The risky business of research: the control of academic knowledge production and the racialised and gendered contours of corporate power

Introduction

Critiquing corporate power is a risky business. For decades, activists, journalists, employees and academics have sought to expose the exploitative practices of transnational corporations and their entanglements with state powers across an array of industries (Cravey, 2004; Sadler, 2004). Forms of exploitation include labour abuses; human rights violations; racial, gender- and sexuality-based discrimination and violence; exploitation of Indigenous peoples; environmental destruction; fraud and illegal behaviour, among other issues. Yet, efforts to uncover harms are often thwarted by corporate attempts to control these exposures through the manipulation of the truth and legal threats.

Powerful industries, like the oil and gas industry, and the state powers that back them up are also known for unleashing police, military and paramilitary forces to crack down on activist and social movement organising, often resulting in violence, such as the violent repression against Nigerian women’s peaceful protests against the practices of oil companies in the Niger Delta in 2002 (Amnesty International, 2003).

Most corporate exploits and the damage corporations cause in their cover-up attempts are unpublicised in the national and international media, particularly when they target marginalised individuals and communities, such as women, Indigenous and Black activists. While some cases of corporate abuse and retaliation have been extensively documented (Kirsch, 2014), even when companies are held legally accountable for their damages to employees or communities, this often results in corporate attempts to overturn the rulings and to discredit the plaintiffs and their legal team (Sawyer, 2004; Cepek, 2018; Kirsch, 2020, 2022).

While highly publicised incidents may expose the public to corporate harms, many corporate exploits never surface due to the quiet manoeuvres and threats of companies, shielding the public from the full extent of corporate abuses. This article focuses on one of these less public forms of corporate control: attempts to censor academic knowledge production and expertise. These processes of control are often not publicly revealed due to power imbalances between academics and corporations (particularly in terms of access to capital, and thus legal defence) and to the threats they pose to academics’ future work given corporate efforts to discredit research and the nature of hierarchical academic promotion and evaluation structures.

This article puts forward the idea that to understand the ways that corporations expand the contours of their power, we must examine the various technologies of control that they employ to secure the conditions for their future growth. In this article, I examine two interrelated forms of corporate control: first, the ways that companies seek to influence girls’ and women’s lives, bodies and futures through business and philanthropic practices, and second, the ways that companies actively seek to influence and distort knowledge production on these very forms of influence over girls and women.

This article provides an ethnographically grounded way of illuminating one corporate foundation’s attempts to influence academic research, as the corporation worked to maintain its hegemony in the face of a long history of public accusations that it has abused its factory workers (Cushman, 1998; Casey and Pura, 2008; Wright, 2011; Clean Clothes Campaign, 2012; Keady, 2012; Xu and Leibold, 2020; Clean Clothes Campaign, 2024). Using autoethnography, I reflect on my own classed, racialised and gendered experiences negotiating research access with Nike and the Nike Foundation to understand its investments in adolescent girls in the Global South and my experience navigating their attempts to influence the title and research findings of my book, The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development (2018), with the University of California Press. These critical reflections reveal what antagonisms provoke corporate attempts to influence academic research, what social relations may ease corporate anxiety and what ultimately, regardless of these social relations, may prompt corporations to protect themselves, often irrespective of the truth.

This article builds on an interdisciplinary theoretical-methodological approach to understanding how corporate power operates within global capitalism – from micro to macro contours of power. The knowledge sought through this approach is key to its conceptualisation of research as a political intervention into corporate processes that are doing harm. This is not politically neutral research. While it employs ethical research practices through its engagement with research participants, it is not research that seeks to protect the corporation as an institution in the same way that one engaged in community-based research would protect the community it engages with through the research endeavour. This article reflects on how we should think about this sticky ethical terrain without getting so stuck in the conundrums that we lose sight of the real ethical problem at the heart of this question – unfettered corporate power within the global racialised, gendered and sexualised capitalist system.

In engaging this question, the article lays out a set of feminist ethical conundrums, and in doing so, it works towards a situated, embodied approach to knowledge production on powerful institutions. It uses autoethnographic experience to reflect upon how feminists conceptualise researcher privileges, ethics and responsibilities; conceive of terrains of practical action; navigate conflicts of interest; and understand the political stakes at the heart of critical research. In this way, the article seeks to build on and contribute to feminist literature on conducting critical, reflective research on powerful institutions.

Theoretical-methodological approaches to studying corporate power

The article situates the analysis within three areas of critical scholarship. First, it builds on interdisciplinary critical ethnographic research in/on corporations. It draws on and is inspired by scholars who engage in ethnography as a way of understanding corporate power – from its inner capillary workings in the everyday to its operations on the level of global structures. These scholars examine corporate power and its often-devastating effects on human, more-than-human and environmental flourishing through the close ethnographic investigation of corporate processes, practices and contradictions. This scholarship has attended to a range of industries, including, but not limited to, mining (Burawoy, 1972; Kirsch, 2014; Welker, 2014; Jenkins, 2015; Kirsch, 2018; Kirsch, 2022); tobacco (Benson, 2012); oil and gas (Sawyer, 2004; Kimmerling, 2006; Watts, 2011; Cepek, 2018; Estes, 2019); manufacturing (Burawoy, 1979; Salzinger, 2003; Wright, 2006); finance (Zaloom, 2006; Ho, 2009; Neely, 2022); the prison industry (Gilmore, 2007); and violations that tend to impact particular types of workers and communities, such as janitors (Savage, 2006), factory workers (Wright, 2006), farmworkers (Saxton, 2021) and Indigenous communities (Kuokkanen, 2008; Estes, 2019). These scholars have often written against the backdrop of threats (Davis, 2004). Particularly relevant to this article is the scholarship that reflects, often autoethnographically, on the role of publicly engaged academics (Kirsch, 2018), expert court testimony by academics (Watts, 2011) and legal threats to academics and publishing organisations (Kirsch, 2020).

