our past or (still) our present? Am I/are we like Uncle after all?1 Neither a definite surrender to the juggernaut of Western consumerism nor a triumphant instance of domesticating the foreign through local cultural appropriation, the skit in the end performs uncertainty; specifically, an uncertainty of perspective, in which Southern Highlanders are presented, momentarily, with the possibility that they appear in the view of others as the Uncle whom they recognize, but do not recognize as themselves. This observation prompts us, in turn, to recover the notion of a commodity or product network, and to trace, however tentatively, the network of perspectives that forms around marketing, advertising, and consuming soft drinks (and other fast moving consumer goods) in Papua New Guinea. How do the meanings of soft drinks take shape in and through this network of perspectives? How is this product qualified as it moves from “agents on the supply side” to consumers on the “demand side” (Callon et al. 2002)? Marketing What perspectives do people involved in marketing soft drinks in Papua New Guinea take on both themselves and the people they address? How do these people meet the challenge of the “marketing concept,”“the pursuit of enhanced understanding and orchestration of consumers’ intentions, starting with their perception of needs and ending with how they decide between alternatives to satisfaction” (Applbaum 2004, 29). Perhaps we first ought to ask how any company might think of marketing soft drinks in Papua New Guinea, of all places, as a viable business proposition. In May 1991, Coca-Cola Amatil announced the signing of contracts for the acquisition of the two major Coca-Cola bottling operations in PNG at

102

Coca-Globalization

a price of 27 million kina (A$36 million). The operations were acquired from Steamships Trading Company, which in 1969 became the first “local” company licensed to bottle Coca-Cola in what was then the Trust Territory of Papua and New Guinea.2 At the time, 51 percent owned by the U.S.based Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) was Australia’s dominant producer of soft drinks and snack foods, with market shares of 60 percent in each of these categories.3 It was also, until its split in 1998, The Coca-Cola Company’s second largest “anchor bottler”; the split assigned CCA’s European operations to a new bottler, Coca-Cola Beverages, based in Vienna (Hays 1998b). CCA currently operates throughout Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea) as well as elsewhere in the South Pacific (Fiji, New Zealand).4 At the time of CCA’s purchase, one generous estimate attributed 56 percent of the PNG share market to Coca-Cola and 44 percent to Pepsi-Cola; by 1997, CCA claimed two thirds of PNG’s entire soft drink market (“Coca-Cola Amatil Claims PNG Sales Victory” 1997). For most of the same period, the Pepsi franchise in Papua New Guinea, Niugini Beverages, belonged to South Pacific Brewery (SPB), which acquired it in 1985 from Burns, Philp & Company Ltd., the Australianbased food group. SPB built a new soft drink plant in Port Moresby and modernized an old plant in Lae. South Pacific Brewery, which in 1954 came under control of Malayan Breweries Ltd., was by then the one and only producer of beer in PNG, having absorbed San Miguel Brewery in 1983. In 2005, South Pacific Brewery Ltd. was a 75.8 percent owned subsidiary of the Singapore-based Asia-Pacific Breweries Ltd., itself a joint venture of Fraser and Neave Limited and the Heineken N.V. international brewing group (2004 APB Annual Report). SP Holdings Ltd., a local umbrella company set up in 1973 that owned South Pacific Breweries and its subsidiaries in PNG, relinquished its Pepsi franchise and withdrew from the soft drink business in January 2000, when The Coca-Cola Company acquired bottling rights to all Schweppes brands in PNG; Niugini Beverages had previously bottled these products. (SP Holdings was put into voluntary liquidation in 2001, leaving South Pacific Brewery Ltd. as a surviving separate entity.) By mid-2000, no PepsiCo brands (such as Pepsi-Cola and Mirinda) were being bottled in PNG, although two years later I noticed cans of Pepsi-Cola imported from Queensland, Australia, on supermarket shelves in Port Moresby. One might reasonably wonder what sort of potential such large transnational corporations saw in the small PNG market for soft drinks. (According to the 1999 CCA Annual Report, PNG had a population of about 4.6 million, of which CCA estimated that it serviced 3.8 million; in its 2003 report, CCA estimated five million potential consumers in the

A Network of Perspectives

103

country). CCA executives had a compelling and distinctive way of answering this question. In retrospect, they seemed to imagine all the markets that the company was moving into in 1991 in much the same way as Roberto Goizueta envisioned the almost infinite universe of Coca-Cola’s business. And it was this shared vision of potential infinite growth that drove CCA’s massive capital investments in new Asian markets, including the market in PNG. Consider, for example, the comments of Dean Wills, who in 1991 was chairman and managing director of CCA, regarding joint ventures that enabled CCA to capture 40 percent of Indonesia’s soft drink market: “While the per capita consumption of Indonesia . . . is a far cry from Australia, it has a 7 per cent growth in gross domestic product and, with a population of 180 million, that represents excellent opportunities during the next few years.” From Wills’s point of view, the consumption gap between Indonesia and Australia—much like the gap between Australia and Eastern European countries where CCA formerly operated—would inevitably close with increasing “economic and political sophistication”: “When countries emerge from such controlled backgrounds they start getting the taste for all things Western and while the cars and houses come much later, a can of Coke is a cheaper, more easily identifiable and accessible status symbol” (Cummins 1991). This is no doubt another conceit. It is also, however, an approximate mapping of other people’s meanings, a routine instance of how the marketing of soft drinks happens within a network of perspectives, in PNG as elsewhere. It is unlikely that the use to which Huli women like Agnes put Coke cans is what Coca-Cola Amatil officials had in mind when they talked about “the development of a soft drink culture” in Papua New Guinea (CCA Annual Report 1994). Such development requires “establishing the basics of acceptability,” and acceptability, they imagine, is achieved through an effort called “community based marketing”: “a host of grassroots promotional and marketing activities including market impact teams (MIT’s), sampling, door to door selling, special events sponsorships such as regional fairs, sporting and music sponsorships and consumer promotions and contests.” Indeed, in PNG, sponsorships and promotions/contests are the prime vehicles for marketing soft drinks and other everyday consumer goods—Trukai rice, Maggi noodles and stock cubes, Benson and Hedges cigarettes, Nestlé’s Milo chocolate drinks and Nescafé, Wrigley’s PK chewing gum, Gillette razors and deodorants. They are the practical means by which transnational corporations, acting locally, seek to make themselves and their worldly things at home in Papua New Guinea or, as one Port Moresby marketing executive told me, to make products “become a person’s friend.”

104

Coca-Globalization

It is through sponsorships in particular that CCA discharges its “responsibility as a good corporate citizen.” As the CEO of operations put it, “We strive not only to earn the respect of customers and consumers, but of governments, authorities and communities where we operate. That is, we involve ourselves in a range of activities over and above those dictated by our operational imperatives” (CCA Annual Report 1995). In Papua New Guinea, it is through sponsorships that CCA not only plays the role of good citizen, but also practically assumes state functions by financially facilitating the delivery of health and education services to non-corporate citizens (see Chapter 5). These state functions include a glocalized form of nation making, whereby sponsorships enable Papua New Guineans to represent themselves as a nation to each other and to the world at large. For example, CCA undertook sponsorship of the PNG team sent to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Special labels were produced for five-hundred-milliliter bottles of Coca-Cola that exhorted consumers to “Send PNG to Sydney.” Proceeds from the sales of these bottles went toward supporting the PNG team. Hence, the advertising copy that linguistically performs nationhood by merging the second person singular with the first person plural: “When you drink a 500 ml ‘Coca-Cola’ you are donating to our Olympic team.”5 Olympic sponsorship—and sponsorship of World Cup soccer—is of course a deliberate part of The Coca-Cola Company’s larger marketing strategy of associating itself with “the world’s only truly global sporting events” (2002 Annual Report). But it is worth noting how, in PNG, such sponsorship is often construed by corporate officials and mainstream media as an opportunity for a small, young, and under-resourced nation to participate in a world forum. Mindful of the “competitiveness of such a tough world class event,” CCA (PNG) Ltd.’s general manager Paul Dobb was quick to temper hopes for winning a medal. “But what Papua New Guineans should remember,” one newspaper report of CCA’s sponsorship quoted Dobb as saying, “is that the country will be represented by a ‘special group of athletes’ and they should take pride in the fact that PNG’s very own athletes will be there at the world’s greatest competition, flying the country’s national colours” (Liri and Banian 2000). Put differently, CCA’s sponsorship gave PNG access to a global system of common difference, and thus to a basic form of national legitimacy; the nation would be able to make itself legible within the conventions of the international community. But, of course, formal and equivalent representation did not guarantee that the nation would be able to compete equally, as PNG athletes “would be up against professionals from USA, Europe and the rest of the world.” The nation making involved in corporate sponsorships not only enables formal and equivalent representation of PNG as a definite nation among

A Network of Perspectives

105

many nations, but also the representation of PNG as a multicultural nation-state. Through their sponsorship of annual cultural festivals— regional shows or fairs highlighted by competitions among groups performing traditional songs and dances in traditional costumes (see Chapter 2)—consumer goods corporations publicize two related claims. First, the sponsorships demonstrate that, alongside the diversity of traditional cultures in PNG, there is a uniformity of consumer products; that is, the shared culture of PNG—the national culture—is in many respects a commercial culture. Consumption of Pepsi-Cola soft drinks or Trukai rice cuts across local cultural differences. There is a species of economic nationalism at work here as well, captured in the slogan and logo, “PNG Made,” which began appearing on certain consumer goods, including cans and cartons of Coca-Cola, around 1997—a clear assertion of the product’s selfrepresentation as simultaneously global and local. Consumption is thus linked with citizenship and endorsed as a form of practical patriotism. Second, the sponsorship of cultural festivals—the Port Moresby Show, the Hiri Moale Festival, the Goroka Show—identifies consumer goods not only with the multicultural nation(-state), but also with modernity itself. It is in this context that soft drinks, for example, are qualified (not to mention sold and consumed ) as the modern complements of indigenous tradition. That is, it is in these contexts that soft drink companies bring their unambiguously foreign products within the same frame as material artifacts defined, by contrast, as unambiguously domestic. This semiotic move is not, however, the same as that effected by Huli women such as Agnes or by the sign painter Kaipel Ka (see Figure 1.2), for it is a move that remains forever incomplete. It generates a composite of discrete heterogeneous elements—bare breasts and Pepsi bottles; a juxtaposition, not a blending (Chapter 2). Here, then, is a projection of Papua New Guineans—a mapping of other people’s meanings—as a new generation of people whose collective identity derives from the ever present, infinitely repeatable encounter of tradition and modernity. The national identity that crystallizes from this imagery is a suturing of past and present, indigenous and exogenous, tradition and modernity. The nation of PNG embodies or contains, now and forever, an encounter between radically heterogeneous elements—much like a fetish (Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988). But whereas soft drink marketers implicitly qualify the conjunction of modernity and tradition as a positive coupling, not all Papua New Guineans share this perspective, as I demonstrate later in this chapter. Another state function discharged through corporate sponsorships is that of moral education (a corollary of nation making). To a large extent, the participation of consumer goods corporations—and especially soft

106

Coca-Globalization

drink corporations—in moral education follows naturally from a marketing strategy that targets youth as the most desirable category of consumer (in a country where approximately 38 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen). CCA and SP Holdings (when the latter was active in the soft drink business) would regularly and with great publicity stage promotions in the schools of Port Moresby, distributing T-shirts or athletic equipment emblazoned with logos all in the name of healthy bodies. In 1996, the Australian pop group Hot Hot Hot—a sort of Spice Girls act— toured primary schools promoting both Fanta Orange and a “say no to drugs” message—a deeply ironic message given the history of sugar as a narcotic instrumental in making the nineteenth century working classes work (Mintz 1986). The following year, CCA teamed up with the National Narcotics Bureau to sponsor an antidrug campaign that featured a speaker who told young people about her struggles with addiction. An editorial in the Post-Courier newspaper praised the campaign, observing that “without corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola, such programs would not eventuate because of the Government’s financial handicaps” (“Listen to the Message” 1997). For several years, SP Holdings sponsored the annual nationwide Pepsi Fun Run, a major fundraising activity of the PNG Sports Federation.6 In 1998, the event raised a record 147,510 kina (one PNG kina was equivalent to forty-five U.S. cents in 1998) through its T-shirt auction, in which various local companies purchased the Pepsi branded shirts, donated by SP Holdings, for distribution to community schools around the country. So, for example, the Post-Courier dutifully reported its own generosity on July 24, 1997, by picturing the newspaper’s administration manager amidst a crowd of excited students at the Wildlife Community School in Port Moresby, recipient of six hundred T-shirts. CCA similarly has “a close relationship with the Papua New Guinean Sports Commission” and is “proud to have been able to sponsor the first PNG Sporting Calendar” in 2004 (http://www.ccamatil.com/PNGsUPPORT.asp, accessed February 14, 2005). In 1996, CCA donated one hundred sporting kits that included equipment (various kinds of balls) and manuals for teaching “Coca-Cola Pikinini Sport” as a supplement to physical education at schools in four different provinces across the country (“New Equipment Gives the Kids a Boost!” 1996). Just as with the antidrug campaign, such marketing sponsorships ally soft drink companies with state agencies and departments, effecting a highly visible form of corporate citizenship (see Chapter 5). Not much has changed since 1992, when then Prime Minister Rabbie Namaliu, in an appeal to the public to support the fun run, noted the growing importance of sponsorship for financing sports programs in PNG: “Sport

A Network of Perspectives

107

is becoming increasingly commercial and during these tough economic times, the Government can only do so much” (quoted in Foster 2002, 93). These sponsorships, moreover, connect products commonly characterized as unhealthy and inappropriate for children with official national ideals of raising a population of strong, fit, healthy, and morally sound citizen-bodies. Clearly, “community based marketing” is anything but “over and above” CCA’s operational imperatives or the imperatives of any consumer goods company operating in an environment like Papua New Guinea where mass media are hardly pervasive and the availability of many products is highly uneven; it is among the principal and integral means through which new consumers are made—and made both brand-aware and brand-loyal. Marketing executives with whom I spoke in Port Moresby sometimes expressed ambivalence about this condition. One executive volunteered his concern about the steady focus of his clients on children, on frequently organizing product launches and promotional activities on school grounds—regardless of the donations these clients often make to the PNG Department of Education. But he then quickly observed, noting the contradiction, that his firm was about to organize a sports day at one school, where donations of athletic equipment would be made and the students used to make an advertisement for a sugary energy drink. Another executive, responding explicitly to the critique of imported consumerism dramatized by the film Advertising Missionaries, pointed out that many of the consumer goods that he markets are not luxuries, but affordably packaged basic products “designed to improve on people’s lifestyles”; to improve on their “nutritional intake” and “personal hygiene.” Hence, the strong educational component of many marketing campaigns, as exemplified by the launch of Colgate Superstrong Toothpaste with Tok Pisin packaging.7 The launch was undertaken jointly by the PNG Health Department and Colgate-Palmolive (PNG) Ltd. The Health Secretary thanked Colgate-Palmolive for its partnership, while the Colgate-Palmolive general manager said that a company survey indicated limited usage of toothpaste in rural areas. The newspaper report of the launch recalled the marketing imagination of per capita soft drink consumption in noting that “PNG had much lower toothpaste usage than Fiji, whose people consumed 396 g per head to PNG with 28 g per head” (“Toothpaste in Tok Pisin Packaging” 2000). The Colgate-Palmolive general manager was quoted as saying, “With the Tok Pisin packaging, this new product will be accessible to the low wage earners. The Colgate Super Strong is very affordable at K1 [thirty-three U.S. cents in 2005] for a 40 g tube, putting to rest the fear of toothpaste being a luxury product.” Affordability enables consumer goods

108

Coca-Globalization

producers to represent themselves as sensitive to the needs of financially strapped PNG consumers. For example, Paul Dobb wrote a letter to the editor of the Post-Courier, published on July 5, 2001, in which he asked that readers be reminded that CCA had not raised the price of its products in twenty-two months: “As responsible corporate citizens, Coca-Cola Amatil has focussed its strategy towards our own efficiencies in order to keep our product affordable and good value for money. I would like your readers to know how responsible Coca-Cola has been in these difficult times.” These efficiencies included the closure of CCA’s Port Moresby plant in 2001 and a reduction in CCA’s total PNG work force from 652 employees (CCA Annual Report 2000) to 595 (CCA Annual Report 2001). The focus on youthful physical activity and drug-free bodies brings the aims of CCA and other transnational corporations in line with those of the nation-state in promoting a healthy population. At the same time, however, other community-based marketing initiatives—initiatives perhaps more in line with the image of the global teenager—appeal to youthful participation in an age-specific translocal subculture of music and fashion. For example, music sponsorship has been a key feature of marketing soft drinks in Papua New Guinea since before the expansion of commercial broadcasting during the 1990s, when the bottlers of both Coca-Cola and Pepsi products began underwriting radio and television programs that aired contemporary music (and music videos) from PNG and abroad. In 1989, Coca-Cola sponsored the first music video television show, Mekim Music, closely modeled on MTV; in 1993, a second show, Fizz, devoted to PNG local music, was sponsored by Pepsi-Cola (until July 1990, Mekim Music showed only foreign produced material; see Hayward 1995). In 1996, Pepsi was sponsoring five other music programs in addition to Fizz, one of which (World Chart) was a Sunday morning syndicated Top 40 radio countdown show that ran on the FM Kalang service of the National Broadcasting Commission. World Chart competed with a Coke-sponsored Top 40 countdown show on another FM station. In 2000, Coca-Cola sponsored Coca-Cola Connection, an EM TV variety program for children that featured cartoons. While much of the community marketing done in schools targets younger children, music sponsorship targets older youth and accordingly appeals to the notion that teens and young adults everywhere embrace a subculture of unconventional, even rebellious desires. Accordingly, both the Mekim Music and Fizz programs ran afoul of the PNG Censor for broadcasting material deemed sexually inappropriate, including Madonna video clips and a locally produced video that focussed on women’s (clothed) buttocks (Hayward 1995). (In the mid 1990s, Benson and Hedges

A Network of Perspectives

109

entered the music scene, assuming sponsorship of Mekim Music [renamed Golden Mekim Musik] and nationwide tours of musicians from PNG and abroad [such as, in 1997, Nigerian reggae musician, Ras Kimono]. These sponsorships associated contemporary music with a product that was banned from advertising on radio and television in PNG; not even images of a closed cigarette pack were allowed to be shown in connection with the Benson and Hedges Golden Tones music video program.8) The distinction between marketing to and through children (which, one executive admitted, dubiously presupposes the influence of PNG children on their parents) and marketing to young adults reflects a series of fundamental dualisms that orient a basic segmentation of PNG consumers into moieties. This segmentation was articulated to me in July 2000 by Peter Aitsi, then general manager of PNG FM, the company that owned and operated the country’s two independent commercial FM radio stations, NAU FM (Tok Pisin for “Now FM”) and YUMI FM (Tok Pisin for “Us FM”). NAU FM, the older of the two stations, was oriented to urban youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five (gender was not a factor in this segmentation). Its male and female disc jockeys projected “attitude,” in Australian-accented English, and supplied fast moving news and entertainment, including Western pop music; its advertising spotlighted fast moving consumer goods and high tech items such as personal computers. Promotions for NAU FM featured wrestling matches and bungee jumping from a crane. NAU FM endeavored to be edgy, to push the limits. It had generated public controversy with its “Doctor Love” program, frank discussions of sexual desires, and its decision to play the song “Sex on the Beach,” by a Dutch-American band, the title of which refers to a cocktail popular at night clubs (the song was banned in Fiji but the ban was defied by a station owned by the Fiji-based parent company of NAU FM). The point of NAU FM, Aitsi said, was not to make everyone comfortable, but, rather, “to encourage youth to start to question” and “to start to think”—to start to ask “Why?” YUMI FM, by contrast, targeted rural audiences in the 30 years old and up category. YUMI FM broadcasted in Tok Pisin and styled itself as “your community radio station,” providing interviews and health and education information for listeners. YUMI FM’s advertising featured consumer goods whose producers sought to establish and expand a rural market— tinned meat and fish, rice, frozen chicken parts. YUMI FM sought to “grow consumers”; its listeners were imagined to be conservative, as Aitsi put it, with “a bit of a culture zone around them.” YUMI FM promotions featured appearances by its disc jockeys in towns around PNG that attracted huge crowds of all ages and elevated the disc jockeys to almost celebrity status.

110

Coca-Globalization

YUMI FM also launched CDs of traditional music (e.g., bamboo bands) and sponsored cultural shows in the country’s different provinces. Not surprisingly, perhaps, YUMI FM “attracts no criticism.” I often heard the station being played on the dusty sixteen-seater vehicles that serve as public buses (PMVs) in Port Moresby. The differences between NAU FM and YUMI FM can be summarized in a list of paired opposites that, again and again, provide reference points to commercial agents—not to mention, at times, anthropologists—for imagining and representing Papua New Guineans: Urban/Rural Western/Indigenous Fast/Slow Youthful/Mature Individual/Community Change/Stasis English/Tok Pisin Modern/Traditional Commerce/Culture To a large extent, this list defines the discursive parameters within which marketers, advertisers, and consumers in Papua New Guinea all operate, even if not always in alignment with each other. The oppositions often mark interfaces within the network of perspectives that takes shape around products such as soft drinks. But it is clear that marketing executives recognize the list’s limitations as a device for imagining their audiences and thus for mapping approximations of other people’s meanings. For example, Peter Aitsi observed that YUMI FM, which started up in 1997, three years after NAU FM, crossed all demographic boundaries, attracting listeners in the young adult category mainly because of the language of broadcast, Tok Pisin. He further suggested that, although relations between village and town have indeed become “more stretched” or spatially extensive for many Papua New Guineans, the basic opposition between rural and urban obscures the extent to which new urban subcultures were developing among second generation youth born and raised in Port Moresby. The same youth who, when asked where they are from, give the names of their home suburbs—Gerehu, Boroko, Waigani, and so forth—rather than their parents’ village or province of origin. I will return to this point presently. Promotions and contests, often connected with sponsorships (as in the Pepsi Fun Run), form the second leg of community-based marketing of

A Network of Perspectives

111

soft drinks. This fact ought to be apparent to even the most casual observer of material culture in the towns and villages of PNG. Legions of people of all ages walk about in Pepsi and Coca-Cola branded hats and T-shirts, carrying backpacks, brandishing wristwatches, and kicking soccer balls all distinctively stamped with globally registered trademarks. The strategy is not restricted to soft drinks. For example, Nestlé runs prize competitions for Maggi Noodles and for its Milo energy drink. Thus, the text of a television ad from 2000 that ran every evening during the six o’clock national news program, complete with an Anglicized Tok Pisin catchphrase, read, “Slam dunk na win with Milo! Five Milo packs to be won. Five lucky winners will receive a Milo basketball backboard, a Milo sports pack, plus K100 cash. To enter, write your name and address on the back of a Milo label and mail it to Milo Slam na dunk, Lock Mailbag, Boroko. Entry forms with competition details and draw dates are available at participating stores and local newspapers. Slam dunk na win with Milo!” Marketing executives report that these contests and promotions are enormously successful. In 1998, a Coca-Cola Amatil soccer ball promotion was so successful that more than 100 percent of the forty thousand balls budgeted for the promotion were redeemed by consumers who had purchased cans with the word “WIN” marked inside (“Soccer Ball Contest” 1998). The company honored the promotion, however, going so far as to take out urbanized/Anglicized Tok Pisin announcements (toksave) in English language newspapers explaining that it had run short of soccer balls but was planning to distribute more the following month.9 One executive complained to me of fatigue after having participated in so many of these giveaways, a marketing strategy employed to retain consumers in response to the devaluation of the kina. Another marketing executive, an expatriate Australian, observed that giving away a hat for free was a big deal in PNG; and one former advertising account and sales manager, also an expatriate, bluntly asserted that promotions are obviously more popular in PNG than Australia: “people are poor here.” There seems to be a simple explanation for the success of such giveaways in the material circumstances of most Papua New Guineans. Nevertheless, a different explanation is possible. An executive in charge of events and promotions for one of the soft drink companies, a Papua New Guinean in his mid-twenties (who, although born in New Britain, considers himself most at home in Port Moresby) related the success of giveaways to the “handout mentality” of Papua New Guineans. He explained the “handout mentality” as “a two-way thing for us in society: you give, we take; we give, you take.”10 As a result, he continued, “the only way a promotion works—normally, in most instances—is when giving

112

Coca-Globalization

away a commodity or premium . . . and that’s accepted. Otherwise, you find that it just becomes a flop . . . It’s not that successful if you are not giving anything in return” (or if the odds of winning a contest are only one in twenty). In other words, contests and giveaways appeal to local expectations about reciprocity, about the give and take of social life. This perspective on marketing thus sees the giveaway not as “something for nothing,” but as the return on a commodity purchase, thereby folding the commodity purchase within the conventions of a gift relationship. Promotions must measure up to the perceived expectations of reciprocity—even if it is just a reasonable chance at reciprocity—or face failure. This marketing perspective, then, imagines PNG consumers not as poor or needy individuals, but as agents acting upon a set of conventions that put a premium, so to speak, on engaged and symmetrical sociality. Nevertheless, if premiums are given and received as gifts, they surely may be recirculated as commodities. When I asked a security guard at a guesthouse in Port Moresby how he had acquired his Coca-Cola wristwatch, he told me that he had bought it at an urban market for four kina (approximately U.S. $1.20 in 2002). While most giveaways in PNG involve mass distributions of inexpensive items, there are notable exceptions (which flagrantly violate the expectation of a reasonable chance at reciprocity). For example, in 1999, SP Holdings sponsored the Pepsi Dream Home competition, in which a lucky winner would collect a house and land package. The National reported that Stan Joyce, SP Holdings marketing manager, called the winners, Mary and Nepa Dawaong, a Port Moresby couple married for a year and expecting their first child. According to the report, “Nepa is unemployed and [Mary] was a domestic servant until her expatriate boss relocated to Lae. They were both just getting by day to day selling betelnut” (“Dream Come True” 1999). The house and land package was a dream come true for the couple. After the departure of Pepsi from the PNG market, CCA launched the “Coke-Win-A-Haus” nationwide competition in which four contestants won a complete home package. The promotion was one of “the biggest ever held in PNG,” with about one million entries from all four regions of the country (Metta 2001). The winner from the Mamose region (Madang, Morobe, and Sepik Provinces), former health worker Maison Uranoli, had his kit home transported from Lae to Aupik village in East Sepik Province. He said his victory was “a miracle for him as his old semi-permanent house was on the verge of collapse.” John Sarufa, a winner from Kerema in the Gulf Province, had his home—complete with solar energy for hot water, three bedrooms, a kitchen and toilet facilities—built at a cost of more than K50,000 at Mahuru village (his birth place) in Port Moresby. Sarufa “said

A Network of Perspectives

113

that he had always dreamt of owning a home and the promotion had made his dream a reality” (Dau 2001). If mass giveaways fit the received anthropological description of gift exchange, then house competitions conform more closely to classic accounts of “cargo cults” in which members anticipate and seek to bring about the arrival of vast amounts of Western material goods (see Lindstrom 1995). A colleague thus told me that he had recorded a few dream narratives from one particular informant in the Eastern Highlands Province during the time of a Coke pickup truck giveaway. The importance of the color “red” indicated that the dream had to do with winning the Coke truck: “People invested a great deal of psychic energy into dreaming about the potential cargo” (Tom Strong, personal communication, May 28, 2002). Besides sponsorships, promotions, and contests, community marketing in PNG takes the form of charity. Hardly a day passes without at least one newspaper report of corporate generosity, complete with a photograph of company officials presenting oversized mock checks to representatives of local schools, churches, and health organizations. The amounts of these checks are often exceedingly modest, and it is difficult not to remark how cheaply transnational corporations can purchase positive publicity in the PNG media. For example, The National reported on December 8, 1998, that the Salvation Army was concentrating its Christmas food relief efforts on families living at the Baruni garbage dump outside Port Moresby. The article, titled “Coca Cola Gives 10 Cartons for X’mas Hamper,” quoted the Coca-Cola sponsorship coordinator: “This shows that we are helping the community.” Nevertheless, corporate charity is a visible and important part of fundraising for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in PNG, such as the Red Cross, the beneficiary of the annual Miss PNG contest. In this way, community marketing enables companies such as CCA to represent themselves as super-citizens, both discharging the functions of a state too weak to do so itself and supporting the vital efforts of NGOs in direct contact with the neediest of PNG’s population (see Chapter 5). Finally, CCA’s community marketing in PNG, like the company’s marketing worldwide, involves an effort to insert the product into every possible context of consumption, until “you know, it’s there,” as Ira Herbert explained. In 2000, when I returned to PNG after a hiatus of three years, I observed this effort in the form of a pushcart program that enabled vendors to sell cold CCA products at markets and bus stops in major cities such as Port Moresby and Lae as well as along the sides of roads linking these cities to rural areas. Errington and Gewertz (2004, 226) have noted that each of these carts was conspicuously labeled in Tok Pisin as a “Coke

114

Coca-Globalization

Ples.” The phrase can be translated into English as “Coke Place,” but this gloss loses the sense in which ples is the Tok Pisin word for “home.” Both a wage-laborer in town referring to his rural village and a rural villager visiting her neighbor might equally say “Mi go long ples nau” (I am going home now). There is thus something alarming in Errington and Gewertz’s suggestion that “at least according to CCA’s definition of geography, wherever one travels in Papua New Guinea, one either is, or soon will be, at a location that, whatever its local meaning, is a place of Coke.” Clearly, this marketing effort appreciated the “mutability of home” and accepted the challenge of reembedding worldly things in highly localized settings (Chapter 1). Whether Papua New Guineans feel at home in a Coke place is, of course, another question. Advertising During the 1990s, four small Port Moresby-based firms handled the marketing of worldly things—branded global consumer goods—in PNG. These firms—HRD and Savi (which had merged by 2000), Pacific View Multimedia, and Craft Works—also produced print, radio, and television advertising for transnational clients.11 They were all headed by men, expatriate (mostly Australian) creative and managing directors, some of whom had lived and worked in PNG for ten years or more; they employed Papua New Guineans in a variety of capacities, including production and editing as well as acting. Expatriate creative/managing directors often dealt with expatriate marketing managers assigned to PNG on short term contracts, some of whom enjoyed considerable latitude in making decisions about promotional if not thematic advertising. These everyday operating conditions—in which non-Papua New Guineans (white men) created advertisements for Papua New Guinean audiences—bear directly on the question of how cultural producers imagine the people whom they address. This question is particularly relevant to understanding the network of perspectives assembled by products such as soft drinks. For if the particular image of audiences elaborated by producers shapes the products offered to consumers, then this image no less shapes commercial media products such as advertisements broadcast to mass audiences. Indeed, it is this image that discursively constructs “the audience” as a social fact. The virtual absence of market research in Papua New Guinea means that the image of the audience that motivates cultural producers derives in large part from a combination of folk theory and trial-and-error experience.12 In the early to mid-1990s, I sometimes heard advertising agents make unilinear evolutionary claims that Papua New Guinea is where the

A Network of Perspectives

115

United States was in the 1940s or where Australia was in the 1950s. That is, the Papua New Guinean media audience was, by and large, imagined to be unsophisticated, capable of understanding only the most basic and uncomplicated forms of advertising. Some marketing and advertising agents recommended the general strategy of KISS: Keep It Short and Simple (or, as one agent put it, Keep It Simple, Stupid). This recommendation was not restricted to expatriates. For example, a Papua New Guinean commercial artist, who produced print ads for a weekly newspaper, responded to my question about how he might advertise canned mackerel with a sketch of a large tin beneath a single Tok Pisin word, in block capital letters: KISSIM! (Take it!). The philosophy of Keep It Short and Simple requires that ads always plainly say something about the product and issue an unambiguous call to action. Ads should be single-minded and focused, literal statements about the specific product rather than metaphorical stimuli for warm and fuzzy feelings about the brand. Put differently, the KISS approach defines an exceedingly narrow range of attributes (price and taste) within which to qualify products. This tactical requirement of single-mindedness was thought to be especially important when launching new products into the market, products with which potential consumers were likely to be unfamiliar—a not uncommon circumstance in Papua New Guinea. In 1992, for example, an advertisement of epic proportions appeared on EM TV. (In December 2004, when EM TV was acquired by Fiji Television Ltd., the station had an estimated audience of 2.5 million people, and a share of around 38 percent of PNG’s advertising market.) It ran for what seemed like several full minutes—a distinct possibility given the low price of media time in Papua New Guinea.13 The ad, done by Pacific View, was for Maggi chicken stock cubes. It featured protracted demonstrations of how to use the cubes as flavoring for a variety of one-pot stews, to which were added vegetables, tubers, frozen meat pieces (e.g., lamb flaps and chicken parts), and—at a decisive moment—the Maggi stock cube. At this point, the cooking demonstration was interrupted by a dancing chicken, or more precisely, by a person dressed in a chicken costume, the Maggi kakaruk (Tok Pisin for chicken). In short, the ad was nothing less than a visual instructional manual for using chicken bouillon cubes, reinforced by the deployment of demonstration vans giving away free samples in PNG’s towns. Simple but not short, the ad ended by emphasizing the low cost of the cubes which (like Colgate toothpaste) were available in unusually small packages, three cubes for fifteen toea (then about fifteen U.S. cents). According to the ad’s producer, Andrew Johnston of PacificView, it was a tremendous success. And by any account, the extensive spread of Maggi products—especially

116

Coca-Globalization

Maggi instant noodle (ramen) packages—throughout the country over the last ten years has been impressive. Johnston reported receiving a personal letter from a senior executive in Nestlé’s Asia-Pacific region, thanking him for opening up a whole new market. Similar educational ads could still be seen running in 1996. For example, one lengthy television ad for “hair products for the modern woman in PNG” featured step-by-step instructions on how to use shampoo, conditioner, and scalp treatments. At the same time, however, ads were being run in which the product made no appearance at all. One ad for Globe brand meat products showed several squealing piglets, swathed in diapers, frolicking together while a whimsical doo-wop tune played in the background; the only voiceover was the ending jingle: “The trusted brand of PNG.” A skeptical representative of the agency responsible for the ad explained that the client wished to associate his products with the idea of taking care of children. By 1997, Phil Sawyer of HRD could say that advertising for Trukai rice had entered its third generation, and that Papua New Guinean audiences were indeed able to appreciate the latest campaign. A television ad running at the time revealed a bowl of steaming rice only in the final frame, but the images that came before were “heavily branded,” drawing on the well established marketing connection between the Trukai rice and competitive body building. In fact, one agency (Savi) specialized in the production of exactly the sort of “warm and fuzzy” brand enhancing ads that are anathema to the advocates of KISS. These ads were almost always produced overseas, for international clients, and at a high level of technical quality that distinguished them from most other locally produced ads.14 The professed contrast between didactic, literal ads and evocative, metaphorical ads reflected some of the inconsistencies in the discourse through which advertising agents constructed “the PNG audience.” On the one hand, creative and managing directors would insist that Papua New Guineans are brand loyal and brand aware. One director, for example, claimed that logos and mascots were particularly important to consumers. On the other hand, directors would point out that promotions and giveaways succeed because they entice consumers to switch brands or that availability rather than brand loyalty was the crucial determinant of purchases. (Indeed, as an insightful colleague noted, this constant switching to brands that give more away mirrors the strategies of PNG voters who repeatedly switch allegiances to candidates running for elected office, ignoring claims of party loyalty in favor of access to campaign distributions.) A marketing manager responsible for Pepsi soft drinks thus said, with obvious frustration, that getting the product into stores and retail outlets—which often meant supplying refrigeration units—was far more

A Network of Perspectives

117

important than advertising. In fact, by 1997, rival CCA had begun to install vending machines at some of the precious few secure locations around Port Moresby, for example, in the departure lounge at the airport and the lobby of a high-rent apartment building. The contrast between literal and metaphorical ads also reflected the tension, endemic to the advertising business, between the desires and expectations of the client and the expertise and intuition of the ad agency. One executive thus deflected my question about whether Papua New Guineans appreciated “image ads” by pointing out that such ads definitely appealed to many of the corporate clients paying for them. To what do Papua New Guineans aspire? The question is clearly relevant to understanding how a network of perspectives takes shape around consumer goods, including soft drinks; advertisements are among the few media vehicles through which Papua New Guineans can contemplate representations of themselves (especially on broadcast television, which is dominated by foreign programs ranging from Australian soap operas to American situation comedies and police dramas). All the advertising directors with whom I spoke took it for granted that these representations should be aspirational—images of the desirable. These images are often intended to address (and perforce construct) a Papua New Guinean urban middle class, a segment of the population imagined to be relatively small but with the greatest disposable income available for purchasing worldly things. One director, for example, explained that he would never show products being used by people living in an urban settlement—one of the many unofficial makeshift housing clusters that have sprung up around Port Moresby and other towns in PNG. He claimed that, on the other hand, product endorsements by expatriate celebrities no longer carry mimetic force with consumers. Another creative director, however, pointed out that he had no qualms about putting expatriates in ads when they are part of the market for the product being sold, such as bottled water, and perhaps in such cases their presence would provide a stimulus for emulation by some Papua New Guineans. A Papua New Guinean production assistant who had also worked on the bottled water ads said that he enjoyed the project since it promoted a “neutral” product, something that anyone might consume—unlike, for example, products for age- or gender-specific market segments (cigarettes, cosmetics, and so forth). The ideas that marketers entertain about the aspirations of Papua New Guineans affect the ways in which “culture”—custom or tradition (kastam in Tok Pisin)—is or is not represented in ads. For example, a Pepsi marketing manager summarized his sense of the audience’s aspirations with the assertion that people living in villages aspired to the lifestyles of people

118

Coca-Globalization

living in towns. Accordingly, he was not interested in making ads in Tok Pisin, or in portraying people in traditional dress or in village settings. He specifically dismissed one television ad in which an Asaro mudman drank Pepsi as simply “not real” and “unpersuasive.” The Asaro mudmen are masked dancers from the Goroka area, well known in PNG and popular among foreign tourists for their costumed performances. Whereas the use of Asaro mudmen in commercial advertising has engendered controversy over rights to cultural property and respect for indigenous traditions (Otto and Verloop 1996), the objection here was differently motivated: qualifying Pepsi-Cola as Papua New Guinean was a flawed marketing strategy. To some extent, this objection was a pointed reaction to the previous marketing manager’s strategy of localizing Pepsi—with the long running slogan “It’s Pepsi in PNG.” The new manager claimed that Pepsi was from America, not PNG, and that Papua New Guineans not only knew this fact, but also accepted it without prejudice. There was no need, he continued, to “flog nationalism” to Papua New Guineans; marketing Pepsi as a sign of an American—that is, modern, cosmopolitan—lifestyle might equally provoke national self-consciousness. Papua New Guineans are comfortable with the fact that they share consumer tastes and habits with people in Australia or the United States (implicitly, the people whom Papua New Guineans in towns aspire to be).15 While this sort of awareness might not be typical of the masses, it was thought to be typical of the market segment that the new manager hoped to address, namely, the relatively small group of mostly young consumers who were able to make choices about the beverages they consumed, including both soft drinks and alcoholic drinks (since Pepsi was bottled by South Pacific Brewery). This was the same small upscale group that was targeted in ads for new lines of beer, such as Niugini Ice, that featured a handsome couple, attractively outfitted, drinking beers in upscale lounge settings. Here, he explained, was a woman doing something that her mother never could have done—enjoying a beer, and in a public place no less. Other advertising directors were much more open to the representation of tradition and custom in ads, by which they usually referred to images of traditional dress (bilas in Tok Pisin), songs, and dances. For example, one creative director aimed to produce images of an “authentic” or “grassroots” PNG, images mainly associated with rural village life. One series of his television ads for a regional airline thus featured spectacular aerial shots— taken from a camera mounted to the tail wing of a small prop plane—of takeoffs and landings at some of the remote, hair-raising grass airstrips serviced by the airline. The tagline of the ads was, “When you want to see the real PNG. . . . ” Similarly, this director insisted on a degree of authenticity

A Network of Perspectives

119

when representing traditionally dressed performers, such as in ads announcing the sponsorship of regional cultural shows by a transnational tobacco corporation. Performers were not represented wearing any Western clothing; bras and wristwatches, for example, were not shown. However, in cases where female performers preferred to wear breast coverings, they might replace their bras with tapa cloth—even if the tapa cloth was associated with an ethnic or regional culture other than that of the performers themselves or if the resultant assemblage of traditional dress amounted to a generic invention. The definition of tradition at work here was, in effect, a negative one; tradition amounts to what remains after all traces of modern/Western material culture are removed. This particular creative director, when asked if he thought that the use of custom and tradition for commercial purposes might offend some viewers, responded by saying that, on the contrary, such advertising might even contribute toward the preservation and revitalization of tradition for future generations. While I have no doubt that this director’s sense of authentic traditional culture was motivated by nothing but affection and respect for local culture, other expats involved in marketing and advertising took a more cynical view. One claimed, in particular, that the representation of tradition in the form of bare-breasted women was an instance of “expat perv,” little more than a poor excuse for soft pornography directed at expatriates. The comment usefully reminds us how agents on the supply side imagine not only prospective consumers, but also other rival agents involved in the qualification of competing products. The search for authenticity and locality in advertising did not always lead to a stark choice between full-blown representations of Western modernity and colorful images of bird-of-paradise plumes and nubile women. For example, a marketing and events manager for Coca-Cola Amatil explained that he tried to represent a hybrid urban youth culture that he observed around him in Port Moresby and other PNG towns. A key feature of this hybrid culture was its distinctive form of Tok Pisin, replete with English words and slang neologisms. So, for example, when confronted with the task of translating a Coca-Cola jingle into Tok Pisin from the “Always” global ad campaign, this manager sought to communicate “attitude” with the slang word, kusai. The words “Whenever there’s a pool, there’s always a flirt” were thus rendered as “Sapos i gat graunwara, kusai bai plenti tru” (“If there’s a pool, there’s a lot of kusai”).16 Kusai describes someone acting a little crazy—not quite showing off, but performing in over-the-top fashion—for example, jamming on an “air guitar” like a histrionic rock star. What is worth emphasizing about this perspective, however, is how it at once recognizes and creates a creolized blend of

120

Coca-Globalization

indigenous and exogenous symbolic forms and practices. It neither rejects all markers of locality—including, of course, Tok Pisin, itself a creolized language—nor projects a version of tradition purged of visibly Western elements. Instead, like the perspective of the NAU FM manager, this perspective conjures up something imagined to be new and different—a kind of local globality, perhaps—emerging in and spreading through the towns of PNG but rapidly making its way into rural villages, too. As this CCA manager observed, referring to his fellow Papua New Guineans, “We move around.” The creolizing, domesticating impulse manifest in certain Coca-Cola advertisements was no doubt in part a function of the brand’s historic associations with “tradition” and in part a market position vis-à-vis PepsiCola’s longstanding self-qualification as a pro-modern, antitraditional brand. In any case, the impulse took creative shape in commercial media representations of the actual urban contexts in which Papua New Guineans consumed soft drinks. For example, during its promotion in connection with the 2000 Olympic Games, CCA also launched the “Caught Red Handed” campaign. Members of the company’s sales division would scout around the Port Moresby area for people drinking five-hundred-milliliter bottles of Coke. Individuals who were spotted would be given a promotional T-shirt, and their photograph (posing with a CCA sales representative) would appear in the newspaper as an advertisement with the deliberate look of a news story. One photo featured a somewhat timid looking unnamed woman receiving a shirt from the hands of a CCA sales supervisor. Its caption read, “This young lass was caught Red-handed with her favourite drink 500 ml Coke at Waigani Second Hand Clothes Market.” The photo situates the young woman’s consumption in a recognizable but homely setting—an open-air market for used clothes; a setting readers would perhaps find more familiar and plausible than aspirational and inspiring. These images recalled a much more elaborate print and television advertising campaign that ran in 1997 and featured a University of Papua New Guinea theater arts student as the intrepid on-the-scene reporter, Derek Dawk. In the television ads, Dawk survives various humorous mishaps in his efforts to report on a new phenomenon—the then newly introduced five-hundred-milliliter PET bottles of Coca-Cola. The print campaign took the form of ersatz newspaper reports, columns of text and a photo beneath a headline all contained within a fine-lined box and marked in small print with the word “advertisement.” More than a dozen of these faux news items appeared, with stories and photos from around the country. Many depicted situations that had a distinctively local flavor,

