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The Materiality of the Corporation: Oil, Gas, and Corporate Social Technologies in the Remaking of a Russian Region
Abstract
In the Perm Region of Russia, recent social and cultural projects sponsored by energy companies prominently reference certain material qualities of oil and gas. The depth associated with the region's oil deposits is evoked in cultural heritage celebrations funded by Lukoil‐Perm, and the connectivity associated with natural gas pipelines figures in PermRegionGaz's efforts to foster new patterns of sociability. Attending to the larger material and semiotic shifts in which these projects are embedded points to a significant dimension of contemporary hydrocarbon politics and to specific ways in which corporations attempt to transform critiques of their operations. [oil, natural gas, corporations, materiality, infrastructure, corporate social responsibility, postsocialisms]
... In these nations specifically, and in others states across the world more broadly, governmental frameworks are uncomfortably defined by an almost contradictory agenda: on the one hand, they are oriented towards producing manageable citizens equally adhering to the rule of law, and, on the other hand, they are focused on creating environments and structures fostering the state's economy to strategically tap into the global market (Ong 2007). In this process, as evidenced by ethnographic explorations in fast developing economies (Benson and Kirsch 2010;Coombe and Baird 2015;Welker 2009;Rogers 2012), corporations are often allowed to provide, to local actors, unique privileged access to cultural capital in an effort to co-opt local elites and drastically impact local epistemologies underpinning perceptions of socioeconomic development and sustainability. ...
... The project is directly connected with a strategic commodity traded with a global economic power. Furthermore, as the timely ethnographic research of Rogers (2012) in the similarly peripheral Perm region (Russia) has illustrated, pipelines are known to have a positive connotation as they elicit connectivity and ( previously unknown) transnational cooperation. However, the belief in ecological return of the pipeline is striking, and specifically highlights Gazprom's impact on redefining local subjectivities. ...
... Strictly speaking, the use of heritage by Gazprom in creating certain subjectivities and political structures on the ground in favor of pipeline construction is hardly comparable with this. However, a central topic that this case studyand other research on the use of culture as a corporate security technology (Rogers 2012;Benson and Kirsch 2010)-shares with existing heritage diplomacy work, is the role of archaeology in relationship building. Ultimately, suggesting a broader and less compartmentalized way of thinking about the nature of heritage in a century prescribed by globalization and neoliberalism. ...
A growing number of scholarly works in the field of archaeology and heritage studies have been investigating the role of culture in relationship management. By assessing the use of heritage and repatriation of archaeological finds by multinational Gazprom, a natural gas company, in the Russian Federation, this paper contributes to this heritage diplomacy research by critically repositioning some of its core paradigms and its predominant emphasis on interstate diplomatic processes. As explored in this paper, archaeology and heritage are cultural technologies that have to be framed in the broader statecraft policies of the nation state, and are enmeshed with different types of power and include a plethora of agents. By exploring a case study investigating the corporate security initiatives of a resource extraction and transport giant in Russia, this paper contributes to the extensive literature on neoliberalism, corporate social responsibility and federalism in newly developing economies.
... Equinor engages diff erently in the north than in larger cities where the headquarters are located, and this regional focus highlights how material and political particularities of the region come to shape the perception of the company at other scales also (cf. Rogers 2012). Throughout this chapter, I will make three main points on the nature of CSR as practiced domestically: fi rstly, the relation between the company and the town must be seen in relation to the intertwinement of Equinor's ownership history (as the formerly fully state-controlled company Statoil); secondly, infrastructure and taxation play a crucial role in the community's gain and thereby their willingness to be a host municipality for petroleum; and thirdly, trust and the changing nature of trust are important as both the ownership structure and corporate communication structures change. ...
... Both concerts featured more famous bands and hosts than the 2017 event, with an atmosphere of a people's celebration aimed more at the population as a whole than the children and youth who are now Equinor's campaign focus nationally. 12 Such sponsorship is in part aimed at tamping down critique (Rogers 2012), and Equinor's gi ing of the concerts certainly took place at a time when the company needed goodwill. The newspapers reported the fi rst of these concerts as a successful event that had been welcomed by people in the town. ...
Do transnational corporations act more responsibly when they are owned by the state and informed by the Nordic societal model? This is explored through multisited ethnographic studies of Norwegian energy and extraction corporations' operations abroad. The book also situates the corporate ethics in the Norwegian 'home context' of the corporations. Case studies are from operations in Brazil, Tanzania, Turkey, China, Northern Kurdistan and the far north of Norway, and include the corporations Norsk Hydro, DNO, Statkraft, and Equinor.
... Somit handelt es sich bei dieser Rohstoffpolitik unmittelbar um Biopolitik, da sie auf die unmittelbare Verfasstheit des Menschen als Individuum und gesellschaftliches Wesen abzielt (vgl. Boyer 2011, Rogers 2011). ...
... Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986). In ähnlicher Weise wie ich in diesem Buch kontextualisiert Rogers (2012) Erdöl als Rohstoff und Pipelines im postsozialistischen Russland am Beispiel der Erdölregion Perm als materielle, sinnstiftende Netze mit ihren sozialen Prozessen. ...