Building on this genre of scholarship on corporations, my book brought together what Urban and Koh identify as two perspectives in the anthropology of corporations – ‘the views from outside (effects of) and inside (inner workings of) the corporation’ (2013: 140). It considered both the internal practices of the corporation and its foundation and how they affect other social actors and institutions. In this way, through careful ethnographic detail, the book sought to provide a nuanced examination of the processes of negotiation within and between corporations, their foundations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and global governance organisations, as diverse social and institutional actors sought to influence how Nike’s goals, interests, funding and expertise were invested in adolescent girls in the Global South and how this, in turn, influenced the corporation and its public image in the location of its headquarters. Understanding the complexity of these dynamics necessitated moving beyond, on one hand, the cultural studies analyses of the representations through which the Nike Foundation produced its philanthropic brand, the Girl Effect, and, on the other, ethnographic examinations of how the Girl Effect is taken up, in particular geographic locations, often by NGOs, and with what effects for girls (Hayhurst, 2011; Murphy, 2012, 2017; Koffman and Gill, 2013; Shain, 2013; Switzer, 2013). While these are important contributions to understanding the Girl Effect, very little was known from these approaches about how the Girl Effect was constituted in practice as a global development apparatus or how its logic shaped social relations on multiple spatial scales from an ethnographic perspective. In this way, my book included, but moved beyond, analysing the realm of representation or the implementation of Nike Foundation-funded or Girl Effect-inspired programmes in specific locales to consider how the phenomenon is constituted and negotiated across spatial scales and diverse geographies. It provided in-depth, ethnographic theorising of how the practice of investing in the Girl Effect is constructed and negotiated by unequally resourced actors – from corporate executives and philanthropists to NGO leaders and programme educators to girls in classrooms – in diverse ethnographic sites including Rio de Janeiro; New York City; Washington, DC; and Beaverton, Oregon. It was the depth and breadth of this ethnographic detail across institutional sites that enabled me to show how the logic of the Girl Effect influenced how the foundation and NGOs engaged with the adolescent girls and young women in their funded programmes.

This type of critical ethnography in powerful institutions seeks to inform on-the-ground activist efforts and policy processes regulating these institutions, with the goal of creating structures of transparency and accountability for powerful institutions like corporations. While this goal is not always achieved, these forms of engaged ethnography seek to transform the corporate worlds they study to reduce the forms of harm so often produced but for which corporations are rarely held accountable.

Second, this article engages with feminist critiques that shed light on the ways in which the expansion of corporate hegemony operates through racialised, gendered and sexualised regimes of difference. Since the birth of capitalism, the expansion of capitalist frontiers has always involved racialised, patriarchal and heteronormative control over girls’ and women’s bodies. As Sylvia Federici argues, beginning with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch hunts in Europe and the Americas, the ‘degradation of women’ (2004: 61) and their knowledge has been a necessary condition of capitalism throughout all phases of globalisation, from early capitalism to neoliberal globalisation, as evidenced through the outsourcing practices of companies like Nike. Feminist scholars of labour and globalisation have demonstrated the persistence of these gender-based exploitative practices across corporate supply chains (Collins, 2003; Salzinger, 2003; Wright, 2006; Ong, 2010). Control of knowledge production on women’s lives, bodies and experiences in the world has been key to exploitation at each stage of history. Heteronormative patriarchy depends on this form of control to ensure its domination.

Scholars of racial capitalism and coloniality similarly show how, through the emergent ideology of racial difference, burgeoning forms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capitalism produced and depended on justified inequality between newly designated races. Hence, racial capitalism is generative for thinking through the ways that ‘the development, organisation, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions’ from its inception (Robinson, 2000: 2). Scholars show how these forms of racialisation continue as a dominant mode of social organisation, underpinning the global capitalist system and thus strongly influencing the ongoing imbalances between labour and capital (Burawoy, 1972; Quijano, 2000; Robinson, 2000; Ferreira da Silva, 2007; Melamed, 2015). In this way, the spread of global capital and expansion of a corporation is often contingent on the power of whiteness to aid in opening markets, evading legal barriers, usurping tax structures and avoiding labour and environmental laws. Corporate cultures of whiteness, often manifesting as ‘niceness’ (Walton, 2021) in white-dominant institutions, also contribute to boundarying whiteness, disarming threats to power and subtly perpetuating relations of racial and other forms of domination in corporate worlds.

Philanthropy, as capital’s benevolent handmaiden, similarly operates to smooth the way for capital to proceed. The long history of white philanthropists – from the American robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie to today’s billionaire elites and multi-national corporations – shows the ways in which the elite capitalist class uses philanthropy to mask over public relations crises, create the conditions for economic development, influence public policies and control socio-cultural, reproductive and political-economic relations (Reckhow, 2012; McGoey, 2015; Willoughby-Herard, 2015; Tompkins-Stange, 2020; Hook, 2023).

This literature is critical to the scholarly understanding of why companies seek to control academic knowledge production on their practices. These responses are part of corporate efforts to ensure their hegemony within the system of racialised, gendered and sexualised capitalism. At the heart of this has been controlling racialised girls’ and women’s lives, bodies and futures.

