MSDN :: coyBOTt/Outsourcing

::coyBOTt::

Outsourcing
by msdm
intro

A project that deals with the soft borders of art practice, with the idea of labour as a platform to assess strategies and imagine tactics of connecting with the globalised productive system. It asks: what are the relations between social and aesthetic thought? Where do the dynamics of art, production and branded economy meet and collide? Outsourcing is a method of subcontracting used by corporations. It follows a rigorous set of protocols designed to enhance profitability by emptying the shell of the corporation through removal of production into peripheral non-regulated cross border export zones. It is proposed here not as a corporate practice but as a critical model to research the formal and the informal bonds - economic, emotional, irrational - that are being threaded between cultural institutions and the autonomous cells that are today's free lance cultural workers.

Outsourcing took place in the context of the soft season at the Institute of International Visual Arts, a programme aiming at the intersection of artistic and curatorial practices. Through Outsourcing, msdm extended the nature of the contract established with inIVA, expanding the terms which stipulated that the budget " must be towards the costs of bringing other artists here and/or commissioning and producing an exhibition". Being outsourced as such, it was msdm' s interest to make specific connections to the place and start working from inIVA, Shoreditch, East London, raising specific questions about the nature of work, curatorial approaches and the nature of display. Not to create a themed group show around the notion of outsourcing but rather outsourcing from a network of collaborators and the geographical and cultural location of the gallery, to think about the practice of exhibition making by an artist. Between a curatorial commission, a project space, a sculpture, an artists' installation, a site-specific work, a networked practice, an archive of collections, a collection of data bases.

www.coyBOTt.net
re.no

As usual with msdm projects, Outsourcing was provoked by a series of conversations. One of the initial collaborators was Sasha Costanza-Chock a researcher from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and author of studies on brand ranking and boycotting. In the summer of 2002 the researcher visited London to present his paper HOLLER WITH YOUR DOLLAR: A Preliminary Study of Boycott Activity Against Top Brands. At this time Bloomberg corporation was literally blooming in London as a major corporate art sponsor. Simultaneously there appeared news in the New York press that Mayor Bloomberg had started withdrawing public
funding from art groups and there was no commentary from the critical artworld on this matter. These and other contradictions dominated ourspeculations about the interlocking of capital and cultural production and ways to make these visible in contemporary practice.

Within this context, msdm outsourced programming work to Renauld Courvoisier, aka re.no of the Federation of Random Action, who had previously collaborated with Costanza-Chock in implementing tactics for electronic contention , namely the Virtual Sit-In for a Living Wage @Harvard and the Netstrike for Vieques. The programmer was commissioned to develop a prototype art software search tool and graphic interface called coyBOTt. coyBOTt is designed to search the internet for information about brand rank, boycott activity, and corporate sponsorship, then report the
results back to the user, in this case to the exhibition space at the Institute of International Visual Arts ( inIVA) and its on-line extension through data visualisation.

In his past research, Costanza-Chock had first gathered information on boycott activity against top global brands, collecting all data by hand from sources available online. He then conducted statistical analyses of the relationships between brand rank and boycott activity, and found that
the rank of a global brand is a good predictor of the amount of boycott activity targeted against it. This research process was useful but painstaking. The coyBOTt aimed at both facilitating and expanding this research. It also coincided with msdm's aim to reevaluate contemporary strategies of institutional critique by artists including the network. The coyBOTt was imagined as a free-standing, evolving, multiuse software package. In its first prototype incarnation, coyBOTt code is used to feed a database backing a website that people can visit and query for constantly updated graphs or representations of boycott activity against specified individual brands, brands within industry categories, and global top 100 brands, as well as forinformation about corporate cultural sponsorship broken down along related lines. The software is made available at www.coybott.net

The outsourcing of a piece of software is to be understood, according to sasha costanza-chock, in relation to a desire to avoid the production of a material object and therefore foreground the current shift towards information services. However, we are critical of the North-centered
discourse of the 'information society' or 'knowledge economy' that might be useful in focusing on certain currents but seems to be employed in order to sanitize, disappear, and otherwise make invisible the very real continued state of industrial (factory and sweatshop) production under abusive conditions throughout the 2/3 world - the South, plus poor and incarcerated workers throughout the North.