... Somit handelt es sich bei dieser Rohstoffpolitik unmittelbar um Biopolitik, da sie auf die unmittelbare Verfasstheit des Menschen als Individuum und gesellschaftliches Wesen abzielt (vgl. Boyer 2011, Rogers 2011). ...
... Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986). In ähnlicher Weise wie ich in diesem Buch kontextualisiert Rogers (2012) Erdöl als Rohstoff und Pipelines im postsozialistischen Russland am Beispiel der Erdölregion Perm als materielle, sinnstiftende Netze mit ihren sozialen Prozessen. ...
... Drawing upon primary data collected at the Solwara 1 DSM project in PNG, 2 this paper argues that the specific materialities of the deep-sea provoke and enable particular forms of 'corporate social technology' (Rogers, 2012) that shape the corporate response to controversy. In particular, the paper exposes and analyses the ways in which the geophysical properties of the deep-ocean are mobilised by Nautilus Minerals in PNG in order to counter narrate DSM as a more 'sustainable' alternative to conventional forms of terrestrial mining. ...
... Where this has happened, it has been anthropology, rather than geography, that has been at the forefront of work that has begun to address this provocation (Manning, 2010;Rogers, 2012). Seen as essential for understanding CSR in the era of the Anthropocene, this framing critically positions the 'social terrain' being fought over as being about the 'biophysical properties of place' (Dougherty and Olsen 2014) as well as the 'corporate political strategies' articulated by different human interests (Levy & Egan, 2003). ...
The world's first deep-sea mining (DSM) project has witnessed the commercial development of plans to extract copper and gold from deposits 1600m deep in the waters of offshore Papua New Guinea (PNG). Viewed as ‘experimental’ and ‘uncertain’ by its critics, it has afforded both controversy and resistance. This paper critically analyses the multifarious strategies that the industry's apologists use in order to respond to environmental concerns and to manufacture consent. It draws upon extensive primary data conducted at the ‘Solwara 1’ DSM project in Papua New Guinea in order to highlight three different ways in which DSM is legitimised by its contractor, Nautilus Minerals. All of these draw upon the spatio-temporal materialities of the deep-sea. In the first instance, the corporation shifts its responsibility away from the ‘social’ realm, instead placing it on a ‘nature’ that is constructed as violent and unruly. Secondly, it emphasises both the relatively short life-span and areal footprint of its mining operations. Finally, Nautilus emphasises the ‘placelessness’ and remoteness of the deep-ocean by claiming that its operations ‘have no human impact’ despite the presence of proximate small island communities. These strategies are part of a corporate understanding that is aware, rather than ignorant, of contemporary geopolitical formations that include geologic and non-human actors and operate dynamically in space and time. Taken together, the paper shows the ways in which resource spatio-temporalities come to matter for the types of CSR practices and narratives that emerge in the context of deep-ocean space and time.
... Somit handelt es sich bei dieser Rohstoffpolitik unmittelbar um Biopolitik, da sie auf die unmittelbare Verfasstheit des Menschen als Individuum und gesellschaftliches Wesen abzielt (vgl. Boyer 2011, Rogers 2011). ...
... Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986). In ähnlicher Weise wie ich in diesem Buch kontextualisiert Rogers (2012) Erdöl als Rohstoff und Pipelines im postsozialistischen Russland am Beispiel der Erdölregion Perm als materielle, sinnstiftende Netze mit ihren sozialen Prozessen. ...
Nahezu unbekannt sind der Öffentlichkeit die Lebensweisen jener ArbeiterInnen, die das „schwarze und blaue Gold“ für den Export nach Europa fördern. Sie sind fahrende und fliegende Menschen, die zyklisch für Wochen oder Monate in den Fördergebieten leben und arbeiten, um wieder für eine Weile zu ihren Familien heimzukehren. Das Buch führt kurzweilig von der Wolgaregion in das subarktische Sibirien. Die Autorin begleitet fernpendelnde Menschen über Tausende von Kilometern. Sie erzählt vom Leben in der sogenannten „Russischen Erdgashauptstadt“ Novy Urengoy, das sich zwischen Erinnerungen an die Sowjetunion und staatsnahen sowie neoliberalen Wirtschaftspraktiken abspielt. Diese detaillierte Ethnographie gibt einen kritischen Einblick in die russische Petroleumindustrie.
Full Open Access: http://www.boehlau-verlag.com/download/164125/978-3-205-79694-7_OpenAccess.pdf
With extendes summaries in Russian and English
... One key example is the so-called 'corporate social technologies' (CST), which corporations use to handle relations with societies of extraction. According to Rogers (2012) and Kirsch (2014), some examples of corporate social technological applications and deployments include manipulating science and research, dividing critics and social movements, delaying the acknowledgment of substantial problems (the first and significant step in addressing them), denying those for which there is no public, physical evidence or outright concealment of evidence. In Zimbabwe and in Mutoko, the people do not trust the government because it downplays, hides, and denies the problems associated with black granite mining. ...
