Selling Icarus' Wings

With the use of sponsorship, the company was especially successful in establishing itself as a sports media brand, primarily within action sports industries. However, in addition to sponsoring entertainment media, Red Bull also financially supported scientific research. Thus, despite the intensified public scrutiny placed on the health risks of energy drinks, the company's involvement in funding academic work allowed it to indirectly participate in relevant scientific discourse or policy debates concerning the regulation of energy beverages. When using a critical political economic lens, both the work of sponsored athletes and sponsored scientists can be understood as similar types of corporate public relations work and subjected to similar pressures of commercialization. Given the complex power dynamics at play within sponsorship agreements, critical political economy's emphasis on re-emphasizing the undermining of labor evaluation within cultural work is a fruitful foundation for revealing the ways in which corporate sponsors such as Red Bull have used such agreements to sway the creative efforts of athletic performers and university professionals toward their own interests. The results of this analysis reveal that Red Bull actively facilitates the creation of neoliberal discourse through its sponsorship of action sports media and contrarian academic research. As illustrated by the answers to RQ1 and RQ2, the company has extensively invested organizational resources toward developing sponsorship networks within both action sports and nutrition science. Regarding the company's sponsorship of action sports, at the time of this study, nearly 90% of sponsored athletes listed on Red Bull's official U.S. website compete in non-traditional sport disciplines. Within research related to energy drinks, the results of this dissertation revealed the company is heavily involved within academic discourse. Out of the 112 studies examined, 27 (or 24%) featured authors with disclosed associations with Red Bull. Not only did this make the organization the most prolific sponsor of energy drink-related research, but out of the 27 studies, 25 exclusively focused on topics disputing scientific evidence indicating potential health risks linked to the use of energy drinks. When contextually examining the political economic dynamics of company's athletic and academic sponsorship networks, the results to RQ3 highlight Red Bull's organizational emphasis on unlimited growth is all-encompassing, including not just athletic performance, but all human potential in general.