A Network of Perspectives

121

including some that referred to PNG’s notorious problems of “law and order.” For example, beneath the headline “Smuggling Tip-Off a Hoax,” ran a story that began “Mount Hagen police surprised a Hevi Lift charter and its crew when they flashed search warrants to strip the plane for smuggled arms.” Instead of finding arms, the police discover a cache of cartons of five-hundred-milliliter bottles of Coca-Cola, which were selling at “an alarming rate.” Another similar story, from Central Province, was headlined, “PMV truck caught at Roadblock!” Yet another story announced the opening of a new trade store by the playfully named successful businessman, “Mr. Opina Sto.” All the ads in this campaign were humorous and whimsical, and all featured photos of ordinary Papua New Guineans holding Coke bottles in poses staged for the “news” story. Many ads represented the consumption of Coke as an inherently social activity, enjoyed in the company of others. Fictional families picnicked together with Coke; a mother rewarded her children with Coke bought at a roadside stand (Coke Ples); a golf champion accepted two cartons of Coke instead of a trophy, claiming that while the trophy would only gather dust on a shelf, the Coke could be shared with his family and friends at a feast to welcome the victor back home. This emphasis on the social context of consumption—no doubt a deliberate contrast with brand Pepsi’s uncompromising individualism—was even more evident in a television ad running about the same time. The ad depicted an older woman wearing a Mother Hubbard blouse and carrying a string bag (bilum)—dress marked as neither radically “traditional” nor self-evidently “modern”—buying a two-liter Coke bottle and bringing it home. There she served it (implausibly, to my eyes) in coconut half shells to people seated at a table. This ad was unusual, however, in depicting the consumption of Coke inside the home—a mode of consumption rarely seen in advertisements in PNG. But it was completely in line with the candid reflections of Ira Herbert on marketing soft drinks: “The trick to selling Coca-Cola is to get it into the house, because it will move out. A case will move out of the house practically as fast as a sixpack if it’s there . . . So the trick is to have consumers stock an inventory—to increase how often they drink and how much they drink and when they drink it . . . If I get a twoliter in that house, it’s gone. Especially if it’s a house with kids” (Herbert 1996, 14). While the Pepsi marketing manager felt that “flogging nationalism” was inappropriate for his flagship product, other creative directors had few qualms about addressing their audience as a national audience or, in other words, using an appeal to nationality as a device for selling a product (see Foster 2002).17 Local clients often specifically request this strategy in the

122

Coca-Globalization

briefs that they provide to advertising agencies. For example, a television ad for a popular brand of tinned meat, Ox and Palm, attempted to induce a certain national nostalgia, drawing upon the brand’s longtime presence in the country. Both client and advertiser thus implicitly constructed an audience with a shared product history and memory. The ad, moreover, included representations of the diversity of the country—highlands and islands, towns and villages, and so forth, all unified by the consumption of the same brand: “The best bully beef in PNG. It’s made right here in PNG.” In fact, imagining PNG as a diverse, multicultural nation provides advertisers with a ready-made way of projecting the country to its citizens, namely, through visual forms that combine images of people or places conventionally recognized as belonging to a certain ethnic group or a certain geographical region. This strategy was commonly used in the early 1990s in producing station identification tags for EM TV, sixty second sequences set to stirring music (including the national anthem) that summoned an imagined community—the national audience of the one and only broadcast television station in PNG. Advertising agents in Papua New Guinea struggled with the challenge of addressing an audience (and representing that audience to itself) that they imagined to be ethnically and linguistically diverse in the most extreme sense of the word, as well as largely unable to read. A creative director explained to me, for example, how he had approached the brand manager for Mirinda, an orange-flavored soft drink in the PepsiCo portfolio of brands, with the suggestion that ads then running overseas would be “brilliant” for use in PNG. These ads featured three mime performers, known as the Blue Man Group, uniformly dressed in black; in the ads, however, the bald heads and clean-shaven faces of the performers were painted not their standard shiny blue but, instead, orange. No words were spoken in the ad; the only sound heard was a straw going into a can and the words, “Ahhhhhh, Mirinda”: “What a perfect visual for PNG! It doesn’t matter what language you spoke, and what color or creed you were, because these were orange men.” The ads thus transcended the famous linguistic and ethnic diversity of PNG, a country of over eight hundred different languages and correspondingly wide cultural variation. A television advertisement for Shell gasoline, featured every night during the six o’clock news, similarly ran without narration but was accompanied by a dynamic theme song with a pulsating electric bass guitar. The ad was an apparent semiotic attempt to nationalize and corporatize the bodies of various athletes—swimmers, runners, soccer players, weight lifters— by dressing them in uniforms of red, black, and gold, the colors of both the PNG national flag and the advertising schemes and logos of Shell gasoline

A Network of Perspectives

123

(see Foster 2002). In this ad, the issue of ethnic diversity was subsumed within a representation of PNG as a nation of fit, competitive athletes, all belonging to the same team. In other ads, however, the question of representation presents certain difficulties, especially given the dictates of “capitalist realism,” in which actors portray not individuals but, rather, archetypes.18 One creative director claimed to try to include actors that appear to come from different regions within the country whenever possible. He showed me one of the few music videos he had produced as an example. As we watched, a Papua New Guinean production assistant commented on the various female dancers: “She’s Trobriand; she’s Kerema; she’s Goroka.” Ultimately, decisions about regional/ethnic representation hinge on the nature of the product. A television commercial for a brand of ice cream available at the time only in the Highlands was accordingly shot with Highlands-looking actors in a recognizably Highlands setting. Another creative director said that he preferred to portray a “generic” Papua New Guinean look, paying more attention to representing lifestyles than regional/ethnic diversity. Sometimes this search for a “generic” look is motivated by the desire to use the ad in a regional market that includes not only PNG but also Vanuatu and Fiji. If this “generic” look often seems to favor light-skinned, straight-haired (so-called mixed race) Papua New Guineans, it is often as a result of the client’s specific requests. I was told a revealing story about how an ad for a particular brand of milk, which included several actors with the conventional look of Highlanders, was rejected by the Australian-based representative of a transnational company on the grounds that people in the ad were “ugly.” Here, as in the case of brand enhancing “image ads,” a client’s prejudices about his company or the product inflect the ways in which advertisers represent Papua New Guineans to Papua New Guineans, in some cases contravening the advertisers’ own sense of what counts as a locally appropriate and persuasive representation. A disjunction or misalignment within the network of perspectives between differently situated cultural producers thus has potential ramifications for the perspectives taken up by other actors elsewhere in the network, especially Papua New Guineans consuming images of themselves circulating through commercial mass media. These disjunctions or misalignments can also occur when global clients deliver briefs to PNG advertising and marketing companies based on the client’s marketing experience in other developing countries, such as countries in sub-Saharan Africa. (For example, Benson and Hedges sponsored concert tours in Africa—where Louis Armstrong toured on behalf of Pepsi International in the 1950s—before pursuing the strategy in PNG in 1997.) Such large clients, I was told by one advertising agent, often show

124

Coca-Globalization

no inclination toward customizing or localizing ads, although they might be open to slight non-thematic modifications. Another long-time creative/managing director remarked to me that, while he used to argue with such clients, he now believes that global advertising, with slight modifications such as in pattern ads, can work in PNG.19 Advertising agents in PNG engage in acts of self-censorship in order to prevent disjunctions in the network of perspectives that entangles them and the audience that they address. Most advertising agents would readily agree that Papua New Guineans are deeply conservative and highly sensitive with respect to two topics in particular: religion and sex. These concerns are not, in my view, unwarranted. Consider this letter from Alu K. Taliko of Port Moresby to the editor of the Post-Courier, published on December 10, 1997: “An advertisement by Globe [for its brand of cooking oil] uses the slogan ‘A marriage made in heaven’ which is very disgusting. The first marriage I know of is that of Adam and Eve (Gen 2:22) by God. I’ve never read in any of the 66 books in the Bible where God arranged a marriage in heaven between a chicken and a cooking oil.” Whence charges of blasphemy might ensue can never be fully anticipated in PNG. Advertisers try to avoid charges of not only blasphemy, but also pornography. They worry more, however, about immodest “modern” dress for women than about the bare breasts and penis sheaths associated with “traditional” garb. I was thus shown by a marketing manager two versions of a print ad for a line of premium beer, one of which depicted an attractive woman seated on a barstool wearing a tiny, tight miniskirt. This version of the ad was never released, but instead replaced by one in which the same model sits in a more modest business suit with knee-length skirt. Another creative director said that he avoided images of any romantic display between men and women. It would be acceptable to depict men walking hand in hand with other men, a public display of friendship, but not men and women walking hand in hand. In this regard, a male university student from the Highlands complained to me about a particular television ad in which a young man carried his girlfriend on his shoulders, a posture that the student regarded with utter disgust. Nevertheless, there seems to be evidence of more attempts to expand the limits of using sexuality than to sell products by invoking God or religion. A television ad for Lux soap, for example, caused a stir by depicting a lathered young lady in her shower, as did the depiction of a young woman wearing jeans in a Pepsi ad. And images of male bodies—maximally muscled and minimally clothed—abound in commercial advertising connected in one way or another with the promotion of fitness and, more specifically, body building. These images of male bodies have not, to my

A Network of Perspectives

125

knowledge, attracted any public criticism, and creative directors apparently use them without hesitation, thereby qualifying the products so advertised as strong and healthful. Consuming How do Papua New Guineans receive and perceive the advertisements that are addressed to them? How do they qualify and consume the worldly things that are marketed to them? What are their perspectives—explicit and implicit—on the perspectives that motivate the advertisers and marketers of consumer goods? Answers to these questions sometimes suggest radical disjunctions in the network of perspectives that form around the movement of commodities in PNG, disjunctions motivated by profound differences in cultural orientation among actors assembled by the network. For example, Jerry Jacka (2001) reports how the discovery of a case of empty but unopened cans of Coca-Cola at a new supermarket in a rough Highlands mining town led to the performance of a healing ritual that had not been undertaken in over thirty years. Clan elders reasoned that ancestral spirits, hungry for the offerings that had previously been made on the site of the new supermarket, had consumed the Coke (and possibly some tins of meat and fish). In order to remedy the situation and to prevent further consumption of “white people’s food” (one tomo in the local vernacular), clan elders sacrificed pigs beside the supermarket, the blood of which flowed into the ground, sending the ancestors back whence they had come. This sacrifice—the first made since widespread conversion to Christianity in the 1960s—demonstrated ongoing claims to the land on which the supermarket was situated and perforce claims to future compensation for its use. From the perspective of the mining company, however, the event was simply a manifestation of superstitious belief, described in the official community newsletter as a feast to drive away evil spirits and ensure the prosperity of the supermarket business. Jacka argues that company officials thus failed to appreciate how local people appropriated Coca-Cola, perhaps the preeminent worldly thing, to articulate claims for compensation in the local vernacular of gift exchange. Ancestral spirits are not the only ones consuming Coca-Cola and other branded soft drinks in Papua New Guinea. Through the 1990s, soft drink bottlers announced that Papua New Guineans were consuming more and more soft drinks, at least in aggregate; happy evidence of a convergence of interests and alignment of perspectives in the soft drink commodity network. In its 1995 annual report, CCA described Papua New Guinea as “a

126

Coca-Globalization

great success story,” noting a 13 percent increase in sales volume and 16 percent increase in trading profit. Halfway through 1996, CCA reported itself extremely pleased with “strong double digit growth in sales volume” and a 20 percent increase in trading profit, which doubled the following year. Similarly, SP Holdings announced in April 1997 a before tax profit of 25 million kina (approximately U.S. $18.5 million). The company’s general manager, Mr. Tan Ang Meng, explained the 8.9 percent increase in profits over the previous year despite the liquor bans declared in many provinces of the country: “Our result of the last financial year was affected by the ongoing prohibition in the Highlands. However, growth in soft drinks is very encouraging and managed to offset the downturn in beer sales” (“SP Holdings Posts K25m Profit” 1997). Although it is difficult to measure this increase in consumption accurately, urban household surveys carried out in the 1980s suggest that expenditures on soft drinks already accounted for as much as 7 percent of all food and beverage purchases (Gibson 1995). Through 1999 and 2000, CCA could claim growth in its sales volume in PNG, largely due to increased availability, despite a dampening in consumer demand caused by price increases resulting from the depreciation of the PNG kina and high inflation. CCA also increased its capital expenditure in PNG, investing in cold drink equipment following its acquisition of Schweppes brands and the withdrawal of PepsiCo brands from the country. Similarly, the annual report of Asia Pacific Brewery for 1999 admitted that depreciation and inflation were putting pressure on its Pepsi brand sales in PNG, but also noted that several other soft drinks bottled by SP Holdings (including Mirinda and the Schweppes brands) held the number one position in their markets. In 2001, however, and for the next two years, CCA reported a decline in trading profits for PNG, the result of a decline in the value of the kina and an increase in the costs per unit case due to inflation. Exact figures for sales volume are not readily available, since the CCA annual reports bundle the figures for Oceania (PNG, Fiji, and New Zealand), but in 2001, the decline in profits from PNG was great enough to offset gains in New Zealand and Fiji. How can we account for the growth in soft drink consumption in PNG, at least before the post-2001 economic crisis? My own survey suggests that growth in soft drink consumption accompanies the proliferation of new contexts for food and beverage consumption outside the home. I conducted the survey with the assistance of a class of journalism students from the University of Papua New Guinea in July 1997. Sixty-nine people (fortysix male, twenty-three female) in the Port Moresby area were interviewed about their soft drink preferences and consumption habits; their ages ranged from six to sixty, but 58 percent were between the ages of twenty

A Network of Perspectives

127

and twenty-nine. University students were heavily represented, but this circumstance allowed for participation of respondents from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and from regions throughout the country. Survey responses indicate that soft drink consumption is part of a whole range of social transformations that involve the emergence of scheduled consumption contexts associated with wage-labor—contexts such as “lunch” or “work break.” More generally, soft drink consumption is one dimension of a new urban lifestyle that routinizes the consumption of food outside the home—with or without meals in restaurants or at snack bars, at school, or in the marketplace. Survey participants infrequently indicated that they drank soft drinks at home, where many said they preferred to drink water. Instead, soft drink consumption occurred in the context of shopping, lunching with fellow workers or students, “spinning” (pleasure outings), or attending sporting events. Most soft drink consumption therefore occurred in the presence of others—with others also consuming—as a manifestly extra-household social activity. It was fitting, then, to read a report published in the Post-Courier on December 29, 1997, “Soft Drink Demand ‘Always’ a Problem at Christmas Time,” that claimed soft drink demand was five times greater during the Christmas season than at any other time of the year—not an unlikely result of the intensified demands of holiday sociality, often funded by urban wage laborers visiting their rural homes. Little of this will come as unexpected to readers of Sidney Mintz’s book, Sweetness and Power. Mintz described therein how the eating habits of the working poor in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain were transformed by increasing sucrose consumption (especially in the form of stimulating hot beverages such as sweetened tea). Much of his description seems directly pertinent to contemporary soft drink consumption in Papua New Guinea, including the way in which soft drink consumption is often seen as the natural complement of high-calorie fast food consumption (the equivalent of an English worker’s jam on bread). Thus the justification given on the survey by one twenty-five-year-old woman, a secretary at Telikom, for her preference for Coke: “Coke is more preferable [sic] because it helps to dissolve unnecessary fat in the body. After taking greasy and fatty food, I take Coke, coz it helps break down the fat. That’s why I like Coke [more] than other drinks. Other drinks are too soft for me.” Or, as another twenty-six-year-old woman answered the question of when she usually drank soft drinks: “When I am having Big Rooster”—Port Moresby’s humble answer to Kentucky Fried Chicken. I must point out that many Papua New Guineans involved in the survey emphasized that they consumed soft drinks in contexts in which no other

128

Coca-Globalization

choice was available to them: away from home in public spaces devoid of drinking fountains. But much like the people Mintz wrote about, many Papua New Guineans explicitly described soft drinks as a cheap food substitute: “I can just drink Coke and go without food for lunch,” or “It makes me feel full when I’m hungry.” A thirty-five-year-old security guard from Mt. Hagen working in Port Moresby told me that when he drank Coke, he felt amamas (“happy” in Tok Pisin). Why? “Taim mi hangre, mi pulap tru!” (“When I am hungry, it really fills me up!”) There is no denying, then, that certain material constraints are shaping the emerging patterns of soft drink consumption in Port Moresby. At the same time, there is no denying that urban Papua New Guineans are using soft drinks as material supports for the creation and recreation of social intimacy (especially intimacy among men). The same security guard, when I asked about his strongly stated preference for Coke over Pepsi, responded after a few seconds not by comparing the tastes of the two colas, but by telling me about how he would play darts with other men, each contributing twenty toea (less than ten U.S. cents in 1997) to the pot in a friendly competition to win Cokes. Responses to a survey question asking when the last time the participant had a soft drink often took the form of this one from a forty-two-year-old unemployed man from Bundi, in the mountains of Madang Province: “The last time I had a soft drink was 2 days ago. I drank a bottle of Coke. I drank it at the bus stop at 6 mile while waiting for the bus. I was standing with one of the guys whom I used to work with. He had bet on a winning horse. So, when he saw me, he went into the shop, bought two bottles of Coke and came and gave one to me.” Or this one, from a twenty-year-old anthropology student from Koroba, in the Southern Highlands: “The last time I had a soft drink was on 27-07-97 [3 days earlier]. I had a Coke. It was for lunch. At about 1PM at Erima [a settlement in Port Moresby]. I wasn’t alone. I was with 2 other boys who brought me the Coke and others attending a funeral were there as well. Actually, the guys bought the Cokes. I had half of each bottle.” I had half of each bottle. Similar instances of sharing soft drinks, as well as buying them for others, were common enough that some survey participants explained why they acted otherwise. Thus, an anthropology student from Manus reported that she had the day before drunk one of the newly introduced five-hundred-milliliter bottles of Coke at lunch time: “I had it all and I was definitely alone coz I didn’t want to share.” A twenty-three-year-old art student from Madang confessed, “When I’m drinking Coke, I hate to share my drink, because I always have this fear of my colleague/friend could use it to make puripuri [sorcery]. If a friend buys a drink, I buy it for him if I have enough. Otherwise I say, sorry

A Network of Perspectives

129

I can’t share my drink. I’m thirsty. Really, [inside of me] I’m scared to death of puripuri.” Here, then, is the Melanesia we anthropologists all know and love, land of compulsive reciprocity and threats of sorcery. Put differently, here is the Melanesia in which foreign imports are revalued in terms of domestic agendas, where within the material constraints of tight budgets stretched by the cheap calories of a Coke, other projects are accomplished. But in an important way, this is not the Melanesia we all know and love; the sociocultural contexts in which urban Papua New Guineans appropriate a foreign import such as Coke or Pepsi differ from the contexts in which the Papua New Guinean villagers of most ethnographies appropriate such imports. In Port Moresby, the context in which Coke is consumed is often, like the bottle of Coke itself—indeed, like the very space of the city—an artifact of the spread of capitalism and its temporal routines: “lunch” or “snack time” or “weekend.”20 In other words, the perspectives on the product held by consumers in Port Moresby are likely to differ from perspectives held by other otherwise situated consumers in PNG; these perspectives imply qualifications that vary as a product makes its way through the network of agents it assembles and, with more or less success, holds together. Although little market research has been conducted in PNG (especially rural PNG) by either anthropologists or commercial firms, the ethnographic record does afford occasional insight into the perspectives that some Papua New Guineans have taken on the marketing efforts of CocaCola Amatil and SP Holdings, the former Pepsi franchise holder. Given the preoccupations of anthropologists, these insights bear mainly upon the perspectives of Papua New Guineans on representations of “culture” or “tradition” promoted and circulated by soft drink bottlers. For example, Gewertz and Errington (1996) have discussed reactions to the Pepsi-sponsored television program, Fizz, on the part of Chambri youths and elders living in a settlement on the edge of the East Sepik provincial town of Wewak in 1994. The music videos—like the one I saw six years later in Tanga—were interrupted by a commercial that proclaimed “a Papua New Guinea variant of PepsiCo’s internationally proclaimed message”: “All over this nation there’s a growing relation . . . as the young at heart . . . while working or playing [learn that] nothing stays the same again . . . [Pepsi] is the choice of the new generation, the voice of the new generation . . . [It’s] the sign of the new generation, the time of the new generation . . . Let your feelings show . . . drink Pepsi, PNG, [yes] Pepsi, PNG” (Gewertz and Errington 1996, 478). The commercial depicted a variety of “types” of Papua New Guineans drinking Pepsi—from young men and women dancing

130

Coca-Globalization

on a yacht or at a disco to a hard-hatted construction worker to a boy gazing at his village off in the distance to the aforementioned Asaro mudmen, seeking a moment of refreshment in the course of their cultural performance. Together the images amounted to an unambiguous juxtaposition of tradition and modernity, rural and urban, tribal and cosmopolitan. Chambri viewers, according to Gewertz and Errington, expressed neither unease nor anxiety with regard to these polarities, but instead seemed to embrace the ad’s democratic promise that the pleasures of consumption were available to everyone in PNG. While the younger Chambri notably endorsed the ad’s portrayal of a world of personal choice, in which one’s subjective identity took shape as a result of individual experiences and feelings and freely entered relationships, senior Chambri also approved the ad: “Indeed, senior Chambri [men] often praised Pepsi Fizz because it helped young people to learn their culture and to value that culture” (Gewertz and Errington 1996, 479). (This particular view thus aligns with the pro-tradition perspective of at least some expatriate advertising directors, but not with that of the marketing manager who explicitly criticized the image of Asaro mudmen drinking Pepsi.) That is, senior men regarded both the ad and other videos that similarly juxtaposed images of traditional warriors with modern music performers as a compelling synthesis of past and present, while junior men felt a positive nostalgia for images of tradition that they imagined as left behind in the village. Gewertz and Errington’s friend, research assistant, and informant, Godfried Kolly, exemplifies the positive Chambri response to the commercial use of images of tradition and clarifies how such images might intersect with the perspectives that Papua New Guineans adopt on both their actual and ideal selves. Godfried had toured Europe in 1990 with a group called the Sepik Performers, and the experience of educating foreign audiences about his traditions—for example, his ceremonial dress (bilas)— prompted him to seek official certification as a “cultural actor.” Such certification, he thought, would enable him to apply for sponsorships of his group from companies such as Pepsi (which, Godfried knew, sponsored Fizz) and Arnott’s Biscuits, which had produced and distributed a promotional calendar for its line of Paradise biscuits, a calendar that Godfried highly appreciated:21 “Featured on the calendar and representing the Arnott’s Biscuits product line was a bare-breasted young native woman in traditional finery. She was painted in a design of extensive tattoos and wore a feather headdress and grass skirt. Holding a cracker in one hand, she gestured with the other toward an array of multicolored, cellophane-wrapped products of Arnott’s Biscuits. It was as though she were offering something for every Papua New Guinean taste.” Godfried, according to Errington and

A Network of Perspectives

131

Gewertz (1996, 116), regarded the young woman pictured on the calendar as just the sort of cultural actor that he aspired to be. Here was a fortuitous conjunction or alignment in the network of perspectives that, although most likely unintended by the company that distributed the promotional calendars, brought culture and commerce into a single frame of reference. At the same time, it is important to emphasize the disjunctions that Godfried’s perspective implies. Unlike the anthropologists, Godfried did not worry about the commodification of tradition; on the contrary, he actively sought commercial sponsorship for his cultural performances. Similarly, unlike cultural purists who might object to bras and wristwatches, Godfried was not haunted by specters of inauthenticity (see Jolly 1992). He saw nothing untraditional, for example, about wearing loincloths made from bright yellow packages of Spear brand tobacco while performing for Western tourists. In this regard, Godfried reflected an indigenous understanding of tradition as a process of constant innovation that especially involved importation of resources capable of sustaining and augmenting one’s own collective powers. (In this regard, Godfried might find common ground with the CCA media manager so attuned to the hybrid developments of contemporary urban youth culture in PNG.) Nor did Godfried think anything culturally suspicious about the young woman on the biscuit calendar, despite the protest by the anthropologists that she was an invented tradition—a cultural composite made up of decorative signifiers drawn from different and disparate regional and ethnic repertoires. Godfried countered by identifying not only the woman’s specific cultural group, but also her precise village. His perception was like those of other Chambri: “although no two people named the same culture (suggestions ranged from ones in the Gulf to ones in New Ireland Province), all insisted she was a traditionally attired member of the particular culture they had specified” (Errington and Gewertz 1996, 116). Eric Hirsch’s (2004) discussion of the photos that his Fuyuge-speaking friend, Alphonse Hega, composed and shot for entry into a Coca-Cola Amatil-sponsored competition also sheds light on the perspectives that Papua New Guineans take on themselves and on the perspectives of other people to whom they imagine themselves connected in a translocal commodity network. One of these photos had been selected as a winning entry and used to illustrate the company’s promotional calendar for 1998.22 Alphonse Hega’s pictures (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2) depicted a senior man (Donato, Alphonse’s kinsman) dressed entirely in traditional adornment and surrounded entirely by traditional artifacts—with the salient exception of the contoured five-hundred-milliliter Coke bottle in Donato’s hand

132

Coca-Globalization

Figure 4.1 Alphonse Hega’s winning entry for the 1998 Coca-Cola PNG national calendar competition. Photograph by Alphonse Hega (see Hirsch 2004).

and net bag, or the cardboard cartons of Coca-Cola placed at the foot of Donato’s hammock, on which he reclined drinking a can of Coke. As Hirsch notes and Hega himself recognized, the format of these pictures is a familiar one—the gently shocking juxtaposition of tradition and modernity familiar from numerous soft drink ads in PNG; in short, the motif of radical heterogeneity that I have identified with the film, The Gods Must be Crazy and, more generally, with the aesthetics of fetishism. The format was chosen deliberately to create an appropriate impression on the judges and to compete effectively in what Hega imagined as a competition among “cultures,” as he put it (Hirsch 2004, 28). Hega’s entry was thus part of a larger effort to represent his culture in a positive manner and, more specifically, to dispute and dispel the reputation of the Fuyuge (and all residents of the Goilala District outside Port Moresby) as criminals and gang members (raskols in Tok Pisin). Hega, who as a young man participated in

A Network of Perspectives

133

Figure 4.2 Alphonse Hega’s second entry for the 1998 Coca-Cola PNG national calendar competition. Photograph by Alphonse Hega (see Hirsch 2004).

church-sponsored campaigns to steer village youth away from Port Moresby’s gang life, would read such descriptions of the Goilala in the national newspapers, when he could obtain copies. Put differently, Hega was concerned with publicizing local Fuyuge culture translocally, with eliciting a positive evaluation of his culture vis-à-vis other distinct cultures in Papua New Guinea and, perhaps, beyond. Like Godfried Kolly, Alphonse Hega engaged with the perspectives of people over the horizon, people whom he imagined but with whom he did not interact in his immediate local setting. Unlike Kolly, however, Hega regarded his culture as a bounded entity that ought to be preserved and insulated against the incursions of other people’s culture—especially white people—such as the infiltration of “disco” style (string band) music into traditional performances. His perspective thus was more in line with that of cultural purists such as the advertising director who did not want to mix wristwatches and grass skirts in the same image (or, for that matter, the marketing manager who found no use in mixing traditional and modern imagery in Pepsi ads). Hega’s perspective also diverged from that of another Fuyuge man, Kol, who asked Hirsch to take a photograph of him (Kol) posed exactly as he aspired to appear: standing stiffly at attention and looking directly at the camera, dressed in a collared shirt and long trousers and wearing what looks like a beret—a disposition that recalls not traditional culture but rather the

134

Coca-Globalization

discipline and punishment meted out by colonial patrol officers lining up village residents for the annual head count. Hirsch (2004, 36) points out that the winning photograph appears to suggest that worldly things such as Coca-Cola are at home or reembedded in Hega’s local experiences. In this view, the message of the photograph recalls the words of the Pepsi ad that Chambri viewers enjoyed watching. But Hega’s view of “culture” and cultural authenticity suggest otherwise. Unlike Godfried Kolly, Alphonse Hega worried deeply about commodification and inauthenticity. If there were any value in the format of Hega’s photos for expressing his view, it might lie in the stark contrast of local and foreign, juxtaposed but obviously and irreducibly alien to each other (see Foster 2002, 50–51). If not, then Hega’s photograph must be regarded as a compromised response to the rare opportunity presented by the CCA calendar competition—a chance to further his project of portraying Fuyuge (Goilala) culture in a positive light to his fellow Papua New Guineans. Hega, Hirsch says, “can only make use of what he has at his disposal” (2004, 36). Thus the very terms in which he presents his perspective on his culture to other actors in the network of perspectives—the terms required to make Fuyuge culture legible—risk that his perspective will be miscommunicated, subsumed (or co-opted) within the interests and intentions of promoting the sale and consumption of carbonated soft drinks in Papua New Guinea. While the Chambri response to the “Pepsi in PNG” commercial bespoke the possibility of a worldly thing becoming reembedded in local experience, Hega’s view of culture led him to regard worldly things as, so to speak, other-worldly. A similar divergence in perspectives was evident in the reactions to advertisements for soft drinks running on PNG television in the late 1990s. These reactions were recorded in the 1997 survey, which asked specifically about two ads, one for Pepsi and one for Coke, informed by the dictates of global marketing campaigns. Local renditions of a single global marketing campaign are intended to produce a sense of familiarity such that one would recognize a Coke commercial in Colombia and a Coke commercial in Holland as variations on a single theme (Chapter 3). As Marcio Moreira, former head of InterNational Team, put it, “Becoming part of people’s lives, belonging, is the name of the game” (O’Barr 1989, 5). How was this game played in PNG? In answering this question, we meet again the twin conceits of soft drink executives operating in the Asia-Pacific region, namely, that soft drinks are affordable items of Western provenance, and that the desire for “all things Western” is itself to be taken for granted. This first conceit has some merit to it; as Sidney Mintz (personal communication, March 20,

A Network of Perspectives

135

1997) notes, products like Coke and Pepsi are notably “democratic” in character. They combine recognizability as specific trademarked forms of sweetness with relatively low price (at least until the devaluation and decline of the PNG kina). Andy Warhol was, somewhat earlier, also keenly aware of this aspect of consumer democracy: “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking” (1975, 100–101). Warhol’s words, incidentally, were displayed with apparent approval to visitors at the old World of CocaCola in Atlanta—minus the final sentence. The second conceit about desire for Western goods, however, has dubious merit, despite its infiltration of Melanesianist anthropology through the post–World War II fascination with cargo cults. As Lamont Lindstrom suggests, writings about cargo cults are allegories that effectively normalize a definition of desire as unremitting and never fully satisfied—the sort of desire appropriate to Goizueta’s vision of infinity. This normalization subverts the manifest effect of cargo writings in depicting cargo cultists as radically alien. It is, in fact, just the opposite: “We are all cargo cultists in that we wait eternally for an end to desire that will not end. The Melanesian cultist merely reads our lines” (Lindstrom 1995, 56). And these lines include “Olgeta Taim Coca-Cola” (“Always Coca-Cola” in Tok Pisin). The two television commercials ran in Papua New Guinea on EM TV in 1997 (the Coke ad was still running three years later). These commercials project different but related versions of modern consumerism in which the identity of individuals (singular or collective) is constructed through the consumption of trademarked or brand-name commodities. The commercial for Coke was filmed in Papua New Guinea but produced by personnel from the Sydney office of McCann Erickson’s global network of advertising agencies. The commercial for Pepsi was filmed in Queensland, Australia, and produced by Savi (now HRD-Savi), the PNG-based advertising agency that handles advertising for global commodities such as Shell gasoline and Benson and Hedges cigarettes. It ran as a “locally” executed version of a global Pepsi campaign known as “Change the Script” (forerunner to “Generation Next”)—a campaign theme which the Pepsi marketing manager in PNG thought necessary to revise on the sound assumption that not many Papua New Guineans would be familiar with the concept of “The Script.” Both thirty-second commercials were made by non-Papua New Guinean

136

Coca-Globalization

creative directors in accordance with the client’s brief and global marketing strategy; both were slickly produced. First the Pepsi commercial: To the sound of a pulsating bass guitar, a red balloon rises in the air. A young man pops the balloon and many blue balloons rise up instead. Male and female voices chime: “Do what you wanna do. Be what you wanna be. Pepsi. Break Free.” A series of images follows quickly: A young woman’s smiling red lipstick changes to blue. Youthful roller bladers swirl in a disco-like blue haze. The camera pans over a blue can of Pepsi-Cola, its surface beaded with small drops of sweat. A platform diver flips languorously into a pool. The lyrics repeat, more passionately. A man and women walk across a street; their formal attire (long sleeve white shirt and tie for the man; a mini-skirt suit for the woman) change into leisurewear (baggy shorts for the man, blue jeans for the woman) and they begin to dance in the crosswalk. The camera returns to the can of Pepsi. A can of blue paint splatters against a red brick wall. Red paint oozing down a stairway turns blue. A woman paints over her red fingernails with blue polish. Red balls bouncing down concrete steps turn blue; a young man in a blue T-shirt and dark sunglasses lounges on the steps as the balls bounce by. The camera returns again to the can of Pepsi, which rolls forward toward the viewer. “Break Free,” written in white script appears across the television screen.

The lyrics of the jingle accompanying this ad explicitly peddle consumer agency, a hallmark promise of modern materialism: “Do what you wanna do. Be what you wanna be.” This invitation to exercise individual self-determination exhorts a break from convention—not only the conventional red of rival Coca-Cola, but also the conventions of work clothes and perhaps even work itself. All the images evoke youthful leisure and play, including (fantastically, for Papua New Guinea) roller blading and platform diving. Here, then, we encounter one of the themes of cargoism—our projection onto them of a deep longing for paradise, an Edenic world without work. In addition, the appearance of a woman’s painted lips and nails tinge the ads with sexual highlights. The slogan “Break Free” thus suggests the emancipatory and eroticized potential of self-construction through commodity consumption. All this is very much in keeping with a marketing theory of global youth culture that recommends questioning authority through universal appeals to individual autonomy and defiance of conformity. These ads found some admirers among Papua New Guinean university students and other young to middle-aged adults who participated in the soft drink survey—even among participants who professed to drink only

A Network of Perspectives

137

Coca-Cola and even to dislike the taste of Pepsi-Cola. (It would be difficult to establish any correlation between preferences for colas and preferences for the ads; Pepsi drinkers often expressed the same misgivings about the Break Free ads as did Coke drinkers.) For example, several respondents characterized the ads as “eye-catching” and “colorful” or referred to both the ad and the actors in it as “cool.” But these ads also drew as many if not more negative responses, and certainly attracted far more criticism than did the ad for Coca-Cola. In general, three interrelated objections were made to the images in Pepsi’s Break Free ads. First, the people depicted in the ads were described as “show offs” or as “pretending to be somebody while they’re not.” That is, the notion of not being like everyone else—which brand Pepsi explicitly endorses—was interpreted as a form of illegitimate and inauthentic distinction. This association of Pepsi with social pretension even came from a thirty-four-year-old Milne Bay man who enjoyed the Break Free ads and accepted the message of the lyrics: “I think Pepsi is drunk by people who just pretend to be different.” Second, the images in the ad were interpreted as being exclusionist and discriminatory, including only teenagers and young adults. Put differently, the images associated with Pepsi denied the democratic potential of soft drinks as accessible mass commodities. One thirty-five-year-old man claimed that Pepsi is “only for the new generation”—a sign of the dubious success of Pepsi’s previous ad campaign—while another older man from Bougainville claimed that Pepsi “is only for people in the towns. The youth of the life in town.” Other respondents associated Pepsi with “rich people” and “superstar” endorsers, such as Cindy Crawford—an association perhaps strengthened by Pepsi’s sponsorship of a television show that showcased glitzy, foreign music videos. Third, the Break Free images associated Pepsi in some people’s view with a morally disreputable kind of person—“fancy people,”“dancers,” and “party goers.” (One student similarly linked Pepsi to the morally objectionable activities of one of its past spokespersons, Michael Jackson.) Several respondents commented unfavorably on the “sexual connotations” of Pepsi, specifically objecting to the image of a young woman in “tight jeans” as demeaning to PNG women and “irrelevant” to the context of PNG society. Elizabeth Solomon, sounding very much like an ex-school teacher, said that she associated the very sound of the word Pepsi with the hissing noises that young people use in public to attract each other’s attention from afar. A twenty-three-year-old young man wondered about what the couple crossing the street in the ad were trying to break free from: “Is it telling us to break our marriages by going out to have fun with Pepsi? . . . I don’t

138

Coca-Globalization

know.” All these responses qualified Pepsi with associations most likely unintended and unwanted by agents on the product’s supply side. The Coke commercial is predictably different: To the strains of a few tentatively plucked guitar strings, a man emerges onto a porch from inside a house; a tropical bird perches on the porch railing. He nervously scans the horizon. A Coca-Cola delivery truck rolls to a stop in front of a tree fallen across the road. A young man, shirtless in a red laplap (loincloth), opens a red cooler and rakes his fingers through the ice cubes; the cooler is empty. In the background, villagers prepare for a singsing (traditional dance performance); a man wipes his brow. Back at the truck, the red-shirted driver waves at a passing airplane; he shouts into his radio. “Take it through!” The music quickens, and the guitars screech and grind. An aerial shot of the tidy village below with its thatched houses. A small child points at the plane. From the side of the plane, two red-shirted CocaCola employees drop a large red cooler, with Coca-Cola script in white visible on its sides. The cooler parachutes downwards while a group of young boys, all in red shorts, run to collect it. The cooler gently splashes into a stream. The young boys merrily slide down the muddy bank of the stream into the water. They retrieve the cooler and haul it up the bank. Back in the village, the cooler is now full of Coca-Cola bottles. The singsing proceeds, with traditionally decorated men pounding hourglass drums. The man who was first awaiting the delivery at the start of the commercial quaffs a bottle of Coke. An older man congratulates the young man who had worriedly inspected the empty cooler, both drinking thirstily from bottles of Coke. The Coca-Cola logo appears on the screen, encircled with the words “Fun bilong yu, fun bilong Coca-Cola.”

Like the Pepsi ad, this Coke ad projects an image of the product consistent with its globally asserted associations—in this case, associations with inclusive sociability, innocent good times, and the celebration of tradition. Unlike the Pepsi ad, the Coke ad includes children, young adults, and, in its closing frame, a senior man. And unlike the Pepsi ad, the exclusion of girls and women from the foreground of the action obviates certain messages of sexual impropriety.23 Indeed, the overt message of this Coke ad appears to be summarized in the mixed English/Tok Pisin of the logo: “Fun bilong yu, Fun bilong Coca-Cola” (“Your fun, the fun of Coca-Cola”). In other words, Coca-Cola is easily incorporated into local traditions—a piece of modernity entirely compatible with valued ancestral customs. Here, then, is the modernity of certain anticolonial nationalisms as sold by a transnational corporation: the material and technological wonders of modernity can be

A Network of Perspectives

139

happily married to the spiritual and moral values of indigenous traditional culture. The cargo has, at last, arrived. Papua New Guineans can determine themselves collectively—as a collective individual—not by breaking free from tradition and joining an international youth culture, but rather by staying put, incorporating and domesticating the material culture brought in, no matter what the obstacle, from the outside. One respondent who participated in the survey—a male anthropology student at the University of Papua New Guinea—criticized this Coke ad because it “demeans/exploits traditional dancing.” Another student, although a devoted Coke drinker, remarked, “They shouldn’t use traditional clothes when advertising Coke. Coke is not part of our tradition and it should not interfere with our traditions.” Opinions of this sort, advocating a clear separation between commercial enterprises and traditional or customary practices are not uncommon in PNG; they would probably elicit agreement from Alphonse Hega, for example. But on the whole, participants in the survey approved of this Coke ad in much the same way as Chambri viewers endorsed the videos and commercials aired during Fizz. Several people recalled it without prompting as their favorite advertisement, and the reasons given for approving the ad generally invert the objections to the Pepsi Break Free ad. Simply put, respondents saw the ad as “more Papua New Guinean” because of its recognizably local setting. The village setting, moreover, evoked the democratic character of Coke. As one twenty-six-year-old male art student put it: “[The ad] says that Coke is not for white men only but blacks can drink it too. With/without clothes in villages/towns—anywhere.” This comment recalls the World War II ad depicting the Admiralty Islanders (without Cokes) staring at the American Seabees (with Cokes), as discussed in Chapter 2. A former racial divide has now been bridged by the advance of consumer democracy. Similarly, the village setting communicated an inclusive and intergenerational kind of sociality, in which children and adults both participated. At least one respondent claimed that watching the ad made her feel happy. Even Elizabeth Solomon, who associated Pepsi with hissing adolescents and decried soft drinks as bad for one’s health, yielded to the memories that the ad provoked for her. This fifty-four-year-old grandmother, who had come to town only several months earlier to baby-sit, confessed, “I like village situations. [The ad] reminds me of home. I want to go back quickly.” Other respondents claimed—again, much like Chambri considering the Arnott’s Biscuits calendar girl—to recognize the provenance of the dancers’ decorations or even the general location of the village pictured in the ad. They recognized “home”—if not their own, then at least someone else’s—in an ad for a worldly thing.

140

Coca-Globalization

The terms in which university students and other urban Papua New Guineans talked about the Coke and Pepsi ads were the organizing terms of the ads themselves. These terms include the familiar litany of dichotomies that orient market segmenters, such as the PNG FM general manager: modernity and tradition, present and past, foreign and local, town and village, youth and elders. A twenty-six-year-old secretary from New Ireland Province was thus able to devise her own marketing analysis of the Pepsi campaign as follows: “For us, the civilized, educated people in towns, I don’t think the lady in the mini-top is insulting. Let’s face it, it’s today’s fashion, but I guess those in the villages and elders will disapprove and say its sexist.” “But,” she concludes in a way that echoes the Pepsi ad’s lyrics, “like I said, people are different and have their own opinions.” Here is an unambiguous example of the complex connectivity involved in a network of perspectives: one perspective, a mapping of other people’s meanings in the form of an ad, incites a woman’s awareness of/construction of a perspective that she knows she does not share—that of the “less civilized” and “less educated”—but which she knows nonetheless impinges uncomfortably on her own perspective. The Pepsi ads, in particular, generated this disjunctive effect among university students, who often objected to the ads as “irrelevant” to PNG on behalf of other, “illiterate” people whom they imagined would not understand the ads. Put differently, the Pepsi ads provoked the students to imagine themselves both as marketing critics and as misaddressed objects of other marketers’ perspectives. Similarly, a thirty-nine-year-old secondary teacher—an apparent proponent of the KISS formula of advertising— noted that the Pepsi ads did not show people drinking Pepsi: “Imagine a person who does not know the drink. He/she will think it a fashion ad. Wake up! We are Papua New Guineans, not whitemen where Pepsi comes from.” The same conclusion about perspectives impinging upon perspectives could also be applied to Elizabeth Solomon’s imaginings: an ad for Coca-Cola made by a transnational agency incites both her desire to return to the village and her construction of a perspective in which she does not feel at home—a perspective on the white man’s world entangling her children and grandchildren in urban Port Moresby. Culture and Commerce: Approximate Mappings of Other People’s Meanings In PNG, advertising for consumer goods other than soft drinks similarly engages people’s perspectives on themselves and their traditions, especially when people imagine their traditions as either under attack or misused by

A Network of Perspectives

141

corporate and/or state agents. For example, a television advertisement for Wrigley’s PK brand chewing gum provoked commentary aired on a popular radio call-in program in 1992.24 The ad followed the strategy of offering health education to the citizens of PNG: “This is a message from the PNG Department of Health.” The narrator reminds the viewer how betel-nut chewing is banned in many public places and also considered to be a cause of mouth cancer. An image of a man chewing betel nut appears; at the bottom left, a superimposed universal sign for “no betel-nut chewing”; at the bottom right, an inset picture of an unidentifiable man with mouth cancer. This image gives way to one of two boys, dressed in T-shirts decorated with a picture of PK chewing gum. One of the boys addresses the camera, “When we want to chew, we chew PK.” The ad closes with an image of a packet of PK gum and words advising not to pay more than ten toea (worth approximately ten cents at the time).

The ad apparently suggests that the state, in the guise of the Department of Health, endorses the substitution of chewing gum for betel nut. This endorsement entails the supposition that chewing gum and chewing betel nut are alternative but equivalent forms of chewing. The ad consequently urges consumers to choose the clean and safe PK, the more hygienic and non-life threatening form of chewing. In the same week of June 1992, however, two male callers to the radio program Talkback voiced their refusal to accept the state’s definition of “health” and its associated campaign to eliminate or replace betel chewing. Talkback was then a morning phone-in show heard daily throughout metropolitan PNG on the Kalang Service of the National Broadcasting Commission. Although the program originated from Port Moresby, callers from as far away as Mount Hagen or Rabaul sometimes rang the station to speak live on the air with host Roger Hau‘ofa. The first caller, John, expressed skepticism about the connection between betel nut and mouth cancer, and wondered where the man whose cancerous mouth is featured in the PK ad came from. John argued that in his home area (Kairuku/Bereina) that people routinely swallowed their betel instead of spitting; they did not “litter.” He also observed that in his home area, lime was manufactured from shells, and that this lime was probably not cancer-causing, unlike alternatives made from coral or fibro (fiberboard). Furthermore, John pointed out the local (Mekeo) practice of issuing betel nut to invite guests to a feast. He asked, What would replace betel nut “as far as our culture is concerned, our custom is concerned” if the Health Department were to ban it “for the good of our health”?