Third, to further understand this, this article builds on feminist perspectives on the ways in which the control of knowledge production is essential to capitalist growth. It draws on Ahmed’s (2017) understanding of ‘dangerous knowledge’ as forms of knowledge that must be contained or eliminated for companies to circumvent critique of purportedly benevolent practices. This theorising enables a way of understanding how and why academic knowledge production that disrupts corporate narratives is responded to as a threat.

Relatedly, this article also draws on feminist theories that unroot claims of neutrality in the interrelated histories of science and capitalism. As Haraway posits, ‘The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power’ (1988: 581). These forms of science have created multiple Others, along racial, gender, sexual, religious and citizenship lines. As I discuss below, corporate philanthropic knowledge production on girls’ and young women’s lives, bodies and futures is part of positioning corporations and their foundations as benevolent actors in girls’ and young women’s lives and neutral knowledge producers on their realities, rather than the institutions that negatively influence them.

If Haraway’s understanding of feminist objectivity ‘allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see’ (1988: 583), my reflection on my research and publishing processes is also part of becoming answerable and responsible for what I was privileged to see, the knowledge I produced on it and the story I told. This article is therefore both a feminist reflection on my own positionality and privileges as a researcher and a critique of academic research on powerful institutions that sidesteps the integral nature of these factors in researcher access and knowledge production.

In the section that follows, I present Nike's history directed towards girls and women to contextualise its philanthropic efforts. I then reflect on the ethnographic processes of researching and publishing my book focused on Nike's philanthropic practices.

Nike's history of corporate treatment of girls and women

Growing up in the 1990s as a white American teenage girl in the wealthy white suburbs of Chicago, I slept alongside a Nike poster of a young white woman running through fields. It read, ‘There are clubs you can’t belong to. Neighborhoods you can’t live in. Schools you can’t get in to. But the roads are always open. Just do it’. I was a target demographic for the company – a young woman athlete and a sports fan from a family with the financial resources to buy Nike products. But even as Nike branded girls’ and women's empowerment to white middle- and upper-class girls like me, the company was being accused of subjecting girls and women to bodily, emotional and professional harm in their roles as sweatshop labourers (Cushman, 1998; Locke, 2002; Casey and Pura, 2008; Wright, 2011; Clean Clothes Campaign, 2012; Keady, 2012; Xu and Leibold, 2020; Clean Clothes Campaign, 2024).

In the 1970s, Nike pioneered global outsourcing, beginning in Japan, and racing to the bottom as it chased factory locations in the Global South with minimal labour rights and environmental restrictions (Peterson, 2014). Responding to years of tarnishing media and activist accusations of abusive labour practices affecting its majority young, poor Brown and Black women labour force, Nike co-founder and then CEO Phil Knight publicly stated in 1998 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC that ‘Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse’ (Cushman, 1998). Responding to these concerns, Knight discussed how to transform the company's business practices during his speech (Cushman, 1998).

In the wake of this crisis, Nike worked in the early 2000s to position itself as a corporate social responsibility leader in the industry. As outlined in its 2005–2006 Corporate Responsibility Report, part of its efforts focused on improving working conditions for ‘almost 800,000 workers’ in its ‘contract supply chain’ (Nike, Inc., 2006: 16). The report estimated that:

80 percent of these workers are women aged 18 to 24, many of whom are the first in their family to work in the formal economy. They have the potential to be significant agents of change within their families and communities, both today and in the future. Yet, they are typically poorly educated, living against a precarious backdrop of poverty and insecurity, within emerging economies, all of which leaves them particularly vulnerable to infringement of their rights. (Nike, Inc., 2006: 16)

In addition to efforts directed at workers, the company also led a strategic search for how to make a broader impact, which led to Nike Foundation's decade-long philanthropic investment in adolescent girls in the Global South between 2005 and 2015. Knight said he ‘tapped’ Maria Eitel, a white woman, ‘to create a not-for-profit arm—but had not dictated a mission’ (McGirt, 2012). A trained communications specialist, Eitel was originally hired by the corporation as its first vice president of corporate responsibility (1998–2004) to ameliorate its public relations image during the late 1990s. She was formerly deputy director of media affairs at the White House, then a special assistant to President George H. W. Bush, a manager and director of Microsoft Corporation and a manager of MCI Communications Corporation. As described by McGirt in Fast Company magazine, ‘Eitel was in the midst of a yearlong exploration to determine how to make the biggest impact’ (McGirt, 2012). Eitel consulted with a wide range of development experts, including a number of my interviewees in the areas of formal education, reproductive health and economic development, as well as ‘villagers, NGO leaders, and industry titans’, before determining that Nike should focus on adolescent girls (McGirt, 2012). McGirt recounted Eitel's pitch to the Nike board of trustees:

She remembers the gremlin that whispered in her ear as she nervously waited outside the 2004 meeting where she was to make her case: ‘Hey, Nike! Let's invest in adolescent girls and poverty! And not in any country where we have factories or businesses! Let's go to places like Ethiopia and northern Nigeria, where no one else dares to go!’ After a perilous few moments of silence, Knight gave her the thumbs-up, the flick that ignited an essential part of a movement. (McGirt, 2012)