Northern multinationals engage in the information work of branding, outsourcing all production and hiding it behind the clean shiny surface of the brand. This same 'information society' discourse is also used to normalize or naturalize neoliberal ideology and erase even the thought of possible alternatives to the current project of corporate globalisation, that extends the freedom of capital flows while creating ever-tighter blocks on the flows of human beings. In the arts world, this has meant erasure of public arts funding and its partial replacement by corporate sponsorship, which translates to an increasing adoption of corporate management strategies by arts institutions as well as new depths of openness to corporate 'partnerships.' Again, this has all been naturalized and is consistently portrayed as the only way forward.

The CoyBott is therefore designed not only as an artistic product that foregrounds the outsourcing of work in the cultural sphere and complicates the branding of arts institutions, but also as a research tool that has potential use value beyond the space of the InIVA exhibition - for
artists, social scientists, activists, and indeed anyone who is interested in issues of branding, cultural sponsorship, and resistance to the neoliberal paradigm.

Futhermore msdm releases coyBOTt as open-source freeware, with the stipulation that any software developed through use of the coyBOTt source code, or any data or representations of data (graphs, maps, and so on) gathered by coyBOTt, be accompanied by the inIVA logo displayed in an appropriate location. In this way, the coyBOTt project also questions the branding of arts institutions by associating the inIVA brand with software that is currently both artware and research tool and that also has the potential to mutate in unforeseen ways. This complicates the standard logic of branding, where branded associations are carefully researched, calculated, reviewed and approved in order to construct corporate identity, and substitutes the potential slippage of branded code and its products once released for public use and adaptation.

In part to illustrate one potential application of coyBOTt, msdm has commissioned Sasha Costanza-Chock to use the software to produce a report on the relationships between brand rank, boycott activity, and corporate arts funding.