142

Coca-Globalization

Roger replied by agreeing that betel spit was a major problem in Port Moresby, but he reiterated that there is a “clean way to chew betel nut,” one that is “traditional and kastam,” namely, “to swallow everything that you put in your mouth instead of spitting it out.” He also agreed that John’s people probably know how to chew betel nut properly, and suggested, “Maybe the Health Department, instead of trying to discourage betel nut chewing altogether, should look at ways which are safe to chew betel nut. People have been chewing it for generations before the Health Department came into being and they knew how to chew the betel nut safely. Maybe they could recommend a certain way of chewing betel nut which will go down better because its part of the traditional culture of the people.” Roger then claimed that “the Western culture had introduced its deadly poisons, like alcohol and cigarettes, and then tried to ban ours.” John agreed enthusiastically, and asked pointedly if, after all, “we were trying to bring in the Western type of living and do away with our proper one.” Two days later, the second caller, also named John, resumed the discussion: “Betel nut is good. It’s how people chew and spit, throw rubbish all over the place, that’s spoiling the image of betel nut.” John enlisted Roger’s support as a fellow chewer, but as one who is “clean and healthy about it.” The problem, as John saw it, was with people who were new to betel chewing and have only recently come across it. They are the ones who chew in an untidy, unhealthy way, spitting indiscriminately and littering the ground with betel-nut skins. The answer—and here John took up Roger’s earlier suggestion—was to get the Health Department to institute a chewing awareness program and to educate people about “the correct habit of chewing—getting rid of your rubbish, keeping the place clean and tidy, free from germs and things like this.” Here, mass media functions as a site for constructing ethnic or regional identities; for the “people who are new to betel nut” are people from the Highlands, where betel nut was not traditionally available because the areca palm does not grow at high altitudes. The opinions of these three men hardly constitute radical liberal challenges to state authority. But they do reject the state-backed corporate equation of “health” with the elimination of betel chewing. And they do reject this equation in part by appealing to some notion of traditional Melanesian culture. In this regard, they can be distinguished from M. Gavi of Boroko whose letter to the Post-Courier published on December 30, 1991, holds up Singapore as an example of “what a small former colony can do if it has pride, discipline and a sense of national purpose.” Gavi points out that, among other things, “Singapore does not tolerate the disgusting practice of spitting betel nut juice on whatever is close by (whether it is moving or not) nor does one see abandoned, burnt out vehicles littering

A Network of Perspectives

143

the streets.” Gavi then goes on to explain this situation as a failure on the part of both citizens and the government, a failure that is excused, moreover, “by telling the world it is the ‘Melanesian Way.’” Gavi thus devalues “custom” in relation to “development” (see also the letter from Anti-Buai Spit published in the Post-Courier on February 12, 1991). It is precisely this relationship between “development” and “custom” that advertisements stimulate consumers—such as the young New Ireland woman already mentioned—to produce discursively, perforce articulating perspectives on themselves and on other people’s perspectives, including those of the advertisers themselves. For example, the following letter, signed by Jack Kagoi of Port Moresby, appeared during 1995 in the PostCourier under the heading “Shell’s Television Advert Portrays PNG Wrongly.” The ad depicted, without narration, a family of Highlanders in traditional ceremonial dress who pull up to a Shell gasoline station in a rickety vehicle and wander around the station’s convenience store with a look of wonder at all the goods on the shelves. The new Shell television commercial showing a Tari [Southern Highlands] man and his family dressed in traditional gear driving to a Shell station with a pig in the car, is in low taste, and portrays a very primitive PNG society. In case Shell hasn’t noticed, we Papua New Guineans do not walk or drive around in grass skirts carrying pigs with us. Maybe a small group of people up in the Highlands still do this, but the rest of us don’t. To the expatriate executives of Shell, we Papua New Guineans are working very hard to take our place in the modern world. Generally we try to speak English, wear clean clothes and most of us make an effort to behave in a civilised and decent manner. Where I come from which is the Momase region, we do not cheapen the value of our traditional clothes by using them to sell petrol. I have my sense about PNG and the fact that we the people are still lacking in some areas of human development, but I value my culture so much that I do not allow business houses to mock it and use it for their own purposes. I believe most of us Papua New Guineans want to go forward, whilst preserving our traditions. We want to take our place in the 21st century. We want the world to know that we are civilised and decent and can survive anywhere on this planet. Please Shell, don’t keep us down there. Don’t treat us like primitives. You’ve convinced the poor Tari man that he is still in the Stone Age, and he has never been to a service station, let alone a trade store in a village in Tari.

144

Coca-Globalization

As for me, I refuse to go to a service station where there are people shopping with pigs.

Kagoi’s letter, in asserting a claim to be recognized as “modern” while recognizing that perhaps a small number of Papua New Guineans remain “primitive,” echoes the anxieties generated by the missionizing dramas of the bus kanaka, “Uncle.” Moreover, like the Talkback conversation, it forcefully demonstrates not only how talk about advertisements has itself become an element of commercial mass media in Papua New Guinea, but also how this talk engages complex issues of identity: cultural, national, regional (ethnic), and personal. Kagoi invokes a collective identity (“we the people”) expressed in national terms (“us Papua New Guineans”) at the same time that he distinguishes the coastal Mamose region from the Highlands. This distinction is again invidious, representing the Highlands as a region perhaps “still lacking in some areas of human development.” But Kagoi does not wholly embrace “the modern world” signified by the Shell station; instead, he argues for the recognition of the value of “our traditions” and, moreover, for the recognition of tradition (culture) and business as properly separate domains. This recognition serves to distinguish Kagoi and his fellow Papua New Guineans from the “expatriate executives” presumed (correctly) to have created the Shell ad. Kagoi concludes with an assertion of self-determination (“as for me”), that is, with a declaration of his intention as an individual consumer not to shop at Shell service stations.25 Kagoi’s letter articulates a perspective on himself and on other Papua New Guineans, and on the perspectives of the “expatriate executives” imagined to be behind the ad and indeed connected to Kagoi in the network tenuously held together by a particular product. Interestingly, expatriate ad executives with whom I spoke in Port Moresby likewise articulated perspectives on the perspectives of the makers of the Shell ad. One marketing manager, who saw no use for images of tradition in ads, thought the Shell commercial to be “misdirected” and criticized its lack of words, while another creative/managing director criticized the ad for saying nothing specific about the product. Yet another creative/managing director similarly noted that the advertisement seemed to market Shell as a kind of tradestore rather than a brand of gasoline. More tellingly, however, this same director claimed that the ad would have been better off running overseas, implying that it was not only made by an “expat,” but effectively addressed to expatriates as well. His view was supported by the observations of Papua New Guinean creative arts faculty member at the university, who complained about the relentless use of “culture, culture, culture” in advertising—as if Papua New Guineans were naturally cultural. She, too,

A Network of Perspectives

145

pointed out that this way of representing Papua New Guineans would be more appropriate for non-Papua New Guinean audiences. Similarly, an independent commercial producer—originally from the United Kingdom, now living in PNG with his Papua New Guinean wife—confessed that his favorite advertising campaign was a set of television spots for Nescafé instant coffee. These spots all showed images of Papua New Guineans doing “a job well done”—students studying, a bank teller at the office, factory workers taking a break—all mercifully without any reference to custom, tradition, or culture. By 1997, the Shell advertisement was no longer running in PNG, replaced by a new campaign with the tag line “Go well, go Shell,” a vintage slogan revived for worldwide use. An advertising executive at the agency that had produced the Shell ad criticized in Kagoi’s letter told me that the client, like Kagoi, was not at all pleased with the ad. The executive claimed that the client regarded the ad as too “parochial” and too customized, and consequently rejected a follow-up proposal in the same vein. The client instead reportedly insisted on an ad that was more “international” and cosmopolitan. This executive personally regarded the client’s perspective as “arrogant,” but he also offered the example as evidence of how brandenhancing “image ads” often respond more to the client’s self-perspective than to the perspective of the ad agency on the imagined perspectives of the potential consumers of the product. Disjunctions and misalignments in the network of perspectives have multiple sources that are rarely easy to predict.

This page intentionally left blank

Part 2

Globalization, Citizenship, and the Politics of Consumption

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship The Coca-Cola Company has always endeavored to conduct business responsibly and ethically. We are committed to creating value in the marketplace, enriching the workplace, preserving and protecting the environment, and strengthening the communities where we operate. —Statement on citizenship, http://www.cokefacts.com/facts/facts_aw_keyfacts.shtml

n April 17, 2002, The Coca-Cola Company held its annual shareholder meeting inside the Theater at Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan. The meeting had been relocated to New York City as a public gesture of solidarity in the aftermath of the previous September’s terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Representatives of the New York City convention and visitors bureau thanked Coca-Cola shareowners in a letter included in the folder of materials that was distributed to the approximately twelve hundred people, including myself, attending the meeting: “Our city is more vibrant than ever in part due to the support we have received from the business community. Your solidarity with our City is greatly appreciated and has helped us all get through these difficult times.” In a videotaped address, Mayor Michael Bloomberg personally thanked the company and its shareowners for supporting the city’s efforts to recover from the trauma of 9/11. The Coca-Cola Company might count the 2002 meeting as one instance of keeping the promise declared in its mission statement: “The Coca-Cola Company exists to benefit and refresh everyone it touches.” This promise was highlighted in a booklet, attractively printed in color on heavy stock (containing “recycled paper content from postconsumer waste”), that was also included in the folder distributed at the 2002 meeting. The booklet was titled, “Keeping Our Promise: Citizenship at Coca-Cola,” and it asserted up front that “The Coca-Cola Company is a vibrant network of people, in nearly 200 countries, with the vision, values and capabilities to

O

150

Coca-Globalization

put citizenship into action.” It opened with a statement from then CEO Douglas Daft in which Daft asked, “How does a local business, global in scope, demonstrate citizenship?” The booklet in effect answered this question, providing a summary in words and pictures of how the company acts as a “local citizen,” striving “every day to refresh the marketplace, enrich the workplace, preserve the environment, and strengthen our communities.” During the spectacular “marketing showcase”—“Coca-Cola: The Power to Connect”—that preceded the scheduled business of the shareholder meeting, the company’s concern with “social responsibility” was put on display in between appearances by sports celebrities (Joe Gibbs and Tony Stewart) and musical stars (Jon Bon Jovi and Wynton Marsalis). Video clips of an interview conducted by television talk-show host Charlie Rose, who also emceed the marketing showcase, featured Daft talking about “doing well by doing good.” Daft noted, for example, how the company got children to read through its marketing partnership with the latest installment of the wildly popular Harry Potter book series. Nelson Mandela and Robert Redford both appeared on the big screen to thank the company, respectively, for helping to fight AIDS in Africa and sponsoring the Sundance Film Festival. There seemed to be no limit to what or whom the company “touches.” As the Boys Choir of Harlem sang on stage, the showcase approached its climax when the actor Donald Sutherland introduced the quintessential global celebrity Muhammad Ali, who waved to the applause of the crowd and exited without speaking. Outside Madison Square Garden on Seventh Avenue, before and during the meeting, another form of asserting solidarity and putting citizenship into action took shape. Representatives of different interest groups handed out fliers. One of the groups marched in a picket line holding red and white posters that read “Racism at Coke” and “Coca-Cola Still Discriminates” (see Figure 5.1). Several members of the Grassroots Recycling Network struggled to inflate a gigantic Coke bottle lettered with the words “Support Bigger Bottle Bill” (see Figure 5.2). The various fliers accused the company of social irresponsibility, specifically, racial discrimination against black employees with regard to pay grade and job category; violation of human rights and worker rights in Colombia, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, and the United States; and denial of medical treatment for HIV/AIDS to workers at Coke’s bottlers and distributors in Africa. One apparently lone protestor distributed fliers that linked the company through its donations to Emory University, where it was alleged that abusive animal experiments were conducted at the Yerkes Primate Center. At least one public figure that appeared at the street events, James P. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, added a dramatic flavor distinct from that of the marketing showcase.

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

151

Figure 5.1 New York, NY: Protestors at annual shareholder meeting of The Coca-Cola Company, April 17, 2002.

Hence the report of the New York Times (Winter 2002): “Standing beside a car-sized inflatable rat draped with the Coca-Cola logo in Manhattan, [Hoffa] accused the company of standing by and abdicating responsibility for the murder of eight union leaders who organized workers at Coke bottling plants in Colombia over the last decade, a charge the company vehemently denies.” The 2002 shareholder meeting effectively functioned as a vehicle for contesting the meaning of citizenship. Two opposed but linked political rhetorics and modes of political action converged in and around Madison Square Garden. That is, the meeting pitted corporate definitions of social responsibility against alternative definitions advocated by an assortment of actors in their market roles as investors, employees, and especially consumers. Put differently, the meeting redefined an old annual rite of business as a new opportunity for civic engagement between the agents of “consumer citizenship” and the representatives of “corporate citizenship.” Both of these political rhetorics and modes of political action derive from long lineages, but their specific manifestation at the 2002 shareholder meeting indicated a more recent and encompassing transformation in the relations among states, citizens, and corporations—and hence a dramatic change in the performance of citizenship. This transformation, I suggest, is an effect of multiple factors, economic and otherwise, that are often bundled together and called globalization; factors that include the shrinking of

152

Coca-Globalization

Figure 5.2 New York, NY: Protestors at annual shareholder meeting of The Coca-Cola Company, April 17, 2002.

the welfare state, on the one hand, and the expansion of information flows made possible by new media technologies, on the other. In this chapter and the next two, I will discuss corporate citizenship and consumer citizenship by turns, treating them as sometimes opposed but often complementary modes of reembedding soft drink companies and their products in local social settings. I begin by examining the rhetoric of corporate citizenship that animates The Coca-Cola Company’s citizenship reports, including the reports from 2002 and 2003 available on the company’s Web site. My goal is to identify the assumptions of this rhetoric and to point out the contradictions and tensions inherent in likening profitdriven corporations to socially responsible citizens. Consumer citizenship is a blanket term for an array of market-oriented political initiatives that I illustrate with various examples drawn from the network of soft drink perspectives. These examples, including recent attempts to mobilize soft drink consumers as ethical or smart shoppers,

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

153

have precedents in a history of consumer politics that reaches back to the fair-labor labeling campaigns and consumer cooperative movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I also critically evaluate newer forms of alternative consumer activism generated by the current economy of qualities, such as “ad busting” and “culture jamming,” that seek to disrupt the efforts of corporate agents in qualifying products such as brandname soft drinks. In Chapter 6, I return to the scene of the 2002 annual meeting in New York, tracking shareholder resolutions as a way of describing how consumer citizenship unfolds within the corporation. That is, I look at the attempts of shareholder activists to reform corporate practices by exercising the available mechanisms of corporate governance and engaging the rhetoric of corporate citizenship directly. Finally, in Chapter 7, I discuss how consumer citizenship took the form of parents organizing around the issue of selling soft drinks in their children’s public schools. I offer this particular case as a vehicle for identifying, with modest optimism, some of the prospects for agency and change offered by consumer politics or, more precisely, a “politics of products” (Micheletti 2003). In each of these three chapters, I wish to demonstrate how two forms of activism, corporate and consumer citizenship, engage each other; for example, when The Coca-Cola Company sets up a Web site (CokeKills.org, since taken down) to rebut charges of complicity in anti-union violence publicized on the Web site of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke (http://www.KillerCoke.org). Or, for example, when the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition-advocacy organization, sets up the Web site of the Save Harry (Potter) campaign (saveharry.com, since taken down) to urge children and parents to protest the marketing partnership between the company and Warner Bros. and to join the fight against corporations selling “junk food.” How does this engagement between corporate and consumer citizenship, increasingly conducted in cyberspace, bring competing soft drink perspectives on globalization to bear upon each other? How does this engagement put the qualification of a product and its vendors at the center of a globalized politics of consumption? In particular, I wish to demonstrate how the regulation of corporate activity occurs by means other than public policy in order to identify the possibilities and pitfalls of contesting social responsibility within the ambit of the market. “Corporate citizenship” and “consumer citizenship” are in effect two sides of the same coin. Both describe responses to the effects of economic globalization on conventional modes of governance and on conventional definitions of what constitutes the locus of citizenship, namely, the state/society relationship. That is, both modes of political activism

154

Coca-Globalization

signal attempts on the part of corporations, on the one hand, and consumers, on the other, to fill the space carved out by the erosion of the territorial nation-state’s capacity to govern—to regulate and address issues of concern that impinge upon the everyday lives and practices of national citizens. In this sense, both modes represent rival strategies for embedding transnational corporations in local settings and for holding together translocal commodity networks, networks that might recruit state agencies and agents but which state agents and agencies in no way inevitably mobilize let alone dominate. What is at stake in this contest? Keeping Our Promise: The Discourse of Corporate Citizenship We pledge to be a good corporate citizen in all the places we operate worldwide. We will maintain the highest ethical standards, comply with all applicable laws and regulations, and respect local and national cultures. We are dedicated to running safe and environmentally responsible operations. http://www.exxonmobil.com, cited in Matten and Crane 2003 Corporate citizenship has become an integral part of every decision and action we take. We believe corporate citizenship is demonstrated in who we are as a company, how we conduct our business and how we take care of our employees, as well as in how we interact with the world at large. http://www.ford.com, cited in Matten and Crane 2003 Our vision is to be an innovative and inspirational global citizen in a world where our company participates. Every day we drive responsible business practices that contribute to profitable and sustainable growth. http://www.nike.com, cited in Matten and Crane 2003 Our goal is to be a good corporate citizen wherever we operate, as a responsible and contributing member of society. http://www.nokia.com, cited in Matten and Crane 2003 With the aim of becoming a corporate citizen respected by international society, Toyota is conducting a wide range of philanthropic activities throughout the world. Its activities cover five major areas: education, the environment, culture and the arts, international exchange and local communities. http://www.toyota.co.jp, cited in Matten and Crane 2003

According to Matten and Crane (2003, 2), who collected the quotes reproduced here, the term “corporate citizenship” moved during the late 1990s out of the realm of management practice and into the discourse of “corporate

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

155

social responsibility” produced by corporate actors (see Vogel 2005). Ford, for example, has issued citizenship reports since 1999; The Coca-Cola Company issued its first citizenship report in 2001. At the World Economic Forum in New York in February, 2002, CEOs from three dozen of the world’s largest corporations (including The Coca-Cola Company) signed a joint statement on “Global Corporate Citizenship—The Leadership Challenge for CEOs and Boards” (Matten and Crane 2003, 1). The statement opens with the claim that the potential for “increased political participation and economic prosperity” created by globalization is not necessarily being realized: “Many people are still facing high levels of inequality, insecurity and uncertainty, as well as new sources of conflict, environmental decline and lack of opportunity” (http://www.weforum.org/pdf/GCCI/ GCC_CEOstatement.pdf). The preamble accordingly concludes that “leaders from all countries, sectors and levels of society need to work together to address these challenges by supporting sustainable human development and ensuring that the benefits of globalization are shared more widely. It is in the interests of business that these benefits continue both for companies and for others in society.” Although something of a new term, corporate citizenship often refers to long established practices of philanthropy and community investment. In general, the term invokes four different and widely recognized sorts of corporate social responsibility: economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic (see Caroll 1979). Its appearance, moreover, signals perhaps merely the latest round of tactical responses to periodic upswings in public concern about the power and size of corporations. It is not wholly cynical to interpret the new discourse of corporate citizenship as a protective measure taken in the wake of the raucous protests at the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle and the subsequent parade of corporate malfeasance scandals epitomized by the stunning collapse of Enron. In this regard, corporate citizenship marks another chapter in the history of “creating the corporate soul” (Marchand 1998), the century-long story of public relations and image marketing whereby corporations have attempted to animate their legally fictitious persons with a sense of moral and social legitimacy. Notwithstanding these historical continuities, I wish to argue that there is something discontinuous in the circumstances—political and economic—that have given rise to the discourse of corporate citizenship. These circumstances include changes in the source and site of value creation for commodities (Chapter 3), on the one hand, and of governance— the state/society relationship—on the other. In order to make my case, I start with an examination of the assumptions and tensions latent in the current discourse of corporate citizenship.

156

Coca-Globalization

A World Economic Forum document defines corporate citizenship as “the contribution that a company makes in society through its core business activities, its social investment and philanthropy programmes, and its engagement in public policy. It is determined by the manner in which a company manages its economic, social and environmental impacts and its relationships with different stakeholders, in particular shareholders, employees, customers, business partners, governments and communities” (http://www.weforum.org/pdf/GCCI/GCCI_NEPAD.pdf). Corporate citizenship focuses on the activities of the corporate person or, more specifically, on the activities of the managers who operate in the name of the corporate person. In this regard, corporate citizenship divides the world between corporate persons and non-corporate persons, and simultaneously bridges that division. That is, corporate citizenship assumes that “the economy”—a function of universal requirements and needs—always and already exists independently of “culture(s),” which operate according to particular requirements that might, on occasion, warrant connection with economic practices (Applbaum 2004)—but not necessarily on all occasions.1 Put otherwise, corporate citizenship presumes that in the world of corporate persons, the first and foremost responsibility is to shareholders. Shareholders are owed the greatest return on their investments, and the managers of the corporate person are mandated to deliver this result by whatever means possible. This imperative—and no other—provides the moral force behind business. From the perspective of the world of non-corporate persons (including corporate managers in their ordinary social roles as parents, neighbors, and friends), the morality of the corporate (person) world appears limited at best, absent at worst. Accordingly, the good corporate citizen must do more than operate in the incidentally moral or even wholly amoral world of business; it must do more than focus on the bottom line. Corporate citizenship entails responsibilities to “stakeholders” other than shareholders—stakeholders whose interests are not increased profits and whose moral concerns are diverse and often contradictory. Stakeholders range from individual corporate employees to the governments of countries and members of local communities in which corporations operate. The population of stakeholders is thus potentially vast, but, in principle, it is finite. The extent of a corporation’s stakeholders defines the limits of its obligation or, by analogy, the boundaries of the polity in which it ought to act as a good citizen. Like the nation-state, this polity might be open to new members, but by definition it does not include everyone. As already mentioned, however, with regard to The Coca-Cola Company—which qualifies

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

157

its products as ubiquitous and indeed operates almost everywhere—this polity might very well be coextensive with the planet. The notion of corporate citizenship is thus at base paradoxical. It emerges as a remedy to a bifurcated situation brought into being by the very constitution of the corporation as a person with both singular dedication to maximizing profits and limited liability for its actions in so doing. Corporate citizenship is also strictly speaking, as Bakan (2004) argues, illegal. Managers acting in the name of corporate persons—and thus managing money invested by other people—are legally beholden not to spend that money on causes which do not enhance shareholder assets. In other words, corporate citizenship, in order to be acceptable in the first place, must never lose sight of the corporation’s fundamental goal of profitability. Corporate citizenship must, as the Nike Web site honestly puts it, “contribute to profitable and sustainable growth.” As a legal activity, corporate citizenship must be nothing other than self-interested altruism, doing good for others only if doing well by shareholders. How is this paradox negotiated in The Coca-Cola Company’s proclamations of corporate citizenship? The paradox is, first of all, recognized. Thus the company’s 2002 Citizenship Report, “Living Our Values,” characterizes its efforts as an attempt to “balance and align” the pursuit of (shareholder) value with (stakeholder) values: “global opportunity with cultural sensitivity; continued growth with responsible use of natural resources; competitive advantage with ethical management; and commercial success with respect for the individual.” CEO Daft argues in the report, moreover, that “More than ever, the boundaries are blurring between . . . profit and principle.” This blurring is a purported effect of increasing interconnection between the world’s “cultures and businesses,” such that consumers now make purchase decisions on the basis of a company’s social contributions. In this blurry world, then, “responsible practices make sound business sense.” That is, corporate citizenship does not violate the company’s legal obligation to maximize revenue for its owners. Indeed, as Daft puts it in The Coca-Cola Company’s 2002 Annual Report, creating new value (earnings) requires “living our values” (integrity, quality, accountability, diversity, and so forth). The company’s citizenship reports all refer to the quadripartite division of activities first outlined in Keeping Our Promise, namely, activities that concern the marketplace, workplace, environment, and communities. (This division corresponds broadly to the four aspects of corporate social responsibility identified in Caroll’s [1979] model.) Within these categories, it is often more or less obvious that activities promoted as socially responsible citizenship are economically beneficial to the company and, in some

158

Coca-Globalization

instances, probably required by law. For example, the company strives “to refresh the marketplace” by offering business training and equipment to entrepreneurs, such as the Luciano family in Zimbabwe, who started selling Coca-Cola as street vendors and ended up owning three superettes. The Lucianos are pictured in the report standing in front of what appears to be one of their superettes. A company supplied sign, with the Coca-Cola logotype, reads, “Luciano Kiosk.” A stack of plastic cartons of bottled Coke is visible in the lower left corner of the photo. Similarly, the 2003 report describes “microenterprise in Vietnam,” a project undertaken with the Vietnamese Women’s Unions in which “2,000 women in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have gone into business selling Coca-Cola beverages from pushcarts.” The company provides product and sales training to the women and characterizes the program as a way “to improve economic opportunities for women.” But the program—like the program supporting the Lucianos—is manifestly also a simple way to recruit and train employees for the purpose of expanding further the availability of company products to consumers. Employing and training workers, a precondition of making a profit, is thus offered with self-congratulations as evidence of good citizenship—especially in Africa, where the Coca-Cola system is the continent’s largest single private sector employer with sixty thousand employees. These programs for creating a pool of skilled workers are not restricted to the developing world. In the United States, the company has created an internship program that identifies “150 top-performing students of diverse heritage who are entering their junior year of college.” The students are invited to participate in a two-year program that provides, for two consecutive summers, about ten weeks of “real-world work” with a mentor and a ten-thousand-dollar-per-year scholarship. This program is represented in the 2003 citizenship report as part of the company’s efforts to promote “a culture of inclusiveness.” But, once again, the program is also manifestly a managerial recruiting and training initiative, one that responds tactically to the highly publicized charges of racial discrimination and ensuing class action suit brought against the company in the late 1990s (for details, see Hays 2004; Girard 2004). Compliance with the law—at least to the extent that “cultures of exclusiveness” are illegal—is offered as evidence of good citizenship. There is a more general way in which corporate citizenship always serves the interests of shareholder value: almost every socially responsible initiative on the part of the company doubles as a marketing opportunity. This doubling effect is one of the main attractions of corporate sponsorship. For example, in 1993, the Coca-Cola Foundation granted $320,000 to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg for an art restoration

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

159

laboratory. More recently, the company contributed to the restoration of the State Hermitage’s entrance on Palace Square by issuing, through its bottler, four commemorative cans, each depicting a recognizable St. Petersburg scene, such as Palace Square. Proceeds from sales of the cans support the restoration project. The program is called “Let’s Preserve the Cultural Heritage Together.” The design of the cans blends the trademarked script of Coca-Cola with public spaces in St. Petersburg, such that instead of the script adorning a commercial billboard on the landscape, the landscape is reembedded in the surface of the product—as if by courtesy of the trademark. Even projects that seem to have little to do with selling and publicizing the company’s products bear traces of its overall marketing strategies. Consider, for example, the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program, an initiative established in 1984 in Texas and since replicated in Brazil. The program aims to reduce the dropout rate of elementary and middle school students by providing peer mentoring and tutoring—a goal admirable enough to render peevish any complaints about the branded T-shirts worn by peer mentors. However, the program typifies the company’s relentless emphasis on youth (valued, indeed) in almost all of it corporate citizenship projects. Look through the entire 2003 Citizenship Report and among the dozens of listed projects worldwide, and you will not find one that targets senior citizens and only a few that cater to people of all ages. It is hardly irrelevant to note that most programs—in their focus on schools and sports—aim at the company’s most valued market segment, the group of heavy-using teenage consumers responsible for drinking most of the world’s carbonated beverages. This focus is self-serving in two related respects. First, the company’s involvement in sponsoring sports for youth allows it to display concern for fostering a healthy and active lifestyle. The 2003 Citizenship Report for Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East observes: “As young people lead increasingly sedentary lifestyles, we are providing opportunities for exercise and athletic competitions across the region.” These opportunities took the form of soccer tournaments in Italy and Poland, playgrounds in Croatia, and physical education programs for secondary schools in Great Britain. The public concerns behind these initiatives were translated in the 2002 Citizenship Report: “In recent years, the related issues of diet, lifestyle and physical activity have received increased public attention. According to government data in the United States, over the past twenty years caloric consumption has remained fairly constant while physical activity has declined by 13 percent. The Coca-Cola Company believes that healthy lifestyle includes a variety of foods and beverages and physical activities.” This particular way of phrasing things reframes the

160

Coca-Globalization

issue of rising rates of obesity, especially among children, as a matter of personal responsibility rather than corporate strategies to increase per capita consumption of non-nutritious, high-calorie soft drinks. As a corporate citizen, then, the company pledges itself to encouraging youth to take responsibility for themselves, “to incorporate physical activity into their daily lives in a way that is easy and fun” (The Coca-Cola Company 2002 Citizenship Report). When asked to address concerns about the obesity issue, CEO Daft prefaced his reply with this point: “Every product we sell is refreshing, enjoyable and of the highest quality. Whether it’s CocaCola or one of our waters or juices, any one of our brands can be enjoyed, any time, as part of a healthy and active lifestyle” (The Coca-Cola Company 2003 Summary Annual Report). Once again, in a jujitsu move of qualification, responsibility is deflected from the product, and perforce the producer, to the consumer. Corporate social responsibility, by this logic, entails changing the consumer’s habits rather than revising corporate marketing imperatives (such as Roberto Goizueta’s self-heralded vision of almost infinite growth in worldwide consumption). Second, the company’s youth-focused philanthropy gives it access to schools, and thus to concentrated groups of potential consumers. Outside North America, the company’s initiatives even involve building schools (inside North America, soft drinks and schools have become a controversial issue; see Chapter 7). For example, according to the 2003 Citizenship Report, the Coca-Cola Foundation Philippines has for several years undertaken the Little Red Schoolhouse project: “Designed to help address the country’s shortage of rural educational facilities, the project is a partnership with the Philippine Department of Education and Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP). The Little Red Schoolhouse project provides school buildings and equipment, teacher training and workshops for parent-teacher community associations.” The report notes that more than five hundred thousand students have been reached by the project. These students presumably include those at the Bulajo Elementary School, pictured in the report. The new single-story building is fronted by a wellgroomed plaza in which a pole stands flying the national flag of the Philippines. A sign proclaims the name of the school in block letters, to the left of which, in ever familiar red and white, is a rectangular Coca-Cola logo. The sign resembles the one on top of the Lucianos’ superette in Zimbabwe. The report’s representation of schools in the Philippines contrasts significantly with the one that emerged at the 2000 annual shareholder meeting of Coca-Cola Amatil, held in the Grand Ball Room of the swank ANA Hotel in Sydney. 1999 was a tough year for CCA’s operations in the Philippines, then CCA’s largest business.2 Sales volume declined nearly

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

161

10 percent; trading profit margin fell from 15 percent the year before to 5.8 percent, partly as a result of rising prices for sugar. CCA responded by announcing a major restructuring of the Philippines business that included consolidating production for Mega-Manila by closing down two older bottling plants, and making adjustments in packaging and price “in order to improve convenience and value to consumers and reduce cost per case sold” (CCA Annual Report 1999). Shareholders at the April 2000 meeting, including myself, were also informed about CCA’s plans to deal with performance in the Philippines by trying to target school children, in schools. The audience watched a video and heard the voice of a Filipina employee of CCA, described as an “educator,” who explained how she sought to make Coke “natural ” to students. She remarked that 17 to 18 million students in the Philippines spend six to eight hours a day in school. Schools were thus the perfect place “to nurture consumption habits and brand reverence for Coca-Cola.” In effect, then, by building schools in the Philippines, the company was expanding its market and cultivating brand loyal consumers. The similarity of the signs on schools and superettes is thus more than coincidental; it is incontrovertible proof of doing well by doing good. The Coca-Cola Company’s discourse of citizenship and corporate social responsibility presumes and asserts that operating a “sustainable” business—and ensuring “sustainable growth” and “enduring value”— hinges on trust. Daft was asked what the company was doing “to address the crisis of trust that pervades the business climate today” (The Coca-Cola Company 2003 Summary Annual Report). He replied that building trust entailed “paying attention to details and making sure they reflect your values.” These details include the political relationships that the company deems important for furthering its interests. So, for example, the 2003 Citizenship Report explicitly describes the company’s Prato Popular program in Brazil as an attempt to join President Lula da Silva’s campaign to eradicate malnutrition and hunger in the country (Zero Hunger Program). What might be gained in such an alliance? Here I speculate. Lula de Silva’s economic policies—his stated skepticism of “free trade” and privatization—might be perceived as potential threats to the company’s operations, which also risked implication in any campaign against poor nutrition. An opportunity to join with the president would go some way toward demonstrating citizenship in one of the communities where the company operates. Significantly, the Prato Popular program, which involves building and outfitting restaurants to serve subsidized meals of meat, beans, rice, and salad, is perhaps of all the company’s projects the least obviously in line with its youth-focused marketing imperatives: “The pilot restaurant

162

Coca-Globalization

opened in Porto Alegre in April 2003 was a real success. Today, 320 meals/day are served—20 beyond the initial goal—to a group of . . . people comprising unemployed and homeless, youngsters, elders, needy families and retirees” (The Coca-Cola Company 2004, http://www2.coca-cola .com/presscenter/pc_include/nr_20040318_americas_zero_hunger _project_include.html). Hardly the company’s target market. Porto Alegre, of course, was home to the first annual World Social Forum in 2001 (and several subsequent meetings), organized by a network of Brazilian trade unions and NGOs as a public attempt to protest the neoliberal policies of economic globalization represented by the annual World Economic Forum meetings in Davos. The new marketing emphasis on international corporate citizenship is consistent with the shift from numerous independent local bottlers to the singular product or brand itself as the primary means for creating trust overseas—for reembedding the company in diverse national and local settings (Chapter 3). Of course, The Coca-Cola Company cultivates political trust at home in the United States through more conventional means as well, such as financial donations to political candidates and political action committees (PACs). The Center for Responsive Politics reports that during the 2000, 2002, and 2004 election cycles, individuals (including employees) and PACs associated with The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises were among the top contributors in the food and beverage industry to federal candidates and parties. For example, in 2002, the company’s associates contributed $849,208 (42 percent to Democrats, 58 percent to Republicans), while associates of Coca-Cola Enterprises contributed $436,956 (16 percent to Democrats and 84 percent to Republicans; http://www.opensecrets.org). Furthermore, Ruskin and Schor (2005) report that two of the 2004 “Rangers” who contributed at least $200,000 each to the Bush/Cheney campaign were Barclay Resler, vice-president for government and public affairs at The Coca-Cola Company, and Robert Leeborn Jr., president of federal affairs at Troutman Sanders PAG and a lobbyist for the company (two other lobbyists qualified as one-hundredthousand-dollar contributors). In addition, both Coke and Pepsi gave one hundred thousand dollars each to underwrite George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2005 (Ruskin and Schor 2005). Besides making political donations, the company also maintains a “Civic Action Network” (http://www2.coca-cola.com/contactus/faq/ civic.html), an “organized grassroots effort” whose purpose is to “influence change in government.” In response to the FAQ, “Why should I join?” the company replies, “Over the next ten years, special taxes and burdensome governmental regulations will cost our industry, and our customers, over

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

163

one billion dollars. We must reduce this cost. As a network member, you’ll add your voice to thousands of others across the country who are ready to speak out for just treatment for our business.” These “burdensome” regulations include, for example, state initiatives to enact returnable bottle (“forced deposit”) laws or to enact taxes in order to raise revenues to protect water resources. The August 2000 issue of Network News, an irregular publication of The Coca-Cola Company Governmental Relations Department, thus reports how Civic Action Network (CAN) members opposed a “hidden tax” on bottled water. According to one brief item, hundreds of CAN members in the state of New Hampshire were contacted “to communicate to their senators and representatives” that the proposed two cents per container tax on all bottles of water “was a selective and discriminatory tax.” The revenue from the proposed tax was “to be used to purchase land or easements from municipalities to protect water resources.” It is not clear from the item if these water resources included the sources of the municipal water system of Londonderry, New Hampshire, where a plant reprocesses tap water as The Coca-Cola Company’s branded bottled water product, Dasani (Clarke 2005).3 Nevertheless, the preoccupation with cultivating trust seems motivated less by immediate political considerations than by long-term economic ones. I suggest that this circumstance—and perhaps the recent enlargement of the discourse of corporate citizenship—is itself a function of the shift in the source of value creation from tangible product to intangible brand (Chapter 3). That is, corporate social responsibility has become a necessary expense of doing business if not for all companies then for consumer goods companies that rely on the reputation of their brands for sales (Klein 1999; Vogel 2005). The Nike Web site duly summarizes its experience with extensive and well publicized campaigns against its use of lowpaid labor to manufacture athletic shoes when it equates corporate citizenship with protecting and enhancing its brand. As Noreena Hertz (2001, 191) puts it, “In the age of the logo, reputation is paramount. It is no longer enough that corporations produce high quality goods at reasonable prices, they also have to be seen to be making a positive or at least not a negative contribution to society.” Or, as Douglas Daft himself put it in the company’s first citizenship report: “Ensuring that we operate as a good corporate citizen is essential—to the strength of our brands, to the value we build for share owners and to our success as a company.” Corporate citizenship is from this angle an investment, a means to create a future for the brand— a purpose also well served by the company’s focus on youth development. Invocations of sustainability and stewardship—words appropriated from the vocabulary of environmental activists—refer, at bottom, to the brand

164

Coca-Globalization

as a renewable source of profits. But this renewal requires, above all, valueproducing consumption work, and it is precisely this work that is put in jeopardy when the company tarnishes its reputation (as in the Belgian recall fiasco) or abuses the trust of consumers (as in the New Coke fiasco). &* The notion of corporate citizenship contains another ambiguity. It implies that as persons, corporations can play a role as citizens analogous to that of ordinary individual citizens. That is, the corporation is one among many citizens—though perhaps first among equals because of its more extensive resources. However, the notion also implies that corporations are not only entities that, like citizens, claim rights and recognize obligations, but also entities that administer and guarantee these rights (Matten and Crane 2003). In this respect, corporations are less like citizens and more like states. Welfare states, to be precise. That is, corporations actively take upon themselves state functions that, in cases such as that of PNG (see Chapter 4), are not or are no longer being discharged by the current government and its agencies. Hence the contention of Matten and Crane (2003, 11) that “corporate citizenship” properly designates how “‘corporation’ and ‘citizenship’ in modern society come together at the point where the state ceases to be the only guarantor of citizenship.” Put differently, corporations take their place beside NGOs (with whom they often partner) and interstate institutions such as the United Nations in performing outsourced state functions and, thus, a new mode of government (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). In particular, entities such as The Coca-Cola Company that fashion themselves as simultaneously global and local become “integral parts of a transnational apparatus of governmentality” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, 994). This mode of government clearly exceeds and confounds the space and scale of the territorial nation-state. How does this new mode of government appear in the pages of the company’s citizenship reports? Here are a few pertinent illustrations. According to the first report, Keeping Our Promise, the company offered “the gift of water” to the rice farmers whose fields surround the Coca-Cola bottling facility near the village of Neung-Hyun Ri in South Korea. The facility developed the means to store treated processed water and to direct it to the rice fields during dry summers. This arrangement is presented as a creative and wise exercise in environmental sustainability. A local farmer is quoted as saying, “The quality of treated process water from Coca-Cola is as good for rice as the water from our natural sources, and is there when we need it.” This particular example of corporate citizenship is perhaps

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

165

ironic, given the company’s current problems dealing with farmers in India who accuse it of stealing groundwater (see Conclusion). It also raises but sidesteps the question of whose water the bottling facility was treating in the first place and giving secondarily. But my point is simply to note how a quintessential rural development project—once the hallmark of development-oriented liberal democratic and socialist states alike—is here carried out not by the South Korean state, but by a transnational corporation. It is the corporation, not the state, that guarantees rice farmers their rights to make a living from the land. In its reports, the company celebrates its partnerships not only with state agencies (the Ministry of Education in Egypt; the Ministry of the Environment in Lebanon), but also with a range of NGOs. In India, these partnerships have delivered educational services to “young people lacking resources” (NGOs include Child Relief and You, and Literacy India), medical services to the poor (NGOs include Indian Red Cross and St. John’s Ambulance Brigade), and rainwater harvesting systems to local communities (NGOs and Resident Welfare Associations as well as state agencies are involved in this initiative). In Africa, the company—through the CocaCola Africa Foundation and its bottlers—has partnered with UNAIDS, a United Nations body, to implement outreach efforts and promotional campaigns designed to increase awareness about and reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. In Zambia, for example, nationwide free delivery of educational materials was offered through the Coca-Cola distribution network. By 2003—in apparent response to vigorous protests such as the one at the 2002 shareholder meeting—the company could report that “all of the nearly 60,000 employees of The Coca-Cola Company in Africa and its 40 African bottling partners—including family members—are provided access to antiretroviral medication and confidential testing and counseling” (see Chapter 6). As in other developing countries, then, the company in Africa takes over “those functions that are clearly governmental functions in the framework of liberal citizenship” (Matten and Crane 2003, 11). The withering of the state in Africa and elsewhere does not therefore automatically mean less government; it can equally mean a new mode of extraterritorial or “deterritorialized” governmentality, in which global corporations as well as transnational NGOs and international agencies all play a part. And while this new mode of governmentality shuts down certain avenues for making claims on the basis of national citizenship, it opens up new avenues for asserting claims on the basis of a deterritorialized— perhaps cosmopolitan—consumer citizenship. Put differently, agents connected within a commodity network, although legal citizens of different and distant nation-states—might resist and/or redirect the agenda of corporate

166

Coca-Globalization

social responsibility in the name of another form of citizenship— consumer citizenship, to which I now turn. Consumer Citizenship and the Politics of Products Consumer citizenship is the flip side of corporate citizenship. Consumer citizenship engages individuals in their roles as market agents—consumers, above all, but also investors—in order to effect goals that might equally and otherwise be achieved through political regulation, such as adherence to environmental standards or respect for the rights of workers. Consumer citizenship, like corporate citizenship, functions as an alternative to conventional modes of government; consumers lobby corporations directly instead of indirectly lobbying political representatives to regulate corporations. In many respects, consumer citizenship is a consequence of frustration with and/or indifference to government—a frustration and indifference registered, for example, by both decreasing rates of voter participation and the increasing appeal of market solutions to what were once government problems. The response is not irrational. If corporations are indeed taking on the functions of government in delivering goods and services to the people, then it makes a certain sense for the people to deal directly with corporations, leveraging influence as consumers and, as I show in Chapter 6, as shareowners. The question consumer citizenship poses about itself is, therefore, should we regard it as a legitimate form of civic engagement or as the degradation of civic ideals—or as both at the same time? Political consumerism—the species of consumer citizenship in which individuals exercise political will via purchasing choices—has a long lineage in the United States. It could be argued that it is coeval with the birth of the republic inasmuch as the American Revolution can be regarded as a consumer protest against British imports (see Breen 1988). In a strict sense, political consumerism is a form of “individualized collective action”(Micheletti 2003) in which the everyday actions of individuals who do not belong to any single association nonetheless generate a collective effect. But the “politics of products” (Micheletti 2003) often goes beyond individualized collective action to embrace concerted collective action, that is, the formation of social organizations dedicated to the use of consumption for political purposes. In many cases, it is these social organizations that make a more individualized and anonymous political consumerism possible in the first place. Two examples from the long nineteenth century illustrate both sorts of market-oriented practices. They deserve brief mention for what they can tell us about the contemporary possibilities of consumer

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

167

agency: first, the White Label campaign and, second, the consumer cooperative movement. The White Label campaign, which ran from 1898 to 1918, was an attempt on the part of the National Consumers’ League—a progressive women’s organization—to construct “an imagined community of consumers and producers” (Sklar 1998, 17). In order to qualify for the White Label, garment manufacturers were required to meet minimum labor standards, including prohibitions on subcontracting, overtime, and child labor. By 1904, the League had licensed sixty factories that produced the sorts of goods regularly purchased by middle-class women, such as stitched white cotton underwear, corsets and petticoats. Although women were then legally denied the right to vote, the campaign promoted notions of consumer agency that shared assumptions with an electoral model of purchasing power—namely, that mass-based consumer demand was central to the national economy and that consumption was all about making choices in the marketplace. However, the campaign linked these assumptions to another one: that consumer agency requires both knowledge about the working conditions of producers and moral obligations to reject goods produced under exploitative circumstances. The campaign was conducted on a national scale, but rooted in local communities, educating middle-class consumers about the working conditions within their own communities. The consumer cooperative movement emerged throughout Europe and in the Americas during the early to mid-nineteenth century and sustained itself until the mid-twentieth century before stagnating and declining. (Its history is complex and understudied, but see Storrs 2000; Frank 1994; Furlough and Strikwerda 1999.) Urban workers and rural farmers organized themselves around a consumer identity that comprehended more than free choice and self-expression: “As consumers they demanded fair prices, unadulterated foodstuffs, and goods made under just conditions by unionized workers. As consumers, they built institutions that returned profits on the basis of consumer purchases rather than on the basis of shares owned. As consumers they constructed vast wholesaling enterprises, founded political parties, and debated the nature of the good society of the future” (Furlough and Strikwerda 1999, 5). The cooperative movement emphasized associations of consumers rather than individual consumers; its ideal—unlike that of later consumer advocates, for example—was that a retail system run on cooperative principles was an alternative to and protection against private capitalist enterprise. Associations of consumers— which could be connected nationally and internationally, and extended into wholesaling and manufacturing operations—committed themselves to “community self-reliance, democratic governance, profits returned to