There is a rising interest in the Global South, to ensure that mineral resources are governed to benefit local communities where they are extracted. The shared Africa Mining Vision and economic aspirations in Zimbabwe seeking to integrate equity in governing and extracting mineral resources reflects such interests. Yet despite these aspirations and commitments to mining development that does not continue to disenfranchise communities, voices of communities remain peripheral to commitments to improve the mining industry that has historically been illustrated unequal, stimulating scholarship on the natural resource curse and recently unequal ecological exchange. I begin this research by asking how people in Mutoko district experience black granite mining and its governance. I inquire seeking to bring forth voices from below, those affected first-hand by extraction and produce an ethnocentric account of mining anthropology rooted in the Habermasian concept of the lifeworld and how its colonization by the system (government-corporation-complex responsible for mining) shapes socioeconomic and environmental affairs at the margins. My key findings show that communities shoulder the multiple burdens of black granite extraction without getting its rewards. Broken bridges, damaged roads, dirty air, hazardous living environments and loss of land are some of the key socioeconomic effects currently being experienced. The current governance regime characterised by outdated laws, dishonesty, intimidation of the governed permits the burdens described to perpetuate. I conclude that in the marginalised lifeworld resides knowledge, capacity and experiences that must be fully accounted for in reshaping governance of extraction to lift the burdens of mining from communities.
... The problem of organizational boundaries poses large difficulties for considering dimensions of interest, control, or normativity located within, performed by, or traceable back to a single organization or its actors. One solution to thinking about the distributed nature of the corporation is to consider it as materially distributed across multiple sites, a sum of its various functions from production to administration (Rogers 2012, Welker 2014, 5, Ferguson 2005, see also , Tsoukas 1996). This approach parallels Marilyn Strathern's (1988) insights into the ways that persons are themselves distributed, or "dividual." ...
This dissertation analyzes changing practices of hierarchy and authority within South Korean business conglomerates. Corporations are often imagined as persons or brands driven by a basic economic goal of profit-seeking. Internally, however, managerial corporations are complex sites of competing modes of control. This is a salient issue among the leviathan-like conglomerates of South Korea where their economic clout pervades social and political life but is elusive to pin down internally. South Korean business conglomerates, commonly referred to as chaebol, are depicted as pyramids of control mediated by military-like hierarchies. This dissertation gathers empirical evidence from the headquarters of one conglomerate, the Sangdo Group (a pseudonym), to understand how hierarchy and authority within top-level management operate, through salient political symbols, genres of management, documents, and other office technologies. Taking an ethnographic perspective on managerial practices reveals that ideas about corporate control are changing in contemporary South Korea. Old political symbols of top-down authority from strong leaders are being devalued, new management techniques implemented, and friendlier work places promoted. These changes do not signal the absence of corporate control, however, but changing sites and modalities through which it operates. The dissertation depicts how within one conglomerate, centralized management was not a given state of affairs but something that had to be created. This was done by creating new forms of expertise in human resources, strategy, public relations, and other departments. The dissertation traces how managers sought to establish their own authorities via their professional knowledge while navigating complex political terrains internally. Expert managers attempted to embed this authority in scientific analyses, friendly office policies, modern branding, common values, and standardized processes, efforts that redirected authority from other actors or politely concealed their own intents. Key to these efforts was the need to manage how projects themselves were read as authoritative or not. At the same time, new projects generated unexpected outcomes, subjecting expert managers to their own forms of control, creating awkward office interactions, and inadvertently re-instantiating forms of hierarchy old and new. In the broader landscape of South Korean conglomerates, this study suggests that we see corporate management projects as embedded within complex internal encounters often not visible to outsiders. Ultimately, conglomerate reform remains an elusive goal for regulators, shareholders, owners, employees, and citizens, in South Korea and abroad. Reform is difficult even for managers themselves who often find themselves negotiating their authority within a stream of ongoing discursive activities, from reporting to PowerPointing. Rather than reducing conglomerates to fixed ownership links, organizational structures, or cultural dispositions, this dissertation suggests that manager-based corporations are always marked by concerns over competing sites and modes of control.
... A growing body of literature addresses how CSR assists in advancing extraction through various means (Bebbington 2010;Franco 2014;Costanza 2016;Coleman 2018;Dunlap 2018). Rooted in Foucauldian thought, the term corporate social technologies is used in this article to portray corporations' efforts to shape social and cultural life (Foucault 1991;Rogers 2012) and to engineer consent (Bernays 1947). Stuart Kirsch (2014) uses the term corporate social technologies to include companies' ability to adapt to pressure from critics, promote uncertainty and doubt in order to establish consent, as well as to manipulate scientific research. ...
Extractive industries increasingly use compensation measures to silence opposition, divide communities and stop resistance. Cerrejón, Colombia's largest transnational coal mining corporation, has a long history of damaging Indigenous Wayúu, Afro-Colombian and local communities' health and livelihoods. In the northeastern Colombian region of La Guajira, local communities struggle against the social and environmental impacts of coal mining. This article, based on field research conducted between 2018-2019, concludes that corporate and state-backed consultation and compensation projects are incommensurable with the damage caused by the coal mining operations and are implemented as a corporate social technology that undermines community cohesion and reinforces a power imbalance, perpetuating and enabling the expansion of damaging coal mining practices in Colombia.
... If Wengle focuses our attention on the technological materiality of the corporation (see also Rogers 2012) in the agricultural sector, Krupp's ethnography of fitness and fizkul'tura in Moscow explores the material intersections of corporation and state in the body. The line of investigation into corporations and corporeality is centuries old: bodies politic, corporate, and physical were, after all, very much on the mind of Thomas Hobbes when he warned, in Leviathan, that the new trading companies of his era were "lesser Commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of natural man" ([1651] 2006:187). ...
