Firestone Tire Research Articles

Too Hot to Handle?: Native Advertising and the Firestone Dilemma

Native advertisements are advertisements that mimic the format and content of non-paid for content that surrounds them. Instead of interrupting the content being consumed, native advertisements become part of that content—they are largely indistinguishable from other tweets, posts, videos, and pictures appearing on a given platform. Because of this unique format, native advertisements are often content that consumers want to engage with. This reformulation of advertising has radically remade the process of persuading consumers to act, believe, and consume. And, over the past two decades, native advertising has become both a ubiquitous part of everyday content consumption and an ever-growing, billion-dollar industry. Unfortunately for consumers, native advertising is also very deceptive. While most people believe they differentiate native advertising from non-advertising content, that is unfortunately not the case. To make matters worse, most native advertising does not include a disclosure that it is advertising—and even when a disclosure is present, most consumers still fail to recognize the content as advertising. To paraphrase contemporary native advertising scholars, we live in a world where consumers cannot tell an advertisement and a non-advertisement apart. To control native advertising deception, the Federal Trade Commission has promulgated numerous subregulatory guidance documents, initiated enforcement actions, and engaged with regulated parties through educational events. The FTC’s goal has been to ensure that native advertising is transparent to consumers and that consumer deception from native advertising falls below 15% consumer deception—the threshold established in Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. v. Federal Trade Commission. The outcome of these concerted efforts is an array of unclear, even contradictory guidelines that have worked against achieving the FTC’s goals. This Note proposes that the FTC adopt an easily met strict liability framework for native advertising disclosure. That framework would require that each native advertisement have a disclosure with three elements: (1) the disclosure must include the language “Paid Advertisement” or “Paid Ad”; (2) the disclosure must include the name (and also logo, if available) of the party paying for the advertisement; (3) the first and second elements must be in close proximity to each other and to the advertisement itself. This Note argues the FTC should adopt this framework because it is empirically likely to reduce native advertising deception below the Firestone threshold. Furthermore, this framework will also produce simple, clear guidelines that balance the FTC’s consumer protection interests with the commercial interests of regulated parties.

Taking Note: Justice Harry A. Blackmun's Observations from Oral Argument about Life, the Law, and the U.S. Supreme Court

Taking Note: Justice Harry A. Blackmun's Observations from Oral Argument about Life, the Law, and the U.S. Supreme Court

The Land beneath Our Feet

In this interview, historian Gregg Mitman discusses the background and significance of The Land beneath Our Feet, a documentary he completed with Sarita Siegel in 2016 that explores a 1926 scientific expedition to Liberia undertaken by Harvard University's Department of Tropical Medicine and funded by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Mitman reveals how Harvard's ethnographic film footage, which constitutes some of the only surviving visual media of early twentieth-century inland Liberians, raises complex questions about film's relationship to national memory and local heritage, thus challenging habitual associations between the medium of film and the practices of racial science.