168

Coca-Globalization

consumers rather than corporations, and economic justice” (Furlough and Strikwerda 1999, 27). Consumer tactics such as boycotts, label promotions, and “unfair” lists have been an important aspect of the labor movement in all periods of U.S. history. As Frank notes, “The politics of consumption . . . have been central to class conflict and working-class self-organization . . . in periods of both expansion and retrenchment (1994, 5).” In short, in the United States at least, discourses of consumer agency and ideals of social justice have been entangled for a long time, and it is against this historical background that a contemporary politics of products must be understood (Micheletti 2003; see Cohen 2003 on New Deal consumer politics). Contemporary political forms reprise older ones: public protests against sweatshop labor in the garment and footwear industries, labeling schemes for fair trade chocolate and equal exchange coffee, consumer coops, and a whole slew of boycotts—perhaps the most venerable tool of political consumerism. They also include new sorts of consumer-based initiatives such as communitysupported agriculture and socially responsible investing. Many of these initiatives are explicitly caught up in the larger politics of globalization, that is, in the operation of transnational activist networks, movements, and organizations committed to addressing the inequalities associated with economic globalization. It is my hope that by situating current consumer-based initiatives in a respectable genealogy of political consumerism, I will temper any impulse to dismiss consumerism—political or otherwise—as the polar opposite of progressive politics, a debilitating ideological effect of industrial capitalism’s prodigious capacity to create wealth. Put differently, I wish to resist the temptation to regard consumer citizenship automatically as nothing but oxymoronic or to lament the transformation of citizens into consumers, of civic engagement into self-indulgent shopping (cf. Ewen 1992). I refuse, then, the axiomatic equation of consumer citizenship with the reduction of democratic freedoms and civil rights to an ultimate and illusory freedom of market choice. Yet I am mindful of these criticisms and more. I recognize the risk that political consumerism—for example, in the form of labeling campaigns for organic foods (Guthman 2004)—lends itself to co-optation and constraint by the very institutions (such as the conventional food system) that it seeks to reform. I similarly recognize the risk that certain articulations of subversive consumer rebellion are by now the hum of business as usual (Frank 1997, Heath and Potter 2004). Aware of all this, I nonetheless want to ask whether there is a form of progressive political agency available in the politics of products and in political consumerism, more specifically. I can suggest what is possible by reviewing

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

169

how such a politics is taking shape around carbonated soft drinks such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola; in so doing, I address the limitations of these possibilities. I address more generally the limitations—as well as the positive potential—of a politics of consumption at the end of Chapter 7 and in the Conclusion. &* The politics of products shifts the site of political agency from production to consumption precisely in order to highlight the connections between both sites, that is, to connect consumers with producers as agents held together (though not always with equal force) by a product network. In the form of political consumerism, it tries to consolidate and leverage the purchasing power of individuals who might otherwise remain unassociated and to use this power to reform the practices of corporations—especially consumer goods corporations that rely heavily on their brands as a source of value creation. Political consumerism that targets brands—Nike, Gap, Mattel—and that attempts to make visible the conditions of workers who produce branded commodities has become one of the hallmarks of so-called antiglobalization activism (see, for example, Klein 1999 or the Web site of the National Labor Committee, http://www.nlc.org). Individuals are encouraged to write directly to retail store managers and corporate officials, invoking their authority as consumers to express moral concerns about products that bear certain brands. This form of political consumerism does not presuppose a unified body of individuals; it is network-based, mobilizing and recruiting participants who do not necessarily share the same perspective on a particular commodity. In this regard, political consumerism takes on the social morphology of other so-called antiglobalization initiatives and coalitions, organized in often informal and ad hoc ways through the new media technologies of e-mail and Internet that also enable such brutal efficiencies of economic globalization as Wal-Mart’s integrated transnational supply chains. Indeed, it takes on the morphology of the very networks assembled by the products that provide the focus of political activism (Graeber 2002; Klein 2000). Nevertheless, political consumerism often requires, entails, and promotes a more encompassing politics of consumption that seeks to establish institutional alternatives for consumers (such as cooperative stores) or institutional arrangements to validate guarantees made to consumers (such as the Worker Rights Consortium set up to monitor compliance of garment producers with minimum labor standards; http://www.worker rights.org). These institutions make it possible for individuals to practice

170

Coca-Globalization

everyday political consumerism with relatively little effort and less than passionate commitment. It is this very possibility, of course, that renders political consumerism both attractive and vulnerable. That is, political consumerism can be easily built into a person’s routine shopping and provisioning, but it can also be easily rendered impotent when, for example, labeling schemes are misleading or weakly enforced, or when, as I argue in Chapter 7, political consumerism becomes an end in itself, detached from other modes of civic action. Political consumerism and the politics of products challenge the distinction between the market and the world outside the market—the cosmological divide that corporate citizenship mediates but never seeks to eliminate (and not only for legal reasons). In so doing, they equally challenge familiar distinctions between public and private, political and economic, citizenship and consumption. In this light, not only consumption, but all market activity must be conducted in morally informed ways— guided by values, virtues, and ethics as well as by self-interest. This dictum applies especially to the conduct of relations between employers and wagelaborers, but in principle the extent of its application is almost boundless. Such a possibility is perhaps most readily apparent when considering the environmental or ecological ramifications of globally produced and consumed products (consider, for instance, a PET bottle of spring water imported from Fiji and drunk in Canada). For a global corporation like The Coca-Cola Company, the politics of products potentially represents a loss of control over delimiting exactly who or what the company “touches” and who or what the company is obliged to “refresh”; a loss of control over the borders of the polity in which the company obliges itself to act as a good citizen. This loss of control is, in other words, an inability to align perspectives within a product network or even to keep the network—ever responsive to the agendas of its diverse constituent agents—from falling apart. The politics of products, moreover, when coupled with an emergent form of transnational governmentality that includes but exceeds the agencies of territorial nation-states, means that the legitimate concerns of consumer-citizens need not be restricted to their own countries of political citizenship. Consumer-citizens, like anthropologists, are free to follow the thing, to track branded consumer goods through value chains of vast geographical extensiveness, reacting in Rochester, New York, to morally troubling situations unfolding in Colombia or South Africa. These reactions, like the operations of NGOs and interstate agencies, form a dimension of transnational governmentality. They potentially open up a new space for the creation of transnational alliances and deterritorialized communities in which some of the inequities of neoliberal economic globalization can

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

171

be redressed if not eradicated. Douglas Daft’s question is thus pertinent: “How does a local business, global in scope, demonstrate citizenship?” We might similarly ask, “How do local consumers, with an eye toward translocal connections, demonstrate citizenship?” What are the ways in which a globally aware form of consumer-citizenship is taking shape in and around the far-flung network of soft drink perspectives? And with what, if any, effects? Soft Drink Perspectives on Political Consumerism Fire up your search engine and enter “boycott Coca-Cola.” You will find unequivocal evidence of the risks of being a high profile global consumer goods corporation in this moment of the politics of products. Reasons for boycotting Coca-Cola include protests over groundwater takings in India and over corporate support for the state of Israel. In addition, groups including the Pacific Green Party of Portland, Oregon, and the National Union of Students in the United Kingdom have called (the latter unsucessfully) for boycotts of Coca-Cola products in solidarity with trade unionists in Colombia, who have accused the company of complicity with anti-union violence (Chapter 6). Updated reports of consumer tactics directed against the company and its bottlers can be found on Web sites including Cokewatch.org. There is no doubt that new media technologies have expanded the possible scope of an old weapon of consumer politics—the boycott. Long lists of ongoing boycotts can be found on the Web sites of groups ranging from the Ethical Consumer Research Association to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Boycotts are a form of negative political consumerism, a kind of antishopping well suited to the quick and unambiguous expression of moral outrage. For example, in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, consumer boycotts were initiated across Europe against American products, including Coca-Cola (see Figure 5.3). While it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of this antiwar action, it is worth noting that the most recent spate of boycotts in connection with accusations of labor violence in Colombia has prompted the company to respond publicly, using the same sort of electronic means available to consumer activists. For example, a Google search of “boycott Coke” in 2005 called up a “sponsored link” to CokeFacts.org, a company Web page with the heading, The Truth About the Coca-Cola Company Around The World. The page not only responds to allegations about human rights abuses in Colombia, but also provides background on the history of the company’s operations there and a copy of a commissioned report that “found no instances of anti-union

172

Coca-Globalization

Figure 5.3 Anglet, France, March 2003. Three members of a Basque antiwar group stage a “die-in” inside a supermarket. The group protested the U.S.-led war against Iraq and called for a boycott of American goods. AP IMAGES/Bob Edme.

violence or intimidation at Coca-Cola bottling plants.” In this case, at least, persistent and well-publicized allegations about the company’s operations posed enough of a risk to reputation and image that the company devoted resources to a substantive rather than dismissive reply. The controversy over The Coca-Cola Company’s operations in Colombia (see Chapter 6) exemplify how transnational governmentality remains open to contest through reconfigurations of a product network. A transnational network of consumers effectively pressured a transnational corporation to clarify its role in a labor dispute that pitted trade unionists against a national state which over the previous two decades of IMF-imposed reforms had used both legislative and paramilitary means to debilitate unionized labor (Gill 2004a). Indeed, the anthropologist Lesley Gill, who has written about the situation in Colombia, has suggested steps that would bring another NGO—the American Anthropological Association— into this network and thus apply further pressure on The Coca-Cola Company “to change its business practices” (2004b, 2). Nor is this controversy unique. As I write these words, the New York Times (Greenhouse 2005) is reporting on a controversy over hourly wages at Wal-Mart, which are below the national average for all retail workers. A campaign called “Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart,” undertaken by WakeUpWalMart.com is encouraging consumers to buy Mother’s Day gifts “from companies that treat our nation’s mothers and all women with fairness and respect.”

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

173

The Mother’s Day campaign has provoked two responses worthy of note. First, five members of the U.S. Congress have lent their support to the campaign to reform Wal-Mart’s labor practices. That is, state representatives are in effect joining an initiative started by the thousands of Americans (385,000 as of 2007)—self-described “grassroots leaders, community groups and activists” (or consumer-citizens)—who compose WakeUpWalMart.com. The state follows rather than leads on this issue of corporate social responsibility. Second, Wal-Mart has—apparently for the first time—gone out of its way to invite journalists to a company-sponsored conference at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, to hear its views. Wal-Mart rejects proposals to increase wages or medical benefits on the grounds that such increases would eliminate price advantages and thus “betray our commitment to tens of millions of customers, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet.” George Whalin, of Retail Management Consultants, put the matter in terms that starkly outline the limits of corporate citizenship: “Wal-Mart has a responsibility to serve their customers—to give them a good product—and to their shareholders. They don’t have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay” (Greenhouse 2005). But Whalin’s comments also foreshadow the limits of consumer citizenship by implying that unless political consumerism results in a change in public policy—“the law”—then its efficacy is measured only by the vulnerability of corporate bottom lines. According to Micheletti (2003, 88–89), most boycotts neither mobilize large numbers of consumers to participate nor achieve their stated goals: “Many are complete failures because they are ill-conceived and are more similar to spontaneous, short-lived, grassroots urgent expressions of protest than serious commitment to a political cause.” Nevertheless, to the extent that boycotts publicize allegations that might harm a corporation’s reputation and image, they will remain a basic tool of political provocation (and of forcefully denying corporations the opportunity to reembed their products in value-creating community relations). The following review of several manifestations of a politics of soft drink products considers forms of “positive political consumerism” (Micheletti 2003, 80) in addition to refusals to buy particular branded goods—“buycotts,” so to speak, as well as boycotts. Ethical or Smart Shopping: The New Anti-Coca-Colas Ethical consumption or smart shopping functions like a tax earmarked for specific purposes. Consumers buy a particular brand of goods because some portion of the sales price will be donated to a particular cause; or, alternatively, consumers pay a premium price for a product guaranteed to

174

Coca-Globalization

have been produced under fair working or environmentally safe conditions, or exchanged for a fair price with its producers. The latter arrangement is almost unknown in the carbonated soft drink industry; “fair trade” colas are scarce. The former arrangement, “cause marketing,” is common, however, as the example of CCA’s sponsorship of the Papua New Guinea Olympic team through sales of five-hundred-milliliter bottles suggests (see Chapter 4). Similarly (and ironically, given the “Love Mom” campaign), according to Hertz (2003, 202), “Coca-Cola calculated that in 1997 it experienced a 490 percent increase in sales of its products at 450 Wal-Mart stores during a six-week campaign allied with Mother’s Against Drunk Driving, to whom the company donated a proportion of its sales.” Hertz remarks that it is not surprising, therefore, that Direct Marketing can report that 85 percent of American corporations now use cause marketing tactics. Recently, calls for ethical consumption and smart shopping have been issued in the name of anti-coca-colonization, active resistance to American political, economic, cultural, and military domination. Anti-coca-colonization has often taken the form of boycotts—not only against Coca-Cola but also against all goods perceived as American, of which Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are perhaps the epitome. The U.S.-led war in Iraq has provided only the most recent stimulus to this strategy. However, with respect to soft drinks, buycotts have seemingly eclipsed boycotts as an instrument of anti-coca-colonization in the years after 9/11. In November 2002, Tawfik Mathlouthi, a Tunisian-born French entrepreneur, launched MeccaCola in Paris as part of a campaign against “America’s imperialism and Zionism” (Murphy 2003). Within a year, Mecca-Cola had expanded to fifty-four countries, booking about nine million dollars in revenue in 2003. Ten percent of Mecca-Cola’s profits are set aside as donations to groups helping Palestinian children, and another 10 percent as funds for local charities. Hence the company’s tag line: “No more drinking stupid. Drink with commitment.” In 2003, Zahida Parveen, a businesswoman based in Derby, United Kingdom, launched Qibla Cola, which her company’s CEO described as “a real alternative for people concerned by the practices of the major western multinationals that support unjust causes and support the American administration, known for its colonial policies” (“Soft Drink Group Expands Range” 2003). (Qibla is Arabic for direction—the direction of Mecca.) Like Mecca-Cola, Qibla Cola donates 10 percent of its profits to charitable causes, including those of the UK-based charity, Islamic Aid. Qibla Cola represents itself as an “ethical alternative” and says to consumers: “Liberate your taste.”

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

175

Liberate your taste recalls Pepsi’s former marketing slogan in Papua New Guinea, Break Free. The fact that Quibla Cola in England and Pepsi in PNG both invoke the notion of freedom and liberation to sell soft drinks no doubt indicates to many critics the worldwide spread of a debased form of “political” freedom and agency. At the very least, the coincidence should make us cautious about the rhetoric of consumer agency in a politics of products and to acknowledge the ironies of anti-coca-colonization as a weapon of resistance against globalization.4 Perhaps more basically, we might ask with Farish A. Noor if the replacement of one brand of sweetened carbonated water by another constitutes radical political and cultural reform. Noor (2003), writing in the New Straits Times (Malaysia), notes that the anti-Coca-Colas, in replicating what they deny, illustrate the twisted logic of hegemony, in which people exhibit true signs of submission by aping the ways of their conquerors: “the nations and communities of the developing world must learn that to confront Western (and specifically American) hegemony cannot be done through piecemeal gestures like imitating Western products and lifestyles.” Furthermore, while Mecca-Cola and Quibla Cola qualify their products as a means for connecting consumers with other persons—both the recipients of the charitable donations and the horizontal fellowship of antiCoca-Cola consumers—the brands also float freely as signifiers of an oppositional identity. Put differently, these anti-Coca-Colas are not marketed as goods enmeshed in a chain of social relations, a commodity network that links producers and distributors as well as consumers. The question of who produced them and who profits from them remains unasked and unanswered. Accordingly, this form of consumer citizenship forestalls any consideration of its instrumental effects in reproducing capitalist class relations despite its manifest claims to address political and economic inequality. Do the emergence of brands like Quibla Cola and Mecca-Cola merely pluralize coca-colonization, making it a multicultural rather than monocultural process? Are these brands signs of glocalization—Wilk’s global “system of common difference” (Chapter 2)—rather than alternatives to (American-led) globalization? The case of the most recently prominent anti-Coca-Cola—Cola Turka—suggests an affirmative answer. Cola Turka is the product of the Ülker Group, a major Turkish confectionery and cookie company that exports to more than ninety-five countries. Ülker has contributed to Turkey’s conservative-religious Justice and Development Party and has been alleged to support an Islamist agenda. In July 2003, a new ad campaign for Cola Turka appeared on Turkish television just as Turkish troops were taken into custody in northern Iraq by U.S. troops—an incident

176

Coca-Globalization

that provoked strong anti-American feelings in Turkey. The first two advertisements were set in New York and featured the American comic actor Chevy Chase (see Özkan and Foster 2005). In the ads, versions of which can be seen on Cola Turka’s Web site, Chase encounters unusual signs of Turkish national culture as he goes about his day. A car full of Turkish men, wrapped in their national flag, drives through Times Square celebrating a soccer victory; a cowboy in a diner speaks to Chase in Turkish argot after drinking Cola Turka; Chase arrives home to discover his wife preparing a Turkish meal; the guests at the table take up the Turkish “anthem of the youth,” a popular song associated with Turkish national independence. Finally, after trying Cola Turka himself, Chase sprouts a bushy black moustache. In Turkey, the advertising campaign prompted many people to adopt Cola Turka as an anti-American, anti-Coca-Cola. Sales increased significantly, as some cafés banned the sale of American soft drinks in protest of U.S. government policies. Ülker and many Turkish consumers, however, denied that the intent of the advertising campaign was to promote an antiAmerican product. The ad agency (an Istanbul affiliate of Young and Rubicam) described its strategy as “positive nationalism.” As one consumer put it, “It is not anti-American, just pro-Turkish.” Indeed, the ads appealed to many viewers as a humorous assertion of national pride that playfully inverts the direction of cultural influence by depicting a typical if bland suburban American (Chevy Chase) reacting to what happens when his fellow Americans adopt Turkish customs (see Özkan and Foster 2005 for more discussion). In any event, whether the ads are understood as pro-Turkish or antiAmerican, the result is identical. Turkish consumers affirm their national identity through the purchase of a soft drink. Drinking Cola Turka, then, is qualified as an act of patriotism. In other words, consumerism, with its dominant values of personal freedom and choice, becomes the vehicle for enacting citizenship. The market, rather than the state, becomes the immediate reference point for demonstrating national belonging. Again, we might well pause to consider whether consumer citizenship of this sort is a form of political resistance or an instrument for consolidating market rule, as many critics would say of all sorts of consumer citizenship. Put differently, do the Cola Turka ads represent the Turkification of America or the continued coca-colonization of Turkey, albeit by a local multinational company?

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

177

De-Coca-Colonization or Culture Jamming Before I take up these issues, I wish to return to a different one—the mutability of commodities and their openness to constant requalification (Chapter 1), an appreciation of which suggests a politics of the product that might be termed “de-coca-colonization.” De-coca-colonization refers to the process by which foreign imports are put in the service of domestic agendas (see Flusty 2004). In other words, cultural products emanating from abroad are put to uses that are neither intended nor anticipated by their original producers. Accordingly, de-coca-colonization can sometimes function as a transparent protest against coca-colonization. Take, for example, Insertions into Ideological Circuits, the project of Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles. In 1970, during a period of military rule in Brazil when political dissent was heavily censored, Meireles appropriated the circuit of returnable Coca-Cola bottles for the dissemination of his own messages. He silk-screened subversive statements such as “Yankees Go Home!” onto the sides of empty returnable bottles, which he then put back into circulation through the deposit system. When the bottles were refilled, the protest slogans became plainly visible (see Figure 5.4). Meireles similarly appropriated the state-issued currency as another circuit of

Figure 5.4 Insertions into Ideological Circuits; Coca-Cola Project, 1970. © Cildo Meireles, Image courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

178

Coca-Globalization

communication, stamping his own dissident slogans on paper bills, the everyday means by which state power naturalizes and circulates itself. In Meireles’s project, de-coca-colonization is intentionally subversive— a deliberate act of resistance. In other instances, de-coca-colonization puts foreign imports to uses that might not be intentionally political, or that might refer to a different sort of politics. Recall Kaipel Ka’s war shield and the offerings of Mayan worshippers (Chapter 1). This sort of appropriation of foreign goods for domestic purposes—what I am calling de-coca-colonization—is most spectacularly illustrated with some examples from Ghana, superbly crafted coffins produced by coastal Ga people to memorialize the deceased. The design of the coffins—a fish, an onion, or a cocoa pod, for example—bears some connection to the life story of the deceased. Often the designs indicate high status, such as a coffin carved in the shape of a Mercedes-Benz sedan. Nor is it apparently uncommon now for brandname consumer goods to receive the dead, such as a coffin in the shape of the Nike Air Jordan sneaker, complete with swoosh. It should not come as a shock, therefore, that a range of Coca-Cola coffins is available—in both can and classic contoured bottle (see Figure 5.5): worldly things for making the journey to another world (see Secretan 1995). The artistic creativity and cultural vitality of the Ga coffins are seductive (and, apparently, available for purchase by mail order at http://www .eshopafrica.com/acatalog/index.htm). They tempt us to celebrate the coffins if not as an example of the culture of resistance (to globalization), then perhaps as evidence of the resistance of culture (Sahlins 2005). Yet cultural appropriations such as the Ga coffins are themselves vulnerable to reappropriation. The Coca-Cola Company, especially under the leadership of its former CEO, Douglas Daft, has shown itself eager to embrace cultural diversity within the apparatus of glocalization. For example, Daft’s mantra of “think local, act local” was a prescription for developing new beverages that appeal to local tastes and new ad campaigns that reflect local cultural conventions. Consider, in this regard, the Coca-Cola Salute to Folk Art program. According to the company’s 1999 annual report, the program “was created to give artists around the globe a chance to express their local cultures through an interpretation of the world’s favorite beverage.” More specifically, artists were enlisted to add “local” designs to the iconic (and trademarked) form of a worldly thing—the contour shaped bottle universally identified with brand Coca-Cola. So, for example, the entry from Mexico bears red and gold motifs “inspired by the Matlazincan Indians,” while an entry from South Africa is sheathed in colorful beadwork produced by a team of artists from the Ndebele tribe, “known for their beautiful beadwork and painting as well as for the joy in their art.” Here, then, is

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

179

Figure 5.5 Teshie, a suburb of Accra (Ghana), January 2004. Carpenters opening a coffin shaped in the form of a Coca-Cola bottle. RUETERS/Wolfgang Rattay.

a striking material instance of a “system of common differences”—a system in which difference can be expressed only within the constraints of a form imposed from without by a single corporate sponsor. Put otherwise, the Salute to Folk Art Program effectively inverts Meireles’s project on ideological insertions; it is as if The Coca-Cola Company is

180

Coca-Globalization

inserting its instantly recognizable bottle into a whole array of already existing artistic traditions. De-coca-colonization has seemingly been recruited to serve the ends of coca-colonization. At the very least, I suggest that de-coca-colonization, much like anti-coca-colonization, is never a sure way to achieve political reform or to ensure cultural integrity. Decoca-colonization might actually reproduce or strengthen agendas that pursue different, if not opposite, outcomes—not necessarily because it is itself vulnerable to appropriation, but because it constitutes a form of rebellion that resembles in many ways the rebelliousness with which marketing campaigns qualify branded consumer goods (Frank 1997; Heath and Potter 2004). This suggestion applies especially to the activity of “culture jamming,” an activity immodestly represented by some practitioners as productive of revolutionary political consequences. Culture jamming refers to the use of existing mass media forms for the express purpose of subverting those very forms through a process of “denaturalization,” of making taken-for-granted images appear strange and unfamiliar. With respect to advertising, culture jamming involves harnessing the aesthetic conventions of the ad form to critical or ironic messages about the products (and corporate producers) being “advertised.” For example, a culture-jammed image might superimpose the familiar slogan “Got Milk?” over the picture of an emaciated African child squatting with an empty bowl. The practice has been popularized in the magazine Adbusters, which seeks to resist a “mental commons” cluttered with commercial advertisements by introducing dissonance and dissent within the system of propaganda. Culture jamming is an attempt to appropriate and recycle both advertising content and the ad form itself in order to cultivate critical self-awareness and to challenge the self-representations of corporate advertisers, especially advertisers of nationally or globally branded products. Here are two examples of culture jamming directed at soft drink marketers. Lighthouse II, by the artist Chris Woods (see Figure 5.6), is available as a poster and postcard for purchase on the home page of Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters (http://www.adbusters.org). The oil painting depicts the consternation of a young man and woman who view themselves as portrayed on the front panel of a Coca-Cola vending machine. The panel—in classic capitalist realist style—reflects back to the man and woman a picture of themselves dressed in the identical clothes that they are wearing, but smiling at each other and holding iconic contour-shaped Coke bottles in their hands. Woods’s Adbuster poster is thus a striking visual image of interpolation—of how advertisements, like all ideology, hail people who, in responding to the call, concede recognition of themselves as being

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

181

Figure 5.6 Lighthouse II, by Chris Woods. Image courtesy the artist and Diane Farris Gallery.com.

addressed (Althusser 1971). The consternation of the young man and woman in confronting the extent to which commercial advertising organizes their consciousness of themselves as subjects is, presumably, the same consternation that the poster’s distributor intends to provoke among viewers. My second example, the CD recording, Dispepsi, by Negativland, is more complex and worthy of longer discussion, but omission would be worse than brief mention (see http://www.negativland.com). Negativland

182

Coca-Globalization

is a group of four men that since the 1980s has been producing “tape-collage compositions” using “sonic bits from here and there to critique the culture industry” (cited in Negativland 1995, 2). The art group attracted unusual publicity in 1991 when it was sued for violation of U.S. trademark and copyright law in connection with a collage CD that reproduced fragments of a song by the rock band U2, and outtakes from announcer Casey Kasem’s popular syndicated radio show, American Top 40. The entire episode, as documented in Negativland’s 1995 book, Fair Use, illustrates the group’s commitment to recycling and remixing pieces of corporateowned commercial culture in an attempt to communicate humorous anticorporate messages and to validate, if not extend, the provisions of fair use. Negativland’s Web site includes numerous articles and helpful resources on fair use and copyright law, including the group’s own original essay on fair use, which advocates the “practice of fragmentary appropriation” and the values of free speech and artistic freedom. Negativland’s position thus converges with that of Coombe (1998; see Chapter 3), who also regards prevailing intellectual property law as an antidemocratic curtailment of individual creativity and the public domain (see Lessig 2004). In 1997, Negativland released a new CD, Dispepsi. The recording consists of found sound-collages that incorporate bits of Pepsi advertisements, including jingles, as well as statements from past celebrity endorsers (such as actor Ricardo Montalban), corporate officials, radio talk show participants, and television news readers. Dispesi’s liner notes observe that “All of the cola commercials that were appropriated, transformed and re-used in this recording attempted to assault us in our homes without our permission.” Accordingly, the appropriated (without permission) fragments are woven into songs that parody the messages of Pepsi commercials and recreate—for example, in repetitive sound loops—the banality of consumer goods marketing. Dispepsi includes such catchy titles as “Drink It Up,” “Why is this Commercial?” and “Voice Inside my Head.” Negativland anticipated a legal reaction to Dispepsi similar to that provoked by their sound appropriation of U2 and Casey Kasem; they consequently designed an ambiguous album cover for which the group could not be sued over trademark violation (see Figure 5.7). They anticipated, however, legal challenges on the grounds of copyright infringement. In the event, however, no lawsuit followed. In fact, Entertainment Weekly reported the casual reaction of a Pepsi spokesman: “It’s no Odelay, but it’s a pretty good listen” (the reference is to an album by Beck, known for his use of sampling and sound collage; review posted at http://www.negativland.com). Dispepsi, moreover, was reviewed in prominent “alternative” magazines such as Mother Jones, the Onion, and Rolling Stone. (The Negativland Web site

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

183

Figure 5.7 Album cover of Dispepsi, 1997. Cover design by Shawn Wolfe and Negativland™.

includes quotes about the group from mainstream publications such as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Washington Post). These reviews, while mostly positive, expressed some doubts about the efficacy of Negativland’s critique. One review noted that the album’s satire fit well with the then current fad for self-deprecation in corporate advertising; furthermore, it observed, the album’s purposively repetitive sound loops and satiric sing-alongs were indeed very much like a commercial. This similarity prompted one online reviewer to note, “Since most of the material is culled from Pepsi commercials of old, the album feels more like an extended, nostalgic Pepsi ad. Only someone with an ear for deconstruction (i.e., the average Negativland fan) will pick up on the anti-commercial/ anti-media saturation commentary it contains. Anyone else hearing it will probably want to drink a Pepsi” (Mattro 1998, http://www.raptorial.com/ Zine/Reviews/Negland01.html). Hence, too, the question posed by a Boston Phoenix reviewer (review posted at http://www.negativland.com/ reviews/reviews_dispepsi.html): Given the recuperative powers of the

184

Coca-Globalization

global economy and consumer culture, would Negativland’s critique itself be able to withstand being made into a sales pitch? None of these criticisms, I hasten to add, were news to Negativland. (Indeed, their inclusion on Negativland’s Web site demonstrates the group’s commitment to nondidactic projects in which the aesthetic experience is primary and in which questions are asked without presuming answers [Mark Hosler, personal communication]). In a 1997 interview with For the Record (http://www.negativland.com), group member Mark Hosler expressed his own uneasiness about the response to Dispepsi. Hosler confessed shock at being invited by the advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy (the firm that put William Burroughs in a Nike ad) to cut up some of the agency’s ads and produce a Negativland-style collage: “[The invitation] means that the Negativland aesthetic, our style, has reached the point where it’s acceptable fodder for a beer commercial. It also, arguably, could have something to do with why Pepsi is leaving us alone.” Hosler goes on to note the rise of “anti-corporate corporate advertising” (see Edwards 1997), and speculates that “Dispepsi isn’t that different than something Pepsi might really do themselves in five years.” In short, Hosler wonders whether Negativland’s form of protest art has indeed been appropriated by the advertising industry—its force as cultural critique put in the service of enabling corporations to represent themselves as hip and knowing, especially to the valued youth segment that Pepsi targets.5 It is at this point that Hosler’s self-doubts converge with recent polemical critiques of culture jamming as a form of ineffective political protest, one version of which appears in the work of Thomas Frank (1997). Frank, whom Hosler himself mentions in the 1997 interview, argues that cultural dissent of the sort promoted by Negativland and Adbusters—dissent that draws upon notions of subversiveness and rule-breaking—is effectively complicit with corporate advertising. Frank, moreover, argues that this is not a new phenomenon, but, rather, one that can be traced to the early 1960s, when advertisers seized upon the dissatisfaction with a 1950s lifestyle characterized as conformist and standardized in order to promote liberation through the consumption of commodities that included Volkswagen Beetles and, of course, Pepsi-Cola soft drinks. The invention of the “Pepsi Generation” in 1963 firmly aligned Pepsi against the conservative world of Coca-Cola by “dramatizing the carnivalesque, the anarchic cultural mode whose genuinely subversive qualities are celebrated by so many social theorists” (Frank 1997, 174). The Pepsi ad campaigns of the 1960s and ’70s—“a panorama of hip images without radical content”—conjured “a vision of countercultural carnival as an all-American myth for the new commercial age” (Frank 1997, 182, 183).

Corporations, Consumers, and New Strategies of Citizenship

185

To imagine cultural dissent as a form of liberated, unconventional, individualizing consumption was thus to imagine oneself in the likeness of the dominant consumer aesthetic. And this aesthetic endures today in soft drink advertising aimed at rebellious (male) youth for whom “image is nothing,” as Sprite ads once proclaimed. Given Frank’s genealogy, it is not surprising that Sergio Zyman, chief marketing officer of The Coca-Cola Company, could propose in 1992 to position Sprite against rival cola beverages as a lemon-lime drink that reflected a cheeky, unconventional attitude: “We saw this as an opportunity to compete with Pepsi in some of its markets by stepping on their positioning of choice and change” (Zyman 1999, 92). &* The countercultural carnival never ends. It becomes part of a perpetual fashion cycle whereby the new and subversive becomes the old and accepted. This cycle fuels consumerism in the apolitical sense of the term: the neverending pursuit of difference, of cutting edge styles that promise—at least for a while—a kind of authentic creativity and unique identity beyond the reach of mass marketing. (It also fuels dubious marketing practices such as “cool hunting,” in which fieldworkers attempt to spot original consumer innovation at the source and funnel it back into the mass production of “cool” commodities; see Gladwell 1997). As Heath and Potter (2004) argue at almost painful length, the analytical flaw of this kind of countercultural dissent lies in its diagnosis of the object of protest. Countercultural dissent objects, largely in aesthetic terms, to mass conformity and the imposition of social norms; it does not give much attention to class exploitation and other institutional forms of injustice. Accordingly, it recommends an individualistic, psychological solution to a collective, political problem; innovative self-expression and non-conformist rule-breaking offer the way to profound changes in consciousness. This tendency emerges even in the interview with Negativland’s Mark Hosler, an informed proponent of changing intellectual property regimes. Hosler seems to concede defeat on the issue of regulating advertising in public places: “When people ask us what they can do about all this advertising, obviously there’s nothing that you or I can do to make it go away.” He apparently sees, however, a possibility for psychic resistance, for altering one’s perception of advertising (for example, by listening to Dispepsi): “And the more you understand what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and why, in a certain way you’ve taken some of their power away. You’ve taken some of their effectiveness away.” Changing oneself takes the place of changing social arrangements, just as

186

Coca-Globalization

The Coca-Cola Company prefers to change consumers’ habits rather than its own marketing imperatives. Consciousness-raising, cognitive dissonance, or individual psychic selfdefense against advertising, do not, of course, directly address the question of regulating the practice of advertising, let alone the practices of corporations targeted by other forms of the politics of products. Culture jamming produces interesting art, no doubt; just listen to Dispepsi or Dead Dog Records, Negativland’s performative case for found sound appropriation on the CD (stamped “Copyright Infringement Is Your Best Entertainment Value”) that accompanies the book, Fair Use; or peruse the polished and clever ad spoofs in Adbusters. But it remains unclear how consumer citizens might move from these creative works to Negativland’s own clearly announced and politically attractive goals of reforming highly restrictive copyright and trademark laws. The questions thus remains, Are there more effective forms of consumer citizenship, other forms of activism in which consumers mobilize themselves as citizens in order to pursue civic ideals with less risk of reiterating consumerist ones? Critiques of culture jamming suggest that if there is an affirmative answer to this question, then it will entail more than consciousness-raising and altered perceptions. That is, it will entail forms of social protest in the service of definite policy outcomes—not a change in how one perceives corporate image making, but a change in how one regulates all corporate practices, including image making. One such form of protest, shareholder activism, has taken shape within the structure of the corporation itself.

Chapter 6

Shareholder Activism Consumer Citizenship inside the Corporation At a time when 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies are corporations, lobbying governments to ensure our collective well-being is now simply inadequate. Corporations wield tremendous influence over nearly every element of our existence, and they must be held accountable. The multinational scope of their power signifies one thing clearly: Protest, too, must become globalized. —Sukant Khurana and Jordan Buckely, University of Texas students, from an opinion piece in the Daily Texan, November 16, 2005

t the 2000 annual shareholder meeting of Coca-Cola Amatil in Sydney, the questions posed from the floor to CCA directors focused mainly on circumstances surrounding the forecast of continued weak performance. Ray Wagner, of the Australian Shareholders Association (ASA), asked why it took so long to authorize a restructuring in the Philippines, and whether CCA had a goal for return on equity. His questions were in the spirit of his nonprofit organization’s mission to “press for improvements in transparency and accountability in relation to company performance, executive remuneration, treatment of minority shareholders, risk management and dividend policy” (“About the ASA,” http://www.asa.asn.au/ WhatWeDo/About.asp). Neither Wagner nor anyone else in attendance raised questions about CCA’s proposed plan to target the captive population of Filipino schoolchildren (Chapter 5). Except for a final politely worded question about what the company was doing to be seen as a “good corporate citizen” in Indonesia (in response to which it was pointed out that CCA plants suffered no damage during the civil unrest of 1998 and that, in some cases, people protected the plants), considerations of social responsibility seemed far removed from the discussion. The atmosphere at the 2002 annual meeting of The Coca-Cola Company in Madison Square Garden was palpably different. Following the marketing showcase, Douglas Daft prefaced the discussion of shareholder proposals and questions with a pre-emptive statement on “how we do

A

188

Coca-Globalization

business.” Daft first referred to a lawsuit filed in Florida on July 20, 2000, against the company and its Colombian bottlers over anti-union violence. He said that there was “no evidence to support the allegations.” Daft then affirmed the company’s support of human rights and worker rights—“we practice social responsibility”—and pointed to a code of conduct for suppliers consistent across the entire Coca-Cola system. He also raised the controversial issues of diet and obesity, again contrasting a sedentary lifestyle with an active Coca-Cola lifestyle and claiming that the company offered a wide variety of beverages that fit into a healthy, active lifestyle. But for a single mention of accounting concerns about off-balance sheet debt, Daft’s prefatory remarks addressed issues of social responsibility rather than corporate governance, a complete inversion of the priorities pursued at the Sydney meeting. Daft knew well what was coming, namely, a disturbing echo of the protests taking place simultaneously on the sidewalks outside Madison Square Garden. Three of the four shareholder proposals on the agenda concerned corporate responsibility with regard to the environment (container recycling), human rights (code of conduct), and ethical business practices in China; the fourth proposal concerned executive stock options. Similarly, shareholder questions from the floor to directors focused on corporate responsibility, twice noting how much good might have been accomplished with the $5 million reportedly spent on the day’s entertainment spectacle (Leith 2002). A Maryknoll priest turned the company’s marketing rhetoric against itself, urging Daft and his directors to “connect with workers” and to “do the real thing.” An AIDS activist likewise called on the board to provide comprehensive healthcare for all Coca-Cola system workers in Africa, employees of bottlers as well as of the parent company, in order to redeem the promise of life “because life tastes good.” By all measures, shareholder activism is on the rise. The Christian Science Monitor (MacDonald 2004), citing statistics from the Investor Responsibility Research Center, reported that in 2003, the number of shareholder proposals brought to a vote at company meetings jumped to 1,082 from 802 the year before. (The number was up again in 2004, with 1,147 proposals voted on by mid-year.) Of the 2003 proposals, the great majority (772) concerned corporate governance—election of the board of directors, executive compensation, separation of the roles of chairman and CEO, and so forth. But some 311 proposals were resolutions on social responsibility, with twenty-six resolutions on global warming alone (Mattera 2003; http://www.corp-research.org). While the increase in proposals dealing with governance might be understood as a direct response to the new millennium’s string of corporate malfeasance scandals, the growth of

Shareholder Activism

189

social responsibility initiatives also testifies to how the politics of products is developing within the legal framework of corporations. Such proposals were submitted by public interest groups in the 1960s and well before that by “corporate gadflies” in order to raise governance questions (Monks and Minow 1996, 137–38), but it was unusual for shareholder resolutions to attract more than token support. Monks and Minow (1996, 138) observe that the “vote of less than 3 percent for Ralph Nader’s 1970 ‘Campaign GM’ shareholder proposals was hailed as a victory of unprecedented levels for a shareholder initiative.” By contrast, in 2002, one hundred resolutions received more than 50 percent of the vote, up from sixty-six in 2001 (Mattera 2003; http://www.corp-research.org). Admittedly, the majority of these successful resolutions concerned governance issues important to large institutional investors, but support for social responsibility resolutions has grown well beyond that of the Nader era. In 2002, “20 social responsibility resolutions tracked by ICCR [Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility] received 16 percent or more, a level the Center defines as ‘exceptionally high’” (Mattera 2003; http://www.corp-research.org). The exercise of consumer citizenship through socially responsible investing and shareholder activism is an attempt to shape and realize the notion of corporate citizenship that corporations themselves promote. It is an attempt to reach specific political and moral goals through direct engagement with corporate managers who act on behalf of shareholders instead of through direct engagements with elected officials who act (ideally) on behalf of their constituents. In many instances, this strategy seems entirely appropriate to the goals at stake, which require interventions beyond the borders of the territorial state of the shareholders themselves. What does this engagement look like in the case of soft drink politics? What, for example, was the fate of the social responsibility resolutions proposed at the 2002 annual meeting of Coca-Cola shareholders, and what does this fate suggest about the potentials and limitations of this particular form of consumer citizenship? Recycling Containers Item 4 on the agenda of the 2002 meeting was a shareholder proposal submitted by Walden Asset Management, the “socially responsive investment division” of Boston Trust and Investment Management Company, along with similar institutional cofilers (Domini Social Investments and Trillium Asset Management). The proposal requested the board to report to shareholders within a few months the company’s efforts to achieve a recovery rate of 80 percent for its beverage containers and to increase

190

Coca-Globalization

recycled content in beverage containers to 25 percent. (A similar proposal had been made the year before, when it attracted a 5.2 percent vote that represented 88.9 million shares; the same resolution received 8.1 percent approval from PepsiCo shareholders.) In his presentation of the proposal at the meeting, Walden portfolio manager Kenneth Scott carefully pointed out that given The Coca-Cola Company’s “nationwide lobbying efforts against container deposits,” the company ought to offer an alternative plan for achieving an environmentally sustainable program for container recycling. Scott also applauded the company for its progress in increasing to 10 percent the amount of recycled resin content in PET beverage containers, effectively claiming this outcome as the result of nearly three years of “positive and constructive dialogue” with the company. The proposal was indeed a model of non-confrontational speech and loyal opposition, thoughtfully worded as an eminently reasonable step toward protecting “Coke’s brand value.” The Walden proposal displayed the softer side of a more aggressive public media campaign to influence The Coca-Cola Company’s policies about container recycling. This campaign was spearheaded by a national nonprofit organization, GrassRoots Recycling Network (GRRN: http://www .grrn.org), based in Athens, Georgia (not to be confused with Rome, Georgia, home of the highest per capita consumption of Coke in the world). GRRN launched its efforts in 1997, three years after, it claimed, the company had abandoned all use of recycled content in its plastic bottles. By 1999, GRRN had published eye-catching paid-for accusations on the op-ed page of the New York Times. One such notice, labeled “Coke’s Broken Promise,” claimed then CEO Douglas Ivester (whose picture appeared with a caption announcing his 1998 total compensation of more than $20 million) broke his 1990 promise to use recycled plastic in Coke’s bottles. In early 2002, GRRN coordinators claimed victory when PepsiCo announced that it aimed to use 10 percent recycled content in its bottles by 2005, a position that Coke’s Douglas Daft had previously announced in April 2001 at the annual shareholder meeting. These concessions, however, did not stop GRRN, in alliance with the Container Recycling Institute, from continuing to press for a deeper corporate commitment to recycling. Another op-ed ad from 2002, which appeared in the New York Times on April 16, the day before Coke’s New York meeting, called on both Coke and Pepsi to “Stop Trashing America” with their annual output of 70 billion beverage containers. The ad, moreover, called upon shareholders to support recycling resolutions at the annual meetings of PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company—the same resolutions introduced the year before. Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, the boards of directors of both companies again

Shareholder Activism

191

recommended voting against the resolutions. The Coca-Cola Company’s justification for its position flatly and somewhat vaguely asserted that its “current approach” made “the most sense” for its business. Several initiatives “undertaken in the past year” were listed as proof. These initiatives included “engaging with a variety of constituents, including share owners and environmental groups, in an effort to better understand existing recycling infrastructures” (The Coca-Cola Company 2002, 39). Strangely, then, engagement with groups such as GRRN was given as a reason for rejecting the proposal of groups such as GRRN. In a similar twist, PepsiCo explained its position by congratulating itself for beginning to use recycled plastic in bottles “with a goal of using 10% recycled material in its bottles by 2005,” that is, by invoking the decision it made to replicate The Coca-Coca Company’s concession of the year before to the requests of environmental groups and socially responsive investors (PepsiCo 2002, 21). The Coca-Cola Company Web site as of late 2006 still bore traces of the GRRN campaign. A frequently asked questions section denied that soft drink containers are “filling up our landfills” (only 1.46 percent of municipal solid waste by volume) and affirmed that “the Coca-Cola system has been the primary user of recycled plastic packaging in the U.S. soft drink industry for the past two years.” The question of whether Coca-Cola broke a promise to use recycled content PET was explicitly asked and equivocally answered in the negative. The site admitted that in the mid-1990s, the system stopped using plastic bottles with recycled content, as GRRN alleged. But the decision was taken because use of recycled content no longer met one of the company’s criteria—cost to consumers. No mention was made of how this cost was calculated—a common complaint of environmentalists who point to the long term and hidden costs of producing certain products, that is, the ecological footprint. (Nor was any mention made of exactly what percent of recycled content the company uses in all its plastic bottles—not just soft drink containers—or what its goals are for increasing the rate of container recovery.1) PepsiCo’s response to the Walden proposal is more revealing on the question of cost, claiming that use of bottles with recycled content “would not make economic sense”: “Current technology is such that it can cost significantly more to produce bottles with recycled content. Where our bottlers have used plastic bottles with recycled content in the past, even when heavily promoted, consumers did not respond in a way to justify the increased costs” (PepsiCo 2001, 19). In other words, PepsiCo, like WalMart, represents itself as a champion of consumers by guaranteeing low retail prices. Other costs—local taxes to fund curbside recycling programs and to expand municipal landfills—are “externalities” and hence not (by

192

Coca-Globalization

law) corporate concerns (Bakan 2004). Even so, only one year later, PepsiCo could revise its position by claiming, “We know it is technically and economically feasible to produce a food-grade container made with 10% recycled content, so we believe achieving that rate is a reasonable action” (PepsiCo 2002, 21). Providing Healthcare Standing outside Madison Square Garden, before the start of the 2002 meeting, I was handed a letter enclosed in a flyer, sealed with a label that read, “Welcome! Coca-Cola Shareholders.” The letter was addressed to Douglas Daft; a blank space was left for me to add my signature as a shareholder. In the letter, I would be urging Daft to extend the benefits of the company’s HIV/AIDS workplace policies to all African employees in the Coca-Cola system; to cover workers employed by the company’s affiliated bottlers as well as the twelve thousand to fifteen thousand workers employed directly by the company: “Particularly, life-sustaining HIV/AIDS medications and treatment for HIV-infected workers and their dependents will save lives and decrease untold suffering among Coca-Cola’s vast African workforce” (which the company estimates to number sixty thousand people). The flyer reiterated this demand, as well as several others regarding HIV testing and counseling and HIV/AIDS prevention and education programs; it also noted the high profit margins that the company recorded in Africa in recent years. It invited me and other shareholders to join in the campaign with Health Global Access Project (Health GAP) and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in order to demand that “Coke provide healthcare to HIV-positive workers in Africa.” The letter and flyer signaled the launch of a protest campaign coordinated by Health GAP and ACT UP that was prompted by an act of corporate citizenship, namely, The Coca-Cola Company’s own well-staged announcement the previous year (during the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS) of its partnership with UNAIDS. Indeed, this was the partnership between UNAIDS and the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation (the philanthropic arm of Coca-Cola Africa) that the company celebrated in its citizenship report, Keeping Our Promise, and for which Nelson Mandela offered videotaped thanks to the shareholders inside Madison Square Garden. Through this partnership, the company would offer logistical support for the distribution of AIDS literature, condoms, and testing kits as well as marketing resources for the dissemination of HIV prevention messages. While the company thus sought to validate its sense

Shareholder Activism

193

of social responsibility, activists sought to turn corporate citizenship into an expanded opportunity for consumer citizenship. Specifically, the Health GAP/ACT UP campaign demanded that the company stop using the distinction between itself and its “independent” bottlers as an excuse for “medical apartheid”—the denial of access to treatment to the workers who bottle and deliver the company’s products throughout Africa. The company offered its partnership with UNAIDS as evidence of its embeddedness in local communities; protestors, however, argued that the partnership exposed an invidious double standard: medical care for parent company employees, and prevention and education for employees of bottlers. In this instance, the franchise system, which has long served the company as a vehicle for localizing itself (Chapter 2), was represented as an insidious device for disconnecting or insulating the company from local social contexts. Once again, the company was confronted with its own lack of control over its product—that is, over the network assembled by the product—and thus the definition of just whom it touches and thereby incurs obligations to refresh. Other agents in the network rejected the company’s qualification of itself and perforce its products, and substituted competing qualifications. The Health GAP/ACT UP campaign continued through the summer (see http://www.treat-your-workers.org), with a call issued for a global day of protest against Coke on October 17, 2002. On September 26, the company announced a new initiative, a partnership between the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation and Population Services International (PSI) to join forces “with Coca-Cola’s 40 bottlers in Africa to put into place comprehensive workplace HIV/AIDS prevention programs” (http://www.psi.org/ news/092702d.html). The initiative also extended healthcare benefits, including access to antiretroviral drugs, to “employees and spouses of any Coca-Cola bottler that chooses to participate.” Access would be provided through a partnership with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and PharmAcess International. The announcement followed a major decision in August by UK mining conglomerate Anglo American plc—with a workforce of 160,000 in Africa—that it would “provide [free] anti-retroviral therapy to all staff who are HIV-positive and are not covered by any medical aid scheme.” Here, again, we meet a new form of governmentality, in which transnational corporations operate as “stunt doubles for state bureaucracy in the delivery of health and education to the poor” (Lopatin 2002). Accordingly, Robert Lindsay, president of the Board of Trustees of the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, could call for greater collaboration and coordination from business, civil society, and the public sector as the most effective way to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa (The Coca-Cola

194

Coca-Globalization

Company 2003a). “Local government” thus becomes one of many partners—and by no means the lead partner—in delivering healthcare. Predictably, perhaps, the Health GAP/ACT UP campaign immediately criticized the company’s new initiative on several scores. Its “activist analysis” listed among the problems with the initiative the fact that a 10 percent copay would be required of workers and that bottlers would be asked to provide 40 percent of the costs for the program (with the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation funding the remaining 50 percent). Most notably, Health GAP activist Sharonann Lynch objected to the fact that the company’s response was limited to employees and spouses; no coverage was announced for dependents and children. She urged, “While we have the media spotlight and the ear of the private sector, it is even more important that activists not accept what is on the whole, a low-ball offer from Coca-Cola” (Lynch 2002). The analysis concluded by questioning the regional focus of the program on Africa and calling for an extension of the program to Southeast Asia—yet again challenging the company’s capacity to define the acceptable limits of its corporate citizenship. The October 17 day of global action was held as scheduled, with rallies and demonstrations in cities around the world—including New York and Atlanta, where the company has offices—and on college campuses in the United States (see Weinert 2002). By November, the company had announced that children of employees would be included in the healthcare plan and that by March 2003, all forty African bottlers would have signed on to the initiative. Health GAP continued to pressure the company through media releases to meet this deadline. It also demanded meetings with company officials and public reports to stakeholders. On April 15, the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation announced that all forty bottlers had enrolled in the program as of March 31 and estimated that the healthcare initiative would cost “the Coca-Cola business system” approximately $11 million per year (http://www2.coca-cola.com/presscenter/nr_20030415 _hivaids_benefits.html). By comparison, The Coca-Cola Company’s net operating revenues in Africa in 2003 were $827 million, up 21 percent from the year before. Even if the company were paying the full $11 million per year (rather than only half), the payment would amount to 1.33 percent of its 2003 profits in Africa. As late as October, 2003, Health GAP continued to characterize the company’s HIV/AIDS treatment initiative in Africa as a public relations ploy and alleged that few programs were actually available to workers. Concern over the apparently slow implementation of the company’s policies with regard to HIV/AIDS was shared by other groups as well. In March 2004, the company circulated a notice of its annual meeting of shareowners

Shareholder Activism

195

that included a proposal sponsored primarily by the Adorers of the Blood of Christ of Wichita, Kansas, along with a few other Catholic organizations and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Master Trust Fund. The proposal called upon the Board of Directors to issue a report that shares the Coca-Cola business systems best practices and approaches to managing the business risks associated with the [global] HIV/AIDS Pandemic. The report would consider the potential economic effects on the Coca-Cola system’s business and highlight Coca-Cola’s initiatives in response to the issue. The report will also consider the issues of tuberculosis and malaria. The report will be developed at a reasonable cost, omit proprietary information and made public in a manner and within a timeframe agreed to by the Company and the investors filing this proposal.