... Hydrocarbon extraction and transport might be relatively dematerialised compared with coal mining (Mitchell 2011), for example. As described by Rogers (2012) in his analysis of Lukoil's activities in the Perm region, the true materiality of the oil and gas industry lies in the outcome of its CSR strategies. In addition to transportation infrastructure directly benefitting the pipeline and Gazprom staff, a suite of other infrastructures were funded by Gazprom geared at raising the profile of the corporation on the ground. ...
en By analysing how shamanist nomads who previously opposed large infrastructure works have suddenly become enchanted by the prospect of the construction of a large gas pipeline, this paper ethnographically investigates how technology and infrastructure become perceived as promising by ordinary people on the ground in post‐Soviet Siberia. Drawing attention to the discursive impact of large gas corporations and the role of deeply embedded Soviet conceptions of modernity in filling pipelines with cultural meaning, this paper provides unique insights into the highly localised engagements with infrastructure. As such, this paper contributes to the anthropology of Russia, where infrastructure has only recently received academic attention. It also corresponds to the ‘infrastructural turn’ in anthropology by studying the social, cultural and material conditions ensuring that infrastructure becomes perceived as promising. Furthermore, this paper explores the significant impact of ancillary infrastructures connected to a construction project in entangling people with technology and infrastructure.
Gazoducs prometteurs et nationalisme pétrolier : la socialité des infrastructures non construites dans la Sibérie autochtone
fr Cet article analyse d’un point de vue ethnographique la manière dont la technologie et les infrastructures ont été reçues favorablement par les habitants de la Sibérie post‐soviétique, en étudiant comment les nomades chamanistes, opposés par le passé aux grands travaux d'infrastructures, furent soudain enchantés par la construction à venir d'un grand gazoduc. Mettant l’accent sur les effets discursifs des grandes compagnies gazières et sur le rôle des conceptions soviétiques profondément enracinées de la modernité visant à remplir les gazoducs d’une signification culturelle, cet article livre des renseignements inédits sur les tensions sociales fortement localisées en matière d'infrastructure. Il alimente ainsi les recherches anthropologiques sur la Russie, où les infrastructures constituent un objet d’étude depuis peu. Par ailleurs, il s’intéresse aux conditions sociales, culturelles et matérielles permettant à l'infrastructure d’être perçue comme un atout, et s’inscrit ainsi dans le cadre du « tournant infrastructurel » de l'anthropologie. Il explore également l'impact significatif des infrastructures annexes – liées à un projet de construction – qui contribuent à relier les populations aux technologies et aux infrastructures.
... This position has two main implications for the applicability of the framework on the political economy of oil: first, instead of analytically chasing an elusive political settlement where instrumental power tends to hold sway, we should pay more attention to how democratic politics and institutional reforms in oil-rich countries permit inclusivity, deliberation and the proliferation of innovative ideas in the management and use of oil resources. Second, contrary to the received notion handed to us by the political settlements literature, the regimes of accumulation and regulation associated with oil tend to be less amenable to the strict dichotomy between formal and informal orders within developing countries (Rogers 2012;Watts 2004). ...
Analysis of political settlements has emerged from the shadows of new institutionalism and moved to the epicentre of political economy analysis across Africa. This debate takes on the framework by scrutinising its applicability to the politics of oil through the combined lens of critical political economy and contentious politics. It argues that contrary to the postulations of strategic elite bargains by political settlement researchers, Africa's oil landscape is marked by pluralistic politics and contestations at multiple scales.
... On the one hand, authors refer to a resource curse that explains why oil-rich countries generally have a poor overall economic performance and undemocratic governments [1][2][3][4]. An alternative body of literature (referring to the US, Canada, Norway and Russia) views oil as an important asset for development [5][6][7][8], as long as it is accompanied with strong institutions and policy instruments to fight the resource curse. ...
This paper analyses benefit-sharing arrangements between oil companies, native corporations, the North Slope Borough, and Indigenous Peoples in Alaska. It aims to disentangle the complexities of benefit-sharing to understand existing procedural and distributive equity. We identified benefit-sharing regimes involving modes, principles, and mechanisms of benefit-sharing. This includes modes that reflect institutionalized interactions, such as paternalism, company centered social responsibility (CCSR), partnership, and shareholders. Principles can be based on compensation, investment and charity. Mechanisms can involve negotiated benefits and structured benefits, mandated by legislation, contracts, or regulation. Furthermore, mechanisms can involve semi-formal and trickle-down benefits. Trickle-down benefits come automatically to the community along with development. The distribution of money by the North Slope Borough represents the paternalistic mode, yet involves investment and mandated principles with top–down decision making. They are relatively high in distributional equity and low in participatory equity. Native corporations predominantly practice the shareholders’ mode, investment principle, and mandated mechanisms. The oil companies’ benefit-sharing represents a mixed type combining CCSR and partnership modess, several principles (investment, compensatory, charity) and multiple types of mechanisms, such as mandated, negotiated, semi-formal and trickle-down. These arrangements vary in terms of distributive equity, and participatory equity is limited.