Introduction: Duty Now For The Future

Introduction:Duty Now For The Future John Lardas Modern (bio) The confidential report begins with a scene of heat and hope-laden tranquility: “Don’t stop around here, but let us go down to Firestone where all is fine.” So sing the Gio hammock men in response to the “big rubber farm” that had recently been established in Liberia. At least according to George Schwab, who had been commissioned by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in 1928 to investigate the culture of Liberia and the prospects of turning it toward the advantage of its newest subsidiary, the Firestone Plantations Company. The hammock men and their relaxed singing style, surmises Schwab, give blessing to the latest scheme of civilized transformation of their world: “The hammock men were but singing the general feeling of the interior people about this great undertaking.”1 Although the hammock men were singing specifically of Firestone, such undertakings had been going on for over a century when this plot of West African land first became the focus of the American Colonization Society. The Firestone’s agribusiness in Harbel, Liberia (the town named after Harvey S. Firestone and his wife, Idabelle), was a continuation of the missionary edge of earlier colonizations. When Firestone contracted Harvard University to initiate an ethnographic expedition, Professor Earnest Hooton tapped Schwab to lead it given his previous experience in producing a 1:1,000.000 map of Africa that was used by the Colonel House Committee in the Paris Peace negotiations. Schwab quickly took an eightmonth leave of absence from his position at the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in order to travel to Liberia.2 The systematicity of the nineteenth-century missionary enterprise had intensified by the time Schwab felt whatever pressures to see what [End Page 165] he saw, smell what he smelt, and to write what he wrote. In his report, the desired movement to be tracked is alive—wider, faster, and deeper than mere territory and the stationary folks upon it. It is an approach to reform by an organization that is, at once, rooted in nineteenth-century modes of governmentality and early-twentieth-century managerial-speak. But it also anticipates a second-order systems phenomenon—a coordination and integration of systems—of race, of reason and resources, of space and time, of behavior and belief down to the molecular details of diet. When Schwab arrives in Liberia in 1928 it is fitting that he travels along routes that connect Missionary outposts: from the Methodist Episcopal Mission Station (6) to the Protestant Episcopal Mission (10) to the Baptist Mission station (12) to the Pentecostal Mission (14) to the Presbyterian Mission (17) up to the boundary that separates the coastlands from the interior. Schwab notes the regrettable lack of missions in the interior just as he himself crosses into the narrative space of ethnographic detail. “Before moving across the threshold we spent a few days measuring men,” writes Schwab (9), suggesting that the greatness of “this great undertaking” (1) is a product of the population’s potential labor value, or more precisely, the report’s single-minded focus on this potential and desire to lay out a reasonable path toward its maximum capitalization (41). Schwab’s report is simultaneously a biopolitical blueprint, corporate strategy session, self-help mirror, and strange confession, all the while turning workers into so many objects—resources to be managed, placated, tortured, deployed—separating the life of men—their faults and potentialities—from the means of production. The future is ever at stake, the goal being to secure “a more permanent and contented working force” (68). “As to which tribe would be most suited for any particular branch of plantation work, it takes some years of experimenting with workmen to really find out” (41). Racial categories come to the fore in Schwab’s calculation of the labor potential of different tribes. In their accumulation, they achieve the appearance of totality, of accounting for life itself, in Liberia: their sensitivity to pain, “olefactory and taste system[s],” their mobility of character (24), their egoism and affections (25), their bonds of friendship and family (26), their moral faculties (27), their “self-interest, caprice [and] gross mysticism” as...

The Firestone Tire & Rubber Company and Liberia’s Civil War

The Firestone Tire & Rubber Company and Liberia’s Civil War

Russell A. Livigni: 2013 Charles Goodyear Medalist

Dr. Russell A. Livigni, retired from GenCorp as the vice president of corporate technology, was named the Rubber Division, ACS 2013 Charles Goodyear Medal winner for his pioneering work with high trans rubbers. Dr. Livigni led the discovery and development of high trans styrene–butadiene rubber (SBR), a crystallizing rubber that has many of the properties and strengths of natural rubber (NR) but does not oxidize or degrade like NR. It was a major breakthrough in tire technology.Dr. Livigni is a native of Akron, Ohio. He graduated from Kenmore High School in 1952, where he was the winner of the Bausch & Lomb Award in Science. While attending high school, he worked part-time in the credit department at the M. O'Neil department store in downtown Akron. After graduating, he worked at the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.'s control laboratory of its Synthetic Rubber Development facility. In 1956, Dr. Livigni completed his B.Sc. in chemistry and in 1960 his Ph.D. in polymer chemistry, with both degrees having been earned at the University of Akron. During his last two years as an undergraduate, he worked as a research assistant in the Institute of Rubber Research. He was the recipient of the Merck Award for undergraduate chemistry majors and was awarded the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.'s Fellowship in his first two years of graduate studies. He was on a National Science Foundation Fellowship his last two years of graduate school.After receiving his Ph.D. degree, Dr. Livigni was first employed at the Ford Scientific Laboratory of the Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Michigan. In 1961, Dr. Livigni joined GenCorp (at that time, The General Tire & Rubber Co.) as a senior research chemist. Subsequently, he rose through a series of positions of increasing responsibility: Group Leader, Polymer Characterization (1962–1963); Section Head, Materials Chemistry & Polymer Characterization (1963–1975); Manager, Polymer & Analytical Chemistry (1975–1980); Associate Director, GenCorp Research (1980–1987); and Vice-President and Director, GenCorp Research (1988–1995). He became Vice-President, Corporate Technology, at GenCorp in 1995 and retired in 1996 to consult for Omnova, a spin-off of GenCorp. Presently, he is a consultant in polymer and rubber chemistry and R&D organization and a member of the advisory boards of the Arts & Sciences College and Chemistry Department of the University of Akron.Dr. Livigni has 37 U.S. patents and numerous technical publications. He discovered high trans SBR, a crystallizing rubber now used in tires. He was involved in the development and commercialization of Telagen used as a rocket propellant binder and poly(propylene oxide) polyols prepared with the zinc hexacyanocobaltate complex catalyst. A past chairman of the Gordon Elastomers Conference (1978), he was awarded the ACESS (Akron Council Engineering and Scientific Societies) Distinguished Award of Council (1991), Melvin Mooney Distinguished Technology Award (1997), University of Akron Alumni Honor Award (2002), University of Akron Department of Polymer Science Outstanding Alumni Award (2002), and the University of Akron Buchtel Award in Natural Sciences (2008).