MSDM/SOFT White Paper #1: Background and Context for the Application of coyBOTt Software to Systematic Analysis of Branding, Boycott, and Cultural Sponsorship
Sasha Costanza-Chock
Version 10.11.2002
I. INTRO
In the summer of 2002, we were commissioned by MSDM to use the coyBOTt software to develop a statistical analysis of the relationships between brand rank, boycott activity, and corporate sponsorship. This came on the heels of a preliminary study we conducted that found the rank of global brands, as measured by leading branding agency Interbrand (supplier of the yearly ‘global top 100 brands’ list to Business Week), to be a significant statistical predictor of boycott activity. Simply put, our earlier work found that the more valuable the brand name, the more boycott activity we should expect (Costanza-Chock, unpublished 2002). This conclusion supports our general observation of the rise of ‘brand jujitsu,’ or attempts by activists to target labor, human rights, and environmental violations by leveraging the brand power created by transnational corporations (TNCs) with gigantic amounts of marketing capital.
Examination of the top global brands reveals both that they are prime targets of boycott activity and also that they spend large amounts of money on the sponsorship of cultural production. Sports, music, film, theater, dance, graphic, multimedia, and other arts at all levels from major cultural institutions (stadiums, museums, theaters, galleries, publications etc.) to ‘local’ sites of cultural production (little leagues, neighborhood arts projects, small arts spaces etc.) to individual artists all receive corporate sponsorship. This is by no means new, and there’s of course a long tradition of scholarship that describes the rise, proliferation, and growing power of the culture industries. For now we’ll simply emphasize that, increasingly, corporate sponsorship extends to every arena of cultural production and systematically incorporates even cultural forms and practices previously imagined as ‘resistant’ to the logic of capital. We will return to this shift in detail below, but move now to what was intended to be the main research question of this report.
Hypothesis
Our primary hypothesis was that boycott activity against top brands would be a significant predictor of cultural sponsorship by the brand parent corporation. We had thought that this predictor would be visible due to corporate attempts to resist ‘softening,’ erosion, or decay enacted against the shiny surface of the brand by activist practices of boycott, negative publicity, detournement, ‘adbusting,’ or brand jujitsu. To rephrase: we expected to find that the more a brand comes under attack by boycott, the more its parent corporation would invest in sponsorship of cultural production.
Methodology and difficulties
We began by adapting methodology used in our earlier study of the relationship between brand rank and boycott activity. Brank rank was taken from www.interbrand.com; boycott activity was measured using the Google search engine (for more methodological details of these measurements consult http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/schock/hollerdollar.html). Sponsorship measures proved more problematic, since no comprehensive database of TNC cultural sponsorship was publicly available. Some data about top sponsors by region or by city is available, and consultants serving both the arts and business worlds advertise comprehensive databases containing sponsorship figures for all global brand parents, but access to this data is not free and was beyond our means for the purposes of the current study.
As expected, the coyBOTt software proved useful for gathering data on boycott activity. coyBOTt not only automated the operation of the google search engine (cutting the data gathering time on measures of boycott activity against all top 100 global brands from hours to seconds) but also replaced a static measure of boycott activity gathered painstakingly by hand with a dynamic database that can be constantly refreshed, providing real-time measures of current and past boycott activity. Unfortunately, as of this writing, data-gathering for measures of corporate cultural sponsorship remains in the developmental stage and is not yet automated in real time or even systematically operationalized. The difficulty of developing a working data map for cultural sponsorship is due to the deep complexity of interlocking flows of sponsorship capital between parent corporations, brand subsidiaries, and sibling corporate, nonprofit, and foundation entities. It has therefore not yet been possible to realize the statistical analysis initially commissioned by MSDM. Instead, we have attempted here to lay the theoretical groundwork that will be used to interpret the data gathered by coyBOTt once it becomes fully operational. To that end, we focus on the context of investigation, unpack relevant key terms ‘information society’ and ‘brand activism’ through historical and theoretical analysis, incorporate statistical findings about the relationship between brand rank and boycott activity, and suggest a trajectory for further research into the proposed relationship between boycott activity and corporate sponsorship of cultural production.
II. INFORMATION SOCIETY
