Managing Black Guys: Representation, Corporate Culture, and the NBA

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of representation, management, and race in the National Basketball Association (NBA) through a larger question on the relationship between corporate strategies for managing racialized subjects and popular representations of race. The NBA “brand”is situated in terms of recent developments in corporate and popular culture and then analyzed as an example of diversity management. Relying on original interviews with NBA corporate employees, as well as business and marketing industry reporting, the article analyzes the NBA as simultaneously an organization and a brand. As such, the NBA helps to “articulate” the corporate with the popular, largely through an implied racial project that manages race relations by continuing to equate corporate interests with Whiteness. The analysis contributes to ongoing discussions about the role of sports in perpetuating social disparities based on race at a time when “colorblindness” remains the paradigm of White approaches to race.

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“…For example, Glyn Hughes (2004) has deftly demonstrated the ways in which the NBA has mobilised multicultural and diversity management sentiments suggesting racial progress. While promoting images of tolerance and equity, the league has also economically exploited the historical associations of a threatening black masculinity.…”

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“…On the other hand, the league has consistently sought to manage and contain the fears that such signifiers simultaneously provoke. This strategy has produced the introduction of the unabashedly racialized and classed dress code Á which prohibits hiphop clothing, chains and medallions, among other signifiers of urban blackness Á and a number of exaggerated disciplinary responses to behavioural infractions on the part of black players (Hughes 2004;McDonald and Toglia 2010).…”

The NBA Dandy Plays the Fashion Game: NBA All‐Star All‐Style and Dress Codes of Black Masculinity

“…Players complied with the policy and thus images of the pros on the sidelines and at press conferences in skullcaps, baggy jeans, and chains were replaced with suits and ties. The league's image change reflects what Glyn Hughes calls the NBA's “strategy for managing player behavior, as well as people's perceptions of those efforts … the NBA is marketed and managed with a specific, if often tacit, goal of making Black men safe for (White) consumers in the interest of profit” (164). Ultimately, Hughes claims:

the NBA stands as a disturbing and prominent example of management becoming consumable as popular culture, popularizing, that is, a management perspective in relation to troublesome, unproductive subjects.

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