Funeral Music and the Transformation of Southern Musical and Religious Cultures, 1935-1945

William Leonard Bivens was a thirty-year-old foreman at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Memphis when he suffered a heart attack and died in June 1944. Bivens left a wife and son who chose the National Funeral Home, a funeral home for whites, to provide the funeral service and then bury him. On its ledger, the funeral home listed the music to be played. During the service, the organist was to play two hymns, Sunrise Tomorrow and God Will Take Care of Thee. The prelude was to be Old Rugged Cross, a Broadman Hymnal (Southern Baptist) standard made famous in the early twentieth century by evangelist Billy Sunday, and the postlude was Brahms's Lullaby. 1 The musical pr ogram performed at Bivens's funeral was emblematic of fundamental changes in Southern funeral music: from 1935 (the begin- ning of the funeral home's records) to about 1943, customers who buried their kin from the National Funeral Home requested rural hymns, songs such as Old Rugged Cross and Sunrise Tomorrow. 2 But in 1943, a shift began that became far more pronounced in 1944 when the funeral home's organists began to perform western art music such as Brahms's Lullaby, Chopin's famous death march from his Piano Sonata no. 2, and Massenet's Meditation from Thais. Intriguingly, organists did not stop performing Old Rugged Cross; instead, they mixed European music from the cul-

Foreign Direct Investment and Entrepreneurial Capture in Pre-Conflict Liberia

This paper investigates the capture of entrepreneurial activity in pre-conflict Liberia focusing on the distortions introduced by foreign direct investment (FDI), most notably by the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. The process through which the existing institutions—established by the dominant coastal elite population—responded to this FDI and allocated domestic entrepreneurial talent into (i) monopsony rent-seeking behavior and (ii) the development of small, independent rubber farms encouraged by the foreign concession is discussed. This entrepreneurial capture, while profiting the ruling class, crippled the development of labor market competitiveness and labor market deepening and allowed for the continued disempowerment of the rural, tribal Liberians used as wage labor in the industry. Thus, rather than encouraging innovation and small and medium enterprises, the intersection of entrepreneurship and foreign direct investment in Liberia did little more than allow another channel for the dominant class to benefit from foreign capital inflows and further deepen the fragile fault line between the coastal and rural Liberians.

Latex and Blood

During the twentieth century the United States developed a unique kind of empire, one bound together less by military conquest and direct political administration than by the expansion of markets, corporate influence, and cultural exchange. The political and economic ties between the United States and the Republic of Liberia, cemented in the 1920s when the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company successfully established a major rubber plantation in the country, exemplify this new imperial relationship. Yet the transformation of Liberia into the United States' rubber empire depended on new tools of seeing and new forms of scientific and medical expertise. Through a focus on the Harvard African Expedition to Liberia in 1926, the motion-picture record it gathered, and the place of rubber as a precious commodity in the global economy, this article investigates the relationships among science, business, and the state in the economic transformation of nature and a nation.