The term ‘information society’ was developed as early as the late 60s and was meant to highlight the shift in the dominant mode of production within the core nations of the world system, away from materials extraction and production of goods and towards services and manipulation of information. However, we are critical of this North-centered discourse of the 'information society' or 'knowledge economy:’ while it might be useful in focusing on certain broad currents, it has historically been employed in order to sanitize, obscure, and make invisible the very real continued state of industrial (factory and sweatshop) production under abusive conditions throughout the 2/3 world - the South, plus poor and incarcerated workers throughout the North (Schiller, 1999).
In other words, the rhetoric of "the information society" serves to mask a global restructuring of labor where workers in the 1/3 world are increasingly involved in information work while those in the 2/3 world are engaged in the extraction of raw materials, production of goods, and de-assembly/disposal of waste products. Even within the field of ‘information work,’ there is extreme stratification between ‘high-end’ professionalized infoworkers and those who labor in data sweatshops. Data-entry and call services are outsourced either overseas to tax-free Export Processing Zones in South Asia or the Caribbean ("Digiports"), where mostly young women, barred from collective bargaining, work long shifts for wages lower than garment workers and suffer health problems including back injury, carpal tunnel, eye and skin problems, and fetal deformation due to monitor emissions (Sussman and Lent, 1998; Wilson, 1998; Skinner, 1998).
Elites in developing countries have actively encouraged the creation of this data processing sector in hopes that it will attract jobs, capital, and technology transfer over the long run. However, some have suggested that this sector will simply mirror the trajectory of the long-established garment sweatshops (which often operate literally next door in the same Export Processing Zones): penny wages, poor conditions, little to no skill or technology transfer, followed by further instability as poor nations end up competing with each other to offer larger and larger incentives in a ‘race to the bottom’ (Ross, 1997). More recently, data entry has both become more automated and also outsourced to privately owned prisons, making the national hopes of Southern elites for long-term economic growth based on attracting data processing even more dubious (Costanza-Chock, in progress).
This same 'information society' rhetoric is also used in general to normalize or naturalize neoliberal ideology and erase even the thought of possible alternatives to the current project of corporate globalization, which extends the freedom of capital flows while creating ever-tighter blocks on the flows of human beings (Mosco, 1996; Sassen, 1998). In the arts world, neoliberal restructuring/deregulation increasingly means erasure of public arts funding and its partial replacement by corporate sponsorship. This also translates to the increasing adoption of corporate management strategies by arts institutions as well as new depths of openness to corporate 'partnerships.' Again, this has all been naturalized and is consistently portrayed as the only way forward.
Still, these developments have not taken place in a frictionless field. The same technosocial conditions that enable the expansion of free market fundamentalism also enable the amplification and extension of transnational activist networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Saskia Sassen notes the emergence of countergeographies of globalization, or networked activists and cultural workers rooted locally and linked globally:
"As is the case with global corporate firms, these countergeographies can be constituted at multiple scales. Digital networks can be used by political activists for global or non-local transactions and they can be used for strengthening local communications and transactions inside a city. Recovering how the new digital technology can serve to support local initiatives and alliances across a city's neighborhoods is extremely important in an age where the notion of the local is often seen as losing ground to global dynamics and actors. (See e.g. Lovink and Riemens 2001)." (Sassen, 2002)
One strategy increasingly employed by networked activists at linked local/global levels is brand activism.
III. BRAND ACTIVISM
Various social movement scholars have pointed out that, in a media-saturated environment, savvy activists in recent years have turned to media-oriented, noncommodity 'leverage boycotts' where targets are high-brand-recognition TNCs. Such corporations become the targets of boycotts when they engage in practices that activists find objectionable, but they are not necessarily targeted because they are the 'worst offenders.' Rather, activists subvert the power of the brand in order to draw greater media attention to their cause (Klein, 2000).
history
The term boycott has been used to describe a wide range of actions. In London before the turn of the century, boycott was used widely in the repertoire of tactics employed by labor activists who pushed for improved conditions in the Shoreditch sweatshops that produced and packaged matches, clothes, furniture, beer, and sugar. One of the first boycotts in London to receive widespread media attention was that against the Bryant and May match factory, where workers slaved away
"…16 hours a day, with out lunch or tea breaks, making matches in appalling conditions for only two shillings. The matches, which sold at 1d for 12 boxes, were made from yellow phosphorus, a poisonous substance which often brought about necrosis or 'phossy jaw' in the match-makers. Phossy jaw was a disease which ate into the bone of the jaw causing severe pain and eventually death." (Salvation Army, 2002)