Remarkably and unusually, the company’s board recommended a vote for the proposal, stating, “Our Company shares the concerns expressed by the proponents about HIV/AIDS” (The Coca-Cola Company 2004, 53). The board’s recommendation reiterated the company’s support for partnerships with “local governments, medical providers, NGOs and grassroots organizations, as well as other businesses”—the new transnational mode of governmentality. It also rehearsed the company’s efforts on the continent of Africa and asserted that it is “in the spirit of collaboration that we welcome this opportunity to work with our share owners.” A promise was made to make the report available for review by shareowners on the company’s Web site. This rather modest gesture of collaboration was declared an unprecedented victory by the religious shareholders behind the proposal, all members of the ICCR. (It similarly earned rare praise for the company on the “Responsible Shopper” section of Co-Op America’s Web site). The ICCR reported in a May 5, 2004, press release, “This is believed to be the first time Coca-Cola has urged shareholders to support a resolution.” The board’s endorsement resulted in a record level of support, with 97 percent approval for the proposal. By contrast, a similar proposal submitted the same year to PepsiCo by Mennonite Mutual Aid did not receive the approval of the board and consequently attracted only a 7.7 percent vote in its favor. The board claimed that PepsiCo already reported on HIV/AIDS programs in sub-Saharan Africa on its Web site and that, furthermore, PepsiCo planned to begin use of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines as a comprehensive reporting mechanism, thus rendering a separate report a poor use of company resources. An investing services manager for the proponents commented, “We have had general discussions with Pepsi for two years, but are still missing firm evidence that

196

Coca-Globalization

the Company has fully analyzed the future business risks of the pandemic and shaped their response accordingly” (ICCR 2004). The proposal, however, was not reintroduced at the 2005 annual meeting. In August 2004, The Coca-Cola Company released the report supposedly requested by shareholders: “Our HIV/AIDS Initiatives in Africa: A Report of The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation.” The ICCR shareholders expressed their pleasure at the “candor and depth” of the report in a letter to newly appointed CEO Neville Isdell, claiming to “know of no other company with this level of comprehensive regular reporting to shareholders on HIV/AIDS risks and opportunities.” They also used the letter as a friendly opportunity to identify shortcomings of the report and to urge the company to respond to HIV/AIDS outside Africa. And maybe more: “We believe that Coke can build on the momentum of our company’s HIV/AIDS response . . . to strengthen the company’s other corporate responsibility initiatives and address ongoing concerns about broader human rights and workplace issues” (http://www.iccr.org/news/press _releases/cokeletter100704.PDF). Sister Vicki Bergkamp, ASC, of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, signed off by looking forward to continued collaboration. It is, in fact, continued engagement and ongoing dialogue that shareholder resolutions such as this one seem designed to accomplish; proposals are regularly withdrawn by shareholders when companies agree to meetings to discuss the issues at hand. Even in this singular case of a “successful” resolution, the company did not produce the report that the resolution specified. No mention is made in the report of malaria or tuberculosis. Nor does the report say anything about the company’s policies with regard to HIV/AIDS outside Africa. It is neither more nor less than a report of the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, one that makes no explicit reference to the shareholder proposal that ostensibly brought it into being. This silence affirms the insistence of the company that it acts in response to nothing but its own motivations. For example, in a section of FAQs on the company’s Web site about its Africa HIV/AIDS activities, one finds the question, “Weren’t you embarrassed into starting this program by protestors?” to which one finds this answer, “While the Company certainly listens to what concerned people have to say about the AIDS issue in Africa, its policies and programs are the results of its own commitment to addressing AIDS in Africa.” And these commitments must attend—as must any corporation’s commitments—to the bottom line. Accordingly, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ cite a Harvard Business Review study (Rosen et al. 2003) on the wisdom of funding HIV/AIDS treatment programs, thereby tinging their proposal with Christian concern and economic rationality in

Shareholder Activism

197

equal measure. Likewise, The Coca-Cola Company openly acknowledges that the HIV/AIDS pandemic “threatens the momentum” measured by a 21 percent increase in net operating revenue from 2002 to 2003 (Our HIV/AIDS Initiatives in Africa). What, one wonders, would become of the company’s commitments if the momentum were in the other direction? Protecting Workers James P. Hoffa not only spoke outside Madison Square Garden next to an inflatable rat, he also spoke inside the annual meeting in support of Item 5, a shareholder proposal submitted by Christian Brothers Investment Services that urged the board of directors to adopt a global code of conduct and standards for its suppliers. The proposal specifically mentioned concern over accusations that Coca-Cola bottlers in Colombia had used a right-wing paramilitary group to intimidate and, in some cases, to assassinate labor organizers. Hoffa likewise called for an end to the violence in Colombia, and he alleged that Coke system workers’ rights had been violated in Zimbabwe and the Philippines, and that in the United States, Florida workers producing Minute Maid juices had been intimidated.2 A flyer calling for the meeting-day “Rally for Justice at Coca-Cola” sponsored by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters also alluded to a grim history of workplace violence at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Guatemala (see Frundt 1987; Levonson-Estrada 1994). Before discussion was cut off by CEO Daft, Hoffa demanded a negotiated code of conduct; the problem, he insisted, was one of human resources (HR) not public relations (PR). My notes from the meeting record few signs of audience support for Hoffa’s intervention, and even loud snickers from some audience members. The company’s written rebuttal of the proposal was less dismissive, but nevertheless unequivocal: “We already have in place a program designed to ensure that the rights of our employees are respected and protected in our day-to-day operations” (The Coca-Cola Company 2002, 41). The company’s adherence, moreover, to the Global Sullivan Principles of Responsibility (http://www.thegsp.org) made redundant any further demonstration of commitment to recognized human rights conventions. No specific mention was made in the written rebuttal of the charges being aired regarding the situation in Colombia, though Daft denied them verbally at the meeting. The charges against the company were serious; they concerned past and ongoing political violence in Colombia. Since 1990, at least eight CocaCola workers have been killed. In December 1996, right-wing paramilitaries shot and killed Isidro Segundo Gil at the gate of a Coke bottling plant

198

Coca-Globalization

in the small town of Carepa. Gil was a member of the executive board of the labor union—SINALTRAINAL (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Industrias Alimenticias [National Union of Food Industry Workers])— representing workers at the plant. An hour later, paramilitaries kidnapped another union leader at his home and set fire to the union’s offices. The following day, paramilitaries “returned to the plant, called workers together, and gave them until 4 p.m. to sign a statement resigning from the union on stationery the unionists claim bore the bottler’s letterhead—or else.” Some union members complied; others, including the union’s president whose life was threatened, quit their jobs altogether and fled Carepa. Union leaders charge that both the company and its bottlers were complicit in this violence, the former by not intervening to condemn it and the latter by directly ordering it (Foust and Smith 2006). In July 2001, the International Labor Rights Fund and the United States Steel Workers Union filed an Alien Tort Claim Act (ATCA) suit on behalf of SINALTRAINAL in U.S. Federal Court in Miami. The suit was against The Coca-Cola Company and two of its bottlers, Bebidas y Alimentos and Panamerican Beverages (see Kurlantzick 2005 on the use of ATCA in holding American corporations responsible for crimes committed overseas). The suit charged the company and its bottlers with intimidation, detention, and murder of trade unionists working at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia. Both The Coca-Cola Company and its bottlers in Colombia have consistently and strenuously rejected these charges. The company’s Web page notes that in a country where “violence against union members has deterred all but four percent of workers from unionizing, 31 percent of the employees of our Coca-Cola Colombian bottling partners belong to unions” (http://www.cokefacts.org/facts/facts_co_keyfacts.shtml). The deaths of the Coca-Cola workers, according to company officials, can be attributed to the longstanding civil war that has left 35,000 dead since the mid-1980s, including some 2,500 trade unionists (Foust and Smith 2006). Two separate judicial inquiries in Colombia “found no evidence to support the allegations that bottler management conspired to intimidate or threaten trade unionists,” although the company readily admits that “impunity with respect to violence against trade unionists continues to exist and that trade unions face several obstacles in both law and practice regarding the full exercise of freedom of association” (http://www.cokefacts.org/facts/facts_co _fact_sheet.shtml). In addition, a Miami judge in March 2003 removed the company from the ATCA lawsuit on the grounds that the company does not determine labor policies at independently owned bottlers (Girard 2004). The company says, “We are confident that as the case proceeds, the court will

Shareholder Activism

199

find no evidence against Coca-Cola bottlers” (http://www.cokefacts .org/facts/facts_co_fact_sheet.shtml).3 The charges against the company and its bottlers in Colombia are controversial. There is no doubt, however, that the workplace environment in Colombia is a dangerous one for trade unionists. This fact is clear from The Coca-Cola Company’s own chilling description of the security safeguards that its bottling partners provide to workers: loans for home security devices, unpaid leaves and transfers for employees with security concerns, and shift and schedule changes for security purposes. There is also no doubt that the company had faced similar charges once before, when Guatemalan Coke workers who had unionized in 1975 faced escalating intimidation and violence, allegedly at the hands of right-wing paramilitary death squads in the service of John C. Trotter, the manager of Guatemala City’s bottling plant (see Pendergrast 1993, 320–22). That situation, like the one in Colombia, provoked the submission of a shareholder resolution by a religious organization, the ICCR, calling for an investigation of the Guatemala City franchise. The resolution was withdrawn after the company agreed to conduct an investigation, but resubmitted the following year after the report of the investigation was found lacking (Louis and Yazijian 1980). ICCR eventually succeeded in compelling the company to broker a meeting between Trotter and ICCR representatives at which an uneasy truce was made between Trotter and his unionized employees. The second resolution, calling for the development of minimal labor standards for bottlers worldwide, was accordingly withdrawn. As the political violence and terror in Guatemala intensified under the administration of General Romeo Lucas Garcia, union officials from the Coca-Cola plant were threatened, subjected to attempted kidnappings, and even killed. A third shareholder resolution was filed by Sister Dorothy Gartland respresenting two hundred shares owned by the Sisters of Providence (Pendergrast 1993, 320), surviving until the annual meeting in May 1979 “to become the first nonmanagement resolution ever voted on by Coca-Cola shareholders” (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 188). At the meeting, Israel Marquez, a former secretary general of the Guatemalan Coca-Cola Union who had fled the country after a third attempt on his life, spoke about the attacks on union officials and claimed that, although he lacked proof, John Trotter had collaborated with government death squads (Pendergrast 1993, 320). Despite the drama, then CEO Paul Austin swiftly concluded the meeting, reiterating management’s position that Sr. Gartland’s proposal “would be considered by most of the company’s independent bottlers to be an improper and unnecessary intrusion by the company into their business affairs” (Louis and Yazijian 1980, 189; see Frundt

200

Coca-Globalization

1987; Levenson-Estrada 1994). In the event, the company was unable to withstand the mounting pressure of bad publicity surrounding the Guatemala City plant, including a boycott and work stoppages organized by the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF). Company officials had hoped to cancel Trotter’s franchise contract when it expired in September 1981. But when four more union members were killed in May 1980, Robert Goizueta, the new president of The Coca-Cola Company, directed company officials to consult with IUF head Dan Gallin and to arrange for Trotter to be bought out—with most of the purchase price supplied by the company (Pendergrast 1993, 338–39). It is worth noting, as The Coca-Cola Company does, that the IUF does not support the charges made by the Colombian labor union SINALTRAINAL against the company or its bottlers: “‘We have no evidence of complicity by Coke in the killing of workers,’ says Ron Oswald, general secretary of the International Union of Foodworkers in Geneva, whose members include tens of thousands of Coke workers worldwide” (Foust and Smith 2006). Nevertheless, the Guatemalan and Colombian cases bear similarities with respect to how a lengthy sequence of shareholder resolutions presented in the United States prompted the company to take notice of and responsibility for the operations of its bottlers overseas. The year after the gathering in Madison Square Garden, a shareholder proposal more tightly focused on the company’s operations in Colombia appeared on the meeting agenda as Item 11. Item 11 called for adoption of an enforceable, active policy to be followed by the company and its bottlers in Colombia that recognized the fundamental principles and rights at work declared by the International Labor Organization. The company’s rebuttal was substantially similar to that of the previous year, an assertion that through “existing policies and activities we already comply with both the spirit and intent of the proposal.” Likewise, the board of directors claimed that a single policy—such as, presumably, the Global Sullivan Principles—would better suit a global corporation than one that would apply to a single country. However, the board this time took note of the fact that the proposal repeated allegations made in a lawsuit against the company and its bottling partners. The company vigorously denied these allegations and claimed that “an investigation” had produced no evidence of violations: “Neither The Coca-Cola Company nor its bottler partners have committed or directed abuses against Colombia’s trade unionists, or condoned any such abuses” (The Coca-Cola Company 2003, 69). No mention was made at the time of the company’s impending plans. Its Mexican-based “anchor bottler,” Coca-Cola FEMSA, S.A. de C.V., acquired Panamerican Beverages (Panamco), Latin America’s largest soft

Shareholder Activism

201

drink bottler, in May 2003. The purchase made Coca-Cola FEMSA—40 percent of which was owned by The Coca-Cola Company in 2004—the world’s second largest Coca-Cola bottler (Coca-Cola Enterprises is the largest). Coca-Cola FEMSA gained Panamco’s markets in Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Panamco also owned most of the plants in Colombia that bottled Coca-Cola products. The acquisition apparently accelerated a process of centralizing production and reducing the number of workers that had already led to the loss of jobs by 6,700 workers between 1992 and 2002. In 2003, according to Gill (2004b, 4), eleven of sixteen bottling plants in Colombia were shut down. Moreover, the makeup of the workforce had shifted such that 80 percent “is now composed of non-union, temporary workers, and wages for these individuals are only a quarter of those earned by their unionized counterparts.” This acquisition would therefore make it even more difficult to invoke a distinction between the company and its independent bottlers in order to evade responsibility for any alleged violations of human rights happening in Colombia. Indeed, in April 2004, SINALTRIAL filed an amendment to its lawsuit in Miami Federal Court claiming that the acquisition of Panamco by FEMSA made the company liable for its bottler’s alleged crimes.4 Two years later, the Colombia issue had still not gone away. Item 3 of the 2005 shareholder meeting was a proposal brought by the New York comptroller on behalf of several of the city’s pension funds (which together own $276.4 million in shares; Gardiner 2005)—so much for post-9/11 solidarity with the city. The proposal followed a visit to Colombia in January, 2004 by City Council Member Hiram Monserrate, who led an independent factfinding delegation to meet with plant employees and company officials. This delegation resulted in a preliminary report (NYC Fact-Finding Delegation on Coca-Cola in Colombia 2004) that called for the creation of an independent human rights commission of labor representatives, company officials, and human rights monitors to investigate the situation in Colombia. Similarly, Item 3 called for the company to send an independent delegation to Colombia to investigate the charges of collusion in anti-union violence that had been made against officials of Coca-Cola bottling plants by SINALTRAINAL, one of the unions representing plant workers. The New York Sun (Gardiner 2005) quoted Kenneth Sylvester, assistant comptroller for pension policy, as saying that “when there is ‘mistrust’ and ‘suspicion’ of a company, its shareholders are at financial risk.” Mistrust, in this context, signals a failure on the part of the company to embed itself in a local setting or, put differently, to hold together a translocal commodity network of producers and consumers. That is, mistrust evinces connections (and

202

Coca-Globalization

disconnections) among economic agents that ordinarily go unrecognized by consumers. The board not surprisingly recommended voting against the proposal (the proposal attracted, however, 5.4 percent of the vote, making it eligible for reintroduction in 2006). It denied the accusations made by “a small number of activists,” citing independent inquiries made in Colombia and internal investigations conducted by the company and its bottlers. But the board’s rebuttal departed significantly from previous rebuttals. Rather than claiming it already had policies in place, the board advocated an “alternative approach, now being implemented by our Company” (The Coca-Cola Company 2005a, 52). This approach—which incorporated input from “stakeholders” including investors, labor unions, and NGOs— featured an assessment of workplace practices at company and bottler locations around the world, including Colombia. Findings from the assessments were to be shared with the public. In addition, the board committed the company to a review of its current human rights policies in collaboration with “a group of investors who have experience in this area.” Furthermore, one week before the annual meeting, the company announced a donation of $10 million from the Coca-Cola Foundation to establish the Colombia Foundation for Education and Opportunity, which will assist victims of violence and civil war in the country: “‘We believe that this foundation will help address pressing issues, build capacity and serve as a model for what the private sector can do to help develop sustainable communities around the world,’ Coca-Cola said in a separate statement” (“Coca-Cola Aids Colombia” 2005). Transnational governmentality, in other words, reminiscent of the company’s African model. &* What explains the shift in the company’s response to shareholder initiatives between 2002 and 2005? The question is especially pertinent, given that neither humanitarian concern nor economic self-interest can account for the company’s response in quite the same way as these factors influenced company policy on HIV/AIDS in Africa. Nor was the company facing opposition from an international labor union, as was the case in 1980 when the IUF took action over the anti-union violence in Guatemala. Perhaps the headline of a March 2005 article from the Nation supplies an answer: “Coke: The New Nike.” The reference was to the long public campaign waged by “anti-sweatshop” student activists against Nike’s subcontracting with companies that allegedly abused and exploited the workers who manufactured Nike footwear in Indonesian plants. On many U.S.

Shareholder Activism

203

college campuses, Internet publicity of the allegations about corporate complicity in the anti-union violence in Colombia had not been defused by the company’s strenuous and consistent denials. In March 2004, as Douglas Daft spoke to a Yale University audience about corporate social responsibility, students lay on the floor as if they were dead, accusing the company of indifference to the violence in Colombia (see Figure 6.1). By early 2005, boycotts of Coca-Cola products had spread across U.S. college campuses, and the same national networks of communication mobilized by Students United Against Sweatshops had been activated. The clearinghouse for much of the publicity about charges against the company and its Colombian bottlers was the Web site of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, an initiative directed by Ray Rogers, head of Corporate

Figure 6.1 Yale University, March 31, 2004. Then CEO Douglas Daft lectures on ethics while surrounded by a die in. Yale Daily News, April 1, 2004. Photograph by Stephanie Dziczek.

204

Coca-Globalization

Campaign, an organization that supports labor unions in contract negotiations and other struggles. Rogers launched the campaign in April 2003. Killercoke.org posts regularly updated news about alleged corporate abuses and activist responses from around the world. The impact of the negative publicity created by the Killer Coke Web site eventually provoked the company to establish a counter–Web site, http://www.killercoke.com (which directs one to http://www.cokefacts.com). There is absolutely no doubt that the company had been motivated to act not by its own commitments, but by those of a growing number of concerned and virtually connected consumer citizens. The Coca-Cola Company, as promised, posted the results of its workplace assessment for Colombia on its Web site well in advance and perhaps in anxious anticipation of the shareholder meeting scheduled for April 19, 2005. It had become clear that the meeting would once again furnish the occasion for visible and vocal protests both inside and outside the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. Indeed, Coca-Cola shareholder meetings now attract the sort of theatrical, media spectacles associated with meetings of the World Trade Organization and IMF, at which networks of protestors against corporate globalization have materialized in the streets of Seattle, Genoa, and Ottawa. The report, unlike that of the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, plainly acknowledged that it was a response to the questions and concerns of shareowners and customers. Chairman of the Board and CEO Neville Isdell, successor to Douglas Daft, explained in a prefatory letter that the company had “asked the internationally respected and certified, independent audit firm Cal Safety Compliance Corporation” to conduct a comprehensive review of workplace practices (wages, safety, security, freedom of association, etc.) at six Colombian plants (five of which were owned by Panamco Colombia, S.A., a subsidiary of FEMSA). Cal Safety’s investigation, according to Isdell, found no evidence to support allegations of human rights violations against the company and its bottlers: “The people employed by our Colombian bottling plants work in an environment where their labor and human rights are respected and protected” (Cal Safety Compliance Corporation 2005, 1; for an alternative view, see Gill 2004b). The workplace assessment of the bottling facility in Carepa, owned by Bebidas y Alimentos de Urabá S.A., found several health and safety violations (“evacuation paths are not marked or lighted”), but made no findings with respect to abuse of labor. Under “collective bargaining,” the assessment noted that “‘there were no reports of threats or intimidation from management against union members.’ However, the assessment team noted a need for better communication between management and labor in

Shareholder Activism

205

its Observations and Recommendations” (Cal Safety Compliance Corporation, 26). The Cal Safety report was swiftly rejected by the organizers of the Stop Killer Coke campaign. A withering statement from United Students Against Sweatshops, also posted on the campaign’s Web site, listed several instances of failure on the part of Cal Safety to monitor and report the abuse of workers, and questioned both the methodology of Cal Safety’s audits and its dependence on corporate clients (including Disney, Nike, and Wal-Mart) for revenue. The statement concluded that “given its repeated failure to find egregious violations in high profile cases of worker abuse, its status as a for-profit corporation, its practice of monitoring [sic] generating revenue from the major corporations for whom it monitors, its lack of experience with the core issue of freedom of association, its flawed methodology in visiting factories and conducting worker interviews, and its utter lack of transparency, Cal-Safety should easily be ruled out as a candidate for credibly investigating the case of Coca-Cola in Colombia” (http://www.killercoke.org/usascal.htm). Among the reasons for the effectiveness of the Stop Killer Coke campaign is its capacity to redeploy The Coca-Cola Company’s own marketing tools. College student activists mobilized by the Colombia accusations have targeted the exclusive vending contracts or athletic sponsorships that both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo use to secure monopolies for selling and advertising their products on campuses (see Chapter 7). These arrangements potentially implicate educational institutions in charges made against their corporate partners. As Larry Mann, associate vice-chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign remarked, “Our reputation and good names are brought into this controversy because of this association” (Lederman 2005). College administrators, in turn, are recruited into the task of bringing corporations to the table to discuss controversial issues. In this way, campus boycotts function less as a form of individualized collective action and more directly as collective action that potentially has nontrivial consequences for corporations. For example, Rutgers University did not renew its exclusive contract with Coca-Cola Enterprises in May 2005, instead signing a seventeen-million-dollar agreement with the Pepsi Bottling Group. While university officials were quick to say that it was Pepsi’s offer that ultimately determined their decision, they also claimed to have taken the concerns of students seriously. Student activists had been meeting with Rutgers officials to discuss criteria in joining corporate partnerships, and Rutgers officials discussed the charges of human rights violations with Coca-Cola officials.

206

Coca-Globalization

Similarly, at the University of Michigan, the Dispute Review Board (DRB) found credible evidence supporting allegations about labor abuses in Colombia (Zbrozek 2005). The DRB was convened at the recommendation of University Purchasing Services as part of a review of Coca-Cola’s compliance with the University of Michigan’s code of conduct for vendors. Codes of conduct are thus double edges. Recall that in its 2002 citizenship report, The Coca-Cola Company offered its own “Supplier Guiding Principles Program” as proof of its commitment to ethical business conduct: “The scope of [the company’s] supply chain makes our attention to a supplier’s own performance and integrity a decisive factor in fulfilling our principle of refreshing the marketplace.” This instrument of corporate citizenship was deftly turned against the company, whose exclusive contract with the University of Michigan was to expire in June 2005. A preliminary report suggested that the DRB would renew its contract with Coca-Cola Enterprises until September, and after that on a month-by-month basis, “provided that Coca-Cola shows it has improved its human rights record” (Zbrozek 2005). In late December 2005, the university announced its decision to no longer sell Coca-Cola products on campus after failing to negotiate with the company arrangements for an independent investigation into the accusations of abuses in Colombia (and in India [see Conclusion]). Michigan thereby became the tenth institution of higher education in the United States to join a growing boycott of Coca-Cola products. Accordingly, the controversy over Colombia continued to occupy the attention of student activists and to elicit responses from the company throughout the spring of 2005. The company dispatched representatives to college campuses to make presentations and to debate publicly the issues surrounding the Colombia controversy—a response to speaking appearances on various college campuses by Ray Rogers and Javier Correa, president of SINALTRAINAL. In addition, on May 6, company representatives met in Washington DC with delegations of administrators and students from a range of schools affiliated with the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a nonprofit organization created by United Students Against Sweatshops to assist in enforcing manufacturing codes of conduct adopted by colleges and universities. The meeting was not organized by the WRC, with whom one participant said, “Coke has refused to meet,” but by officials from colleges and universities with whom the company does business (Grossman 2005). &*

Shareholder Activism

207

I do not wish to overstate the significance of company representatives debating undergraduate students and meeting campus purchasing officers; no harbinger of consumer democracy here. After all, it was the company that apparently dictated the terms of the meeting, opening it only to “students who were part of official delegations approved by their institutions” (Lederman 2005). Meeting participants, moreover, seemed to demand merely that the company convene another meeting to discuss an independent investigation into the violence directed against Coca-Cola workers in Colombia (Grossman 2005). Engagement thus becomes the means, mainly, to further engagement— on terms that are not always regarded as equally favorable by all parties. For example, in April 2006, the University of Michigan resumed procurement of Coca-Cola products after receiving a letter from the company outlining a process for an independent investigation into concerns about the safety of workers at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia and the environmental impact of bottling plants in India. The investigation was to be conducted by the International Labor Organization, a United Nations Agency. Michigan’s announcement was roundly criticized on the Killer Coke Web site, which noted among other things that “Edward E. Potter, Coca-Cola’s Director of Global Labor Relations and Workplace Accountability, serves on the Applications of Conventions Committee within the International Labor Organization. He is currently the head spokesperson for the entire Employers’ Group, a powerful position within the ILO structure to promote the interests of big business and thus the interests of Coca-Cola” (http://killercoke.org/pr060417.htm).5 I do wish, however, to acknowledge the efficacy of the Stop Killer Coke campaign, including its use of shareholder activism, in compelling company officials to engage directly with U.S. consumers concerned about the labor practices of a company vendor (if not subsidiary) in another country. The campaign highlights some of the positive aspects of shareholder activism, such as its potential capacity to facilitate action on issues and events technically outside the jurisdiction of local and national politicians. Though here it must be stressed that these bounds of jurisdiction are themselves subject to renegotiation as a result of shifting streams of transnational migration.6 So, for example, New York City Council Member Monserrate explained his delegation to Colombia in a press release by saying, “As the representative of one of the largest Colombian communities outside of Colombia, I am dedicated to ensuring that none of the rights of my constituents’ families are abused under the banner of an American corporation and that New York City’s consumer dollars aren’t underwriting human rights abuses in other countries” (Monserrate 2004). Similarly,

208

Coca-Globalization

Dhruti Contractor of the Georgia Indian American Political Action Committee justified her protest against The Coca-Cola Company’s operations in India by reading a statement at the 2005 shareholders’ meeting in which she noted, “I am here today because I have a responsibility to my home in Atlanta and my relatives in India. And I know many other Indian Americans who feel the same way . . . ” (http://www.stopcorporateabuse .org:80/cmc/page 1257.cfm). The mutability of home—the stretching of family ties across continents—thus motivates an international form of consumer citizenship. In short, global corporations can and, in some instances, do respond directly to specific consumer claims with arguably greater speed and deliberateness than that of elected politicians. Shareholder activism thus promises real if incremental progress toward particular goals—recycling plastic, extending health benefits, launching investigations—and toward the general aim of heightening corporate transparency and holding corporations accountable to stakeholders. But these examples of shareholder activism within and against The Coca-Cola Company also highlight some of the limitations of this sort of political practice. First of all, even when apparently successful, engagement and dialogue often resemble a version of marketplace haggling. Activists demand 25 percent recycled content; the company offers 10 percent. Activists demand free access to medicines for all workers and dependents; the company offers access for workers and spouses, with a copay. Indeed, one Health Gap media release exhorts activists not to accept a “low-ball offer” from The Coca-Cola Company. This sort of consumer democracy takes the used-car lot rather than the town square as its model; it is a form of bargaining between unequals, in which one side wields more control over the transaction and often commands more information about the issues being negotiated. There is little incentive for corporations to concede anything more than they must, since although consumer citizens can turn to PepsiCo for comparable products, they can not turn to PepsiCo to reform the labor practices of Coca-Cola bottlers in Colombia. Perhaps it is in the actual space and conduct of the annual meetings that the limitations on shareholder activism emerge most starkly. The meeting site itself is chosen by the corporation. One PepsiCo shareholder, Evelyn Davis of Washington DC, submitted a proposal in 2001 requesting that the site of the annual meeting be rotated among large cities with large concentrations of shareowners. The board recommended voting against the proposal, and annual meetings have been held every year since 2002 in Plano, Texas, at Frito-Lay headquarters. According to Walden Asset Management,

Shareholder Activism

209

EMC Corporation took the extra step of trying to change the state of Massachusetts’s business law to “allow companies broadcasting their annual meeting over the Internet to dispense with their in-person annual meetings all together [sic]” (http://www.waldenassetmanagement.com/social/ topics/02062c.html). The effort failed, but other methods enable corporations to set meeting agendas. At the 2002 Coca-Cola meeting in New York, almost two hours were devoted to extravagant entertainment; thirty minutes or so were allocated to discussion of both company and shareholder resolutions. Microphones are turned off when shareholders exceed time limits of a few minutes to make their comments. Ray Rogers was forcibly removed from the 2004 Coca-Cola meeting—held in Wilmington, Delaware, with only three hundred people attending as compared with 1,200 at the 2002 meeting in Madison Square Garden—as then CEO Daft implored security staffers to be gentle and to “stand down, please, please” (Leith and Kempner 2004). It is such rudely vivid moments that remind us that shareholder activism does not equal shareholder democracy. How could it, when one director, Warren Buffett, controls about 200 million shares of The Coca-Cola Company (and thus 200 million votes), and I own five? This is a brute fact of inequality that Andy Warhol failed to notice in his observation that the president, Liz Taylor, you, me, and the bum on the corner all consume the same Coke. The resistance generated by shareholder activism, like that of the anti-Coca-Colas, is diminished if not deflected by the very tactic of working within a hegemonic relationship.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

Pouring Rights Politics, Products, Agency, and Change Limiting calories in schools is a sensible approach that acknowledges our industry’s long-standing belief that school wellness efforts must focus on teaching kids to consume a balanced diet and exercise more. Schools provide an opportunity to create a healthy environment that equips our children with these skills. Our industry will continue to do its part to contribute to that environment. —Susan Neely, American Beverage Association President and CEO, regarding the partnership with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation on a new school beverage policy, May 3, 2006

he politics of soft drink products confront obvious limitations. Culture jamming, for example, often fails to engage the corporations it criticizes with regard to any particular goal or concrete outcome. Shareholder activism, while aimed at very precise objectives, often struggles against the antidemocratic structure of the corporation, working as hard to keep the engagement going—another report, another meeting, another media release—as it does to resolve the issues at hand. Is there any form of the politics of soft drink products that can subordinate the corporation’s interests and schedules to those of consumer citizens? And if so, how? The ongoing controversy in the United States about the sale of soft drinks in schools suggests some answers. In significant ways, the controversy enacts on a smaller scale the same processes put in motion by the decline of the welfare state across the globe. Amid a deepening crisis in funding for American public schools, corporations offer solutions to the problem of delivering goods and services—solutions that by design offer corporations opportunities to expand and consolidate present and future markets for their products. Many individual schools and numerous school districts have embraced these solutions, implicitly and sometimes explicitly promoting an equation of increased consumption (and hence increased revenues for schools) with good citizenship. But more and more, parents, educators, school nutritionists, and health advocacy organizations

T

212

Coca-Globalization

have come to reject these solutions, mobilizing as citizens around consumption issues to effect local regulation of corporate practices. In these instances, consumer citizenship materializes as a community effort to reclaim the democratic political process, an effort in which activist networks of shorter length realize the promise of what longer networks might accomplish in effecting transnational regulation of corporate practices. The 2003 Coca-Cola citizenship report lists school partnerships as a case study of the company’s socially responsible initiatives in North America. In the report, the company’s announcement of new guidelines for such partnerships is presented as evidence of “a commitment to be responsive to and respectful of each school’s choices.” Such affectation obscures the extent to which the announcement was the result of a vigorous politics of the product directed against the company’s marketing techniques. This politics emerged out of intensified efforts to sell soft drinks to schoolchildren in the United States during the 1990s and the reactions that in-school marketing programs provoked. The history of this episode illuminates from a different angle the global imperative of soft drink companies to expand into new markets, and the attempts of these companies to create new consumers, not only in the remote corners of Papua New Guinea, but also in the urban centers of the United States. It also poses questions about the meaning of rights and freedom; specifically, whether the “freedom of choice” enjoyed by individual sovereign consumers can coexist with the rights of local communities to self-determination with regard to public health and the care and feeding of children. This history entails a politics of consumption that challenges rather than reproduces the assumptions of coca-colonization and that transcends some of the limitations of both culture jamming and shareholder activism. Healthy Children: Local Communities, Global Industries In the early 1990s, Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottlers began to acquire “pouring rights” at public high schools and middle schools around the country (Nestle 2000). These contractual arrangements gave the bottlers exclusive rights to vend the products of either The Coca-Cola Company or PepsiCo in machines at a particular high school or middle school or at all schools within a particular district. In effect, the contracts greatly extended earlier agreements in which the soft drink bottlers had provided schools with athletic equipment such as scoreboards in return for the opportunity to advertise on the scoreboards. By 1997, the number of schools and school districts signing contracts for pouring rights was noticeably on the rise. Multiyear contracts that brought school districts large cash payments up

Pouring Rights

213

front and annual commissions on sales volume attracted widespread media attention (Hays 1998c; Kaufman 1999). In 1998, for example, the Keller district (K-12) in Texas struck a deal with the local Coca-Cola bottler that paid the district more than $4.2 million over fifteen years, including an immediate $1.6 million payment that the district planned to spend on computer equipment. Some school boards began to use the services of third-party brokers in an attempt to solicit competitive bids from rival soft drink bottling companies (Hays 1999a). School principals in cash-strapped districts often welcomed the revenue. “This contract is a godsend,” remarked the deputy director of procurement for the Washington DC Public Schools (Kaufman 1999). From the outset, however, there was criticism of exclusive contracts, mostly on the grounds that schools should be commercial-free zones and that soft drinks were essentially non-nutritious beverages. Such criticism was inadvertently validated when a letter written by the executive director for school leadership in the Colorado Springs district became public. In the letter, signed “the Coke Dude,” the executive director urged local school principals to ensure that vending machines were easily accessible and “if soda products are not allowed in classes” to consider “allowing juices, teas and water” (Kaufman 1999). Similarly, the release of a 1998 report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest called Liquid Candy elicited public outcries. The report noted increases in the rates of soft drink consumption since 1974 on the order of three times for boys 12 to 19 years old, and linked these consumption rates with obesity, tooth decay, and heart disease. The National Soft Drink Association (now the American Beverage Association, a trade organization representing the interests of the nonalcoholic beverage industry), however, dismissed the report as a “strained effort” that was “not supported by the facts” (Kaufman 1999). The battle over pouring rights had begun in earnest. By the year 2000, approximately two hundred school districts in the United States had entered into pouring rights agreements with soft drink companies; two years later, forty more districts had signed agreements (Nestle 2002, 202; Fried and Nestle 2002). (In addition, the city of Huntington Beach, California, and the national YWCA also had entered into agreements.) But some school districts were already rethinking the advisability of selling exclusive pouring rights. The Madison, Wisconsin, school district, for example, cancelled a contract it had signed in 1997, forfeiting an estimated three hundred thousand dollars in bonuses and commissions. The Sacramento City Unified School District rejected a five-year exclusive contract for $2 million to sell Pepsi products. In Philadelphia, “parent activists scuttled a proposed 10-year, $43 million deal between the school

214

Coca-Globalization

system and Coca-Cola” and enacted a total ban on the sale of soft drinks in school (Groves 2001). In January 2001, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a report, “Foods Sold in Competition with USDA School Meal Programs,” that urged Congress to “strengthen USDA’s ability—and the ability of states and local schools—to foster a healthier school nutrition environment in communities across America.” The report expressed concern over the availability of “foods of minimal nutritional value” (FMNV), such as soft drinks, that compete with USDA-funded school meal programs, and it specifically cited “pouring rights” contracts as one factor driving schools to provide students with such foods. A few months later, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont introduced the Better Nutrition Schoolchildren Act of 2001, which would ban the donation of sodas during lunch in school cafeterias (where sales were already banned) and mandate the agriculture secretary to consider a ban on sales and donations of sodas and other FMNV before lunch. The senator’s own press release quoted him as saying, “Schoolchildren are a captive market for soda vendors. Our kids pay the price when we give soft drink companies free reign to market their products in schools” (Leahy 2001). It was not the first time Senator Leahy had introduced such a bill; he had done so in 1994. Nor was it the last; he reintroduced a version of the 2001 bill with Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2003 (as well as a Child Nutrition Initiative Act that would create a new farm-to-cafeteria program to supply locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables to school cafeterias). Nor was it the first time that the USDA sought to strengthen (or exercise) its ability to regulate so-called competitive foods. Indeed, there is a long history of USDA struggles to assert the priority of children’s health and nutrition over the interests of corporations and school boards seeking revenues from the sale of FMNV. This history perfectly illustrates the sort of cynical politics that have compelled consumer citizens to seek redress for their concerns outside the legislative process—to mobilize as sovereign market actors rather than as enfranchised constituents of democratically elected representatives in order to regulate corporations. Since the early 1970s, USDA rulings about permitting the sale of FMNV foods in schools at certain times and places—as well as the USDA’s authority to make regulations about all competitive foods, which was turned over to state and local boards of education in 1972—have been challenged and overturned. For example, in 1978, the USDA proposed restricting sales of FMNV from the start of the school day until after the last lunch period, but the proposal was withdrawn in response to comments. The following year, the USDA again proposed restrictions, having redefined FMNV to mean

Pouring Rights

215

foods with less than 5 percent of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for eight nutrients per one hundred calories—that is, only carbonated soft drinks, water ices, chewing gum, and certain candies. This proposal received some 4,200 comments, “of which 562 could be traced to a PepsiCo directive to its employees suggesting that they tell the USDA that its health objectives would be better achieved through nutrition education” (Nestle 2002, 210). Although the USDA nonetheless issued its restrictions in 1980, the National Soft Drink Association sued to overturn the regulations, winning its case on appeal in 1983 (for more details on USDA policies, see Nestle 2002). Federal regulation of the sale of FMNV in schools has weakened to the point that even existing laws seem to be largely ignored (Nestle 2002) or circumvented—hence Senator Leahy’s attempt to ban the free distribution of soft drinks at lunchtime. In March 2001, sensing the force of backlash and threat of government regulation brought on by the debate over pouring rights, The Coca-Cola Company issued new guidelines for business/school partnerships. These guidelines encouraged bottlers to pursue nonexclusive agreements, and offered schools the choice of juices, water, and products free of sugar and caffeine in vending machines. They also expressed willingness to “comply with all federal, state and local guidelines.” In addition, “Coca-Cola bottlers will unconditionally honor the wishes of all schools that seek to limit the sale of beverages at certain points of the school day, or at certain locations on school campuses” (The Coca-Cola Company 2001). Finally, the guidelines specifically prohibited advertising in the classroom and mention of Coca-Cola in curricular materials. The guidelines did not, however, recommend discontinuing the sale of soft drinks in schools. While Coca-Cola bottlers, with whom schools and school districts make contracts, were said to be on board with the new guidelines, a company spokesman acknowledged that, “if this movement doesn’t take off, you might [continue to] see exclusives” (Groves 2001). Similarly, a spokeswoman for Coca Cola Enterprises (CCE), the company’s largest bottler, was reported to say that CCE would comply—if schools stopped putting out bids for exclusive contracts (Henry 2001). The Coca-Cola Company’s intervention was not enough to stop the growing expression of discontent over soft drink sales in schools. Prominent activists dismissed the company’s announcement as self-interested public relations. Andrew Hagelshaw, director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, claimed in a press release that the company had “to do something if they want to stay in schools” (http://www.ibiblio.org/ commercialfree/presscenter/pr_31301.html). And, in fact, the company’s own Web announcement admitted that “the initiative will be beneficial to