... We do this in order to highlight how forms of tactical violence and technologies of pacification work across the landscape of the operation. As we will explore in detail below, QMM's concessions comprise what we describe as 'territorially fixed' spaces for mining, conservation and environmental rehabilitation, 'non-territorial regulatory spaces' formed by technical practices (K€ ak€ onen & Thuon, 2018, p. 2) associated with compensatory biodiversity offsetting, and what we introduce as non-territorial pacified development spaces formed through corporate social technologies (Rogers, 2012) operating through the institution of so-called 'development gifts'. ...
Bringing political ecology's concern with the critical politics of nature and resource violence into dialogue with key debates in political geography, critical security studies and research on the geographies and phenomenology of violence and warfare, this paper explores strategies 'from above' in relation to the establishment and operation of the Rio Tinto QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) ilmenite mine in southeast Madagascar. While QMM claims to be a responsible 'green' self-regulator and sustainable development actor, it has triggered serious social, environmental and legal conflicts since its inception, including allegations of a 'double land grab' to accommodate mining activities and compensatory biodiversity offsetting. We argue that 'pacification', theorised as a productive form of violence that works through the reordering of socio-nature, underwrites the forms of 'security', 'stability' and even 'sustainability' that facilitate multiple and overlapping strategies of value extraction in the territorial and extraterritorial spaces occupied by the QMM mine partnership. By situating these dynamics historically, we identify ways in which pacification draws upon sedimented and evolving logics of racialised violence to facilitate operations and silence opposition.
... Hagglund, 2000). Indeed, it could be argued that exploration geologists and speculators in the junior mining market pre-empt through their practice the resource materialities critiqueor the claim that resources are 'not substances "in nature"' but are instead 'complex arrangements of physical stuff, extractive infrastructures, calculative devices, discourses of … the nation and the corporation' (Richardson & Weszkalnys, 2014, p. 7; see also Limbert & Ferry, 2008;Rogers, 2012;see Bakker & Bridge, 2006, pp. 8-9). ...
In this paper, I examine the capacity that ‘technologies of the imagination’ have to suture routinized financial practices in the City of London to the opening up of new extractive industry ‘frontiers’. I focus on the political risk rankings through which host jurisdictions of speculative projects are assessed, and the selection of discount rates in the valuation of prospective mines. By treating these as technologies of the imagination – rather than calculative devices – the significance of the meaning created by mining professionals as they generate images of ‘politically risky’ territories or jurisdictions prone to ‘resource nationalism’ comes into view, along with a particular deployment of international investment law upon which speculative activity in the junior mining market depends.
... One significant strain of this scholarship focuses on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the energy sector, one of the chief ways in which diverse publics encounter enterprises that specialize in energy. In a study of energy-sector CSR projects in Russia, for instance, Rogers [131] pointed to the ways in which the social development projects of Gazprom and Lukoil drew heavily on the material infrastructures associated with each industry. Gazprom's imagery and rhetoric focused on the rebuilding of social connectivity in the wake of the turbulent 1990s, just as its business model sought to connect ever more towns and villages to its gas network. ...
This jointly authored essay reviews recent scholarship in the social sciences, broadly understood, that focuses on the materiality of energy. Although this work is extraordinarily diverse in its disciplinary and interdisciplinary influences and its theoretical and methodological commitments, we discern four areas of convergence and divergence that we term the locations, uses, relationalities, and analytical roles of energy materiality. We trace these convergences and divergences through five recent scholarly conversations: materiality as a constraint on actors’ behavior; historical energy systems; mobility, space and scale; discourse and power via energy materialities; and energy becoming material.
... Based on this reconfiguration, anthropologists stress that the resource curse is not a peculiarity of low or even middle income countries, highlighting the presence of the various characteristics taken to be symptoms of the resource curse in high-income countries such as Australia, the United States, Canada, Scotland, Norway, Finland, Russia, and the Gulf (see for example, Brotherstone, 2012;Coumans, 2011;Cumbers, 2012;Gilberthorpe et al., 2014;Smith, 2014;Langton & Mazel, 2008;Lawrence, 2007;McNeish & Logan, 2012;Overland & Kutschera, 2012;Rogers, 2012;Szeman, 2014). What these studies underline is that 'the curse' is not solely driven by economics. ...
... Elsewhere, the ability of trade unions to represent the interests of their members has been weakened either through co-option by the state (Lazar 2017a) or violent repression by judicial and security forces (Gill 2007). In large corporate workplaces, political faith in trade unions has also been eroded by Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, which assert that capital has the capacity to conduct itself in a manner that is of benefit to classes of labour, potentially rendering trade unions less relevant (cf Bair and Palpacuer 2012;De Neve 2009;Mezzadri 2017;Rajak 2011;Rogers 2012). ...
Employees in global workplaces commonly suggest they are being failed by trade union representatives that betray the political ideals of their institutions. The tenacity of this discourse requires interrogation, since the notion persists even in contexts that lack evidence of such practices occurring. Based upon a comparison of Kazakhstan and India, we suggest that there is a fundamental slippage between the emotive aspect of union politics and the banal realties of institutional processes. We explore how conservative and radical trade unions alike rely upon appeals to an affect of struggle, in order to rationalise their work as part of an international and historically continuous political project. The paper explains why it is in the bureaucratic nature of trade unions to betray such an affect.
