Big Football: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Culture and Color of Injury in America’s Most Popular Sport

Abstract

Although much has been said about football concussions in the media, academic inquiry into the National Football League’s (NFL) strategies for containing critique and shaping public discourse remains limited. I investigate the league’s multisided “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) campaign, which involves harm reduction reforms (e.g., improved helmets, tackling techniques) as well as public relations and philanthropy. This campaign is an “anti-politics machine,” a movement that generates its own discourse about concussions, the integrity of football, and normativity; depoliticizes the institutional and foundational sources of harmfulness; and advances narrow technical and managerial solutions. The league’s CSR initiatives are also intended to engender mass feeling, melding multiple images and rhetorics, invoking technoscientific progress as much as corporate care, family values, suburban comfort, national sentimentality, soft masculinity, and women’s health. Through strategic public relations, the campaign organizes a certain affective and cognitive antipolitics, a depoliticized way of conceptualizing and experiencing football that reflects a wider matrix of intelligibility framing what is normal and legible with regard to race, gender, and precarity in the United States. Rather than addressing societal factors or ending an innately destructive practice, the NFL proclaims social responsibility while perpetuating conscription, extracting labor and value from conditions of socioeconomic and racial marginalization. And strategic public relations inure a devoted fan base to football’s complicity in helping to reproduce the problems and privileges of America’s racial order. My analysis of harm reduction is also a critique of the dangerous moral contours of racial capitalism and how corporations influence and capitalize upon what is deemed tolerable in American life.

Duty of Karius: Media Framing of Concussion Following the 2018 UEFA Champions League Final

“…Given that media attention on health and safety issues in sport is growing (Cassilo & Sanderson, 2018), and as Benson (2017) argues that concussion in sport should be viewed as a public health issue, on a par with smoking, it is unsurprising that framing should take place in this setting. While there have been a number of examinations of media framing of concussion, these have typically been focussed on the NFL (see Anderson & Kian, 2012;Cassilo & Sanderson, 2018;Furness, 2016;Karimipour & Hull, 2017;Mirer & Mederson, 2017;Sanderson et al, 2016).…”

“…Interestingly, while not as explicit as the leveraging of socio-political capital that was used to call for regulation in MMA (Santos et al, 2013), the attempts to educate readers, combined with the use of political sources are indicative of a desire to protect society. Perhaps most importantly, by quoting members of the British Parliament, concussion was framed as a public health issue and not only a sporting issue (Benson, 2017).…”

Understanding Emerging Adults’ National Attachments and Their Reactions to Athlete Activism

“…Today, there is a push to include social justice issues into the realm of CSR activities. Before crafting CSR activities, however, NFL sport managers must understand the optics of their league within the current sociopolitical climate “as a kind of modern-day plantation system” (Benson, 2017, p. 320) where mostly Black players serve for the entertainment and profit of largely White, male audiences and owners (Benson, 2017). Or, perhaps NFL owner McNair’s comment demonstrates Nobel prize–awarded economist Milton Friedman’s position that social responsibility is “fundamentally subversive” asserting that “[f]ew trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible” (Carroll, 1979; 133).…”

“…First, the data are cross-sectional and involve self-reported measures. In addition, our sample is predominantly White in a proportion that somewhat resembles the NFL’s fan demographics (Benson, 2017), but we concede questions of race are nonetheless intriguing and might temper the generalizability of majority-segment findings to minority-segment fans. The manner in which race influences national attachment is not explored in this study.…”

Concussions and Capital: Tom Brady, CTE, and the NFL’s Crisis of Identity

“…Considering that concussions prove most common in “positions most populated by black players: wide receiver, defensive back, and running back” (Oates, 2017, p. 168), Bündchen’s comments offer a particularly generative site for examining the intersections of Whiteness, hegemony, and injury in professional football. The concussion crisis ultimately amounts to a “social justice issue” (Benson, 2017, p. 325) because the NFL extracts “labor and value from conditions of socioeconomic and racial marginalization” (p. 307), inevitably disposing of used-up bodies and often sentencing them (and their families) to lifetimes of pain and trauma. Analyzing the discourses surrounding one of the least marginalized bodies in the least precarious position in the most successful (but also vulnerable) American sport illuminates the complex efforts to recuperate and reconsolidate “racialized masculinity” in a moment of corporate and cultural crisis (Oates, 2017, p. 20).…”