Beginning in that moment, Nike worked to position itself as leading the effort to end poverty in the Global South through the foundation's investments in adolescent girls. In 2008, together with financial support from NoVo Foundation and the United Nations Foundation, the Nike Foundation branded its discourse on investing in girls as a force for social and economic change as the ‘Girl Effect’, a protected trademark. The brand is anchored in the idea that the future of humanity depends on poor racialised girls in Latin America, Africa and Asia lifting themselves and their families and countries out of poverty. As the Girl Effect (2008) video states: ‘Invest in a girl and she will do the rest. It's no big deal. Just the future of humanity’. The idea is predicated on the twenty-first-century neo-Malthusian logic that pushing back pregnancy among poor girls and women is key to reducing population, promoting economic growth, increasing GDP and creating the conditions for corporate growth and profit. ¹ It is promoted as a revolutionary way of looking at girls’ latent potential. If granted access to education, girls are imagined to rise from the obstacles that pull them down – poverty, hunger, disease, early marriage and adolescent pregnancy – to solve the problems that plague our world. They will supposedly marry later and delay childbearing, and in doing so, they will generate economic development, limit population growth, educate their children, improve child and maternal health, conserve environmental resources and control the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Yet, despite the company's corporate social responsibility and philanthropic efforts, over two decades later, stories of striking workers and questionable labour practices still surface, such as 2020 accounts of a Chinese contact factory with prison-like conditions for Uyghurs workers and 2023 accusations by Human Rights Watch, Workers Rights Consortium and others of failures to pay outstanding wages (Xu and Leibold, 2020; Clean Clothes Campaign, 2023).

Immediately following the publication of my book in February 2018, a powerful internal uprising of Nike's women employees accused the company of a toxic gender culture from its executive suites on down (Adams et al., 2018). An internal investigation by its women employees into pay inequity, lack of female executives and a pervasive ‘boys' club’ resulted in a spring housecleaning of the company's top executives and called into question the company's commitment to gender equity (Germano and Lublin, 2018).

The following year, its star marketed women athletes revealed that Nike's problems extended to its maternity leave practices. Nike-sponsored Olympian runners Alysia Montaño and Kara Goucher broke their non-disclosure agreements and came forward in The New York Times in 2019 with stories of how their pregnancies were ‘the kiss of death’, as athlete Phoebe Wright called it, for their running careers (Montaño, 2019). Track and field star Allyson Felix described, ‘We fetishize the rising athletes, but we don’t protect them’, explaining how after she gave birth, Nike wanted to pay her 70 per cent less than prior to her pregnancy (Felix, 2019). Due to their collective outcry, Nike announced a new maternity leave policy for all women athletes that protects their pay and bonuses for eighteen months surrounding pregnancy (Felix, 2019).

Kara Goucher has further written about what she calls a ‘culture of abuse’, including accusations of sexual abuse by coach Alberto Salazar, within the company's elite running group, the Nike Oregon Project (which Nike closed in 2019), in her 2024 memoir, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running Team (Goucher and Pilon, 2024). The company and Salazar also settled a US$20 million lawsuit with runner Mary Cain in 2023 for accusations of emotional and physical abuse (Guardian, 2023).

The situation of Nike is not unique, however. Transnational corporations across an array of industries have long histories of controlling girls and women and efforts to quell exposés of their exploits. For decades, activists, journalists and academics have sought to expose these types of practices despite corporate and media attempts to suppress these efforts. In the section below, I discuss my own efforts to research the relationship between Nike's corporate and philanthropic practices.

Researching Nike

The book I ultimately published was based on ethnographic research I conducted in the USA and Brazil on the Nike Foundation's investment in adolescent girls in the Global South. Its philanthropic endeavours were ongoing between 2005 and 2015 through partnerships with NGOs, organisations like the World Bank and DFID and global forums like the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and the World Economic Forum.

I began following the foundation's investments in adolescent girls when it announced its new endeavour in the 2005 press release, linking these philanthropic efforts to the company's broader commitment to investing in human capital. Between 2007 and 2009, I sought research access to the Nike Foundation. As I discussed above, the study design built on the genre of critical ethnographies of corporations in which researchers move beyond an analysis of the corporation's discourses and effects from outside of the corporation, towards an ethnographically informed understanding of how corporations, and their practices, processes and contradictions, are constituted through uneven socio-spatial and political economic processes occurring within and outside of the corporate boundaries on multiple spatial scales. Using this research approach, I began reaching out to Nike and the Nike Foundation in spring 2006. I initially emailed the foundation's general address, but I received a generic response thanking me for my interest. Still committed to the research project, by spring 2007 I began to carefully plan encounters with Nike and later the Nike Foundation. This became necessary once I realised that direct contact would not be possible. I used research funds I had access to at Berkeley to show up at places where Nike staff would be, and I built relationships through these fieldwork encounters. While my access to each institutional space has its own particular story, which I narrate in the book, my ability to gain entry into these elite, and in some cases highly securitised, spaces was the result of my eliteness and my whiteness, mapped onto my gendered body, which together enable the performance of a non-threatening white woman academic, one who ‘belongs’ in these spaces despite not actually being a member.

The first such encounter was at a US university in 2007 where I met a Nike executive who was giving a guest lecture I had learned of through a colleague. I had received permission from the professor to attend this lecture due to my research on Nike. I approached the executive following the lecture, and after a short conversation, the executive provided me with their contact information. We began email correspondence shortly thereafter.

The second encounter I had with Nike staff was at a small, closed, high-level event at the World Bank's headquarters in Washington, DC in 2007 that I was invited to attend as a graduate student researcher after reaching out to the organisers. I would continue to encounter one of them throughout my fieldwork at high-level events, and they would eventually become an important part of my study. I ended up conducting multiple interviews with them during the course of several years.

Lastly, I attended the Global Youth Enterprise Conference in Washington, DC in 2008 where I met a team of Nike Foundation staff members at an informal dinner that I was invited to join by a Nike Foundation contact.