216

Coca-Globalization

its continuing relationship with educators, and the long-term viability of its beverage program in schools” (The Coca-Cola Company 2001). By the end of 2001, the issue had become caught in a storm of media attention devoted to the problem of obesity in the United States precipitated by a Center for Disease Control finding that 15 percent of American children were overweight or obese. By 2002, fourteen states were considering regulations on the sale of soft drinks in schools. Reaction against the sale of soft drinks in schools peaked in August of 2002, when the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the second largest school district in the United States—voted to ban the sale of soft drinks in schools, effective January 2004. (Other beverages would be available, but not carbonated beverages.) This vote resulted from months of carefully planned lobbying, in which an informal network of parents and community activists established the Healthy School Food Coalition (HSFC). At every step in the long process of formulating a food policy for the LAUSD, the HSFC network recruited and mobilized parents, teachers, students, experts, advocates, and administrators in an effort to materialize visible and strong support for their goals, especially at public hearings. HSFC, allied with the Center for Food and Justice, met with school board members multiple times, reached out to various community organizations, and controlled media coverage of the school board’s vote on the soda resolution (which was one part of a larger program to promote nutrition in schools). This was not all the network made visible; coalition members delivered to each school board member “a full-sized mason jar of sugar representing the amount a teenager consumes in a week by drinking two sodas a day” (Center for Food and Justice 2002, 6). In particular, HSFC members struggled to keep consideration of the public health aspects of the soda resolution separate from fiscal considerations of school revenues, and thereby avoid the death of the resolution by amendment. The HSFC campaign now serves as a model for other community activists seeking to ban the sale of soft drinks in schools. The NSDA responded to the Los Angeles ban with the claim that obesity was due mainly to inactivity—the couch not the can. One NSDA spokesman said, “This could usher in an era when the industry has to be more aggressive in the PR realm” (Arnold 2002). Yet by July 2003, The Coca-Cola Company once again revised its marketing guidelines, publicly vowing to roll back all its marketing efforts to children under the age of twelve. At the same time, however, Coca-Cola Enterprises became an official sponsor of the National Parent Teachers Association and CCE’s senior vice president for public affairs and chief lobbyist was given a seat on the board (Day 2003). In November 2003, another new set of voluntary

Pouring Rights

217

guidelines was issued by the company for school decision-makers. These guidelines indicated that the company would be, in the words of its 2003 citizenship report, “responsive and respectful regarding each school’s choice of beverages”—as if the problem were one of tastes and preferences rather than health and nutrition. Not surprisingly, the concessions that the company made were rather minor. For example, carbonated soft drinks would be made unavailable, but only to elementary school students and only during the school day. For middle and high school students, more choices would be made available (100 percent fruit juices, water, teas, etc.)—hardly a disinterested move given the rapid growth in consumption of noncarbonated beverages. Perhaps more significantly, the company announced a decision to substitute one-time, up-front payments with a “reliable and consistent level of resources for the length of the partnership.” This decision was taken, ostensibly, in the interest of the schools, much like the decision to discourage brokers, who charge steep fees to schools and school districts, not to mention negotiate aggressively with soft drink corporations for favorable contract terms (Hays 1999). The new approach, it was claimed, would “help to even out budget fluctuations from year to year,” thus making revenue from soft drink sales a permanent feature of fiscal planning (“Coca-Cola Issues Model Guidelines” 2003). The company’s willingness to de-emphasize carbonated soft drinks in its contracts with schools went beyond calculation of the increasing demand for noncarbonated beverages, especially water. It also confirmed a guiding orientation to promoting brands and trademarks rather than to pushing tangible, physical products—even the venerable flagship product. Cultivating lifelong brand loyalty is certainly at stake here, but there is more. Access to schools, I suggest, is fundamentally a question of recruiting new consumption workers; consumers whose biographical experience of and investment in brands can be transformed into a source of value creation (Chapter 3). That is, consumers must be engaged and assisted in the work of giving meaning to brands, of appropriating branded commodities for use in contexts that render brands as material tokens of both self and social identity. The terms of my suggestion here echo the rhetoric of soft drink corporations themselves. Consider, for example, the 2003 annual report of Coca-Cola Enterprises, titled “Delivering Value.” The report lists the strengthening of brands as “strategic initiative one”: “Our brands— already among the strongest, most recognized in the world—are our greatest asset. By offering the right products and packages for each consumption occasion, we will continue to grow the value of our brands for consumers and our customers.” Offering the right products and packages is a function

218

Coca-Globalization

of innovation in design, of meeting “specific consumer needs and wants” such that the consumer never loses the ability to recognize him or herself in the brand (Chapter 1). From the perspective of CCE managers, guaranteeing this outcome requires matching the qualifications they attach to a product with those of the consumers enrolled in the same product network. Accordingly, access to schools concerns logos and signage and promotional activities as much as it does the soft drinks themselves, for what is at stake above all is the creation of a social environment or context in which young consumers regard the presence of brands as natural, appropriate, and desirable. As if in disdainful reply to The Coca-Cola Company’s new guidelines, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement in January 2004 encouraging pediatricians to work towards the elimination of soft drinks in schools. The statement provided specific recommendations about “tempering” soft drink contracts already in place such that a contract does not “promote overconsumption by students.” For example, “incentives based on the amount of soft drinks sold per student should not be included as part of exclusive contracts” (American Academy of Pediatrics 2004, 153).1 And so the battle over pouring rights continues. On the one side, soft drink corporations respond to public health concerns with moves such as that of PepsiCo, which revealed in February 2005 that it too had enacted self-imposed restrictions and “would no longer place advertising for its flagship cola brand in outlets that directly reach children under 12.” PepsiCo also promised to limit portion sizes of snack foods sold in U.S. schools and to replace fried snack foods with baked lower-fat alternatives in elementary schools. These tiny concessions are accompanied by inflated selfcongratulation: “Our intent is not to just beat our chests and take credit for what we’re doing. We’re just quietly doing it because it’s the right thing to do,” says the CEO of Frito-Lay North America, PepsiCo’s snack unit (“Report Pepsi Limiting” 2005). The move admittedly signals a big shift from the position of Pepsi North America’s chief marketing officer who, in 1999, identified marketing to eight to twelve year olds as a priority: “We’re absolutely going to look at preteens” (Hays 1999b). On the other side, public health advocates continue to press for legislative means to regulate school soft drink contracts. In California, Senate Bill 965 was signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in September 2005, extending an existing ban on soft drinks to high schools statewide effective July 2007. At the same time, public health advocates worry about gains that they had considered already won. In Oregon, a bill to ban the sale of soft drinks in schools became a bill that requires schools to adopt goals for nutrition education and physical activities. Members of the Senate Education

Pouring Rights

219

Committee that rewrote the bill had received campaign contributions from the Oregon Soft Drink Association, which contributed $91,000 to lawmakers in the 2004 fall election cycle (Cain 2005). In Connecticut, where a similar bill had already passed the state Senate, lobbyists for the Connecticut Pepsi Bottlers Association and the Coca-Cola Bottling Companies of New York and New England contributed to delaying a vote on the bill in the House (Hladky 2005).2 The lobbyists were joined by a range of interest groups that all fear a loss in revenue—from school boards and high school coaches to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (perhaps ironically, given the union’s adversarial position on The Coca-Cola Company’s accounting of its business in Colombia). If regulation can not be blocked, moreover, other means are apparently available to circumvent bans on soft drinks. In Hernando County, Florida, where the local school board voted to ban carbonated soft drinks (but allow sales of other beverages), machines vending soda during the school day were still in operation despite complaints from a school district official (Quinlan 2004). Asked about the ban, a representative from the bottling company said, “If business declines more than ten percent . . . Coca-Cola Enterprises has the right to conduct a review with the board, offer recommendations, and seek a compromise to improve the state of business.” In Sacramento, such compromises were forwarded by school district representatives themselves. Concern over a projected $27 million district budget shortfall prompted the suggestion to decrease gradually the sale of soft drinks in schools rather than enacting a complete and immediate ban on sales (Macdonald 2004). The spirit of compromise similarly infuses the agreement brokered in May 2006 by the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a collaboration between the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation. According to the voluntary agreement, the top three U.S. soft drink companies (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Cadbury-Schweppes) pledged to begin removing sweetened drinks from school cafeterias and vending machines in the fall of 2006 (Burros and Warner 2006). The concession was an apparent response to credible threats of litigation, modeled on lawsuits against the tobacco industry, made by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Some critics saw the response as an unenforceable and weak substitute for legislation such as California’s ban on soda sales. Perhaps significantly, the agreement said nothing about banning the advertising and marketing of soft drinks in schools; the symbolic means for recruiting new consumption workers. The saga of soft drink marketing in schools demonstrates how the politics of products and consumption potentially slides global issues into local frames and vice-versa, thereby enabling a kind of scale jumping that allows

220

Coca-Globalization

analysts and activists alike to make translocal connections. For example, we should note that in many of the cases where soft drink sales in schools have been banned or regulated, it was parents and school nutritionists who took the initiative rather than school boards. School boards often find themselves in the desperate position of trying to recover funds slashed from operating budgets by state and local legislatures. It is hardly far-fetched to argue that these budget cuts are the partial result of pressures generated by economic globalization, including the specific effect of declining tax revenues as businesses close or relocate and the general effect of neoliberal policies designed to cut personal taxes and limit the extent of state services (see Giroux 2004). In the United States, as in Papua New Guinea, corporations move into the space vacated by the state, bringing hitherto public services such as education into partnership with private enterprise. Parents and school nutritionists, mobilized by concerns about what their children and students ought to consume, sought to resist this move by bringing the state back in—by using legislative means to regulate corporate practices and at the same time to challenge the state to meet its obligations to its youngest citizens by restoring funding to public schools. Their actions make it plain that consumer citizenship, despite its flaws, is not something to be dismissed as pure illusion. But neither is consumer citizenship an alternative to political citizenship. Rather, consumer citizenship and political citizenship are both intrinsic aspects of civic engagement, locally as well as globally. Soft Drinks and Big Sugar The future of the battle over pouring rights might be read most clearly in the marketing moves of soft drink companies and the global sugar industry. In March 2005, Coca-Cola North America announced the introduction of Coca-Cola Zero, a zero-calorie cola targeted at “young adults”—“a new brand they can call their own” (“Coca-Cola Announces Plans to Launch Coca-Cola Zero” 2005). Coca-Cola Zero is sweetened with aspartame and acesulfame potassium (ace-k), yet one more blow to the sugar industry which has long relied upon soft drink corporations as key customers worldwide. The sugar industry, for its part, is busy revising the farm-to-table narratives it uses to represent sugar to supermarket shoppers. In order to differentiate sugar from other sweeteners, especially industrial sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup, these narratives now appeal to notions of place, freshness, and environmental sustainability (Hollander 2003). As hidden sugar consumption continues to increase (in the form of sweeteners as components of all sorts of foods), visible

Pouring Rights

221

sucrose consumption—from New York to New Guinea—is revalued as “natural as life” (Errington and Gewertz 2003). Indeed, Wholesome Foods, a sugar-marketing firm, now employs images of third-world peasants to qualify organic sugar with the same sort of moral concerns that infuse Fair Trade coffee: “Wholesome Sweeteners seeks to improve the quality and productivity of the growers it relies on. By doing so, these growers realize additional income from their crops giving them the opportunity to improve their standard of living” (cited in Hollander 2003, 68). Another reminder, should one be necessary, of the limitations faced by the politics of products: even the most “maligned food products” (69) can be requalified, narratively rehabilitated to meet the evolving demands of consumer citizenship. Local fights over the sale of soft drinks in schools also recapitulate global struggles over the promotion of dietary guidelines with implications for the practices and products of transnational food corporations. In 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a report suggesting dietary changes for individuals, including limits on sugar consumption, as a step toward reducing “the growing burden of non-communicable diseases” (Waxman and Nurum 2004). The WHO estimates that 300 million people worldwide are obese and one billion people are overweight; by comparison, the WHO estimates that 800 million people are suffering from undernutrition (Waxman and Norum 2004). These counter-intuitive figures are a consequence of factors including tobacco use, reduced levels of physical activity, and dietary changes connected with the global expansion of food markets. With regard to the last factor, Waxman and Norum note, “Populations are exposed to increased availability and aggressive promotion of processed, inexpensive food—generally high in fats, sugar and salt—but reduced access and affordability of fruits and vegetables” (2004, 381). The director of the London-based International Obesity Task Force similarly explains that “fat and sugar are cheap products, and people are eating the wrong stuff ” (Ford 2004). What were once diseases of affluence are now becoming diseases of poverty: “The number of obese people in China doubled between 1992 and 2002” to 60 million or 7.1 percent of adults (Ackman 2004). Put differently, noncommunicable diseases connected with obesity and overweight follow vectors of social inequality (including gender inequality); risk factors and disease outcomes cluster in developing countries, on the one hand, and in the poor urban centers of developed countries, on the other. Elizabeth Solomon’s concern over the consumption habits of her grandchildren in Port Moresby is shared by the parents of school children in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago,

222

Coca-Globalization

the three largest school districts in the United States, where actions regulating the sale of soft drinks in school have been taken. In many Pacific island nations, this situation is alarming. In Nauru, for example, 70 percent of the inhabitants are obese according to WHO studies—a consequence of both material and cultural conditions, namely, a population flush with revenues from phosphate mining that is able to afford imported foods, and a local aesthetic that values large body size. Even in Papua New Guinea, a country with a much lower per capita income and much greater variation in access to imported foods, evidence suggests that many people are on “the rocky road from roots to rice” (Sawyer 2001), substituting bread and rice for starchy root crops such as sweet potato and taro. This substitution characterizes the diets of urban wage earners, in particular: “Average calorie intake for the wealthiest 25% of the population is well above requirements and people are likely to become overweight or obese. Most of this group are people in formal employment, businesses or waged jobs, which are physically less demanding” (Sawyer 2001, 155). Hence the jibe,“One can easily pick out politicians and those who do well in private and public services by their heavier weight, large size and potbelly.” (Taufa and Benjamin 2001, 109). But people living in urban squatter settlements and in rural areas close to largescale development projects (such as mines) are also experiencing accelerated changes in diet, which includes increased consumption of “modern” foods such as rice, tinned meat, biscuits, and snack foods. Although difficult to measure precisely, incidence of noninsulin dependent diabetes mellitus appears to be on the rise (Taufa and Benjamin 2001). The health implications of modern diets are a matter of concern to individuals and organizations practicing the politics of products in the South Pacific. For example, the South Pacific Consumer Protection Programme, an affiliate of the NGO Consumers International, has launched awareness campaigns designed to educate secondary school students about their rights as consumers, including the right to a healthy environment. One of the program’s publications, Cola or Coconuts? (South Pacific Consumer Protection Programme 1996), specifically addresses the problem of rising rates of diabetes in conjunction with increased consumption of imported, processed foods (as well as a range of other topics including fair business practices, advertising, product safety, and human ecology). The goal of the publication, which is meant for use in schools, is “to empower Pacific Island students to create safe, informed and fair marketplaces in our island nations.” While no one can deny the value of such a goal, it is important to note some of the challenges that will confront even the most educated and

Pouring Rights

223

aware population of Pacific Islanders in asserting control over their consumption practices. For example, a broad-based survey of food-related issues in the Pacific islands Kingdom of Tonga clarifies the link between dietary change and policies of selective trade liberalization associated with economic globalization. Evans et al. confirm that in Tonga, “a pattern of high rates of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease has emerged with the shift from traditional diets” to increased consumption of imported foods, especially fatty meats such as mutton flaps (2001, 79–80). But they insist that this shift has occurred despite strong Tongan preferences for traditional foods (greens, fish, yams) and accurate perceptions of the poorer nutritional value of “modern” foods (bread, mutton flaps, imported chicken parts). Instead, they argue that Tongans consume less healthy foods because of cost and availability. For example, “healthier, low-fat Tongan sources of proteins, such as fish, generally cost between 15% and 50% more than either mutton flaps or imported chicken parts” (859). In many areas, moreover, imported foods such as rice were more readily available than local foods such as taro. Evans and others thus conclude that trade policy rather than nutritional education might be the key to solving Tonga’s growing health problems. The steady increase in relatively cheap imported foods—mutton flaps from New Zealand, chicken parts from the United States—not only badly affects Tonga’s balance of trade, but also constrains the development of sustainable markets for indigenous fishing and farming industries. Increased international trade, purportedly intended to stimulate economic growth, thus creates conditions that promote the growth of health-related problems. Evans et al. leave a grim impression of the options available to the national government and health authorities in Tonga for dealing with the tide of imported foods. They note that under the provisions of the World Trade Organization, of which Tonga became a full member in July 2007, tariff-based limitations on imports designated “legal and of doubtful benefit” will be difficult to enact. Fiji, for example, has imposed a complete ban on the importation of mutton flaps and chicken parts, but “as a full member of the WTO it is under threat of a complaint by New Zealand” (Evans et al. 2001, 860). The capacity of the Fijian state and Tongan state to administer the health of their respective populations is compromised by the higher authority of the WTO, acting on behalf of the New Zealand-based mutton exporters (see Gewertz and Errington 2007). But it would be a mistake to assume that inter-state organizations always override the interests of nation-states, especially when powerful nation-states ally themselves with powerful corporate interests, which brings us back to the WHO Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health.

224

Coca-Globalization

The U.S. sugar industry launched an aggressive attack on the WHO report, angered by the specific recommendation in the dietary guidelines that “free sugars” (both sucrose and other sweeteners such as HFCS) should account for no more than 10 percent of a healthy diet. The Sugar Association, for example, declared its intent to use “every avenue available to expose the dubious nature” of the report, including asking members of Congress to challenge the United States’ $406 million in contributions to the WHO, a quarter of the annual total. (The National Soft Drink Association likewise characterized the report’s recommendation of a 10 percent limit as too restrictive, instead backing a 25 percent limit [Boseley 2003].) In this instance, the Bush administration aligned itself with the sugar industry, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human services issued a critique of the science behind the WHO report. The result was perhaps predictable, given the enormous power of so-called Big Sugar’s lobbying machine: “Despite its small size, accounting for just one per cent of US farm receipts and 61,000 direct jobs, sugar is the largest agricultural industry donor to political campaigns,” giving nearly $3.2 million during the 2004 elections (Alden et al. 2004; Barrionueva and Becker 2005). Not surprisingly, in Brazil—which controls a quarter of the world sugar market—the government also opposed the WHO Global Strategy, while the president of the Sao Paulo Sugarcane Agroindustry Union (UNICA) claimed that there is no scientific proof that sugar harms human health. At the same time, Brazilian health advocates claimed that “health should come before sector-specific economic interests” (Osava 2004). Thus the opposing positions in the school soft drink wars—public health versus school budgets—reemerged on and within the national scale of the Brazilian state. In this instance, however, industry and trade interests prevailed, at least in one particular respect. In a final compromise, the WHO agreed to remove from its report the recommendation that intake of added sugar be limited to no more than 10 percent of daily calories (see the account of Kaare Norum [2005] who chaired a WHO Reference Group charged with shaping the Global Strategy). Even so, Brazilian economic interests, or at least those of the Brazilian sugar industry, are not the same as those of the U.S. sugar industry. While the latter seeks to maintain its tariff-protected domestic market, the former seeks to increase its access to markets worldwide, especially the U.S. market. (The average American derives approximately 16 percent of calorie intake from added sugars; Alden et al. 2004). In early 2004, the U.S. sugar industry succeeded in excluding sugar from a bilateral free trade agreement that the United States concluded with Australia, one of the world’s top ten sugar producers (though a small player by comparison with Brazil, the

Pouring Rights

225

United States, the European Union, and India; Alden et al. 2004; Vernon 2004). But by the middle of the following year, the industry seemed to be losing its allies in the Bush administration over the industry’s opposition to the administration’s top trade priority, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) (Barrionueva and Becker 2005). CAFTA would open up the American market to approximately 1 percent more sugar from Central American producers. Similarly, the industry’s allies in agribusiness were withdrawing support for the quota system that protects U.S. sugar producers from competing with less expensive imported sugar (many of these allies, of course, are themselves beneficiaries of U.S. taxpayer subsidies). Much is at stake for U.S. cane and beet growers: “If you go to free trade, Brazil wins and everybody else gets killed,” said the president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association (Alden et al. 2004). It remains to be seen whether U.S. sugar producers, already witnessing the departure of American candy manufacturers to Mexico and Canada in search of lower sugar prices, will ultimately succumb to the pressures of neoliberal trade policies. It is already clear that these same policies have elsewhere reduced the size and scope of state activities and perforce created the conditions for an expansion of corporate citizenship and transnational governmentality. For just as transnational corporations benefit from reducing barriers to trade such as (selected) state subsidies and tariffs, these corporations perversely benefit from reduced state support of public education, taking advantage of cuts in public spending to promote private consumption as an alternative source of revenue for schools. The Morality of Products Michele Micheletti (2003) has made a strong and thoughtful argument for recognizing the positive political potential of virtuous consumption. As I also have tried to do here, she shows how a politics of products (boycotts and buycotts, smart shopping, socially responsible investing) attempts to bring moral values of fair mindedness and social justice into a marketplace otherwise given over to the demands of practical reason or “need and greed,” as Sahlins (2004) would say. In so doing, the distinction between public citizens and private consumer disappears. Furthermore, the distinction between “culture” and “economy”—a product of the great historical transformation that disembedded “the market” from social life (Polanyi 1957)—likewise disappears. The politics of products thus promises to reembed everyday economic activity within a moral framework, to hold everyday activities of production and consumption accountable to the

226

Coca-Globalization

same moral standards we use on a daily basis to tell right from wrong, good from bad. Put differently, and in terms that Micheletti (2003) also uses, the politics of products is trust-generating activity—activity that diffuses trust throughout the networks that such activity constructs. These networks can be both shorter in length, like the network mobilized to ban soft drink sales in Los Angeles schools, or greater in length, like the networks mobilized to advocate on behalf of HIV-positive workers in the African Coke system or threatened workers in the Colombian Coke system. These networks might take the form of commodity chains that link southern producers with faraway northern consumers; or they might take the form of strategic alliances between preexisting groups of various sorts—as when representatives of ACT UP encourage people to join with the Teamsters to support the cause of workers in Colombia. If transnational alliances of this latter sort are indeed typical of the so-called anti-globalization movement, then it is evident how important a role the politics of products—branded, mundane, widely distributed consumer goods, or worldly things—is destined to play in this movement (Klein 1999; Graeber 2002). I am sympathetic with Micheletti’s view, and I have demonstrated here some of the modest gains that the politics of products focused on soft drinks has been able to achieve. Gains on issues of environmental sustainability and worker’s rights, for example, testify to the slow process of incremental change that the politics of products entails. The process should certainly not be confused with a revolution in the capitalist mode of production, but it makes gains, nonetheless. Soft drink politics, however, also demonstrate some of the persistent problems that confront any effort to shift the orientation of political activism from production to consumption and to engage with corporations in the role of consumers rather than the role of workers or rights-bearing citizens. These problems cling to two of the promises held out by the politics of products, namely, the promise of political agency and the promise of civilizing capitalism. The attraction of political interventions such as buycotts and shareholder activism lies in their capacity to enable individuals to do something—to take immediate and personal responsibility for realizing moral values perceived as unimportant to public policy makers. While some critics might dismiss such actions as purchasing Fair Trade coffee as an inconsequential quick fix for solving structural dilemmas (cf. Micheletti 2003, 161), my concern is different. I worry that consumption is always an overdetermined site of moral activity, at which individuals confront competing moral agendas. For example, Micheletti (2003, 151) speculates that green political consumerism, which simply regards certain products as

Pouring Rights

227

unsustainable and thus not to be purchased, enables individual shoppers to realize the virtue of thriftiness. Yet the very same virtue can be realized by a Wal-Mart shopper who purchases products that are ecologically unsound but significantly cheaper on the grounds that her family will be better provisioned (see Miller 1998). This shopper is acting with others in mind; her consumption is not motivated by narrow self-interest and it would be mistaken to call it unethical. Put differently, there is an irreducible element of “perplexity” built into consumption practices (Ramamurthy 2003). Consumers do not choose between ethical and unethical consumption, smart and stupid shopping; they instead negotiate multiple and sometimes contradictory moral demands. Harnessing the agency of individual consumers to specific political goals will always involve coming to terms with these negotiations. The problem of enlisting corporate citizens in the service of civilizing capitalism is yet more daunting. No matter how much good corporations have done and can do, doing good will never be their “core activity”: “Their contribution to society’s overall needs will always remain at the margins, and their contribution to welfare will never be comprehensive” (Hertz 2001, 214). The legal mandate and main purpose of corporations is to enhance market value for the owners of the corporation; hence the corporation’s ever present incentive to “externalize” any and all costs possible and to calculate its destructiveness in relation to its profits (Bakan 2004). Under these circumstances, the best consumer citizens can hope for from corporations is charity—the timing, amount, and purpose of which is largely determined by corporations. As Marcel Mauss (1925) noted long ago, what is so wounding about charity is that the giver, and only the giver, controls the gift; charity is not a material vehicle for an ongoing social relation, the hallmark of a genuine gift relationship. Charity is instead a token of power—a sign of the donor’s lack of obligation to sustain a relationship with the recipient. Accordingly, when profit is threatened, it is likely that charity will be scarce. As Micheletti (2003, 162) understands, and as the struggles over soft drink sales in schools illustrates, a politics of products must include civic engagements in addition to market-based efforts. Without some measure of state-enforced regulation—regarding corporate taxes, environmental safety, worker’s rights—it is unlikely that the practices of corporations will be effectively monitored, let alone changed. If the choice of Cal Safety to validate The Coca-Cola Company’s corporate policies is not reassuring, the alternative of an underfunded, unmandated watchdog coalition such as the Workers Rights Consortium inspires only marginally more confidence. Nor should we confuse consumer citizenship with participatory democracy.

228

Coca-Globalization

Participatory democracy can certainly benefit from the energetic protests of consumer citizens, but only if the protests of particular pressure groups working on particular issues are redirected toward the general end of reestablishing government as a forum in which all people have a say. All people’s interests—including those of people without shares to vote on and without the means to buy ethically certified goods—should be deemed at least worthy of consideration. Activism outside of traditional political channels can be a catalyst for political change, as the history of Progressivism in the United States suggests. As with the White Label Campaign, it might well be that the past history of consumer citizenship holds lessons for the political future of participatory democracy.

Conclusion

Product Networks and the Politics of Knowledge n July 2005, Internet news sites circulated stories about Sharad Haksar, an Indian photographer based in the city of Chennai (formerly Madras) and well known in international advertising circles. According to reports, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Private Ltd., a subsidiary of The CocaCola Company for whom Haskar had done work in the past, threatened Haksar with legal action on the grounds that he had caused “‘incalculable’ damage to the goodwill and reputation of the brand Coca-Cola” (Bhattacharya 2005). At issue was a large billboard that Haksar had placed in a busy area of Chennai. The billboard displayed a photograph by Haksar that depicted a dry water pump with four empty pots lined up next to it, waiting to be filled. In the background appear the words “Drink Coca-Cola,” painted white on a red wall, with the name of the soft drink written in its familiar trademarked script (see Figure C.1). The incident condenses many of the themes of this book, of which I have chosen a few for a final reprise: brands, value creation, and the politics of consumption on a transnational scale. These chosen themes sound the uncertain future of soft drinks, in particular, and of worldly things, in general, foreshadowed by current circumstances of globalization. This future hinges on everyday contests over commodity values, both economic and semiotic, and on a politics of knowledge that might enable agents located differently within spatially extensive product networks to assemble themselves in new and unlikely coalitions advancing a variety of morally charged agendas.

I

&* A Coca-Cola spokesperson referred to Haksar’s twenty-foot-by-thirty-foot billboard as an “infringement of our trademark.” The letter sent to Haksar by the law firm representing Hindustan Coca-Cola characterized the billboard as “a deliberate attempt to bring disrepute to my client’s global reputation built up by spending millions and millions of rupees and by its

230

Conclusion

Figure C.1 Chennai, India, June 2005. Billboard with picture by Sharad Haksar. Getty Images/AFP.

quality of product and service” (Bhattacharya 2005). Reputation—the public meaning of Coca-Cola—was thus unambiguously claimed as the exclusive creation and private property of The Coca-Cola Company, regardless of the logical and material condition of reputation as an interactive social process, a qualification generated by the ongoing response of consumers to a trademark or brand (see Chapter 3). From this soft drink perspective, Haksar’s image was both an attack on and an illegal appropriation of the company’s capacity to create commercial value. Haksar defended his billboard as a social message, one in a series of such messages that he had communicated over the previous three years on billboards that occasionally and similarly used trademarked images (such as the Nike swoosh). The social message in this case referred to the scarcity of drinking water in urban Chennai: “I wanted to show the irony of the situation—when there is such acute water shortage, aerated drinks are freely available” (Bhattacharya 2005). Haksar, moreover, claimed that the billboard was an expression of his artistic freedom and not an attempt on his part to reap commercial gains. He said, “If MNCs [multinational corporations] do not want their trademark image used in art, they should have a disclaimer on every one of their products! By that yardstick, if I take a photograph of a street, house-owners can object to their house being in the image. Where does it stop?” (Rajagopalan 2005). From this soft drink

Conclusion

231

perspective, the legal action threatened against Haksar was an attack on his right and capacity to produce semiotic value, in other words, to make meaning. The question asked by one Indian blogger commenting on the case is entirely appropriate: “The question is, when a brand and it’s [sic] slogan becomes [sic] part of the popular culture, how far can it—or should it—be ‘protected’” (Bansal 2005). This disjunction in the product network—between the perspectives of Sharad Haksar and the attorneys for Hindustan Coca-Cola—recalls the extent to which consumption work rather than raw material or productive (manufacturing) labor is a source of commercial value, perhaps the preeminent source of value of globally branded consumer items or worldly things (Chapter 3). If this condition holds true for carbonated soft drinks, how much more true must it hold for the fastest growing beverage of soft drink companies, bottled water? The Coca-Cola Company addresses this question on its Web site: “When The Coca-Cola Company sells drinking water in its various forms, it is not charging for the water per se, but rather for the value we add to the water to make it a branded beverage. For instance, we treat water to high safety and quality standards, put it into convenient packages to suit different needs, distribute the product to places where people want to consume it, and cool it for immediate consumption” (The Coca-Cola Company 2005). It is not the value of the product per se— which is, after all, municipal tap water, already subsidized by consumers— for which the consumer is charged (again). Instead, the value for which the consumer is charged allegedly derives largely from the activities dedicated to evoking a consumer response to the product (branding) and inserting the product into as many potential contexts of consumption as possible (distribution). Since the product itself apparently has no intrinsic value, the whole process of realizing commercial value depends upon the work of consumers in recognizing “the branded beverage” as endowed with qualities for which the consumer is willing to pay the going price. This qualitative endowment is as much the work of the consumer as that of the producer, if not more so. And it is precisely this tacit collaboration between producers and consumers—ideally a joint project of meaning making— that some (though not all) disjunctions in a product network put at risk. The disjunction between Haksar and the attorneys’ perspectives also recalls the extent to which misalignment and misrecognition in a product network are capable of producing unanticipated outcomes. Haksar’s own billboard cannot escape this contingency. For example, one consumer posting to a Chennai blog is quoted as confessing, “I’ve passed this hoarding a million times on Nungambakkan High Road and have been under the impression all this while that it was a Coke ad that used one of Sharad

232

Conclusion

Haksar’s photographs!!!” (Bansal 2005). Similarly, despite Haksar’s claim that the point of his billboard was “to highlight the problem of water shortages in my city, and not to bring Coca-Cola down” (Rajagopalan 2005), his image was perceived differently by activists accusing Coca-Cola bottling plants across India for depleting (or “mining”) groundwater—accusations strenuously and consistently denied by the company. In fact, it was on the Web site of the India Resource Center (IRC), an NGO initiative largely devoted to campaigning against the company’s operations in India, that I learned of the Chennai billboard controversy. According to an IRC news release that appeared the day after Haksar was served legal notice: “Mr. Haksar’s billboard highlights the severe water shortages being experienced by communities that live around Coca-Cola bottling plants across India. A community close to Chennai, in Gangaikondan, has already held large protests—protesting against an upcoming Coca-Cola plant. In the neighboring state of Kerala, in the village of Plachimada, Coca-Cola has been unable to open its bottling facility for the last 16 months—because the community will not allow it to” (IRC 2005a). Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center thanked Haksar for his unintended efforts. That is, the photographer’s self-professed gesture of irony had been taken up as a public protest of transnational corporate practice. It was perhaps exactly this interpretation of the Chennai billboard that prompted Hindustan Coca-Cola’s legal action in the first place. Haksar, who speculated likewise, noted that,“There is, though, no mention of Plachimada in the five-page notice they have served me” (Bhattacharya 2005). The charges of environmental irresponsibility made by activists against The Coca-Cola Company and its bottlers in India are serious, controversial, and often articulated in strident rhetorical terms. The company has supplied on its Web site a substantial defense of its use of local water resources and product quality in India (see CokeFacts.org, http://www .cokefacts.org/facts/facts_in_keyfacts.shtml). This defense includes documentation of the High Court of Kerala and Indian Supreme Court rulings in 2005 directing the local council (panchayat) in Plachimada to renew the Coca-Cola plant’s license to operate, despite claims by the mostly low-caste villagers that their underground water deposits were being depleted. A fuller discussion of the situation would require an account of the history of economic reform in Kerala, the politics of caste and indigenous people’s rights in India, and the laws regulating groundwater extraction for private enterprise. I am less concerned here with the specific charges being made by activists such as those involved in the Stop Killer Coke campaign than with the nature of the activism itself. Who is Amit Srivastava and what is the India Resource Center?

Conclusion

233

A Wall Street Journal profile describes Srivastava as the sole full-time employee of Global Resistance, the nonprofit, activist organization he runs out of a shared house in El Cerrito, California (Secklow 2005). Srivastava is a key figure—along with Ray Rogers—in the upsurge of protest in the United States and elsewhere directed against The Coca-Cola Company (Chapter 6). Like Rogers, he has toured college campuses presenting allegations against the company’s operations in India that include stealing groundwater, polluting soil with toxic byproducts given to farmers for use as fertilizer, and selling drinks that contain pesticides. Like Rogers, he has urged student protestors to mobilize campus officials against the renewal of exclusive vending contracts with the company. More significantly, the Web site he manages for the India Resource Center (http://www.indiare source.org) links activists inside and outside India while it coordinates the activities of protestors spread across the vast subcontinent. It attracts twenty thousand visitors each month (Secklow 2005). While a company representative drolly commented that “the moral high ground seems to be anyone with a Web site,” R. Ajayan, a Kerala activist, observed that “[Srivastava] has such enormous resources. We don’t have a Web site or a communications system. Whenever we have a protest, we have no way to publicize it—he’s doing all this.” Ajayan’s comment underscores the claim made by the author of the Wall Street Journal article: “That a one-man NGO armed with just a laptop computer, a Web site and a telephone calling card can, with his allies, influence a huge multinational corporation illustrates the role that social activists can play in a world that’s going increasingly online” (Secklow 2005). Srivastava’s activism illustrates well two different characteristics of the heterogeneous social movements that gather loosely under the heading of anti-corporate globalization. First, it highlights in its specific focus on water shortages a widespread concern about the increasing privatization of public resources (see, e.g., Barlow and Clarke 2002). And there is no doubt that the threat of water privatization has provoked strong responses among international activists against corporate globalization and at least one regional social movement now taken as an emblem of successful resistance to state, World Bank, and corporate privatization schemes—the Coalition (Coordinadora) for the Defense of Water and Life. The Cordinadora overturned plans in 2000 to transfer the water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia to a consortium called Aguas del Tunari controlled by a partner (International Water) then wholly owned by the giant transnational construction and engineering company Bechtel. The Coordinadora brought together people from diverse social sectors—“rural farmers, industrial proletariats, disillusioned in-migrants, largely invisible members of a growing informal

234

Conclusion

economy, environmentalists, retirees, left-leaning economists and technocrats, as well as sympathetic foreigners, in provincial towns, peripheral shantytowns, and the urban streets” (Albro 2005, 251). These people recognized each other’s predicaments in the face of both increasing scarcity of water and a state that, embracing the orthodoxy of neoliberalism, had undertaken the sale of public sector assets. Grounded less in a sense of shared cultural identity or values, the Coordinadora exemplified “the agency of a ‘plural popular’ subject,” a coalition that drew its collective vitality from a “pluralistic appreciation of diverse constituent networks” (even if this appreciation was lost in the subsequent translation of the Coordinadora as an essentialized indigenous movement by international activists; Albro 2005, 249). Srivastava’s campaign against The Coca-Cola Company in India raises fundamental questions about property claims, about who owns the groundwater that provides the main ingredient of branded beverages. These questions pertain not to abstract or intellectual property (brands, logos, trademarks), but rather to material property—“water per se” as part of the public commons. This question has become urgent not only in water-poor developing countries such as India and Bolivia, but also in the United States, Canada, and Europe, where the explosive growth of the bottled water industry has prompted community resistance to and state regulation of spring water takings by both large and small water companies (see Clarke 2005). In 2002, a United Nations committee declared access to water resources a human right and stated that water ought to be treated as a social and cultural good and not primarily as an economic commodity. Plachimada (see Cockburn 2005) and Cochabamba (see Albro 2005) are increasingly cited on the left as grassroots victories in a global water war, a war that is being fought not only in rural communities, but also at the shareholder meetings of The Coca-Cola Company. In April 2005, at the annual meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, Dhruti Contractor, founder and director of the Georgia Indian American Political Action Committee, delivered a statement in protest of the company’s actions. The statement was notable for how it linked circumstances in rural villages of India with the lives of Americans in the suburbs of the company’s hometown, Atlanta: “This issue is personal. While it may not affect our families in India directly, it still hits home. And for those Indian Americans in metroAtlanta and Georgia, there is an obligation, I believe, to act on this issue” (http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org:80/cms/page1257.cfm). In other words, the mutability of “home” thus gives impetus to a new form of diasporic politics, in which transnational communities of migrants lobby transnational corporations. (Amit Srivastava, incidentally, was born in the

Conclusion

235

United States, grew up in India, and attended Southern Illinois University before devoting himself to full-time activism; Secklow 2005.) Dhruti Contractor’s situation recalls that of the large number of Colombians living in Queens, New York, whose elected city council member led a delegation to Colombia and a fact-finding mission in connection with allegations of labor abuses at Coca-Cola bottling plants in that country (see Chapter 6). And here we meet the second aspect of Srivastava’s type of activism—its coalitional, pluralistic, and deterritorialized nature. For not only was Contractor’s organization allied with other NGOs (Corporate Accountability International and Georgia Kids Against Pollution), the overall campaign against the company’s actions in India had become allied with the Stop Killer Coke campaign against the company’s labor practices in Colombia. Ray Rogers and Amit Srivastava spoke together on many U.S. college campuses in April 2005. Similarly, the India Resource Center and the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke were two of several groups sponsoring a workshop on the International Campaign to Hold Coca-Cola Accountable at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The workshop— translated, according to the India Resource Center into English, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish—linked groups campaigning against the company from platforms promoting human rights, labor rights, and environmental justice (IRC 2005b). Dhruti Contractor’s personal concerns thus articulated with local and transnational networks of activists addressing, as in Cochabamba, diverse concerns of their own. These activist networks are both part of the product network that takes shifting shape around a particular worldly thing and a source of disjunction among perspectives within that network. It is these disjunctions that potentially disrupt the economy of qualities in which soft drinks and other branded beverages circulate, opening up new possibilities for social action across political borders and for bringing different perspectives on mobile commodities to bear upon each other. &* The power of consumer politics stems from its capacity to connect everyday private acts of consumption—drinking a bottle of Coke or wearing a pair of Nike sneakers—with issues of larger public significance. It was precisely this connection, Mark Weiner (2002) notes, that The Coca-Cola Company sought to make in its efforts to supply Allied servicemen with Coca-Cola during World War II and in its wartime advertising (see Chapter 2). The company’s initiatives, like wartime propaganda more generally, established a kind of “moral equivalence” by suggesting that “objects of

236

Conclusion

peaceful domestic use were intricately tied with objects employed on the field of battle, so the consumption of those objects in the United States tied individuals to remote people and events” (Weiner 2002, 130). This equivalence blurred any distinction between the personal and the civic, the domestic and the public: saving pan grease at home supported the production of anti-tank shells for fighting Nazis abroad. (Such a distinction is similarly elided today in the logo of the company’s Civic Action Network— a red silhouette of the continental United States, with a white dynamic ribbon spreading from California to New Jersey, and the words “Civic Action Network” stamped across the heartland in the inevitable trademarked script.) By the same token, soldiers drinking a Coke on the field of battle reconnected themselves with home, their private memories of kith and kin put in the larger civic service of lifting morale and defining the war’s purpose. Scholars and critics have pointed out how a civic language modeled on a language of consumption usually portends the demise of republican ideals of participatory democracy. Stuart Ewen, for example, argues, “We are witnessing the swift debasement of the concept of ‘citizen’—the person who actively participates in shaping society’s destiny—to that of ‘consumer,’ whose franchise has become his or her purchasing decisions. The pernicious tendency to equate the freedom to choose between products with the concept of democracy is bringing about the humiliation of a profoundly empowering political idea” (1992, 49). Promoting consumerism as practical patriotism might thus connect individuals to remote people and places, but these same connections hide anti-democratic relations of economic power, such as the collusion between the U.S. state and The CocaCola Company that enabled the provisioning of Allied combat soldiers with soft drinks. Instead of promoting a collective, participatory kind of politics, consumer citizenship in this view privatizes citizenship, reducing civic fellowship to shopping and limiting democratic expression to only those individuals with the means to buy. This critique is surely applicable to the politics of consumption in postwar U.S. history, through which earlier campaigns by working-class and middle-class movements that seized upon consumer citizenship as a way to advance the public interest were absorbed by a state project dedicated to the interest of private capital (Cohen 2003). But is this critique a necessary correlate of all consumer politics? Can there be a consumer politics that begins with social relations rather than isolated individuals and that champions mutual cooperation and care rather than freedom of choice? A product-centered politics of the sort that has taken shape around brand-name soft drinks seeks to establish connections among people and events in remote places through the medium of a global commodity. It

Conclusion

237

brings about these connections not only through its coalitional nature, but also by connecting consumers in one place to other agents in a spatially extensive product network. Through these perspectival connections, product-centered politics make visible what is hidden in plain view, namely, the shared concerns (as opposed to shared identities) of people linked, however tenuously, by associations with a worldly thing. These are not the cola connections of which Douglas Daft spoke in his 2000 marketing speech on globalization (see Introduction), nor do they signify the “tiny bit of commonality between all peoples” represented by the multinational gathering of youth chorusing their desire to buy the world a Coke in the company’s famous 1971 Hilltop ad (Backer 1993, 7). They are, instead, connections that, once made, close disjunctions in a network of perspectives (between Coke consumers in Michigan and Coke system workers in Colombia) at the same time that they open up new disjunctions (between the perspectives of company officials and socially responsible shareholders). These connections—convergences in perspective—comprise new kinds of knowledge that carry with them new possibilities for coordinated action on social issues that go well beyond a limited significance to individual consumers. Disjunctions in product networks are neither new nor unusual; indeed, they have been longstanding conditions for creating commercial value in a globalized economy, the means by which long-distance traders qualify merchandise acquired cheaply in one place as dear in another faraway place (see Chapter 1). Activists such as Ray Rogers and Amit Srivastava recognize, however, that disjunctions in perspectives enable a contemporary form of labor and environmental politics that takes shape as a wired politics of knowledge. The management of knowledge, what different actors connected in spatially extensive networks of production, exchange, and consumption know about their place in the network and their connections to other actors, is a crucial feature of value creation in the current economy of qualities. This much is clear from the campaigns of so-called anti-globalization activists who strive to make visible the conditions of production in which Nike sneakers, Gap blouses, and Mattel toys originate. The goal is to overcome a disjunction in perspectives, to connect persons with other persons whose diverse interests implicate a particular brand-name product or a whole category of consumer goods. Hence a report in the New Internationalist, a magazine devoted to issues of global social justice, of an attempt to bridge worlds of knowledge with the visit of a Ghanaian cocoa farmer to the United Kingdom. The farmer toured various sites along the cocoa trail, including the large chocolate processing plant, Cadbury World, to learn what happens to the crop he grows (Swift 1998). But it is equally

238

Conclusion

clear that the management of knowledge also matters greatly to certain companies, for whom segmented knowledge can often interfere with the qualification of products. Alberto Arce (1997, 180–82) relates the story, for example, of how a group of flower growers from Tanzania were brought by KLM airlines to the Netherlands in order to see firsthand the operation of flower markets and thus learn well the importance of “quality”—that is, learn well the perspective of European flower consumers, as mediated by flower retailers (see Hughes 2004). Arce’s story recalls the similar way in which Australian colonial authorities attempted to combat what they saw as the ignorant notions of value informing cargo cults by producing films to show native audiences how a pair of trousers begins in the cotton fields of Queensland and eventually makes its way from field to factory to steamship to tradestores throughout Papua and New Guinea. The success of this pedagogy was equivocal at best, and it would be likewise dubious to assume that “filling gaps in knowledge” will motivate immediate political action on the part of defetishized consumers. How could it, given the ethical overdetermination and irreducible perplexity of consumption in practice (see Chapter 7)? Nevertheless, the politics of product networks entails a politics of knowledge, opening up a variety of possibilities for both corporate actors and their social critics to pursue competing agendas for achieving ends that are at once economic and moral. The accomplishments of student activists in joining and forging transnational coalitions with trade unions and religious organizations in order to publicize and protest sweatshop labor in the globalized garment industry are just one compelling example of this kind of politics. Consideration of the movement of worldly things—such as soft drinks from New York to New Guinea—promises not only a novel way of thinking about globalization, but also a progressive and ethical kind of political economic analysis. Dicken et al. (2001, 106), for example, have observed that “a network methodology expands the horizons on which our actions can be seen to be influential and within which we might be held to some ethical responsibility” for the “claims of distant strangers.” But it would be naive to ignore the fundamental challenges involved. There is no guarantee that increased knowledge of product networks will automatically translate into changes in consumption practices let alone prompt other forms of political action directed at changing the conditions under which products are produced and distributed. Consumers might lack knowledge of how a product connects them to other people and places, but such a lack of knowledge does not mean that consumers act without ethical concerns. On the contrary, consumption is rife with ethical concerns, not all of which are

Conclusion

239

matters of self-conscious acknowledgement. A mother buying food for her family shops habitually with others in mind and not out of self-indulgence and narcissism (Miller 1997). Inasmuch as everyday consumption routines presuppose a self and others in ethical relations, consumption is “ordinarily ethical” (Barnett et al. 2005). The choice between ethical or unethical consumption is a false one; at stake is which set of ethical concerns will be acted upon in and through particular practices of consumption. Put differently, expanded horizons are a necessary but insufficient condition for assuming responsibility for the “claims of distant strangers.” Nor should we underestimate the challenges involved in making increased knowledge of product networks available to the various actors enrolled in these networks. For example, organic labeling initiatives that seek to “thicken connections between producers and consumers” often fail to make transparent the conditions under which producers labor, or the agribusiness channels through which products circulate. Organic growers themselves are sometimes ignorant of these distribution channels, unaware that their crops ultimately reach export markets (Guthman 2004). In some cases, moreover, ethical trade initiatives designed to regulate product networks by certifying safe working conditions have created burdensome auditing systems imposed by corporate retailers, worried about bad publicity, upon under-resourced growers (Hughes 2004; see Freidberg 2004). The expansion of an “audit economy” effectively entrenches rather than overturns the inequities of a global trading regime underpinned by free market fundamentalism. Indeed, the development and implementation of auditing practices by a combination of NGOs and corporate retailers might actually advance a neoliberal mode of transnational governmentality, replacing state legislation as the guarantor of a citizen’s rights to minimal labor and environmental standards. Nor, lastly, should we forget the ways in which increased knowledge of product networks can become commoditized. On the one hand, such knowledge can serve as a mark of distinction in tournaments of personal status competition and displays of conspicuous consumption. Knowledge of a product’s connections to remote people and places thus fuels new forms of connoisuership—including new forms of cultivating oneself as virtuous—instead of expanding the spatial scope of ethical responsibility. On the other hand, such knowledge can serve as a source of rent for supply-side agents seeking to qualify products with attributes that can command a premium from consumers. In this sense, a consumer’s awareness that her coffee comes from Kenya or Papua New Guinea, or has been certified eco-friendly is a precondition for charging a higher price rather than the first step toward enabling a form of geographically expanded citizenship.