Subgame perfection and the ethics of competition

AbstractThis paper integrates economics and business ethics through the use of the subgame perfection/backward induction decision rule. It is shown that textbook examples of subgame perfection differ in their ethical complexity. Specifically, predatory pricing is difficult to justify on both game‐theoretic and ethical grounds, whereas ‘poison pill’ takeover defenses have complex economic and ethical ramifications. Further, I employ backward induction to examine two additional areas of ethics and management decision‐making: product recall (the Ford Explorer and Firestone tires), and price versus advertising competition. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Workers' Control and Militancy in An Iowa Labor Movement: the Use of Wildcat Strikes at the Des Moines Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 1950-1959

Workers' Control and Militancy in An Iowa Labor Movement: the Use of Wildcat Strikes at the Des Moines Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 1950-1959

Radials, Rollovers and Responsibility: An Examination of the Ford-Firestone Case

In August of 2000, Firestone executives initiated the second largest tire recall in U.S. history. Many of the recalled tires had been installed as original factory equipment on the popular Ford Explorer SUVs. At the time of the recall, the tires and vehicles had been linked to numerous accidents and deaths, most of which occurred when tire blowouts resulted in vehicle rollovers. While Firestone's role in this case has been widely acknowledged, Ford executives have managed to deflect much of the attention away from themselves, mainly by claiming that the Firestone tires were not its product, and therefore not its responsibility. In this paper, we examine the extent to which Ford can be held morally responsible for the incidents at issue. In so doing, we develop an approach for determining when an item is a product in its own right, as opposed to a component of another product. We argue that such an analysis not only provides a better understanding of this case, but also more properly accounts for the extent to which evolutions in technology and business relationships can affect issues of moral responsibility in business contexts.

Market Overreaction to Product Recall Revisited—The Case of Firestone Tires and the Ford Explorer

We revisit the issue of market reaction to product recall and evaluate the magnitude of market reaction to the news of recall. We also examine how the competitors' stock prices are affected by the product recall. Specifically, we evaluate the stock price effects of events relating to the recall of Firestone tires by the Bridgestone Corporation, which were linked to the rollover accidents of the Ford Explorer SUVs. Our results indicate that the initial loss in the market value both for the Bridgestone Corporation and Ford Motor Company was far in excess of direct costs associated with recall. The market losses are approximately equal to the near worst-case estimates of direct and indirect costs, litigation costs, regulation compliance costs and costs associated with future losses in sales. The firms recovered their market value as more information on actual costs became available. These results suggest that the market initially overreacts negatively to the recall news and this reaction is generally based on all potential losses associated with recall. This reaction is corrected as information on actual costs becomes available. With regard to the competitors, our results show that the major competitors in the tire and auto industries experienced a significant gain in the market value of their stocks probably because their products were substitutes for the products affected by recall.

Rollover of Sport Utility Vehicles

Recently, the PBS program “Frontline”1 examined the history of the development of the sport utility vehicle (SUV) and the efforts to force car makers to design SUVs that are less prone to rollover. The dangers of SUV rollovers were spotlighted in the fall of 2000, when the Ford-Firestone scandal prompted Congress to launch a series of hearings focusing on deaths and injuries related to faulty Firestone tires mounted on Ford Explorers. However, during the same 10-year period in which Ford-Firestone rollover crashes caused some 300 deaths, more than 12,000 people — 40 times as many — died in SUV rollovers unrelated to tire failure.1