Organized by concerned bourgeois samaritans like Clementia Black (whose Consumer Union was a twin forerunner of today’s No Sweat clothing and other fair trade enterprises), HH Champion and Herbert Burrows of the Social Democratic Federation, and activist/agitator Annie Besant, this boycott was the loudest salvo in the growing battle against sweatshops that led directly to the famous Match Girls Strike (Willis, 1998). For the purposes of this paper we don’t have time to investigate the gender and cross-class dynamics of this wave of activism; suffice it to say that this early series of boycotts, strikes, and media interventions has since been written by labour historians as the turning point towards the rise of new unionism in the UK and the eventual creation of the Labour Party.
In the US context, ‘boycott’ includes turn of the century attempts by New York City women to reduce beef prices; 1930s Catholic National League of Decency attempts to force the movie industry to stop producing pictures that ‘corrupt public morals and promot[e] a sex mania in our land' (Freidman: 1999); and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that lasted over a year and forced Civil Rights onto the US national agenda (Robinson: 1997; Barnett: 1993). Transnationally, ‘boycott’ applies to demands from the 1970s through the 1990s that Nestle adhere to World Health Organization conventions on the marketing of infant formula in developing nations (Keck and Sikkink: 1998); 1980s pressure on corporations, banks, and academic institutions to divest from apartheid South Africa (Smith: 1990); and the current wave of campaigns, modeled after the successful mobilization against the South African regime, for divestment from arms manufacturers and other companies that support human rights abuses by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (see www.penndivest.org, www.columbiadivest.org), just to name a few. In the more recent cases, the internet has made it easier for groups with few resources to launch local, national, and transnational calls for boycott. Online boycotts focus on a wide range of advocacy issues, from those just mentioned to campaigns for human rights (against PepsiCo, Shell), and environmental protection (Texaco, BP), animal liberation (Adidas, GlaxoSmithKline).
Freidman (1999) has developed a taxonomy of boycotts in which, among other categories, he differentiates 'surrogate boycotts' from 'nonsurrogate' boycotts. Surrogate boycotts involve targeting a company that is not directly responsible for the policy or behavior activists wish to change, but is theoretically in a position to put pressure on the responsible party — for example, in the USA Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority launched a major boycott in the early 80s, aimed at shifting television content towards ‘family-value’ material (i.e., away from sex, violence, and especially gay content). The strategy of this campaign was to announce a yearlong coding effort by the Coalition for Better Television (funded by Falwell’s televangelist spoils) in which all network broadcasts would be rated according to a ‘family values’ scale that was not released to the public. At the end of the year, companies that ran ads on the network that scored lowest would become targets of a boycott by the 80,000 pastors and 4.5 million families of the Moral Majority (Freidman: 1999). This boycott is classified by Freidman as ‘surrogate’ since the targets — companies that advertise on the ‘worst’ network — have only indirect control over the network policy.
Nonsurrogate boycotts, on the other hand, involve directly targeting the company responsible for the policy, event, or stance that activists wish to change. An example would be the ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’ campaigns during the Great Depression, in which an estimated 75,000 jobs were secured for U.S. urban Blacks through targeted boycott/picket actions outside businesses in Black neighborhoods that had refused to hire black people (Hunter: 1977).
Our quick review of the history of boycotts over the last century suggests other potentially useful ways to divide boycotts into categories for analysis. Many earlier boycotts were directed at specific market outcomes, namely lowered commodity prices. Later, the boycott was increasingly used as an aid to attempts by organized labor to gain better working conditions, hours, wages, or benefits, often in conjunction with other tactics such as strikes, slowdowns, and the like (Tarrow: 1998). Beginning with the international boycott of Nestle launched in 1977 by the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT), multinational corporations became the targets of boycott activity, with well-recognized brands increasingly coming under fire as carefully chosen stand-in representatives for industry-wide practices (Smith: 1990). For example, Nike became emblematic of antisweatshop campaigns across the globe, although most other major sneaker manufacturers not only also employ sweatshop labor but in fact often subcontract production to the very same export processing shops used by Nike (Klein: 2000). As we mentioned above, the target selection in these campaigns is based on what Saul Alinsky called ‘political jujitsu:’ by piggybacking on the massive recognition generated by corporate investment in the power of the brand, activists find they can attract attention with spectacular brand-subversion tactics. Boycotts aimed at lowering commodity prices seem to have vanished, to be replaced by boycotts aimed mostly at gathering media attention for a widespread problem, where the boycott target may or may not actually be the worst perpetrator of the practice under attack.
