| This dissertation explores the marketing of three corporate sports media brands: Sports Illustrated Women (a now defunct magazine), the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network's (ESPN) X Games, and the National Basketball Association (NBA). By combining original interviews of marketing professionals, surveys of business and marketing journalism, and analyses of media products themselves, SportCo's inquiry traverses the boundaries between popular sports and corporate interests and between the inside and outside of the corporation. This perspective reveals marketing as a management discipline that works also as a form of broader social governance, both as a general effect and in particular ways for specifically targeted markets. In this respect, SportCo's marketing-based analysis of the often taken-for-granted sphere of sports reveals links between popular ideas about embodied subjectivity (in terms of race, age, and gender) and the broader conflation of social governance and marketing. |