... As part of the material turn across the social sciences, scholars have employed notions of materiality to explore the novel material environments that define sites of resource extraction and the various ways natural resources are handled, speculated about, and imbricated in distinct lifeworlds (Bridge 2009;Rogers 2012;Rolston 2013;Walsh 2010). Interest in resource materiality has likewise engendered questions of resource becoming-the cultural, political, and scientific means through which resources are imagined, abstracted, and brought into being as natural objects (Huber 2018;Kneas 2017Kneas , 2018Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). ...
Along the peripheries of mineral exploration, resources come and go, defined by periods of presence and absence. Though recent scholarship on “resource becoming” highlights the nonlinearity of subsoil resources, analyses of identity formation and resource conflict still tends to assume resource inevitability. Yet the ebbing of resource potential reflects on-the-ground social fields that have received little ethnographic attention. Such is the case in the Intag region of northwestern Ecuador, site of copper mineralization and an ongoing conflict over resource exploration. In this article, I examine the everyday relations between pro-mining “mineros” and anti-mining “ecologistas” during and after a conflict with Ascendant Copper, a junior company present between 2004 and 2008. Analyzing these local relations through the medium of social play, I describe the mediated and equivocated ways locals articulated these subject positions. This dynamic set the conditions for a distinct period of aftermath following Ascendant's departure, during which the significance of minero and ecologista subjectivities waned. While anthropologists have long approached emergent identities as processes of being and becoming, this article puts into sharper relief questions of degree and duration, highlighting the partial formation of these identities and the conditions through which they may subside. [identity, temporality, resource becoming, mining conflict, Ecuador].
... This study also builds on and extends the existing political ecology literature on oil, which has often discussed the shifting temporalities of petrochemicals (Limbert 2010;Rogers 2015;Huber 2017), as well as the material assemblages of chemical infrastructure (Appell 2012; Rodgers 2012; Rodgers and O'Neill 2012;Barry 2013;Larkin 2013;Appell, Mason, and Watts 2015;Landa 2016;Folkers 2017). Huber (2013), for example, drew attention to the unique temporality of fossil fuels, noting how they represent the biological compression of deep time. ...
This article explores how time interacts forcefully with the experience of living within toxic spaces. Through ethnographic research and interviews with residents of a contaminated town in Louisiana, the article unpacks the uncertain temporalities of industrial pollution and potential means of resistance. Putting Mbembe's (2003) postcolonial treatise on necropolitics in conversation with Nixon's (2011) work on slow violence, the article examines the racialized, uneven, and attritional experience of petrochemical pollution in a former plantation landscape. By exploring the necropolitics of place, the article reveals how unjust exposure to toxic chemicals creates contemporary “death-worlds” that are experienced in temporally uncertain and constricting ways. The oppressive nature of uncertain temporality makes the material assemblages of petrochemical infrastructure daily environmental concerns. Yet by focusing on the lived experience of communities inhabiting this toxic geography, the article notes how witnessing gradual changes to the local environment has become a barometer for perceiving chronic pollution. The idea of “slow observation” is posited as a useful counterpoint to slow violence and the permanent wounding of toxic pollution. Slow observation is an important aspect of living with sustained environmental brutality and offers a potential means of political resistance and doing undone environmental justice.
... Furthermore, referring to the literature on identity construction based on materialities of energy in Russia (Bassin 2006;Grib 2009;Bouzarovski & Bassin 2011;Rogers 2012), 22 we find that climate denial discourse in Russia could be strategically used to strengthen a national identity constructed on the notion of Russia as a 'hydrocarbon giant' or 'energy superpower'. As noted by the above-mentioned scholars, there is the wish of the leadership to strengthen the role of hydrocarbons as the basis for Russia's Great Power status. ...
In this article we examine Russia’s recent public discourse on climate change, with a special focus on the arguments denying anthropogenic climate change. We scrutinise the ways in which denial arguments presented in the media are tied to the changing Russian political and economic context, especially the increasingly authoritarian turn in governance during President Vladimir Putin’s third term in office (Putin 2.0). We conclude that the Russian discourse on climate change emphasises Russia’s Great Power status, identifying its sovereignty and fossil energy as the basis of this status. This discourse refers to key categories, including Russia’s national identity and the spatial–material characteristics of the Russian state.
... For scholars interested in the cultural and political processes of resource extraction, materiality has opened important intellectual space. It has allowed scholars to critically examine the social worlds that different resources invite and inhibit (Li, 2015), the dynamics of corporate practice and mining labor (Rogers, 2012;Rolston Smith, 2013), and the diverse natures that emerge from and in opposition to mineral extraction (DeLa Cadena, 2010;Kirsch, 2014). Moving beyond conventional accounts in which "humans are in a position of mastery and control over what is portrayed as an essentially passive material world" (Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014:11), materiality has played a key role in on-going scholarship on the temporalities and becoming of resources (Ferry and Limbert, 2008;De Gregori, 1987). ...