Part of the power of such industry 'leverage boycotts' comes through a kind of domino effect, where companies across an entire industry may rapidly fall into line with new policies adopted by the industry leader in response to boycott pressure. This was the case, for example, with the campaign for dolphin-safe tuna fishing launched in 1988. Activists targeted Heinz Starkist because it was the largest actor in the market, and when that company capitulated to pressure by announcing the adoption of dolphin-safe fishing practices, all major competitors followed suit within one day (Freidman: 1999). This domino effect also rippled through certain sectors of the clothing and cosmetics retail markets as a result of PETA's successful campaign against animal testing at Benetton (Freidman: 1999).
Current developments
Meanwhile, in the shift to the so-called ‘information economy’ that we described above, Northern-based transnational corporations (TNCs) have overwhelmingly oriented resources towards the managerial information work of brand strategy, outsourcing production and data-entry to poor communities of color in the 2/3 world and hiding it all behind the clean shiny surface of the brand. We suggest that in response there is a historical trend, accelerated in recent years, away from commodity-price, ‘nonsurrogate’ boycotts towards media-oriented, noncommodity 'leverage boycotts' where targets are high-brand recognition multinational corporations. TNCs become targets of boycotts when they engage in practices that activists find objectionable, but they are not necessarily targeted because they are the 'worst offenders.' Rather, activists subvert the power of the brand in order to draw greater media attention to their cause. Familiarity with activist campaigns against top brands (see www.nosweat.org), historical analysis (Klein 2000), and preliminary statistical analysis of the relationship between brand rank and boycott activity (Costanza-Chock, 2001) all support this idea.
IV. CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Such anticorporate activist tactics do not develop in a vacuum, but rather in a dialectic relationship with the strategies of the TNCs that they target. When attempts to leverage brand power involve highly mediated strategies aimed at ‘softening,’ dirtying, sullying, or reinterpreting the meaning of brands, or in other words aim at disrupting the smooth surface of the brand to reveal the practices, conditions, and human and environmental effects of resource extraction or production processes, TNCs respond. Alongside litigation, the most powerful tool in the TNC arsenal of tactics used to protect against ‘brand rupture’ has been corporate sponsorship of cultural production.
This is not to suggest at all that corporate sponsorship of culture is a new development. Around the same time as the Match Girls Strike, William Morris critiqued what he saw as the growing alignment of artistic practice (and charitable organizations) with the interests of capital (Morris, 1884). The theorists of the Frankfurt school applied Marxist analysis to develop their scathing critiques of the culture industries, describing the production of media and entertainment, particularly Hollywood film, as an industrial process akin to the manufacture of cars in its extreme division of labor and realignment towards the profit imperative. During the 70s and 80s, Herbert Schiller (and many others) traced the extension of this trend and questioned the impact of transnational corporate cultural production on democracy, education, the law, and public sites of expression (Schiller, 1989). More recently, Chin-tao Wu has documented the shrinkage of state arts support in the UK (British Council on the Arts) and USA (National Endowment for the Arts) beginning in the Reagan/Thatcher years, the resultant further encroachment of corporate capital into the cultural sphere, and the current phase of ‘globalization’ of the US/UK-led corporate arts paradigm — now in a phase of aggressive export to the countries of the South (Wu, 2002).
The depth and intensity of corporate colonization of the sphere of cultural production has increased in the wake of the fall of the bipolar system, the US assumption of the position of monopole superpower, and the increasingly hegemonic assertion of free market fundamentalism as global organizing principle, (at least among the vast majority of policymaking elites). What’s more, the growth of corporate sponsorship of cultural production is not only enabled by but becomes ‘necessary’ since public arts funding has been progressively dismantled. State ‘sponsorship’ is increasingly under attack, as policymakers aligned with TNC capital erode the very notion of the public good or the commons at all levels, privatizing everything from health care, housing, and cultural production to prisons, schools, airwaves (the electromagnetic spectrum), and genetic code. This process is most advanced in the United States but has expanded throughout the globe - increasingly including to the global South, where local elites who dominate the centres of the peripheries are linked to the elites who rule the centres at the core. In an ironic twist, these are often the same elites who in the past used state sponsorship of cultural production to build up nationalist projects in the wake of liberation struggles and decolonization.