The relationships I developed at these three events provided a series of openings over time at Nike and the Nike Foundation. They were integral to my access to high-level colleagues in the foundation and company. But these relationships were not sufficient alone to secure research access. Thus, over time I developed a methodological strategy of encircling the corporation and the foundation. Beyond the events I described above, and in some cases because of these efforts to meet Nike staff, I developed relationships with staff members at three NGOs funded by Nike Foundation in Brazil, World Bank and the CGI. The World Bank launched the Adolescent Girl Initiative with Nike Foundation in 2008, and Nike Foundation played an influential role in shaping the agenda focused on girls and women at CGI.

This research is contingent upon gaining trust and access. Like my eventual negotiations with the Nike Foundation, these encounters in elite spaces that one must have permission to access (whether it was a classroom, a closed event or a private dinner) were all eased by my whiteness and eliteness, as no one questioned my presence despite my not actually being a staff member or funder in any of these contexts. In this way, whiteness and eliteness create ties that subtly bind. This also enabled me to cold-email people in positions senior to me – in particular, a well-known professor and high-level World Bank staff members – for permission to show up at their class or event and receive an affirmative response. In some cases, my access also necessitated high-level security clearance. These forms of security operate as mechanisms for quelling internal dissent and external protest in powerful institutions. My whiteness and eliteness, together with my status as a PhD student at UC Berkeley, undoubtedly made me far less threatening in these highly securitised spaces than I might have been had I been non-white and/or a non-US citizen.

Furthermore, in all of the institutions I entered as primary research sites, the majority of gatekeepers were women. While relationships between women can be hostile, as I have personally encountered in competitive contexts where women feel threatened by each other, in the case of my research access, where I was an ‘outsider’ in their organisations, my gender was an additional part of easing my relationships with the women who were the gatekeepers to my sites. In all of these cases, my research contacts and I developed an affinity for one another, and in some cases we developed friendships that outlasted the fieldwork.

As I continued to develop these research relationships, I worked on gaining formal access to the Nike Foundation. After months of negotiating, in 2009 the foundation eventually agreed to allow me to visit the foundation and interview six staff members. The foundation requested interview questions ahead of time, along with human subject consent forms. Weeks in advance, I sent tailored interview questions for each interviewee, along with the human subjects consent and ethics forms. I travelled to Portland, Oregon on a US$500 graduate student travel award from the Department of Gender & Women's Studies. As I sat in my hotel room, the foundation politely emailed to cancel all my organised interviews for the next day despite having received the questions weeks prior and giving the go-ahead to proceed with the visit. The email I received included the following:

Thanks for sending the interview questions in advance. Given the formality of some of the questions, the team would prefer to meet with you as a group as an initial introductory meeting. We are not currently in a position to sign any consent forms nor are we in a position for the meeting to be recorded. I hope you will understand. We realize that this is different from the intent initially set forth, and we apologize for any inconvenience. The group meeting will take place here at the Nike Foundation from 10:30 to 11:30.

After this, they flipped the typical interview script as the senior team slowly proceeded to ask me questions. A staff member took out a recorder for our six-on-one conversation. I was told that I could not record the conversation, so I left my recorder in my bag.

Even though I had dressed the part and answered all of the questions to their satisfaction, the senior staff still would not let go of their primary demand. Prior to leaving the room, they made it clear that I would not receive further access for interviews if I did not share my research with them prior to publication. I was told very directly by one of the most senior executives: ‘Unless you agree to share your work with us, we really have no incentive to talk with you’. But more than that, they wanted to retain the right to change the manuscript prior to publication.

Upon leaving the foundation, I spoke with my dissertation committee to seek their advice. They unequivocally refused to allow me to hand over my academic independence to the foundation. I also sought advice from the University of California's legal counsel for students; yet the lawyer's expertise seemed more appropriate for protecting evicted students than dealing with my intellectual property dilemmas.

On Tuesday 1 September 2009, I responded to the Nike Foundation with the following letter, in which I agreed to share my findings and writing with them prior to publication but emphasised that I would not jeopardise my academic freedom.

Dear ______.

The foundation's reply to this email on Wednesday 9 September 2009, highlighted its concern with controlling the reputation of the brand, specifically ‘how the Nike Foundation is presented’. Thus, while I had been willing to give them access to all direct quotes, it wanted to ensure a higher level of control over how it was represented. It specifically acknowledged the need for considering ‘the visibility of the Nike Inc brand (and the prior media attention on labour issues)’.

Dear Kathryn

On Thursday 17 September 2009, I responded to the foundation's need to control ‘how the Nike Foundation is presented outside of the direct quotes or materials’ as ‘highly unusual’ for academic research. I decided I would give the foundation access to my full manuscript rather than only direct quotes; in this way, the foundation could ‘look out for particular words, phrases or positioning statements that touch on specific sensitivities and would suggest alternatives’; however, I would still be under no obligation to alter my thesis, evidence or conclusions or to incorporate the foundation's suggestions into my final book or article manuscripts. My PhD advisors and I were understandably still concerned about such an arrangement. But given the high level of anxiety at Nike regarding academics and activists, which had made the relationship tense from the beginning, it was clear that my access depended on this agreement.

Dear ______.

The foundation ultimately agreed to this arrangement. It enabled me research access to the foundation in the years that followed. What the foundation clearly knew at the time of the agreement, and what I did not understand given my lack of legal counsel and knowledgeable academic advice, was the fact that such an agreement did not preclude the foundation from suing me in future.