240

Conclusion

Given these and no doubt other difficulties, wherein lies the promise of an enhanced knowledge of product networks? I suggest that this promise lies in the potential for transforming the moral geography of valuecreation. Let me phrase this suggestion in the Lovemarketing terms discussed earlier. The goal of a product-centered politics of knowledge would be to replace one kind of love relationship with another; that is, to replace the love of a consumer for a brand-name product with the love between fellow participants in a geographically far-flung but shared moral economy. This latter kind of love is not amor (romantic, erotic, or sexual love). It is closer in essence to caritas (charitable, self-sacrificial love) or what might be called caring at a distance, the corollary of the capacity to act at a distance so unevenly enhanced by globalization. But caring at a distance must go beyond one-sided charity, the charity that active donors give to passive anonymous recipients and that neither challenges inequalities nor requires reciprocity. Caring at a distance hinges on the respectful and serious regard given by people, connected to each other as agents in a product network, for each other’s concerns: a politics of mutual recognition. It is such an ideal that motivates ethical initiatives such as Fair Trade that seek to enable growers to exert more control over a product network, to reorganize the relations of power in a product network instead of responding exclusively to the concerns, ethical or otherwise, of consumers and retailers. Put differently, the goal of a product-centered politics of knowledge would be to enlist caring at a distance in a broader project of social justice, to embed caring based on generic human motivations within particular and more symmetrical social and political relationships, and to translate individual acts of beneficence into collective action for social change. This project would begin by redefining the connections between persons and (worldly) things, and by identifying the moral relations and ethical responsibilities implicit in the movement of products from one set of hands to another. But it would end somewhere else altogether, in a form of economic life organized across a range of spatial scales through cooperation rather than competition, and premised upon the equitable distribution of value rather than the imperative to increase profits.

Notes Introduction 1. Australia ruled Papua (formerly British New Guinea) as a territory from 1906; in 1921, Australia assumed rule of the Territory of New Guinea (formerly German New Guinea) by mandate of the League of Nations. The two territories were first jointly administered by Australia in 1949 as the UN Trust Territory of Papua and New Guinea; a Legislative Council was established in 1951. In 1964, the Legislative Council was replaced by a House of Assembly with an elected indigenous majority. The territories were renamed “Papua New Guinea” in July 1971. Self-government was granted in December 1973, and full independence followed on September 16, 1975.

Chapter 1 1. The scene was filmed at a site known as “God’s Window,” a popular vantage point on the great escarpment along the Blyde River Canyon in South Africa. 2. Callon et al. (2002) use ideas associated with actor network theory to imagine their “economy of qualities.” For example, processes of qualification are instances of “translation”: “all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force” (Callon and Latour 1981, 279; see Callon 1986). The sociological method appropriate to actor network theory is one of following, that is, of following the associations and dissociations by which actors (including non-human actors) bind and unbind themselves and other actors into networks of varying length and durability. In this regard, actor network theory and its method converge with anthropological studies, such as my own, that track commodities in motion and trace networks of perspectives (see Introduction). 3. In 1988, Moffet observed Tushum’s influence at work in San Juan Chamula: “Whatever the motivation, Chamulans are undoubtedly some of the world’s most fanatical Pepsi consumers. Chamulans use Pepsi in church ceremonies, chanting as the bubbles fizz to the top of a just-opened bottle. A few cases of Pepsi are a major part of a dowry. Almost invariably, a Chamulan trying to patch up a serious dispute with a friend will set before him a bottle of Pepsi. Nearly every Chamulan house displays a Pepsi poster, a crucifix and a red, white

242

4.

5.

6.

7.

Notes

and green banner of the PRI” (Moffet 1988). Belew (2003, 20) notes that in 2003, the majority of Catholics in San Juan Chamula preferred Coke over Pepsi to burp out the evil spirits killed by the consumption of poch. Belew (2003, 22) notes: “Conversions to Evangelical Protestantism continue at a remarkable rate. One of the major draws of the religion is its prohibition on alcohol consumption—the Catholics require alcohol consumption and the Protestants forbid it at any cost. As a result, many women who are domestically abused by alcoholic husbands push for conversions to Protestantism that symbolize personal safety.” The Belgian crisis reminds us of how consumer goods—especially ingestibles and comestibles—can define flashpoints for struggles over trust relations. Such struggles emerge particularly clearly in situations where people encounter goods not previously seen in the local marketplace. Timothy Burke thus describes the introduction of Stork Margarine to southern Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. Originally marketed by Lever Brothers in a wrapper with a picture of a baby on it, the margarine quickly prompted rumors that it was in fact “rendered baby fat, proof of the ghoulish practices of the settlers” (Burke 1996, 162). The rumors registered the way in which goods made in unknown places by unknown people harbor the capacity to arouse fears and anxieties and to disrupt the distanciated relations of trust intrinsic to modernity. See Caplan 2000 on scares over eating beef in Britain. Caplan notes that the response to a breakdown in impersonal trust is often a reassertion of personal trust: “Trust, then, came from knowledge, ‘knowing’ where the meat had come from, under what conditions it had been produced, and, above all, knowing the person who sold it” (2000, 193). Similarly, the restoration of confidence in the products of The Coca-Cola Company could only begin with a personal apology by then CEO Douglas Ivester to all Belgian consumers, an apology seen by many at the time as coming long after it was due. It is precisely this misalignment that is exploited if not actually sustained by advertising agencies that sell their expertise in knowing local consumers to transnational clients marketing global brands (see Mazzarella 2003).

Chapter 2 1. Pasi Falk (1991) argues that Coke is the perfect “synthesis drink,” mediating the oppositions between intoxicant and medicine, and pleasure and sobriety, as well as tradition and modernity. 2. Confidence is the right word (trust in trust, impersonal trust, or systemic trust), though the word that marketers themselves use is trust, in part because they imagine and speak of the relationship between companies and consumers in highly interpersonal terms (see Luhmann 1988). 3. TO Digest was a wartime publication of The Coca-Cola Company that ceased operation in 1948. All quotes from TOs in this chapter come from issues of TO

Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

243

Digest, a copy of which is held in the Mark Pendergrast Research Files, box 25, item 1. Melanesian men, who worked as stretcher bearers, scouts, and soldiers on behalf of the Allies, were called “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” by the Australian and American troops. The patronizing image of the “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel” dominates a particular version of Australian national history that depicts indigenous Papuans and New Guineans as loyal “colonial subjects who did not exercise choices in response to the war’s disruption of their lives” (Reed 1999, 162). The image has also been invoked by PNG war veterans repeatedly seeking compensation from the Australian government. Friedman (1992) also discusses how the double-sided nature of Coca-Cola— American and universal—was constructed and narrated in the exhibits at the old World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. This view of global commodity culture inverts David Suzuki’s view (Chapter 1) in one respect: whereas Suzuki denies any agency to Papua New Guineans in negotiating the consumption of foreign imports, the Pepsi bottlers assign Papua New Guineans complete agency, the sovereignty of the free market consumer. At the same time, however, both views treat consumer commodities as having fixed or inert meanings; soft drinks always and everywhere mean Western modernity. These meanings can be accepted or rejected, but not transformed or remade. Nolan’s (1999) informative overview of the Coca-Cola product network (or supply chain) documents the ramifications of selling soft drinks on a global scale. The Coca-Cola system, Nolan estimates, purchases approximately 30 percent of the world’s total production of cans, 5 percent of glass containers, 4 percent of sugar, and 30 percent of high fructose corn syrup. Friedman (1993) notes that The Coca-Cola Company responded to the Atlanta Board of Education’s concern that there be enough clearly “educational” content in the displays at the World of Coca-Cola by installing video booths that show five-minute clips integrating the history of Coke into the history of the United States. As a result, the old World of Coca-Cola was regularly visited by busloads of students visiting the nearby Georgia state capitol. Insistence on quality control is a salient aspect of the company’s public face. A 1994 article in a PNG business magazine, for example, recounts a tour of the Port Moresby bottling facility much like that on which we were led by David Lane. The article notes that some bottles are returned “in a pretty filthy state,” but that the bottle washing process is “rather severe” in removing dirt and killing microbes: “CCA are concerned about their reputation because CocaCola, USA, imposes rigid standards of quality control. If these are not observed by the company which holds the bottling franchise, there is a clause in the franchise agreement which can cause them to lose it” (“Your Quality Control” 1994). In the company’s 2002 citizenship report, quality control and management of supply chains were offered as evidence of responsiveness to consumers: “At The Coca-Cola Company, quality belongs to all of us, not just to a single department. The Coca-Cola Quality System establishes standards,

244

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

Notes

self-assessments and continuous improvements that guide quality in products, processes and relationships across the Company. This includes everything from the conditions of physical facilities to advertising and trademark use to ingredient sourcing, packaging and distribution, as well as regulatory compliance and safety.” Since at least 1997, PNG Recycling has purchased cans for recycling and export. There is no facility for recycling plastic (PET) bottles in the country. In its 2004 annual report, CCA notes that since 1999, CCA Fiji has been buying back empty PET bottles for recycling as part of the Mission Pacific program, in which consumers are paid by the kilogram for returned containers: “Over this period, an estimated 35 million PET bottles have been shipped to Australia for recycling into new bottles.” It is unclear from the report whether a similar program is operating in PNG, where concern over the environmental impact of plastic waste led to the introduction of bans on the import, manufacture, and sale of plastic shopping bags beginning in 2005. “We designate certain bottling operations in which we have a noncontrolling ownership interest as ‘anchor bottlers’ due to their level of responsibility and performance. The strong commitment of anchor bottlers to their own profitable volume growth helps us meet our strategic goals and furthers the interests of our worldwide production, distribution and marketing systems. Anchor bottlers tend to be large and geographically diverse, with strong financial resources for long-term investment and strong management resources. In 1998, our anchor bottlers produced and distributed approximately 43 percent of our total worldwide unit case volume” (The Coca Cola Company Annual Report 1998). For more on Levitt’s vision of globalization and its effects on global advertising, see Levitt 1983, 1988; and Mazzarella 2003. In the aftermath of the New Coke debacle, Goizueta applied the same sort of calculations to his company’s products, arguing that the Coca-Cola “megabrand” claimed a larger share of the soft drink market than rival PepsiCo, even if brand Pepsi-Cola outsold brand Coca-Cola Classic (a temporary situation that ended—along with the idea of the megabrand—in 1987). According to one estimate, 58 percent of Papua New Guineans are without reasonable access to an adequate amount of drinking water from improved sources (United Nations Development Programme 2001, 150). “Reasonable access is defined as the availability of at least 20 litres per person per day from a source within one-kilometre of the user’s dwelling. Improved sources include household connections, public standpipes, boreholes with handpumps, protected dug wells, protected springs and rainwater collection” (United Nations Development Programme 2001, 256). The financial situation here is, in actuality, more complicated. SP Brewery is majority owned by Singapore-based Asia Pacific Breweries Ltd., a joint venture of the Heineken N.V. international brewing group and Fraser and Neave Limited. Fraser and Neave Limited owns 5.54 percent of CCA ordinary stock, acquired from The Coca-Cola Company in exchange for Fraser and Neave’s 75

Notes

245

percent ownership interest in F&N Coca-Cola, which holds majority ownership in bottling operations in Brunei, Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Vietnam. 16. Curiously, the company seemed to be recycling this strategy five years later in the wake of Daft’s departure as CEO. In April 2005, Mary E. Minnick was appointed head of a new department formed to coordinate global marketing, new product development, and expansion plans. The New York Times reported: “The analysts say it is no coincidence that someone who spent the last seven years in Asia overseeing Coke’s most innovative markets is now in the de facto No. 2 spot. In Japan, Coke regularly replaces 20 percent of its products each year, introducing roughly 200 new products or varieties. Coke investors are hoping Ms. Minnick . . . will apply companywide the product development lessons she learned in Japan, Coke’s most profitable market” (Warner 2005). 17. Doubts about how Goizueta and Ivester had accounted for the charges involved in their huge bottling transactions had surfaced on Wall Street in the mid 1990s (Greising 1998, 292). An article in Fortune magazine by Patricia Sellers (2000) raised doubts about the long-term viability of the anchor bottler system, wondering whether The Coca-Cola Company’s past success came at the expense of bottlers who paid higher prices for concentrate and sustained major losses in the economic turbulence of 1998 and 1999. These losses in turn translated into a $184 million loss in equity income to the company in 1999 from its bottling investments (see Hays 2004 for details). For more on “creative accounting” and dubious methods used by The Coca-Cola Company as well as other companies and accounting firms to assign and manipulate the value of assets, see McQueen 2003.

Chapter 3 1. A clear example of such use is the magazine Adbusters, which often contains mock advertisements that put familiar cultural forms in the service of expressing alternative social messages (see Chapter 5). 2. In 1999, The Coca-Cola Company’s then wholly owned Singapore-based bottler, Fraser and Neave Coca-Cola Pty. Ltd., similarly faced competition from “parallel imports.” Because of the drop in value of the Indonesian rupiah, Coca-Cola could be shipped from Indonesia and sold at a price cheaper than its manufacturing cost in Singapore (Ismail 1998). 3. Coke also sued two small export companies in the United States, even though these exporters bought directly from Coca-Cola Enterprises, the company’s largest anchor bottler (40 percent of whose stock was then owned by The CocaCola Company). Lawyers for the exporters claimed that Coca-Cola violated antitrust statutes by trying to control prices worldwide (Hays 2000c). 4. Quoted from the World of Coca-Cola’s Web site (http://www.wocatlanta.com), which was revised for the opening of the new World of Coca-Cola in May 2007.

246

Notes

5. This claim is, of course, the rhetoric with which local ad agencies create a space for themselves in negotiating with transnational corporate clients; see Mazzarella 2003. 6. See Mazzarella 2003 for a discussion of the marketing category of “global teen” and how the notion of “the Indian teen” required a significant modification of the category’s premises about “family” and “cultural tradition.”

Chapter 4 1. I encountered a similar sense of discomfort during a discussion with university students about a television advertisement for tinned meat. One student praised the ad for showing a woman in her kitchen cooking the meat in a frying pan with onions and greens. The student was pleased that the ad dispelled any idea that consumers simply eat the contents straight out of the can with no culinary preparation. 2. Steamships Trading is the largest non-mining company in Papua New Guinea. It began as a coastal shipping company in 1926 with the financial backing of a group of Australians. See company Web site: http://www.steamships.com.pg. 3. By the end of 1999, The Coca-Cola Company had reduced its holdings in CCA to about 37 percent of all ordinary shares (Coca-Cola Amatil Annual Report 1999). CCA sold its Snack Food Division in 1992 to United Biscuits of the United Kingdom. 4. From 1997 to 2001, CCA also operated in the Philippines. In 2001, The CocaCola Company and the San Miguel Corporation, the largest food and beverages company in the Philippines, repurchased the Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines Inc., which San Miguel had owned from 1927 to 1997. 5. Two toea of each one kina (one hundred toea) bottle were to be donated to the Olympic effort. With a goal of K80,000, the promotion aimed at selling four million bottles, almost one for every person in PNG (pop. 4.4 million in 2000; CCA Annual Report 2000). 6. In 2000, sponsorship for the fun run, worth K300,000 was assumed by Trukai Industries, PNG’s major seller of rice. Trukai had already sponsored weightlifting and body building teams and competitions in Papua New Guinea for several years, associating in its advertising images of strong and energetic male bodies with Trukai’s brands of rice (Banian 2000). 7. Or, to take a different example, the advertising of brown rice—often rejected by consumers in PNG—by a superhero presenter, “Natural Brown.” A thirty-second television ad produced for Trukai Industries was described as promoting “a healthy lifestyle of good food and sports” and “communicating a number of positive messages to young Papua New Guineans,” including “respect in the home” (“Attempt to Improve Rice Relations,” National, September 4, 1997). 8. Given these media restrictions, sponsorship is particularly important for marketing alcohol and tobacco products. For example, SP Brewery is a major sponsor of PNG’s national game, rugby (see Foster 2006). The company’s marketing

Notes

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

247

manager told me words to the effect that if you are not in rugby, you are nowhere when it comes to marketing beer. Toksave i go long ol gutpela kastoma bilong Coca-Cola olsem planti manmeri i resis tru long winim soka bal long dispela Coca-Cola soka bal promosen. Mipela i sot stret long ol bal nau givim ol wina. Plis holim ol “Win Can” inap next mun taim mipela i redi long givim ol soka bal. Mipela i sori tru long dispela liklik hevi. The term “handout mentality” is not entirely unambiguous; it is sometimes used by relatively affluent Papua New Guineans to criticize as unreasonable the expectations of the so-called “grassroots” population that it is entitled to government services and the largesse of better off kin (see Gewertz and Errington 1999). EM TV also produces advertisements in-house. In the 1990s, First Market Search published annual media surveys that were described as comprehensive studies of media reception and consumption in PNG. The surveys were conducted in the urban and rural areas of PNG’s three major cities and in the two major provincial towns of Rabaul and Madang. Respondents, men and women, were asked about their media consumption practices, preferences for radio and television programs, and awareness of advertisements for certain brand-name products. I thank Phil Sawyer for sharing copies of these surveys. In 1996, the EM TV Chief John Taylor mentioned to me that there was no reliable estimate of how many television sets there were in the country. One ad executive quoted a price of seventy kina (then less than fifty-five U.S. dollars) for an average EM TV television spot in 1997. In May 1985, the National Parliament of Papua New Guinea passed the Commercial Advertising Act. According to this act, all commercial advertising in Papua New Guinea must be locally produced by local agencies employing local talent—designers, artists, models, and so forth. Infractions were to be treated as criminal rather than civil offenses. Some advertising executives told me that exceptions to the act were permitted when required production facilities were not available in PNG. One executive, a director of client services, confessed ignorance of the act. When I explained it to him, he candidly remarked, “Well, we don’t follow that!” Coincidentally, the assumptions expressed here about brand Pepsi resonate well with the globalizing marketing cosmology of Theodore Levitt (1983) embraced by The Coca-Cola Company under the leadership of Roberto Goizueta. The lyrics to the jingle are as follows: Whenever there’s a pool, there’s always a flirt, Whenever there’s school, there’ll always be homework, Whenever there’s a beat, there’s always a drum, Whenever there’s fun, there’s always Coca-Cola—yeah. The stars will always shine, the birds will always sing, As long as there’s thirst, there’s always the real thing. Coca-Cola is always the one,

248

Notes Whenever there’s fun, there’s always Coca-Cola—yeah. Coca-Cola, always Coca-Cola!

17. One creative director, however, expressed caution over the sometimes-lingering perception of PNG-made goods as goods of inferior quality. 18. Schudson (1984, 212) thus refers to the “abstract people” represented in advertisements: “The actor or model does not play a particular person but a social type or demographic category. A television actress, for instance, will be asked to audition for commercials that call for a ‘twenty-six to thirty-five-year-old P&G [Proctor & Gamble] housewife.’” 19. For example, pattern advertisements for Gillette shaving products in PNG depict rugby players instead of baseball players. Similarly, a clean-shaven man is shown snuggling his cheek against the face of an infant instead of the face of an attractive woman; familial love thus displaces romantic love. 20. Similarly, community based marketing in the form of sponsorship creates more new contexts for soft drink consumption. That is, CCA and SP Holdings are official sponsors of the emergent urban public culture with which soft drink consumption is widely associated in Papua New Guinea. Through their sponsorship of major sporting events and holiday celebrations such as Remembrance Day, soft drink companies insinuate their products into the life of the nation, effecting thereby a convergence between consumption and citizenship. 21. Arnott’s Biscuits (PNG) Pty. Ltd. was until 2007 a subsidiary of Australianbased Arnott’s Biscuits, which has supplied the Australian market with biscuits (cookies and crackers) since the late nineteenth century. 22. Other winning photos included, almost predictably, a shot of three Asaro mudmen, masks off but still in hand, chugging bottles of Coca-Cola; and a striking image of a group of young men, several wearing dark sunglasses and affecting “attitude,” each man sporting a red-and-white Coca-Cola trademark— complete with Spencerian script and dynamic ribbon—painted on his bare chest. 23. Some respondents, however, commented upon the decidedly masculine inflection of this ad. A forty-two-year-old man from Bundi who grew up in Kudiawa wrote, “I think [the] Coke advertisement shows ‘em man tru ya’ [‘here’s a real man’]. It shows a man’s sweat on his skin after a singsing [song/dance performance], therefore, what makes a man a man.” 24. According to the company’s Web site, “The Wrigley Company has established itself as the world’s largest manufacturer and marketer of chewing and bubble gum, and a leader in the confectionery marketplace with a diverse portfolio of innovative products. Wrigley products are a part of everyday life in more than 180 countries around the world.” 25. One Papua New Guinean production assistant with whom I spoke shared Kagoi’s opinion and criticized the ad for portraying Papua New Guineans as “backward” and “primitive.”

Notes

249

Chapter 5 1. As an alternative to thinking of “economy” and “culture” as separate and discrete domains, one might think of different possible networks of economic practice, networks constructed differently out of people and things, responsive to different material constraints and ideas about what matters. I have taken this alternative in my approach to soft drink product networks and the economy of qualities. 2. In July 2001, The Coca-Cola Company and San Miguel Corporation acquired Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines, Inc. from Coca-Cola Amatil Limited. As a result of the transaction, the company held 35 percent of the common shares in CCBPI and reduced its interest in CCA from 38 to 35 percent (The CocaCola Company 2001 Annual Report). 3. See Girard 2004 for a similar case in Texas in which the bottled water industry killed a state senate bill that would have levied a five cent tax on every bottle of water sold in the state for the purpose of raising funds to improve water-related infrastructure. 4. As spokespersons for Coca-Cola and McDonalds are quick to point out, boycotting local franchises affects the local employees and local suppliers of those franchises as much if not more than it affects “Americans.” 5. Negativland’s Dispepsi can usefully be compared with the work of another art group, Superflex, also produced to challenge prevailing intellectual property regimes (http://www.superflex.net). In one project, Superflex collaborated with a cooperative of Brazilian guarana farmers to develop a soft drink— GUARANÁ POWER—that could be manufactured and sold independently of the multinational corporations that dominate the market for guarana (an ingredient in popular energy drinks). Rather than focusing on culture jamming, Superflex emphasized “self-organization,” bringing together “art, design, and commerce to challenge economic structures of dependency” (http://red cat.org/gallery/superflex.html).

Chapter 6 1. Especially plastic water bottles. “Carbonated soft drinks historically accounted for most of plastic bottle waste but the discarded containers of the bottled water industry are rapidly taking over. The share occupied by the bottled water industry has grown rapidly to almost 25 percent of this form of plastic resin production [in 2002]” (Clarke 2005, 56). 2. According to Minute Maid’s Web site, The Minute Maid Company was purchased by The Coca-Cola Company in 1960: “In 2003, The Minute Maid Company formed the core of the new Juices, Teas and Emerging Brands business unit of Coca-Cola North America. The new name reflects the broad portfolio of juices and other non-carbonated beverages that have taken on increasing importance to The Coca-Cola Company.” For a case study of two boycott

250

3.

4. 5.

6.

Notes

threats made against the company by Caesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in the 1970s—threats made in order to compel Minute Maid to sign a union contract with its Florida grove workers—see Hall 1977. In September 2006, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida issued a decision to dismiss the two Coca-Cola bottlers in Colombia from all remaining cases filed in 2001. The following month, SINALTRAINAL notified the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta of its intention to appeal the decision. The September 2006 court decision also denied the motion to amend the complaints to bring The Coca-Cola Company back into the lawsuit. In the April 10, 2007, edition of the Michigan Daily, Emily Angell reported that the ILO investigation had missed the March 31 deadline set by the University Dispute Review Board for producing a documented independent assessment of alleged human rights violations at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia. As well as creative use of some very old legal provisions, such as the Alien Tort Claims Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1789 and seized upon by the International Labor Rights Fund to file more than twenty cases against American corporations such as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and Unocal for violations alleged to have been committed in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Nigeria, and even Papua New Guinea (Kurlantzick 2005).

Chapter 7 1. According to a 2005 study of soft drink contracts in Oregon, school districts “receive larger commissions for selling soda, compared with juice and water. Portland Public Schools receives 50 percent of the price of each 20-ounce soda sold; 35 percent of the price of each 12-ounce soda sold and 30 percent of the price of juice and water sold” (Green 2005). 2. In June 2005, Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell vetoed the bill. The state senator who sponsored the bill on school nutrition, which was said to have been the strictest in the country, estimated that soft drink and vending companies had spent more than $250,000 in lobbying against the initiative out of fear that it would set a national precedent (Fletcher 2005).

References Ackman, Dan. 2004. Fat in China. Forbes.com, October 13, http://www.forbes .com/home/commerce/2004/10/13/cx_da_1013topnews.html. Albro, Robert. 2005. “The water is ours, carajo!”: Deep citizenship in Bolivia’s water war. In Social movements: An anthropological reader, ed. June Nash, 249–71. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Alden, Edward, Neil Buckley, and John Mason. 2004. Sweet deals: “Big Sugar” fights threats from free trade and a global drive to limit consumption. Financial Times, February 27, p. 17. Allen, Frederick. 2000. Secret formula: How brilliant marketing and relentless salesmanship made Coca-Cola the best-known product in the world. New York: Harper Business. Alter, Stewart. 1994. Truth well told: McCann-Erickson and the pioneering of global advertising. McCann-Erickson Worldwide Publishers. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation). In Lenin and philosophy and other essays, 121–73. London: NLB. American Academy of Pediatrics. 2004. Policy statement: Soft drinks in schools. Pediatrics 113 (1): 152–54. . . . an adventure in friendship. 1950. Coca-Cola Overseas, December, p. 1. Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Aoki, Keith. 1994. Authors, inventors and trademark owners: Private intellectual property and the public domain. Part II. Columbia-VLA Journal of Law and the Arts 18:191–267. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. A. Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Applbaum, Kalman. 2004. The Marketing era: From professional practice to global provisioning. New York: Routledge. Arce, Alberto. 1997. Globalization and food objects. In Images and realities of rural life, ed. H. de Haan and N. Long, 178–201. Assen: Van Gorcum. Arnold, Matthew. 2002. Soda makers respond to LA school ban. PR Week (US), September 2, p. 3. Arnold, Thurman. 1949. Model of a great business. Coca-Cola Overseas, February, p. 10. As others see us. 1954. Coca-Cola Overseas, April, p. 29. Backer, Bill. 1993. The care and feeding of ideas. New York: Times Books.

252

References

Bakan, Joel. 2004. The corporation: The pathological pursuit of profit and power. New York: Simon & Schuster. Banian, Christine. 2000. Trukai to sponsor annual Fun Run. National, April 13. Bansal, Rashmi. 2005. Coca-Cola sees red in India. http://www.psfk.com/2005/07/ cocacola_sees_r.html. Barlow, Maude, and Tony Clarke. 2002. Blue gold: The fight to stop the corporate theft of the world’s water. New York: New Press. Barnet, Richard J., and John Cavanagh. 1994. Global dreams: Imperial corporations and the new world order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Barnett, Clive, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke, and Alice Malpass. 2005. Consuming ethics: Articulating the subjects and spaces of ethical consumption. Antipode 37 (1): 23–45. Barrionueva, Alexei, and Elizabeth Becker. 2005. Mighty lobby is losing some luster. New York Times, June 2, p. C1. Bashkow, Ira. 2006. The meaning of whitemen: Race and modernity in the Orokaiva cultural world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bell, Hunter. n.d. History of Coca-Cola. Mark Pendergrast research files, box 25. Belew, Kathleen. 2003. The sparkle of difference: Localized hybridity in responses to Coca-Cola. Paper presented at the University of Washington, Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities Symposium, August 11, http://www.washington .edu/research/urp/sinst/pubs/2003/The%20Sparkle%20of%20Difference_Bele w_03.pdf (accessed June 23, 2005). Bergin, John. ca. 1991. Thoughts about global Coca-Cola and a basic theme to match. Mark Pendergrast research files, box 27, item 22. ———.1992a. Memo to Gordon Bowen, June 8. Mark Pendergrast research files, box 27, item 22. ———.1992b. A modestly refreshing idea for Coca-Cola: Let the brand be itself. Mark Pendergrast research files, box 27, item 22. Berman, Marshall. 1983. All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. London: Verso. Bestor, Theodore C. 2001. Supply-side sushi: Commodity, market and the global city. American Anthropologist 103 (1): 76–95. Bhattacharya, Chandrima S. 2005. Cola behind empty pots? Coke thirsts for a fight—No water, no problem? Telegraph (Calcutta), July 17. Boseley, Sarah. 2003. Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO. Guardian, April 21, home pages, p. 1. Brands, H. W. 1999. Coca-Cola goes to war. American History 34 (3): 30–36. Brannen, Mary Yoko. 1992. “Bwana Mickey”: Constructing cultural consumption at Tokyo Disneyland. In Re-made in Japan: Everyday life and consumer taste in a changing society, ed. Joseph J. Tobin, 216–34. New Haven: Yale University Press. Breen, T. H. 1988. “Baubles of Britain”: The American and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth century. Past and Present 119: 73–104. Bronson, Gail. 1985. The soda wars—a report from the battlefront. U.S. News and World Report, July 8, p. 58.

References

253

Burke, Timothy. 1996. Lifebuoy men, lux women: Commodification, consumption, and cleanliness in modern Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burros, Marian and Melanie Warner. 2006. Bottlers agree to a school ban on sweet drinks. New York Times, May 4, p. A6. Cain, Brad. 2005. Soda pop industry helps kill junk food bill. Associated Press state and local wire, May 7. Callon, Michel. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay. In Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge?, ed. John Law, 196–233. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1981. Unscrewing the big leviathan: How actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. In Advances in social theory and methodology: Toward an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies, ed. K. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel, 277–303. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Callon, Michel, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharosoa. 2002. The economy of qualities. Economy and Society 31 (2): 194–217. Cal Safety Compliance Corporation. 2005. Workplace assessments in Colombia. http://www.cokefacts.com/citizenship/cit_co_assessmentReport.pdf. Caplan, Pat. 2000. “Eating British beef with confidence”: A consideration of consumers’ responses to BSE in Britain. In Risk revisited, ed. P. Caplan, 184–203. London: Pluto. Carrier, James G. 1990. The symbolism of possession in commodity advertising. Man, n.s., 25: 693–706. Carroll, Archie B. 1979. A three-dimensional conceptual model of corporate performance. Academy of Management Review 4 (4): 497–505. Cassell, Philip. 1993. Introduction. In The Giddens reader, ed. P. Cassell, 1–37. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Center for Food and Justice, and Urban and Environmental Policy Institute. 2002. Challenging the soda companies: The Los Angeles Unified School District ban. Occidental College. http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/cfj/publications/ Challenging_the_Soda_Companies.pdf. Chawla, Indira. 1999. Marketers shift in India: Sprite, Adidas, MTV place stress on localization efforts. Advertising Age International, April 12, p. 13. Clarke, Tony. 2005. Inside the bottle: An exposé of the bottled water industry. Ottawa: Polaris Institute. Clairmonte, Frederick, and John Cavanagh. 1988. Merchants of drink: Transnational control of world beverages. Penang: Third World Network. Clifford, Mark L., Nicole Harris, Dexter Roberts, and Manjeet Kripalani. 1996. Coke pours into Asia. Business Week, October 28, p. 72. Coca-Cola aids Colombia violence victims. 2005. CNNMoney, April 13, http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/13/news/fortune500/coke_colombia.reut/ (accessed May 8, 2005). Coca-Cola Amatil. 1991. Coca-Cola Amatil to acquire PNG bottling operations. News Release, May 21.

254

References

Coca-Cola Amatil claims PNG sales victory. 1997. Post-Courier, August 8, Finance section. Coca-Cola announces plans to launch Coca-Cola Zero. 2005. BevNet.com, March 21, http://www.bevnet.com/news/2005/03-21-2005-coca_cola_zero.asp (accessed May 23, 2005). The Coca-Cola Company. 1988. The power of presence. Copy in Mark Pendergrast research files, box 28, item 12. ———. 2000. The Coca-Cola Company announces major organizational realignment. Our News, January 26. http://www.thecocacolacompany.com/News/ NewsDetail3.asp?NewsKey=165 (accessed January 27, 2000). ———. 2001. Coca-Cola announces new education advisory council; major changes in its public/private partnerships with the nation’s schools. Our News, March 14, http://www.thecocacolacompany.com/News/NewsDetail4.asp ?NewsKey=553 (accessed March 14, 2001). ———. 2002. Notice of annual meeting of share owners. March 4. ———. 2003a. Press release. Greater collaboration and coordination required in fight against HIV/AIDS, says Coca-Cola Africa Foundation president. December, 1. http://www.socialfunds.com/news/release.cgi/2298.html. ———. 2003b. Notice of annual meeting of share owners. March 5. ———. 2004. Notice of annual meeting of share owners. March 4. ———. 2005a. Notice of annual meeting of share owners. March 8. ———. 2005b. Packaged water. http://www2.coca-cola.com/citizenship/ packaged_water_include.html (accessed November 7, 2005). Coca-Cola issues model guidelines for school beverage partnerships. 2003. BevNet.com, November 17, http://www.bevnet.com/news/2003/11-17-2003cokeschools.asp. Cohen, Leah Hager. 1997. Glass, paper, beans: Revelations on the nature and value of ordinary things. New York: Doubleday Books. Cockburn, Alexander. 2005. Message in a bottle. Nation, May 2, http://www .thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20050502&s=cockburn. Cohen, Lizabeth. 2003. A consumer’s republic: The politics of consumption in postwar America. New York: Knopf. Cook, Ian, and Philip Crang. 1996. The world on a plate: Culinary culture, displacement and geographical knowledges. Journal of Material Culture 1 (2): 131–53. Cook, Ian, et al. 2004. Follow the thing: Papaya. Antipode 36 (4): 642–64. Coombe, Rosemary J. 1998. The cultural life of intellectual properties: Authorship, appropriation, and the law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cummins, Carolyn. 1991. Potential in region enormous—Wills. Australian, May 22, p. 30. Curtis, J. F. 1948. The overseas story. Coca-Cola Overseas, June, p. 4. Daft, Douglas. 2000. Globalization: Connecting with consumers. Vital Speeches of the Day 66 (19): 606–08. Dau, John. 2001. Gulf man wins dream home in Coca-Cola promo. National, February 19.

References

255

Dawson, Havis. 2000. Go deep. Beverage World, October 15, p, 41. Day, Sherri. 2003. Coke moves with caution to stay in schools. New York Times, September 3, p. C1. Dicken, Peter, Philip Kelly, Kris Olds, and Henry Wai-Chung Yeung. 2001. Chains and networks, territories and scales: Towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy. Global Networks 1 (2): 89–112. Dicker, John. 2005. The United States of Wal-Mart. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. Dream come true for Mary. 1999. National, April 14. Edwards, Jim. 1997. Notes from underground. Adweek, August 18, p. 23. Enjoy the relationship. 2000. Beverage World, October 15, p. 30. Enrico, Roger. 1986. The other guy blinked: How Pepsi won the cola wars. New York: Bantam Books. Errington, Frederick, and Deborah Gewertz. 1995. Articulating change in the “Last Unknown.” Boulder, CO: Westview. ———. 1996. The individuation of tradition in a Papua New Guinean modernity. American Anthropologist 98 (1): 114–26. ———. 2004. Yali’s question: Sugar, culture, and history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans, Mike, Robert C. Sinclair, Caroline Fusimalohi, and Viliami Liava’a. 2001. Globalization, diet, and health: An example from Tonga. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 79 (9): 856–62. Ewen, Stuart. 1992. Pragmatism’s postmodern poltergeist. New Perspectives Quarterly 9 (2): 46–51. Falk, Pasi. 1991. Coke is it! Cambridge Anthropology 15 (1): 46–55. Farley, James A. 1954. A place in the community. Coca-Cola Overseas, October, p. 1. Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981–1002. Fletcher, Anthony. 2005. Connecticut governor slammed for “siding with soda companies.” FoodNavigator-USA.Com, June 24, http://www.foodnavigatorusa.com/news/news-ng.asp?n=60883-connecticut-governor-slammed. Flusty, Steven. 2004. De-coca-colonization: Making the globe from the inside out. New York: Routledge. Ford, Peter. 2004. Foes of “globesity” run afoul of sugar’s friends. Christian Science Monitor, February 19, p. 1. Foster, Robert J. 1995. Social reproduction and history in Melanesia: Mortuary ritual, gift exchange, and custom in the Tanga Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Materializing the nation: Commodities, consumption, and media in Papua New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006a. Tracking globalization: Commodities and value in motion. In Handbook of material culture, ed. C. Tilley et al., 285–302. London: Sage. ———. 2006b. From Trobriand cricket to rugby nation: The mission of sport in Papua New Guinea. International Journal of the History of Sport 23 (5): 739–58.

256

References

Foust, Dean. 2000. Now, Coke is no longer “it.” Business Week, February 28, p. 148. Foust, Dean and Geri Smith. 2006. “Killer Coke” or innocent abroad? Business Week, Januray 23, p. 46. Frank, Dana. 1994. Purchasing power: Consumer organizing, gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frank, Thomas. 1997. The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freese, Barbara. 2004. Coal: A human history. Cambridge, MA: Perseus. Freidberg, Susanne. 2004. French beans and foodscares: Culture and commerce in an anxious age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fried, Ellen J., and Marion Nestle. 2002. The growing political movement against soft drinks in schools. JAMA 288 (17): 2181. Friedman, Jonathan. 1995. Global system, globalization and the parameters of modernity. In Global modernities, ed. M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, 69–90. London: Sage. Friedman, Ted. 1992. The world of the World of Coca-Cola. Communications Research 19 (5): 642–62. Friedman, Thomas L. 1996. Big Mac II. New York Times, December 11, p. A27. Frundt, Henry J. 1987. Refreshing pauses: Coca-Cola and human rights in Guatemala. New York: Praeger. Furlough, Ellen, and Carl Strikweda. 1999. Economics, consumer culture, and gender: An introduction to the politics of consumer cooperation. In Consumers against capitalism? Consumer cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990, ed. E. Furlough and C. Strikweda, 1–65. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Gardiner, Jill. 2005. Comptroller asks Coca-Cola Co. to probe violence. New York Sun, April 29, http://www.nysun.com/article/13030. Gately, Ian. 2002. Tobacco: A cultural history of how an exotic plant seduced civilization. New York: Grove. Geertz, Clifford. 1998. Deep hanging out. New York Review of Books, October 22, pp. 69–72. Geiger, Lt. Ray A. 1944. New business frontiers “down under.” Red Barrel 24 (11): 2–5. Gewertz, Deborah B., and Frederick K. Errington. 1991. Twisted histories, altered contexts: Representing the Chambri in a world system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. On piety and PepsiCo in a Papua New Guinea “modernity.” American Ethnologist 23 (3): 476–93. ———. 2007. The alimentary forms of the global life: The Pacific Island trade in lamb and mutton flaps. American Anthropologist 109 (3): 496–508. Gibson, John. 1995. Food consumption and food policy in Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: Institute of National Affairs. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

References

257

———. 1991. Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Giddens, Anthony, and Christopher Pierson. 1998. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making sense of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gill, Lesley. 2004a. Coca-Cola in Colombia: Increased profits, downsized workforce. Dissident Voice, July, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/July2004/ Gill0727.htm. ———. 2004b. Labor and human rights: “The real thing” in Colombia. Report to the Human Rights Committee of the American Anthropological Association, November 28, http://www.aaanet.org/committees/cfhr/gill.pdf. Girard, Richard. 2004. Company profile. Coca-Cola Company: Inside the real thing. Polaris Institute, Ottawa, ON. Updated, August 2005, http://www .polarisinstitute.org/files/Coke%20profile%20August%2018.pdf. Giroux, Henry A. 2004. The terror of neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Gladwell, Malcolm. 1997. The coolhunt. New Yorker, March 17, pp. 78–88. Goizueta, Roberto C. 1993. Globalization: A soft drink perspective. Vital Speeches of the Day 59 (12): 360–62. Gootenberg, Paul. 2004. Secret ingredients: The politics of coca in US-Peruvian relations, 1915–65. Journal of Latin American Studies 36:233–61. Graeber, David. 2002. The new anarchists. New Left Review 13 (January/ February): 61–73. Gray marketer beats Coke. 2000. Democrat and Chronicle, May 6, p. 13D. Green, Aimee. 2005. Soda pop contracts could mean millions for schools, study finds. Oregonian, April 15, p. B8. Greenhouse, Steven. 2005. Can’t a retail behemoth pay more? New York Times, May 4, p. C1. Greising, David. 1997. I’d like to buy the world a Coke: The life and leadership of Roberto Goizueta. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Grossman, Jake. 2005. Obies meet with Coke execs. Oberlin Review, May 13. Groves, Martha. 2001. Coke to curb marketing in schools. Los Angeles Times, March 14, p. A3. Gugler, Josef. 2004. Fiction, fact, and the critic’s responsibility: Camp de Thiaroye, Yaaba, and The gods must be crazy. In Focus on African films, ed. Françoise Pfaff, 69–85. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guthman, Julie. 2004. The “organic commodity” and other anomalies in the politics of consumption. In Geographies of commodity chains, ed. A. Hughes and S. Reimer, 233–49. New York: Routledge. Hall, Bob. 1977. Journey to the White House: The story of Coca-Cola. Southern Exposure Spring:32–42. Hannerz, Ulf. 1992a. The global ecumene as a network of networks. In Conceptualizing society, ed. Adam Kuper, 34–56. New York: Routledge. ———. 1992b. Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organization of meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

258

References

Harrold, Frank. 1948. Effective availability equals sales. Coca-Cola Overseas, October, p. 8. Hart, Matthew. 2002. Diamond: The history of a cold-blooded love affair. New York: Plume. Hatfield, Stefano. 2000. Coke ads need extra fizz. Times of London, January 28, 1F, p. 42. Hays, Constance L. 1998a. Coca-cola is battling to consolidate its recent gains over PepsiCo in a turf war in Venezuela. New York Times, December 19, p. C3. ———. 1998b. Big Coca-Cola bottler will split into 2 parts. New York Times, February 5, p. C5. ———. 1998c. Be true to your cola, rah! rah! New York Times, March 10, p. C1. ———. 1999a. Today’s lesson: Soda rights. New York Times, May 21, p. C28. ———. 1999b. Bridging a “Generation Next” gap. New York Times, January 31, p. C2. ———. 2000a. Learning to think smaller at Coke. New York Times, February 6, p. C1. ———. 2000b. Coca-Cola to cut fifth of workers in a big pullback. New York Times, January 27, p. A1. ———. 2000c. In Japan, what price Coca-Cola? New York Times, January 26, p. C1. ———. 2004. The real thing: Truth and power at The Coca-Cola Company. New York: Random House. Hayward, Philip. 1995. A new tradition: Titus Tilly and the development of music video in Papua New Guinea. Perfect Beat 2, no. 2, January, http://www.dcms .mq.edu.au/perfectbeat/issues/v2n2_hayward.html. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. 2004. Nation of rebels: Why counterculture became consumer culture. New York: Harper Business. Henry, Tamara. 2001. Coca-Cola rethinks school contracts. USA Today, March 14, p. 1A. Herbert, Ira. 1996. Interview, April 15, 1993. In Making and selling culture, ed. Richard Ohmann, 3–17. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Hertz, Noreena. 2001. Better to shop than vote? Business Ethics: A European Review 10 (3): 190–193. ———. [2001] 2003. The silent takeover: Global capitalism and the death of democracy. New York: Harper Business. Hirsch, Eric. 2004. Techniques of vision: Disco and renderings of present perceptions in Highland Papua. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 10:19–39. Hirst, Paul, and Grahame Thompson. 1996. Globalization in question: The international economy and the possibilities of governance. Cambridge: Polity. Hladky, Gregory B. 2005. Soda makers pull out all stops to put big chill on school ban. Bristol Press, May 7, http://www.bristolpress.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=1 4486223&BRD=1643&PAG=461&dept_id=10486&rfi=6. Hollander, Gail M. 2003. Re-naturalizing sugar: Narratives of place, production and consumption. Social & Cultural Geography 4 (1): 59–74.