The extraction of resources entails processes of transformation and rupture, the creation of new landscapes, communities, mining companies, as well as nations. Such processes involve varying forms of agency. In the promotion of both particular projects and national economies that encompass them, the language and locus of change often falls onto the resource itself. The inscription of agency and inordinate power onto subsoil resources represents a distinct form of resource fetishism. In this paper, I analyze the relationship between mineral boosterism and resource fetishism by examining imagery associated with Ecuador’s promotion of mineral exploration and extraction. I call attention to the ways that fetishism infuses the ubiquitous, yet often taken-for-granted imagery of mining promotion. I demonstrate how patterns of fetishism are an inherent part of the subsoil imagination, and relevant for on-going debates about the materiality and becoming of mineral resources.
... In recent years, a number of scholars have explored the ways in which corporations have sought to engage with the media and the general public in order to present themselves in a more favourable light. Many have examined the rise of the "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) movement, which has endeavoured to portray private corporations as an important part of the solution to social and environmental problems rather than as villains or pillagers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Welker observes that CSR has become an industry unto itself, "complete with profit and non-profit organizations, journals, classes and workshops, guidelines, and prizes" [6]. ...
... Energy production and consumption more generally -through its linkages with climate change -is a global political-ecological problem (Peet et al., 2011). When it comes to climate change adaptation projects, as with other 'sustainable imaginaries' (Boyer, 2011;Rogers, 2012), making the politics of energy legible is key to avoiding the reductionism usually found in economistic schemes such as REDD (Barnes et al., 2013). Such reductionism relates to hegemonic discourses that narrowly focus on technical progress and 'cost-effectiveness' while rendering invisible the presence of negative externalities, ecological costs, cultural mindsets, institutional barriers, political corruption and other complex 'people problems' (Nader, 2010;Sovacool, 2008). ...
In this chapter we examine the contributions that the field of political ecology – with its focus on the mutually constitutive relationships between environments, cultures, politics and power – has made, and can continue to make, to a more nuanced understanding of disasters. Disaster research also contributes to political ecology insofar as it illuminates the complexity of relationships between environments and societies over space and time. Drawing from ethnographic examples and historical analysis, we situate epistemologies of disasters within broader analyses of scale-making, nature-culture dichotomies, the classification of disasters as “natural” or “social”, the interpretive dimensions of identity and the construction of self. The very definition of a situation as ‘disastrous’ or not varies with one’s political resources. Overall, we argue that political ecology frameworks pose new questions about the operation of power and politics in contexts of disasters, resulting in enriched understandings of the social experience of disasters. Ethnographic examples, like those presented in this chapter, illustrate the rich promise of continued work at the confluence of the fields of political ecology and disaster studies.
... A growing body of ethnographic work focusses upon the so-called 'corporate social responsibility' (CSR) of extractive industries, often offered as an appeasing gift to populations in the areas where the extraction of resources takes place (Rajak 2011, Welker 2012, Frynas 2005, Kapelus 2002. As this demonstrates, extractive industries are keen to show a 'smiling face' (Shever 2010) by offering a range of development gifts which attempt to rebrand the corporation as compassionate, caring, in partnership with 'local communities' (Zilak 2004, Rajak, 2009 or manipulating the discourses of environmentalism with which they are critiqued to suggest that their work is sustainable and that they are protecting the environment and contributing to local culture , Kirsch 2014, Rogers 2012. ...
This introduction to the volume addresses some of the complexities surrounding land acquisition in contemporary Bangladesh and India. By interrogating four conceptual issues concerning current land expropriation, we seek to develop some common ground and to reveal important questions addressed in the articles and beyond. First, we discuss recent theoretical approaches to dispossession and land loss and secondly, the ideological apparatus of contemporary dispossessions—the discursive formations of ‘development’ and ‘security’. Thirdly, by contrasting the historical trajectories of both countries, we also explore the coalitions between states, corporations and the military. Finally, we discuss the ways in which violence and security have played a changing role in displacement.
... Based on this reconfiguration, anthropologists stress that the resource curse is not a peculiarity of low or even middle income countries, highlighting the presence of the various characteristics taken to be symptoms of the resource curse in high-income countries such as Australia, the United States, Canada, Scotland, Norway, Finland, Russia, and the Gulf (see for example, Brotherstone, 2012;Coumans, 2011;Cumbers, 2012;Gilberthorpe et al., 2014;Smith, 2014;Langton & Mazel, 2008;Lawrence, 2007;McNeish & Logan, 2012;Overland & Kutschera, 2012;Rogers, 2012;Szeman, 2014). What these studies underline is that 'the curse' is not solely driven by economics. ...
Attempts to address the resource curse remain focussed on revenue management, seeking technical solutions to political problems over examinations of relations of power. In this paper, we provide a review of the contribution anthropological research has made over the past decade to understanding the dynamic interplay of social relations, economic interests and struggles over power at stake in the political economy of extraction. In doing so, we show how the constellation of subaltern and elite agency at work within processes of resource extraction is vital in order to confront the complexities, incompatibilities, and inequities in the exploitation of mineral resources.
... In examining Ascendant's politics of prognosis in relation to both CSR and the Toronto rules of resource classification -two defining fields of post-millennial corporate practice -I present an important addition to recent work on the varied dimensions of mineral exploration and mining conflict within Ecuador, the Andes, and South America as a whole (Bebbington 2012b;Bebbington & Bury 2013). 1 At the same time, I also further discussion on resource temporalities (Ferry & Limbert 2008) and the materiality of corporate social practice (Rogers 2012;Rolston 2013). The latter body of literature is itself emblematic of recent interest in the social lives and modalities of corporations (Appel 2012;Welker, Partridge & Hardin 2011). ...