Following our agreement, I visited the Nike Foundation again in 2009 to conduct a full round of semi-structured interviews with its senior management team and its programme managers. Once they had received permission to engage in interviews with me, the staff members were relatively at ease and open during the interviews. However, while these formal interviews provided me with important information regarding the foundation's strategy, practices and relationships, they did not, in large part, critique the company or the foundation. Critiques I heard from current or former foundation employees were usually in informal conversations that occurred after I developed trust with them or that occurred outside of the foundation's formal permission or after employees had left the organisation. After my two visits to Beaverton, Oregon in 2009, I continued to interview a select number of these employees and relevant new employees via Skype in 2010 and 2012. Moreover, I conducted additional interviews with former foundation employees, consultants and other institutional partners between 2007 and 2012. During my fieldwork in Brazil, I also conducted interviews with four senior staff members at Nike do Brasil in São Paulo, the corporation's Brazilian headquarters. Interestingly, given that my access to Nike rather than the foundation was facilitated at the highest level of the company, I did not have any pushback regarding my interviews at the company headquarters in Beaverton or its office in São Paulo. I also encountered Nike Foundation staff at the CGI Annual Meetings in 2009 and 2010, and at one of the foundation's last public events, the Girl Effect Accelerator, a Silicon Valley event targeting for-profit investors in San Francisco, CA, before it shifted its strategy away from its philanthropic strategy of investing in adolescent girls in 2015.

After completing my fieldwork, in the years that followed, each time I prepared to publish a book chapter or article, the foundation staff and I would engage in a familiar routine. I would send the manuscript to the Nike Foundation and within four weeks they would provide me with feedback. I was not legally bound to alter my writing, but I would often incorporate some of their feedback into the text as background or additional evidence, citing it as communication with the Nike Foundation. The threatening feeling of the company's power over me remained in the back of my mind, leading me to think very carefully about whether I would or would not incorporate their feedback.

Publishing on Nike

On a hot August day in 2017, a week before my copy edits were due for my forthcoming book, I opened an email from a Nike Foundation and Nike senior executive. We were accustomed to communicating with each other as they were the person with whom I had engaged regarding my prior publications. In this latest round of communications, they wrote, ‘As you know, the Girl Effect became an independent organization in 2015’. The letter further described that the book's original title, The Girl Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development, was in violation of the ‘Girl Effect’ protected trademark. Despite the book already having an ISBN from the US Library of Congress under this title and being on pre-sale on Amazon, the title would have to be changed. The correspondence specifically read:

In addition to the attached input and feedback, please note that ‘Girl Effect’ is a protected trademark and that no rights have been granted for the use of ‘Girl Effect’ as any part of the title for this book. Use of ‘Girl Effect’ in this manner is likely to cause confusion and lead consumers to believe that there is an endorsement and/or other association with ‘Girl Effect’ which is not the case. Accordingly, ‘Girl Effect’ should be removed from the title for this book. These rights in ‘Girl Effect’ are held by Girl Effect and questions or follow-up regarding the use of this mark should be addressed to the Girl Effect team.

Yet more concerning was the foundation’s six-page response of ‘input and feedback’. As I scanned the text, one of these comments stood out. A version of it had appeared previously in the foundation's feedback, but I hadn’t changed the text as I had multiple triangulated forms of evidence to document that what I was claiming was true (Moeller, 2013). The Nike Foundation wrote: ‘A survey used by one partner organization is said to contain questions about the forms of sex (e.g., vaginal, oral, etc.) in which girls may have engaged’. In the manuscript, I detailed survey questions in baseline and endline surveys that asked young women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil about their intimate sexual practices. Specially, the questions in the section ‘Let's talk about your sexual experience’ asked in Question 9.1 if the young women had had their ‘first sexual experience, either vaginal, anal, or oral sex’. Question 9.2 then asked: ‘How old were you when you had your first sexual experience, either vaginal, anal or oral sex?’.

I knew the questions existed because I had personally distributed and collected the survey on two occasions at an NGO in Rio de Janeiro and observed the young women, the overwhelming majority of whom identified as Black or Brown in the survey, responding to it. Their enrolment in the programme and their graduation from it depended on their participation in the survey, which I state in the book as an example of unethical research practice. I had also translated the NGO's baseline evaluation report from Portuguese to English that had been sent to the foundation in 2010, and I brought hard copies of the survey in English and Portuguese with me when I returned to the USA later that year.

Nevertheless, the foundation contested that it had not approved this survey question prior to administration: ‘The survey that was approved by this partner organization's Institutional Review Board and reviewed by the Nike Foundation did not ask about, list or require responses to questions about specific forms of sex in which girls may have engaged’. This was followed by: ‘The Nike Foundation previously addressed the inaccuracy and misrepresentation of this survey with author in 2013’.

The foundation was accusing me of this inaccuracy and misrepresentation not just once but twice. The foundation's accusation was not shocking. But the feeling of its threat loomed large, nonetheless.

The University of California Press recommended I purchase writer's insurance since, as I quickly learned, if the press was sued, I would incur the costs. But more significantly, I learned, the press would not publish the book without a legal read for which I was personally financially responsible. The press recommended a law firm, to whom I reached out immediately. I explained the details of my case to the firm's staff member; yet, after a search of the firm's database for conflicts of interest, the staff member returned my call to let me know the firm could not take on the case as Nike was already represented by the firm. A wave of fear went over me again. The staff member recommended a smaller firm to reduce the chances that it would have a conflict of interest. The smaller firm agreed to take on the case. I paid the lawyers to go line by line through the foundation's comments and the manuscript. Most of the foundation's concerns were addressed without compromising the integrity of the research.