Judicial Standard of Review in ERISA Benefit Claim Cases

The federal law known as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) provides protection for participants' employee benefits and prescribes a uniform set of requirements for employers in the voluntary delivery of such benefits. Unfortunately the statute is silent regarding the judicial standard of review in ERISA litigation cases. The Supreme Court in Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. v. Bruch rendered the de novo standard as the presumed standard of review in benefit denial cases. This allows the court to substitute its decision for that of the plan administrator. The ability to second-guess the findings of a plan administrator can cause unexpected administrative and substantives consequences for employers maintaining these plans. The federal courts have fashioned a common law alternative to the de novo standard permitting plan administrators, in certain circumstances, a more deferential review. However, the application of this more deferential standard, especially in conflict of interest cases (e.g., the employer as plan administrator of a self-funded plan), is anything but straightforward within the various federal circuits, either for the benefit of the participant or the plan administrator. This article examines the discrepancy in application of the more deferential standard by circuits and recommends a multi-step approach for courts to use which is consistent with ERISA's legislative intent, as well the goal of providing a uniform and cohesive rule for employee benefit plans.

Ford Explorers and Firestone Tires

Ford Explorers and Firestone Tires

FIRESTONE'S TIRE PROBLEM

Firestone has admitted that design and manufacturing problems contributed to tire failures resulting in 148 U.S. traffic deaths. But some industry experts go further and suggest that the manufacturing problems led to poor chemical bonds between the rubber components and steel belts, which led to the tread separation problems those tires have experienced. The tires—the Firestone ATX, ATXII, and Wilderness AT—were primarily used as original equipment on Ford's sport-utility vehicle, the Explorer. Firestone says the tires were made at the company's Decatur, 111., plant. Initial reports of the Firestone problem surfaced in May when Ford recalled Firestone tires used on the Explorer in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Saudi Arabia. In early August, Firestone, with prompting from the government watchdog National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), recalled 14.4 million tires in the U.S. Tire making is a complicated process, one observer tells C&EN. Lots of variables lead to anomalies, and the pub...

The Dynamics of Standing Still: Firestone Tire & Rubber and the Radial Revolution

Business historians have illuminated how first movers in many emerging industries secure an enduring leadership position, but have devoted less attention to the processes by which industry leaders relinquish their dominance. This paper examines why rubber industry leader Firestone Tire & Rubber failed to respond effectively to new technology and foreign competition. The author argues that Firestone did not respond by doing nothing, but rather accelerated activities that had contributed to its past success. Firestone's response was constrained by managers' existing strategic frames and values, and the company's processes and long-standing relationships with customers and employees.

Surfing the Noosphere

When I was an undergraduate student in physics at the University of Akron, I had a job as a page at the univer-sity library. Since I had served as a page at the Firestone branch of the Akron Public Library located across from the main gate of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, my campus position was both familiar and invigorating. In the summer when things went slack, we had time to inventory and reorganize the stacks. It was in the base-ment stacks that I found leather-bound volumes of the 15th and 16th centuries—books that I am sure now reside in special climate-controlled vaults. With leather under my fingernails I examined shelf after shelf. On the last pages of volumes that bound London newsweeklies were tabulations of the deaths in the city that year. The num-bers, as I remember them now, were in the thousands; they probably included only tradesmen and nobility. They were fascinating as real and immediate connections to a remote past.

The demand of the future: “The complete executive”

Human Resource ManagementVolume 32, Issue 2-3 p. 385-397 Executive Forum The demand of the future: “The complete executive” John H. Zimmerman, John H. Zimmerman Senior vice president and chief human resources officer for MCI Communications Corporation with responsibility for all human resource activities. Prior to joining MCI in 1982, Zimmerman was vice president of employee relations and chief labor negotiator at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Ohio.Search for more papers by this author John H. Zimmerman, John H. Zimmerman Senior vice president and chief human resources officer for MCI Communications Corporation with responsibility for all human resource activities. Prior to joining MCI in 1982, Zimmerman was vice president of employee relations and chief labor negotiator at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Ohio.Search for more papers by this author First published: Summer ‐ Autumn (Fall) 1993 https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.3930320213Citations: 2 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume32, Issue2-3Special Issue: Special Issue on 360-Degree FeedbackSummer ‐ Autumn (Fall) 1993Pages 385-397 RelatedInformation