In this context, while corporate sponsorship of cultural production certainly serves as advertising and branding strategy even in the absence of brand-targeted anticorporate activism, it also explicitly serves to suture and smooth branded surfaces that have come under attack. Hence, sponsorship industry trade literature in the UK emphasizes (for example) that oil company BP invests millions in cultural production in an attempt to counter the negative images of the oil industry spread by environmental and human rights activists; banks invest in local cultural production in attempts to counter the image of ‘flighty capital’ unconnected to the local; and beer and alcohol companies invest in cultural production in attempts to highlight their concerns over ‘responsible drinking’ (http://www.sponsorship.co.uk/).
Estimates of the amount of corporate capital being poured into cultural sponsorship, at the level of either global or national analysis, are difficult to develop. Where databases tracking such sponsorship exist, they are generally proprietary, created and maintained by ‘sponsorship consultants’ and available for large fees to major arts organizations and to potential corporate sponsors. Still, even a cursory glance at, for example, the UK sponsorship scene reveals multimillion dollar deals in the spheres of sports, music, festivals, and museums, as well as ‘local’ cultural production and sponsorship of ‘cutting edge’ process-based or participatory artistic practices. Some of the top UK corporate cultural sponsorship deals of the past year include: $19 million from Barclay’s for the Royal National Theatre and Exhibitions at the British Museum, National Gallery and Tate Britain; $4 million from worldpop.com for the BBC UK Top 40 singles and album charts; $2.2 million from Vidal Sassoon for London Fashion Week; $1 million from British Telecom for the Collection 2000 at the Tate Modern (LeisureScan, 2002). Our hypothesis that sponsorship activity is at least in part ‘damage control’ is borne out by the fact that these companies were all targets of extensive activist campaigns over the past year, on charges ranging from support for authoritarian regimes that abuse human rights, to destruction of local cultural production in poor countires, to violation of animal rights.
What’s more, such sponsorship deals, which we are reading as at least in part damage-management, do not emerge haphazard but flow along organized network lines through websites, trade press, fairs and trade shows (www.sponsorshiponline.com). Dedicated consultant groups (like BDS, Educational Communication, Karen Earl, and MVI) also exist to mediate between corporate sponsorship arms and cultural organizations. However, it is not our task here to map or further describe the growth of corporate cultural sponsorship as an emerging information service sector in its own right. Rather, we turn from a glance at the broad contours of the sponsorship scene to suggestions for the next phase of research that will be enabled by the coyBOTt: systematic examination of the relationship between boycott activity and cultural sponsorship.
V. NEXT STEPS
We have discussed the rise of the so-called ‘information society,’ traced the transformation from commodity boycott to brand jujitsu, and touched on the growing corporate colonization of the cultural sphere. Our preliminary research has provided strong statistical evidence describing the relationship between brand value and boycott activity, and trade press and anecdotal observation supports our claim that cultural sponsorship is at least in part a response to boycott. With the aid of the coyBOTt tool we hope to turn our attention to the more complex interactions between the three variables. How will we proceed methodologically?
Our first step towards sustained analysis of these relationships will be to build on the database already assembled by coyBOTt that tracks global brand rank and brand boycott activity. A new data category has been created, ‘cultural sponsorship,’ and we are currently developing the software’s capability to search for dollar amounts, for each global brand, according to systematic criterion. Once sponsorship amounts have been estimated for each brand, we will run correlations and linear regression on the relationship with boycott activity. Of course, correlation will not provide us with causality, a key question here: is it the case that large amounts of cultural sponsorship trigger increased boycott activity, or vice versa, or (most likely in our view) do the two exist in a dialectical relationship? Although we expect looped causality, as we collect more data over a longer period of time we might also be able to employ time series analysis, a statistical tool that would allow us to better understand the causal relationship between these three factors.
Thinking more broadly, it will also be critical in the next stage of development to extend coyBOTt’s capabilities to include analysis of regional, national, and local brands, not only global. Measures of brand-targeted activism should be broadened beyond current methodology of internet-posted, English-language calls to boycott. The key will be to find ways to examine the relationships between the multiple spatial levels that organize branding, cultural sponsorship, and activist activity. In this way, we will develop coyBOTt into a tool that can help us ground global analysis at the level of the local, in line with the call for countergeographic practice.

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