But the survey question regarding the young women's sexual practices was more challenging. My analysis was based on triangulated evidence. Yet, it was clear that the forms of evidence I describe above weren’t necessarily going to hold up in a court of law because I couldn’t prove that Nike Foundation staff had approved the question with my existing documentation.

Luckily, via a contact I had stayed in touch with over the years, I located a tracked-changes document with comments throughout the survey draft from ‘Nike’, timestamped 22/05/2009 13:27. Indeed, the Nike Foundation had approved the survey with the Questions 9.1 and 9.2 about the ‘specific forms of sex in which girls may have engaged’. This was sufficient proof for the lawyers. I kept the material on the survey question in the manuscript.

Dangerous knowledge

Even though it was the truth, the inclusion of these questions in the book manuscript still felt like ‘dangerous knowledge’, to use the language of Sara Ahmed (2017), given the Nike Foundation's response. As Ahmed further describes, ‘When you expose a problem you pose a problem’ (2017: 37). The foundation's response to my manuscript made me feel as though I suddenly posed a problem because of the data I shared in the book. To understand why the foundation responded in a threatening way necessitates examining the logic of the Girl Effect and the historical discourses it draws on, as well as its role in the foundation's history.

The foundation's goal of ‘unleashing’ the Girl Effect depended on girls and young women not falling through what foundation staff referred to as ‘irreversible trapdoors’, such as pregnancy, child marriage and HIV/AIDS (Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, 2011). In this theoretical conceptualisation, if a girl falls through a trapdoor, she continues the intergenerational cycle of poverty. As Nike Foundation President and CEO Maria Eitel describes in an interview in the Huffington Post:

This is urgent and everyone is losing. To change her life and her possibilities, she then transforms every child who will be born into poverty. She has the opportunity to break that intergenerational cycle and that's very unique to an adolescent girl. What happens to her at that transitional moment will determine whether her family is on an upward spiral or a downward spiral. (Kanani, 2011)

Drawing on ethnographic observations at two NGOs funded by the Nike Foundation in Rio de Janeiro in 2009–2010, in the book I attempt to show that this logic influenced how the NGOs engaged with the adolescent girls and young women in their programmes. On one level, I provide evidence to show how it influenced the monitoring and evaluation practices of both NGOs programmes, including the survey questions on girls’ sexual history that the Nike Foundation denied approving. ² On another level, I also provide evidence to show how it impacted, in the case of one NGO, how the staff interpreted goals of their programme and engaged with the young women. As an example, I share my observations of how the pregnancy of one participant during the programme was articulated by a staff member as programmatic failure. Towards the end of my fieldwork, during a long, late afternoon staff meeting, as the previous conversation ended, Susanna (pseudonym), one of the NGO's staff members, lowered her eyes, gently shaking her head. She uttered, ‘I have something sad’. She paused. ‘Again, there is a young woman in the programme who is pregnant. We didn’t meet our goal, our indicator’. Susanna turned to another staff member to ask, ‘How many months is she?’. The staff member responded, ‘Three months, and even after the Gender class’. For Susanna, the pedagogical and curricular interventions in the programme had been unsuccessful in ensuring the participants did not get pregnant. The programme had failed to meet its goal.

Regulating adolescent girls’ sexuality and affective relationships is core to the logic of the Girl Effect. Collecting knowledge on girls’ and young women's sexual practices was imagined to enable more effective interventions targeting the participants. Yet, collecting knowledge on the sexuality of Othered bodies is a practice with a long, problematic history in colonial and development interventions. Given the Nike Foundation's effect of helping to redirect public attention away from Nike's controversies, perhaps the foundation staff thought that the book's discussion of questions on girls’ sexual practices was a threat to the foundation's legacy and thus the corporation's efforts to remake itself given this complex racialised and gendered history. The corporation could potentially suffer further reputational damage if its foundation's practices were seen to be a continuation of, rather than a break from, the corporation's broader history. In this way, this article sheds light on the ways in which the expansion of corporate hegemony necessitates and operates through the control of knowledge production.

Elite whiteness as the tie that disarms and binds

When I began researching Nike's philanthropic investments, I was aware of public accusations regarding its history, and consequently fearful of the repercussions that could emerge. Despite the foundation's initial refusal to participate in the research, as I recall above, I eventually came to a legal agreement with its executive team. In my reflections on this, I argue that my research access was ultimately contingent on the co-constitution of my whiteness and eliteness, what Gaztambide-Fernández and Angod call the ‘modern elite/white subject’ (2019: 722). This subjectivity enabled me to successfully embody the learned ease of a white elite researching body in a majority-white corporate world (Khan, 2021). Despite the foundation's initial anxieties and intimidating strategies, this ease – which was the result of my own learning in the elite spaces over many decades of family life, schooling and professional experiences – eventually disarmed the Nike Foundation's executive staff, all of whom were white with one exception at the time of this negotiation. My embodiment as a white, upper-class, highly educated American woman was thus ultimately non-threatening to the foundation staff despite explicitly verbalised and written concerns that I represented a potential problem.

In this way, the relationship between whiteness and eliteness shapes, in the language of Ahmed, ‘what it is that bodies “can do”, and thus, what it is that researching bodies racialised as white and elite “can do”’ (2007: 150). It shapes the ethnographic terrain of what spaces they can access, how they can move, who will speak to them and where they can direct their gaze, among other aspects. In reflecting on my process of research, elite whiteness, with its ‘learned ease’, is not only the tie that disarms perceived threats to the corporation but also the tie that binds. It enabled me to not only conduct one set of interviews with Nike Foundation staff but also interview multiple staff members over many years, and comfortably move in and out of the partner organisations where they donated funds, events they attended, phone calls they participated in, etc.