References

259

Hopkins, Terence, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1986. Commodity chains in the world economy prior to 1800. Review 10 (1): 157–70. ———. 1994a. Commodity chains: Construct and research. In Commodity chains and global capitalism, ed. G. Gereffi and M. Korzeniewicz, 17–20. London: Praeger. ———. 1994b. Conclusions about commodity chains. In Commodity chains and global capitalism, ed. G. Gereffi and M. Korzeniewicz, 48–50. London: Praeger. How Coke runs a foreign empire. 1973. Business Week, August 25, p. 40. How Pepsi-Cola is marketed overseas. 1958. Printer’s Ink, August 15, p. 65. Howes, David. 1996. Introduction: Commodities and cultural borders. In Crosscultural consumption: Global markets, local realities, ed. D. Howes, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Hughes, Alex. 2004. Accounting for ethical trade: Global commodity networks, virtualism and the audit economy. In Geographies of commodity chains, ed. A. Hughes and S. Reimer, 215–32. New York: Routledge. India Resource Center. 2005a. Coca-Cola threatens top Indian photographer with lawsuit. News release, July 12, http://www.indiaresource.org/news/2005/1077 .html. ———. 2005b. Massive support for Coca-Cola campaign at World Social Forum. News release, January 30, http://www.indiaresource.org/press/2005/cokewsf .html. Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. 2004. Press release. PepsiCo shareholders urge company to follow Coke’s lead on disclosing global AIDS pandemic risks, May 5. Ismail, Betty. 1998. Soft drink arm of Singapore’s Fraser & Neave sees “rough” year ahead. Dow Jones Business News, Article 7, December 14. Jacka, Jerry. 2001. Coca-Cola and kolo: Land, ancestors and development. Anthropology Today 17 (4): 3–8. Jackson, Peter. 1999. Commodity cultures: The traffic in things. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 24 (1): 95–108. ———. 2004. Local consumption cultures in a globalizing world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 29 (2): 165–78. Jolly, Margaret. 1992. Specters of inauthenticity. The Contemporary Pacific 4 (1): 49–72. Johnson, Tim. 1999. Smallest Coke bottler makes humble way in the Amazon. Dallas Morning News, January 24, p. 28A. Kaufman, Marc. 1999. Fighting the cola wars in schools. Washington Post, March 23, p. Z12. Kelly, John D., and Martha Kaplan. 2001. Represented communities: Fiji and world decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klein, Naomi. 2000. The vision thing. Nation, July 10, http://www.thenation.com/ doc/20000710/klein. ———. [1999] 2000. No logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies. New York: Picador.

260

References

Knauft, Bruce M. 2002. Trials of the oxymodern: Public practice at Nomad station. In Critically modern: Alterities, alternatives, anthropologies, ed. Bruce M. Knauft, 105–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. A. Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kramer, Louise. 1999a. Beverages: Nimble response best for colas. Advertising Age, October 11, p. S20. ———. 1999b. Coca-Cola tells shops: Capture magic moment. Advertising Age, October 25, p. 32. Kuisel, Richard F. 1993. Seducing the French: The dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kurlansky, Mark. 1997. Cod: A biography of the fish that changed the world. New York: Walker. ———. 2002. Salt: A world history. New York: Walker. Kurlantzick, Joshua. 2005. Pirates of the corporation: Holding American companies responsible for high crimes committed overseas. Mother Jones, July/August, p. 19. Kulick, Don, and Margaret Willson. 1992. Echoing images: The construction of savagery among Papua New Guinean villagers. Visual Anthropology 5 (2): 143–52. Lattas, Andrew. 1998. Cultures of secrecy: Reinventing race in Bush Kaliai cargo cults. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Leahy, Sen. Patrick. 2001. Press release. Leahy calls for limits on soda, junk food in schools. April 9. Lederman, Doug. 2005. Coke: the new Nike. Inside Higher Ed, May 5, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/05/coke. Lederman, Rena. 1986. Changing times in Mendi: Notes toward writing Highland New Guinea history. Ethnohistory 33 (1):1–30. Leichty, Mark. 1995. Media, markets and modernization: Youth identities and the experience of modernity in Kathmandu. In Youth cultures: A cross-cultural perspective, ed. Vared Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff, 166–201. New York: Routledge. Leith, Scott. 2002. It’s razzle! It’s dazzle! It’s Coca-Cola’s annual meeting. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 18, p. 1H. Leith, Scott and Matt Kempner. 2004. Coca-Cola Co.: Scuffle, catcalls spice meeting. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 22, p. 1F. Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free culture: The nature and future of creativity. New York: Penguin. Levitt, Theodore. 1983. The globalization of markets. In The marketing imagination, ed. Theodore Levitt, 20–49. New York: Free Press. ———. 1988. The pluralization of consumption. Harvard Business Review, May/June, pp. 7–8. Levonson-Estrada, Deborah. 1994. Trade unionists against terror: Guatemala City, 1965–1985. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

References

261

Lindstrom, Lamont. 1995. Cargoism and occidentalism. In Occidentalism: Images of the West, ed. James G. Carrier, 33–60. New York: Oxford University Press. Liri, Martin, and Christine Banian. 2000. K100,000 boost for Team PNG. National, March 9, p. 36. Listen to the message. Post-Courier, September 30, editorial. Liu, Betty, and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. 2000. Coca-Cola aims to rebuild overseas political goodwill. National Post, February 1, p. C12. Löfgren, Orvar. 1989. The nationalization of culture. Ethnologia Europaea 19 (1): 5–24. Lopatin, Marc. 2002. Can Coke deliver more than fizzy publicity? Observer, December 1, business pages, p. 7. Louis, J. C., and Harvey Yazijian. 1980. The cola wars: The story of the global corporate battle between the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, Inc. New York: Everest House. Luhmann, Niklas. 1988. Familiarity, confidence, trust: Problems and alternatives. In Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations, ed. Diego Gambetta, 94–107. New York: Blackwell. McCarthy, F. T. 2000. Debunking Coke. Economist, February 12, p. 70. Macdonald, Cameron. 2004. Selling students by the pound, Sacramento News and Review, March 9, http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid= 27066. MacDonald, G. Jeffrey. 2004. A record year for shareholder activism. Christian Science Monitor, June 28, p. 14. MacDougall, J. Paige. 2003. Transnational commodities as local cultural icons: Barbie dolls in Mexico. Journal of Popular Culture 37 (2): 257–75. McKay, Betsy. 2000a. New chairman hits the road to reassure soft-drink giant’s investors. Asian Wall Street Journal, February 1, p. 19. ———. 2000b. At Coke, layoffs inspire all manner of peculiar rumors. Wall Street Journal, October 17, p. A1. McQueen, Humphrey. 2001. The essence of capitalism: The origins of our future. New York: Black Rose Books. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the western Pacific. London: Routledge. Marchand, Roland. 1998. Creating the corporate soul: The rise of public relations and corporate imagery in American big business. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marcus, George E. 1993. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:95–117. Mattelart, Armand. 1991. Advertising international: The privatisation of public space. London: Routledge. Matten, Dirk, and Andrew Crane. 2003. Corporate citizenship: Towards an extended theoretical conceptualization. No. 04–2003 Research Paper Series, International Center for Corporate Social Responsibility. Nottingham, UK: Nottingham University Business School.

262

References

Mattera, Philip. 2003. Confronting company policy: The growing power of shareholder activism. Corporate Research E-Letter, no. 36 (June), http://www .corp-research.org/archives/jun03.htm. Mauss, Marcel. [1925] 1967. The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. Trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton. Maynard, Michael. 2003. From global to glocal: How Gillette’s SensorExcel accommodates to Japan. Keio Communication Review 25:57–75. Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shoveling smoke: Advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. Culture, globalization, mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:345–67. Metta, Edward. 2001. Coke joy for Aupik villager. National, May 31. Micheletti, Michele. 2003. Political virtue and shopping: Individuals, consumerism, and collective action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1988. Appropriating the state on the council estate. Man, n.s., 23:353–72. ———. 1997. Capitalism: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1998. A theory of shopping. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mills, Mary Beth. 1997. Contesting the margins of modernity: Women, migration, and consumption in Thailand. American Ethnologist 24 (1): 37–61. Mintz, Sidney W. [1985] 1986. Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 1995. Enduring substances, trying theories: The Caribbean region as oikoumenê. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 2:289–311. Miyoshi, Masao. 1993. A borderless world? From colonialism to transnationalism and the decline of the nation-state. Critical Inquiry 19:726–51. Moffett, Matt. 1988. Mexicans convert as a matter of politics. Wall Street Journal, June 1, p. 22. Monks, Robert A. G., and Nell Minow. 1996. Watching the watchers: Corporate governance for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Monserrate, Hiram. 2004. Press release. NYC delegation releases report on alleged human rights violations by Coca-Cola in Colombia. July 29. Moreira, Marcio. n.d. Letter to Mark Pendergrast. Mark Pendergrast research files, box 23, item 20. ———. 1991. Interview with Mark Pendergrast, June 14. Mark Pendergrast research files, box 23, item 21. Munn, Nancy D. 1977. Spatiotemporal transformations of Gawa Canoes. Journal de la Societé des Océanistes 33:39–53. Murphy, Verity. 2003. Mecca Cola challenges US rival. BBC News Online, January 8, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2640259.stm. Negativland. 1995. Fair use: The story of the letter U and the numeral 2. Concord, CA: Seeland.

References

263

Nemery, Benoit, Benjamin Fischler, Marc Boogaerts, and Dominique Lison. 1999. Dioxins, Coca-Cola, and mass sociogenic illness in Belgium. Lancet 354 (9172): 77. Nestle, Marion. 2000. Soft drink “pouring rights”: Marketing empty calories. Public Health Reports 115:308–19. ———. 2002. Food politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health. Berkeley: University of California Press. New equipment gives the kids a boost! 1996. Post-Courier, May 14, p. 16. New marketing plan speeds Pepsi’s rise. 1959. Printer’s Ink, March 6, p. 60. Nolan, Peter. 1999. Coca-Cola and the global business revolution: A study with special reference to the EU. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, Judge Institute of Management Studies. ———. 2003. Global business, value chains and developing countries. In ECR in the third millennium: Academic perspectives on the future of the consumer goods industry, ed. D. Corsten and D. T. Jones, 14–20. Brussels: ECR Europe Academic Partnership. Noor, Farish A. 2003. More original thinking to tackle the problem. New Straits Times (Malaysia), March 1, p. 11. Norum, Kaare R. 2005. World Health Organization’s Global Strategy on diet, physical activity and health: The process behind the scenes. Scandinavian Journal of Nutrition 49 (2): 83–88. O’Barr, William. 1989. The airbrushing of culture: An insider looks at global advertising. Public Culture 2 (1): 1–19. O’Hanlon, Michael. 1993. Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands. London: British Museum. Oliver, Thomas. 1986. The real Coke, the real story. New York: Random House. Osava, Mario. 2004. Brazil: Sugar, a trade celebrity, is blamed in the obesity fight. IPS-Inter Press Service, March 17. Otto, Ton, and Robert J. Verloop. 1996. The Asaro mudmen: Local property, public culture? Contemporary Pacific 8:349–86. Özkan, Derya, and Robert J. Foster. 2005. Consumer citizenship, nationalism and neoliberal globalization in Turkey: The advertising launch of Cola Turka. Advertising and Society Review 6 (3). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v006/ 6.3ozkan_foster.html. Palazzini, Fiora Steinbach. 1988. Coca-Cola superstar. New York: Barron’s. Partridge, Ben. 1998. Central Asia: Coca-Cola wins the soft drink war. RadioFreeEurope / RadioLiberty, August 24, http://www.rferl.org/features/ 1998/08/f.ru.980824131144.asp. Pendergrast, Mark. 1994. For God, country and Coca-Cola: The unauthorized history of the great American soft drink and the company that makes it. New York: MacMillan. Pepsi ad push felt in 101 countries. 1963. Advertising Age, May 29. PepsiCo, Inc. 2001. Notice of annual meeting of shareholders, March 23. ———. 2002. Notice of annual meeting of shareholders, March 22. Pietz, William. 1985. The problem of the fetish, I. Res 9:5–17.

264

References

———. 1987. The problem of the fetish, II. Res 13:23–45. ———. 1988. The problem of the fetish, IIIa. Res 16:105–23. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. 2002. Industrial tortillas and folkloric Pepsi: The nutritional consequences of hybrid cuisines in Mexico. In Food nations: Selling taste in consumer societies, ed. W. Belasco and P. Scranton, 222–39. New York: Routledge. Polanyi, Karl. [1944] 1957. The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon. Ponte, Stefano, and Peter Gibbon. 2005. Quality standards, conventions and the governance of value chains. Economy and Society 34 (1): 1–31. Pottasch, Alan. 1984. Oral History Interview, May 8. Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection. Quinlan, Paul. 2004. Official says Coca-Cola is ignoring selling ban. Tampa Tribune / Hernando Today, December 15, http://www.hernandotoday.com/ news/MGBFE6K7S2E.html (accessed May 22, 2005). Rajagopalan, Sudha. 2005. A soft drink giant, a photographer, and artistic license. The Power of Culture, August 2005, http://www.powerofculture.nl/uk/current/ 2005/august/haksar.html. Ramamurthy, Priti. 2003. Material consumers, fabricating subjects: Perplexity, global connectivity discourses, and transnational feminist research. Cultural Anthropology 18 (4): 524–50. Reay, Marie O. 1982. Abstinence, excess and opportunity: Minj, 1963–1980. In Through a glass darkly: Beer and modernization in Papua New Guinea, ed. M. Marshall, 163–74. Boroko: IASER Monograph No. 18. Reich, Robert B. 1992. The work of nations: Preparing ourselves for 21st century capitalism. New York: Knopf. A report from the Middle east: Selling soft drinks in the desert. 1999. Beverage World, November 15, p. 14. Report Pepsi limiting marketing to kids. 2005. Brandweek.com, February 28, http://www.brandweek.com/brandweek/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu _content_id=10008-18605. Richards, George. 1993. They’re the real thing—war relics as revenue raisers. Sydney Morning Herald, May 8, p. 6. Rintelen, Joe. 1955. New 1956 pattern advertising campaign goes all over the world. Coca-Cola Overseas, October, p. 20–23. Ritzer, George. 2004. The globalization of nothing. Thousand Oaks: Pine Gorge. Roberts, Kevin. 2004. Lovemarks: The future beyond brands. New York: Powerhouse Books. Robertson, Roland. 1995. Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneityheterogeneity. In Global modernities, ed. M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, 25–44. London: Sage. Rogers, Edward S. 1948. Democracy and trademarks. Coca-Cola Overseas, June, p. 7. Roseberry, William. 1995. The rise of yuppie coffees and the reimagination of class in the United States. American Anthropologist 98 (4): 762–75.

References

265

Rosen, Sydney, Jonathon Simon, Jeffrey R. Vincent, William MacLeod, Matthew Fox, and Donald M. Thea. 2003. AIDS is your business. Harvard Business Review, February: 80–87. Rosenfeld, Jill. 2000. Experience the real thing. Fast Company, January 1, p. 184. Sahlins, Marshall. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding history as culture and vice-versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. Preface. Special issue, Outside gods: History making in the Pacific. Ethnohistory 52 (1): 3–6. Sassen, Saskia. 1996. Whose city is it? Globalization and the formation of new claims. Public Culture 8 (2): 205–23. Sawyer, W. 2001. The rocky road from roots to rice: A review of the changing food and nutrition situation in Papua New Guinea. PNG Medical Journal 44 (3–4): 151–63. Schein, Louisa. 1999. Of cargo and satellites: Imagined cosmopolitanism. Postcolonial Studies 2 (3): 345–75. Schudson, Michael. 1984. Advertising, the uneasy persuasion: Its dubious impact on American society. New York: Basic Books. Secklow, Steve. 2005. Virtual battle: How a global web of activists gives Coke problems in India. Wall Street Journal, June 7, p. A1. Secretan, Thierry. 1995. Going into darkness: Fantastic coffins from Africa. New York: Thames and Hudson. Sellers, Patricia. 1994. Pepsi opens a second front. Fortune, August 8, pp. 70–76. ———. 2000. First: Coke’s CEO Doug Daft has to clean up the big spill. Fortune, March 6, p. 58. Shake-up at Pepsi. 1963. Forbes, November 15, p. 19. Sklair, Leslie. 2002. Globalization: Capitalism and its alternatives. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sklar, Kathryn. 1998. The consumers’ White Label Campaign of the National Consumers’ League, 1989–1914. In Getting and spending: European and American consumer societies in the twentieth century, ed. S. Strasser, C. McGovern, and M. Judt, 17–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slater, Jan S. 2001. Collecting the real thing: A case study exploration of brand loyalty enhancement among Coca-Cola brand collectors. Advances in Consumer Research 27:202–08. ———. 2002. Collecting brand loyalty: A comparative analysis of how Coca-Cola and Hallmark use collecting behavior to enhance brand loyalty. Advances in Consumer Research 28:362–69. Smith, Dinitia. 2005. The poetic hearts of Mayan women writ large. New York Times, May 11, p. E1. Soccer ball contest corners market with soft drink fans. 1998. Post-Courier, July 15. Soft drink collection a big hit; Coke memorabilia turns lots of heads. Florida Today, November 13, p. 10B. Soft drink group expands range. 2003. Beveragedaily.com, May 5, http://www .beveragedaily.com/news/ng.asp?id=11828-soft-drink-group.

266

References

South Pacific Consumer Protection Programme. 1996. Cola or coconuts? Consumer education for Pacific students. Wainuiomata, New Zealand: Consumers International. SP Holdings posts K25m profit. 1997. National, April 1. Spinks, Peter. 1999. Monocultural madness is disastrous. The Age, April 22, p. 22. Storrs, Landon R. Y. 2000. Civilizing capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, women’s activism, and labor standards in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Swift, Richard. 1998. A cocoa farmer in Cadbury’s court. New Internationalist, Issue 304, pp. 26ff. The sun never sets on Cacola. 1950. Time, May 15, pp. 28–32. Taufa, TukuTau, and Amos L. Benjamin. 2001. Diabetes: The by-product of Westernization in Papua New Guinea. PNG Medical Journal 44 (3–4): 108–10. Tedlow, Richard S. 1990. New and improved: The story of mass marketing in America. New York: Basic Books. The thirsty global village: Where are we headed? 1996. Beverage World, September, p. 138. Thomas, Nicholas. 1989. The force of ethnology: Origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division. Current Anthropology 30 (1): 27–51. ———. 1991. Entangled objects: Exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Toothpaste in Tok Pisin packaging is launched. 2000. National, July 7. Twenty-five years of “Coca-Cola” in Germany! 1954. Coca-Cola Overseas, August, p.1. United Nations Development Programme. 2001. Human development report 2001. New York: Oxford University Press. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2005. Celestial jukebox: The paradox of intellectual property. American Scholar 74 (2): 131–35. Vernon, Ken. 2004. Sugar farms’ bitter end. Gold Coast Bulletin, February 18. Vogel, David. 2005. The market for virtue: The potential and limits of corporate social responsibility. Washington: Brookings Institution. Warhol, Andy. 1975. The philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Warner, Melanie. 2005. New course for Coke’s sinking fortunes. New York Times, April 5, p. C1. Watson, James L., ed. 1997. Golden arches east: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Watters, Pat. 1978. Coca-Cola: An illustrated history. New York: Doubleday. Waxman, Amalia, and Kaare Norum. 2004. Why a global strategy on diet, physical activity and health? The growing burden of non-communicable diseases. Public Health Nutrition 7 (3): 381–83. Wellman, David. 1999. Occasionally Coca-Cola. Supermarket Business 54 (9): 79–80.

References

267

Weiner, Jack B. Why things go better at Coke. Dun’s Review, October, p. 28. Weiner, Mark. 2002. Consumer culture and participatory democracy: The story of Coca-Cola during World War II. In Food in the USA: A reader, ed. Carole M. Counihan, 123–41. New York: Routledge. Weinert, Lisa. 2002. Can Coke prevent AIDS? Nation, October 24, http://www.the nation.com/doc/20021111/weinert20021024. Whatmore, Sarah, and Lorraine Thorne. 1997. Nourishing networks: Alternative geographies of food. In Globalising food: Agrarian questions and global restructuring, ed. David Goodman and M. Watts, 287–304. New York: Routledge. Wilk, Richard. 1995. Learning to be local in Belize: Global systems of common difference. In Worlds apart: Modernity through the prism of the local, ed. Daniel Miller, 110–33. London: Routledge. ———. 1996. Connections and contradictions: From the crooked tree cashew queen to Miss World Belize. In Beauty queens on the global stage: Gender, contests, and power, ed. C. Cohen, R. Wilk, and B. Stoeltje, 217–32. New York: Routledge. Winter, Greg. 2002. Teamsters union protests at Coke meeting. New York Times, April 18, p. C4. With New Delhi operating, Pepsi has 243 overseas plants in 72 countries. 1956. Advertising Age, April 23. Wrynn, V. Dennis. 1996. Coke goes to War. Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories. Young, Michael. 1997. Commemorating missionary heroes: Local Christianity and narratives of nationalism. In Narratives of nation in the South Pacific, ed. T. Otto and N. Thomas, 91–132. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Your quality control. 1994. Your Choice, October, pp. 6–7. Zbrozek, Christopher. 2005. Evidence supports Coca-Cola allegations. Michigan Daily, May 16. Zuckerman, Larry. 1998. The potato: How the humble spud rescued the Western world. Boston: Faber and Faber. Zuckerman, Laurence. 1998. P. & G. seeking greater diversity. New York Times, July 17, p. D4. Zyman, Sergio. 1999. The end of marketing as we know it. New York: Harper Business.

Manuscript Collections Mark Pendergrast Research Files, Manuscript Collection No. 741. Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL), Emory University. Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

268

References Films

Advertising missionaries. Directed by Chris Hilton and Gauthier Flauder. Bondi, NSW, Australia: Aspire Films, 1996. The cup. Directed by Khyentse Norbu. New York: Coffee Stain Productions, Palm Pictures, 1999. Distributed by Fine Line Features. The gods must be crazy. Directed by Jamie Uys. South Africa: New Realm, Mimosa, and C.A.T. Film, 1980. The red violin. Directed by François Girard. Santa Monica, CA: Lion’s Gate Films, 1999.

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables. actor network theory, 241n1, 249n1 ACT UP, 192, 193, 194, 226 Adbusters, 87, 180, 184, 186, 245n1 advertising: as capitalist realism, 89, 96, 99, 123, 180, 248n8; and censorship, 124–25; for Coca-Cola, 78, 88–97, 120–21; global, xx, 56–58, 89, 92–96, 119, 124, 134; international, 89–92; multilocal, 89–90, 91, 122; for new products, 115–16; for soft drinks in PNG, x–xi, xxiv–xxv, 114–25, 135–40, 248n23; for teens, 93–95, 97, 136, 218, 246n6; uniform and pattern, 56–58, 91, 92, 124, 248n19; wartime for Coca-Cola, 40–47, 89, 100, 139, 235. See also Coca-Cola Company: advertising for; Commercial Advertising Act; Pepsi-Cola: and advertising in PNG Advertising Missionaries, 99–101, 107 agency: of consumers, 7, 10, 23, 167, 168, 227, 243n6; rhetoric of, 175 Aitsi, Peter, 109, 110 Albro, Robert, 234 Alien Tort Claims Act, 198, 250n6 Allen, Frederick, xiii American Beverage Association, 211, 213, 215, 216, 224 Anderson, Benedict, 36 Appadurai, Arjun, 17, 22, 27, 30 Applbaum, Kalman, 101, 156 appropriation: of Coca-Cola, 9, 63, 83, 125, 129, 177, 178, 179, 181, 217, 230; of commodities, 11, 13, 15–16, 18, 24, 29, 80, 101, 178 Austin, J. Paul, 52, 60, 69, 199

Bakan, Joel, 56, 80, 192, 227 Bergin, John, 92, 94–95 Berman, Marshall, 19 Bestor, Theodore, xvi bottlers, soft drink: in Africa, 193; anchor, 61–62, 102, 200, 244n11; in Colombia, 197–202, 208, 250n5; consolidation of, 51, 61–62, 71, 75; inventories of, 71, 245n17; in PNG, 53–55; and school partnerships, 212, 215; and standardization, 53, 56–57 boycott, xx; and Coca-Cola, 171, 172, 203, 206, 233; and political consumerism, xxiii, 168, 173 branding, 29, 76, 97, 231; standardized, 95 brands: and commodity chains, 22–23, 76–77; imagery of, 78, 116; and loyalty, xx, 116; management of, 28, 34, 72, 84; trust in, 79, 80, 163–64; value of, 28–31, 77, 163, 164, 169, 190; and value creation, xviii, xxii–xxiii, 76, 217, 229 Buffet, Warren, 62–63, 209 Burke, Timothy, 13–14, 23, 242n5 Bush, George W., 224, 225 Cadbury Schweppes, 51, 66, 219; brands of, 126 Callon, Michel, xviii, 14, 23, 83–84, 241n1; and product networks, xix, 7–8, 19, 22, 26, 35, 50, 80; and product networks in PNG, 101 Cal Safety, 204, 205, 227 Candler, Asa, 78, 79 cargo cults, 113, 135, 139, 238

270

Index

Center for Science in the Public Interest, 153, 213, 219 charity, 227, 240; corporate, 113, 175, 227 citizenship, consumer, xiv, xxii, 151–53, 168, 186, 193, 220, 228, 236; defined, 166; limits of, 173, 208, 221, 226; in PNG, 105; transnational, xxiii, 170–71, 189, 208, 235, 238; and value creation, xviii citizenship, corporate, xiv, xxii, 151–53, 157, 189; and Coca-Cola, xxii, 52, 69, 150, 152, 157–66, 170, 192, 212, 217, 243n9; and codes of conduct, 206; defined, 155, 156; and governance, 164–66, 193, 225; limits of, 173, 194, 227; in PNG, 106; transnational, xxiii, 164, 193; and value creation, xviii, 157, 161, 163 Coca-Cola: as American, 40–41, 46, 47; as local, 48–50; as modern, 44, 46, 105, 243n6; per capita consumption of, 63, 64–66, 107, 218; ubiquity of, 48, 84–88; as universal, 42, 91 Coca-Cola Amatil, 52, 62, 129, 244n15, 246n3; in Philippines, 160–61, 187, 246n4, 249n2; in PNG, 54, 64, 67, 101–104, 106, 108, 113–14, 116, 119, 125–26; and promotions, 111, 12, 120, 131–34, 132, 133, 248n22; and quality control, 53–56, 243n9; and sponsorships, 104, 174, 246n5, 248n20 Coca-Cola Company, The: accounting methods of, 245n17; advertising for, xxii, 22, 40–47, 247n16; in Africa, 165, 192–97; annual meetings of, xxiii, 149, 150–51, 151, 152, 153, 187–88, 192, 204, 209, 234; and antitrust, 66, 70, 245n3; foreign expansion of, 37–38, 47–56, 48, 67, 70–71, 193; and franchises, xx, 34, 36, 47–56, 71, 193, 249n4; in India, xxiv, 67, 93, 165, 208, 229–35; layoffs at, 70–71; lobbying for, 162–63,

190, 213, 216, 219, 236, 250n2; localization of, 34–35, 47–56, 67, 70–71, 193; marketing of, xvii, 34, 158–59; as relationship company, xii, 86; trademarks of, xxi, 22, 40–47, 247n16; and WWII, xviii, 36, 37–47, 83, 235–36 Coca-Cola Enterprises, 63, 162, 201, 205, 206, 217, 218, 245n3; and school contracts, 215, 216, 219 Coca-Cola Export Corporation, 37, 38, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 58, 84; and advertising, 56, 89; expansion of, 59 Coca-Cola FEMSA, 200, 201, 204 Coca-Cola Zero, 220 coca-colonization, 62, 63, 175, 176, 177, 212; anti-, 174, 175, 180, 209; de-, 177–85 Cola Turka, xxvi, 46, 175–76 Colombia, 171, 172, 188, 197–202, 207, 219 Commercial Advertising Act, 247n14 commodities: branded, xiii, 19, 23, 33, 97, 135; domestication of, 6, 8, 9–10; in motion, xv-xvi, 9, 26; mutability of, xix, 7, 11–17, 83, 177. See also appropriation: of commodities commodity biography, 12–13 commodity chains, xv, 22–27, 28, 63, 76–77, 226; defined, 22 commodity fetishism, 53, 82, 105 commodity network, xii, xiii, xix; and civic engagement, xxiv; and globalization, xvi, 22, 62, 154; and soft drinks, xvii, 19, 125; and trust, xviii, 201, 226. See also product networks connectivity, complex, xxiv, 10, 97; defined, xii-xiii, 26; and inequality, xix, 26; and soft drinks, xiv, 140; and worldly things, 17, 22, 237 consumerism, 72, 100, 101, 176, 185, 236, 239; anti-, 87; modern, 135; political, xxiii, 166, 168, 169–70, 171, 226

Index 271 consumption: cross-cultural, 13, 17, 20, 24; ethical, 173–76, 225–26, 227, 238–39; of soft drinks in Mexico, 20–21; of soft drinks in PNG, 126–29 consumption work. See labor: of consumers Contractor, Dhruti, 208, 234, 235 Cook, Ian, 26 Coombe, Rosemary, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 182 cooperatives, consumer, 167–68 corn syrup, high fructose, xvii, 220, 224 corporate personhood, 156, 157 corporate social responsibility, xxii, 151, 155, 160, 163; and the state, 173 creolization, 9, 17, 119–20 culture: hybrid, 119–20, 131; traditional, 117–18, 119, 120, 129, 130–34, 138–39, 141–45. See also global culture; national culture culture jamming, xxiii, 153, 180–85, 181, 211, 212; defined, 180 Cup, The, 4–5, 6–7, 12, 99 Daft, Douglas, xi, xii, xv, xxi, 27, 35, 53, 70, 71, 86, 96, 192; and annual meeting, 187–88, 190, 197, 209; and citizenship, 150, 157, 161, 163, 171, 203, 203; and cultural diversity, 178; on globalization, ix, xiii, 67–69, 88, 237; and obesity, 160, 178 democracy: consumer, 69, 135, 207, 208; participatory, 227–28, 236; and soft drinks, 137, 139, 212 Departmant of Agriculture, U.S., 214, 215 Department of Health and Human Services, U.S., 224 diet: and disease, 221, 222, 223; of Pacific Islanders, 222–23 disembedding: of social relations, 18–19, 35, 37–47, 70; and trust, 76. See also distanciation

distanciation, 41, 240; defined, 18; and trust, 19, 242n5 Dobb, Paul, 104, 108 Dunn, Jeff, 86 economy of qualities, xix, 7–8, 10, 34, 237, 241n1, 249n1; competition in, 88 EM TV, xxiv, 108, 115, 122, 135, 247n11, 247n12, 247n13. See also Papua New Guinea: television in Errington, Frederick, xxv, xxvii, 53, 54, 55, 56, 94, 113, 114, 129, 130, 131, 221, 223, 247n10 Evans, Mike, 223 Ewen, Stuart, 236 fair use, 182 Farley, James, 49 Frank, Thomas, 184, 185 Frenette, Charles, 96, 97 Friedman, Jonathan, 6, 10 Friedman, Ted, 43, 243n5, 243n8 Friedman, Thomas, 58 Funil, Somanil, x, xxvii Geertz, Clifford, ix Gewertz, Deborah, xxv, xxvii, 53, 54, 55, 56, 94, 113, 114, 129, 130, 131, 221, 223, 247n10 Gibbon, Peter, xxi, 7, 23, 55 Giddens, Anthony, xv, 18–19, 24, 25 Gill, Lesley, 172, 201 global culture, 91; and consumerism, 4; and diversity, 35–36, 58, 72; and homogeneity, xi, xvii, xix, 6, 10, 16, 33, 63; and youth, 94, 136, 139 global high-sign, xx, xxi, 36, 40–44, 89, 95 globalization: anti-corporate, 233, 237; and commodity connections, xi; defined, 17; dialectics of, 19–20, 21, 35, 70; economic, 168, 223, 225; and health, 70, 223; methods for studying,

272

Index

xv, 22, 23, 26, 238; strong, 6, 8, 21; weak, 6–7, 8, 10, 21 global teenager, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 246n6 glocalization, 33–37, 58, 68, 104, 175, 178; defined, xx Gods Must Be Crazy, The, 3–4, 5–6, 99, 100, 132 Goizueta, Roberto, ix, xiii, 51, 59, 67, 68, 70, 72, 75, 87, 200, 245n17; on globalization, 60–62, 63, 247n15; on trademarks, 78, 81, 244n13; vision of, 62–66, 88, 103, 135, 160 governmentality, transnational, 164–66, 170–71, 193, 195, 202, 205, 239 Grassroots Recycling Network, 152, 150, 190, 191 Greising, David, xiv, 60 Hagelshaw, Andrew, 215 Haksar, Sharad, 229, 230, 230, 231, 232 Hannerz, Ulf, 25–26 Hau‘ofa, Roger, 141, 142 Hays, Constance, xiv health: and betel nut chewing, 141–42; and diet, 221, 224; and soft drinks, 106–7, 108, 159–60, 214–20 Health GAP, 192, 193, 194, 208 Hega, Alphonse, 131–34, 132, 133, 139 Herbert, Ira, 75, 86, 113, 121 Hertz, Noreena, 163, 174, 227 Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages, 229, 231, 232 Hirsch, Eric, 131, 132, 133, 134 Hoffa, James P., 150, 151, 197 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 79 home: and Coca-Cola, 11–12, 21, 41, 42, 72, 95, 114, 139, 140; and CocaCola Export Corporation, 58; mutability of, xix–xx, 11–12, 17–22, 114, 208, 234 Hosler, Mark, xxvi, 184, 185 Howes, David, 14, 17 Hunter, John, 52–53, 61, 68

India Resource Center, 232, 235 internationalism, utopian, 43, 57 Isdell, E. Neville, 52, 196, 204 Ivester, Douglas, 66, 67, 70, 87, 190, 242n6, 245n17 Jacka, Jerry, 125 Joyce, Stan, 112 J. Walter Thompson, 89, 90 Kendall, Donald, 59–60, 90 Keough, Don, 84, 86 Killer Coke, Campaign to Stop, 153, 203, 204, 205, 207, 232, 236 Knauft, Bruce, 100, 101 Kopytoff, Igor, 12 labor of consumers, xviii, xix, 11, 26, 29–30, 72–73, 80, 219; control over, 83, 86, 87, 96–97; and value, 28–30, 80, 85, 164, 217, 231 Leahy, Patrick, 214 Lederman, Rena, 14–15 Levitt, Theodore, 63–64, 72, 92, 244n12, 247n15 Lindstrom, Lamont, 113, 135 Löfgren, Orvar, 36 Louis, J. C., xiii, 90 Lovemarks, 28–31, 84, 240 Malinowski, Bronislaw, xii, 13 marketing: and children, 108–9, 212–20; and Coca-Cola, 78, 83–84, 86, 188; community-based, 103, 107, 108, 110, 113, 248n20; gray, 81; integrated, 90; micro-, 58–59, 68, 88; occasion-based, 87–88; in schools, 161–62, 205, 212, 215, 218, 219; social science of, 91; for soft drinks in PNG, xxv, 100–114, 116 Marx, Karl, 18, 29, 36, 77 materialism and modernity, 4, 39–40, 136 Matten, Dirk, 154, 164, 165 Mauss, Marcel, 227

Index 273 Mazzarella, William, 72, 81, 242n7, 246n5, 246n6 McCann Erickson, 89, 90, 94, 135 McQueen, Humphrey, xiv, 79, 81, 245n7 Mecca-Cola, 174, 175 Meireles, Cildo, 177, 177–78, 179 Micheletti, Michele, 153, 166, 168, 173, 225, 226, 227 Michigan, University of, 206, 207, 250n5 Miller, Daniel, 11, 23, 24, 26, 29, 227, 239 Minnick, Mary, 245n16 Mintz, Sidney, xv, 8, 38, 83, 87, 106, 127, 128, 134 Minute Maid Company, 197, 249n2 Miyoshi, Masao, 33 modernity: and Anthony Giddens, 18; global, 5, 8, 18, 44, 63; and soft drinks, 105, 130, 138–39, 243n6; vernacular, 8. See also materialism and modernity Monserrate, Hiram, 201, 207, 235 Moreira, Marcio, 89, 91, 92, 134 multilocalism: and advertising, 89, 91, 95; and Coca-Cola, 33, 47, 66, 69; and globalization, 58, 67–68 national culture: in PNG, 104–5, 118, 121–23, 143–44; and soft drinks, 45, 46, 64, 176 National Soft Drink Association. See American Beverage Association Negativland, xxvi, 181–84, 183, 186, 249n5 Nestle, Marion, 212, 213, 215 network of perspectives, xvi, xviii, xix, 10, 30, 73, 123, 131, 145, 235, 241n1; and Coca-Cola, 63, 134; and soft drinks in PNG, xxii, 27, 101, 103, 110, 114, 129, 140; and worldly things, xx, 25, 117, 125, 237 Niugini Beverages, 102 Nolan, Peter, xii, 50, 65, 75, 76, 243n7

Noor, Farish A., 175 objectification, 11, 80. See also appropriation O’Hanlon, Michael, 15, 15–16 Oliver, Thomas, xiv Papua New Guinea: anthropology of, xiv, xxii; and diet, 222, 246n7; fieldwork in, ix, xvii; political history of, 241n1; radio in, 109–10, 141–43; soft drinks in, 43, 44–46, 99–145; television in, 134, 246n1, 246n7, 247n12 Partui, Bonaventura, x, xi, xxvii Pendergrast, Mark, xiii, xxvi, xxvii, 47 PepsiCo, 64, 95, 102, 126; annual meeting of, 190, 208; and bottlers, 62, 205; formation of, 59; and recycling, 191–92; and snack foods, 60, 218 Pepsi-Cola: and advertising, 90, 182, 183, 184, 218; and advertising in PNG, 46, 117–18, 121, 122, 124, 129–30, 135, 136–38, 140; and marketing, 22, 50 Pepsi-Cola International, 44, 50; advertising for, 57, 89, 90, 92; franchises for, 57; overseas expansion of, 59–60, 67 politics: of consumption, xix, 166–71, 212; of knowledge, 31, 167, 221, 229, 237–40; and nation-states, 154, 156, 164–65, 211, 220; of products, xxii, 153, 166, 168, 177, 189, 225, 226, 227 Ponte, Stefano, xxi, 7, 23, 55 Pottasch, Alan, 90 procurement, global, 50–51 product networks: alignments within, xviii, xx, xxii, 25, 28, 30–31, 80, 123, 125, 131, 145, 170, 231, 237; and imagination, 26, 133, 140, 144; and inequality, 8; and qualification, xviii, xix, 35, 49, 55, 101, 218; and

274

Index

worldly things, 19, 226, 237. See also network of perspectives promotions: in PNG, 110–13, 116, 130; for soft drinks, 110–11 property, abstract: and copyrights and trademarks, xviii, xxi, 77, 78, 80, 81, 234; and goodwill, 79–80, 83; laws about, 182, 185 Qibla Cola, 174, 175 qualification: of Coca-Cola, 40–41, 46, 49, 129, 157, 218, 230; control over, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 97, 153, 193, 238, 239; of Pepsi-Cola, 138; of products, 7–8, 14, 22, 23, 55, 71, 72, 75–97, 119, 231, 241n1 quality control: in advertising, 56–57; and Coca-Cola, 53–56, 231, 243n9 Ramu Sugar, 53–56 recycling, 189–92; in PNG, 244n10 Red Violin, The, 12 rights: of consumers, 212, 222; pouring, 212, 213, 215, 218; of workers, 197–202 Roberts, Kevin, 28–30 Robertson, Roland, xx, 34, 36, 72 Rogers, Ray, 203, 204, 206, 209, 233, 237 Sahlins, Marshall, 225 schools. See marketing Schudson, Michael, 89, 96, 99, 248n18 shareholder activism, xxiii, 188, 189, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 226 shareholder resolutions, xxiii, 187–89; for healthcare, 192–97; for recycling, 189–92; for worker rights, 197–202 SINALTRAINAL, 198, 200, 201, 206, 250n3 soft drinks: and children, xxiii; as collectibles, xiv, 13, 83; and obesity, 215, 216, 221; sales of in schools,

211, 214–15, 216, 218, 219, 221, 227; and school partnerships, 212–14, 217, 250n1 Solomon, Elizabeth, 27, 28, 137, 139, 140, 221 South Pacific Brewery, 67, 102, 118, 244n15, 246n8 South Pacific Consumers Protection Programme, xxvi, 222 South Pacific Holdings, 102, 106, 112, 126, 129 space-time, 18, 75, 87. See also distanciation sponsorship: and Coca-Cola, 52, 88, 158–59; and music, 108–10, 123, 129–30, 137; Olympic, 104; in PNG, 103, 104–14, 119, 131, 246n6, 246n8; and youth, 159–61, 205 Sprite, 54, 93, 94, 97, 185 Srivastava, Amit, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237 sugar industry, xv, xxiii, 220, 224–25; in Brazil, 224, 225; in PNG, 53–55 Superflux, xxvi, 249n5 surplus value: and commodity chains, 22; and copyrights, xviii, 80; extraction of, xviii, xxi Suzuki, David, 6, 243n6 Tanga Islands, ix-xi; and soft drinks, xxi, xi, xii technical observers, 38; in New Guinea, 38–39, 43–44. See also TO Digest Tedlow, Richard, xiii, 84 Thomas, Nicholas, 16, 44 Thorne, Lorraine, xvi TO Digest, 38, 242n3 Tomlinson, John, xii, 18, 19–20, 26, 97 trademarks: and Coca-Cola, 78–84, 229, 230; litigation over, 79, 81, 182, 186, 229–31; value of, 82. See also property, abstract Trobriand Cricket, 20 Trotter, John C., 199, 200

Index 275 trust: and brands, 76, 163–64; in CocaCola, 24–25, 36–37, 52, 69, 162, 242n6; of consumers, xviii, xxi, xxiii, 28, 30, 35, 242n2; loss of, xx, 24–25, 70, 164, 201, 242n5, 242n6; and modernity, 19, 24; and politics, 226; and trademarks, 79; and value, xviii, 162–63 use value and consumption, xviii, xx, 36, 84 value: chain, xxi, 23, 29, 50, 51, 55, 170; and consumption work, xix, 28, 76, 231; creation of, xvii, xxi, xxiv, 82, 155, 169, 217, 229; and knowledge, 30–31, 240; and network of perspectives, xx, 28; tournaments of, 22. See also use value and consumption; surplus value Wallerstein, Immanuel, 22 Wal-Mart, 172, 173, 174, 191, 205, 227 Wardlow, Holly, 9, 9 Ware, Carl, 69 Warhol, Andy, 81, 135, 209 water: access to, xxiv,164–65, 171, 230, 232, 244n14; bottled, 66, 71, 163,

231, 234, 249n3, 249n1; fountains, 87, 128; privatization of, 233–34; tap, 65–66 Watson, James, 7, 95 Weiner, Mark, 235–36 Whatmore, Sarah, xvi White Label campaign, 167, 228 Wilk, Richard, 36, 46, 58, 72, 175 Woodruff, Robert, 37 Woods, Chris, 180, 181 Worker Rights Consortium, 169, 206, 227 World of Coca-Cola, 82, 82, 85, 135, 243n5, 243n8, 245n4 World Health Organization (WHO), xxiii, 221, 222, 223, 224 World Trade Organization (WTO), 223 worldly things: Coke bottles as, 4, 21, 86, 178–80, 179; embedding of, xixxx, 17–22, 34, 95, 134, 139, 201; and home, xvii, xix, 21, 27, 72, 86, 114; meanings of, 83, 85; value of, 28–31, 231 Wrynn, V. Dennis, 43 Yazijian, Harvey, xiii, 90 Zyman, Sergio, 88, 97, 185