The other side of this is precisely the ways in which racialisation and class, in turn, may limit or close off non-white, non-elite researchers from seeking access to spaces governed through the intimate co-formed relationships between capital and whiteness, spaces like the corporations, philanthropies and global governance institutions that I moved within in my research. This can, course, be extended to other ‘co-formations’ of marginalisation around gender, sexuality, citizenship, language, religion, etc. (Bacchetta, 2007).

However, the article also shows the limits of these relations of elite racial filiation – what I call the ties that bind elite white subjects despite corporate anxieties. Given that a corporation's expansion is ultimately contingent on the ability to eliminate any barriers to its profit structure, any threats to a company or a foundation's reputation must too be neutralised or eliminated.

Conclusion: towards a feminist approach to embodied knowledge production on powerful institutions

In this article, I have reflected on what happens when a researching body that was considered safe and non-threatening in a powerful, white-dominant corporation (Global Data, 2021) becomes the object of corporate control. Years after the publication of my book, I am continuing to grapple with a set of feminist conundrums that emerge from my reflections on researching corporate power.

As I seek to navigate – to the extent possible – these multiple conundrums, I am drawing on a conception of power from within Black and women-of-colour feminisms that simultaneously accounts for our situatedness within transnational, multi-scalar ‘co-formations of power’ (Bacchetta, 2007) while seeking to transform the conditions of the racial, patriarchal capitalist system as a praxis of collective liberation (Davis, 1983; Ferreira da Silva, 2007). These perspectives on power help to inform a feminist approach to embodied knowledge production in/on powerful institutions that accounts for the researcher's situatedness within these structures of power as they seek to transform those same structures. This approach acknowledges and works within these conundrums, rather than attempting to avoid them with approaches that fail to account for one's situated position or with research methods that only touch upon the surface of corporate phenomenon.

First, in the ethnographic study of powerful institutions, the power and privilege of the researcher's body enables their research access. As I discussed above, my privileged position facilitated my ethnographic research access – access that someone differentially situated would most likely not have had. Reflecting on this is the purpose of this article, and it should indeed make all of us very uncomfortable. Everything about the power and privilege of the gendered and racialised system of global capitalism should make us deeply uncomfortable. Yet, how are the inner workings of this power – those micro-contours of power that one can only see from the inside out – to be understood if powerful institutions police their boundaries? Each negotiation I engaged in over a decade slowly pieced together my analysis of how corporate capitalism responds to perceived threats, neutralises them, attacks them, etc., an analysis of which would not have been possible by only examining videos, website documents or NGO programmes receiving corporate funding.

Second, how should feminists ethically navigate their research responsibilities when researching in controlling environments? I understand these environments to be ones where both the researcher and the employees are potentially subjected to corporate control over knowledge production. Employees, such as the ones I interviewed at Nike and the Nike Foundation, often have constraints on their speech due to corporate forms of surveillance of written and spoken communications, such as non-disclosure agreements. In these contexts, interviews and interview questions are also often ‘approved’ from above by the senior management or legal teams, as they were in the case of my initial round of formal, approved interviews. In this context of control, given their responsibilities to their employer, these same employees may simultaneously act in ways that seek to influence or control the researcher's knowledge production. This places the researcher and the research subject in a difficult bind defined by conflicts of interest that may extend far beyond their own ethics and agencies.

Third, in these contexts, how do we think about the intersubjective processes of critical research? What types of research relationships form and/or are possible in this context? How should ‘politeness’ or ‘niceness’ be interpreted and responded to by the researcher in this context, particularly when cultures of whiteness are often expressed as ‘niceness’ and used to boundary, exclude and, ultimately, reproduce relations of domination (Walton, 2021)? Beyond this, can meaningful, genuine relationships be developed in these contexts, and if so, under what conditions, constrains and timelines?

Fourth, what happens when employees break with their employers and provide another narrative or critique of the company? How can you ever ensure that your interlocutors in these cases are protected from the corporation that employs them and aren’t subjected to potential retaliation in the moment of the research or in the future due to their participation in your research, even if it was formally approved (or perhaps because of this)?

Fifth, to whom is a critical feminist researcher ultimately responsible – directly and indirectly? Where do the researcher's boundaries of responsibility begin and end in a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnographic project? How may they shift within the course of the research, in different institutional sites and with different interlocutors? How does one think about relations of responsibility, power and authority, as they define those differentially positioned within the research, including the researcher, the corporation, its employees and those whose lives, well-beings and futures it impacts?

Lastly, my research on corporate power – based on my own privileges – have been a critical part of making my career. In essence, it has been part of furthering my own power, privilege and authority as an academic. This is a feminist dilemma that extends beyond research in corporations, touching academic research across sites, subject areas and theoretical perspectives, but is one that those within this area of research should consider carefully so that we are not distracted by academic pressures and rewards. The researcher's purposes for research and theorising, to quote Stuart Hall (1988), are ultimately ‘not to enhance one's intellectual or academic reputation, but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain – to produce a more adequate knowledge of – the historical world and its processes: and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it’ (36).

These are the questions that have emerged in my reflections on the research processes I engaged in over a decade, and that I continue to take part in through my new research on the power and influence of Silicon Valley. A feminist approach to critical research on corporate power necessitates that we wrestle with and return to complicated questions that emerge long after the act of research is completed, as we continue to be deeply entangled with the power relations we study.