Spectacle and performance have long characterized global mining investment. In this paper, I examine the performative strategies of a junior mining company called Ascendant Copper in its pursuit of copper in northwestern Ecuador in the mid-2000s. I focus on Ascendant's contradictory efforts to attract mining investment with imagery of subsoil abundance while also downplaying the scale and significance of mining in the face of local opposition. I approach the company's divergent strategies as reflective of the dual meanings of prognosis, as both forecast and diagnosis. I begin by examining the means through which Ascendant promoted subsoil copper wealth within the framework of resource classification established by the Toronto Stock Exchange. I then analyse the way the company employed discourses of corporate social responsibility to portray its local presence as one defined by conservation and development. In analysing the articulation of a junior company like Ascendant in relation to both subsoil and surface, I not only highlight the materiality of corporate social responsibility, but also underscore the precarious becoming of junior companies, who seldom feature in anthropological accounts of corporations.
Neste artigo, analisamos os casos de quatro pesquisadores e professores que tiveram suas atividades acadêmicas constrangidas por iniciativa de grandes empresas mineradoras e projetos de infraestrutura relacionados às atividades minerárias. Discutimos os contextos em que surgiram restrições à prática acadêmica, caracterizando os atores envolvidos e traçando alguns elementos que possibilitem identificar algum padrão de atuação dos atores responsáveis pelo constrangimento aos pesquisadores. Para a realização dos objetivos propostos, a pesquisa envolveu um processo de consulta da literatura pertinente à liberdade acadêmica e da documentação constante nos processos judiciais e, em um segundo momento, realizou entrevistas semiestruturadas com os pesquisadores em questão.
The Russian state requires companies to invest in welfare provision and to conclude socio-economic cooperation agreements (SECAs) with regional administrations. Based on empirical evidence from Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, this article analyses state-business interactions at the subnational level. We show that state and business actors have formalised their resource exchange in the SECAs. Because of the agreements' adaptive nature, both parties are able to manage their respective obligations and risks within an authoritarian and highly volatile environment. We identify four patterns of contractual relations, depending on the companies' production capacities and their commitment to providing social investments in the region.
When Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest against the Tunisian authorities in 2010, he quickly became a universal symbol across the Arab world.
The earlier chapters aimed to illuminate how, throughout Oman’s modern history, varied discourses and practices have shaped how ‘energy security’ is conceptualised today.
A questão ambiental no Brasil ganhou, nos últimos anos, crescente centralidade política, tanto pelo confronto entre distintos mundos na fronteira de expansão territorial do capitalismo extrativo quanto pela evocação das desigualdades ambientais verificadas no espaço urbano-industrial. Neste artigo, discutimos as afinidades eletivas entre o neoextrativismo e o autoritarismo no Brasil, a partir da análise dos novos dispositivos do capitalismo ecologicamente modernizado, da linguagem antipolítica do liberalismo autoritário e da relação entre neoextrativismo, antiitelectualismo e constrangimento da liberdade acadêmica.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are key to U.S. plans to transition to a green economy that is powered by renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. There has been extensive research documenting the adverse socio-ecological impacts of resource extraction for EVs, including water shortages driven by lithium mining on Indigenous lands in South America and child labor in cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, little research has attended to the ways that automakers and utility companies shape the adoption of EVs through the use of corporate narratives and strategies. In this paper, we introduce the concept of points of continuity, whereby specific aspects of the gasoline vehicle user experience are mimicked by the EV industry to increase adoption of EVs. This desire to adopt behavioral similarities between gasoline and electric vehicles allows for existing patterns of automobile production and consumption to be maintained. However, in order to establish points of continuity, EV industry actors must navigate material constraints imposed by the physical properties of electric power. Through this case study, we demonstrate that the production of points of continuity is an exercise of political power that may maintain the environmental violence of green capitalism.
Ecological catastrophe and global inequality are pressing, yet socio-ecologically destructive natural resource extraction continues unabated. This special issue explores the strategies and tactics employed by large-scale mining and energy companies to render extraction socio-politically feasible in the face of multi-pronged opposition. Extraction, we contend, does not only need physical engineering, but requires social engineering as well. This entails shaping the behavior of people to 'manage' dissent and 'manufacture' consent. Situating the social engineering of extraction in key debates in the literature, this special issue introduction traces the evolution of its main technologies and techniques, related to colonialism, wars of decolonization, neoliberalism and the 'green' economy, respectively. We conclude by outlining a number of ways to advance research on the social engineering of extraction.
Building on contemporary social science, we intend to go beyond current Russian studies by creating a completely new paradigm in the field. In this chapter, we develop the conceptual starting points of this new paradigm and specify our methodological approach to modernity and modernization. Our critique of previous paradigms is not ‘flaw-centred’. Rather we intend to show that Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory gives us instruments for methodological specifications that broaden the horizon towards more comprehensive research programmes. Previous approaches do not seem to find ways to examine both structures and agencies at the same time. Russia’s development is explained either as an inevitable structural process, or only as a result of the intentions of the actors. We argue that it is essential to be able to study modernization both as a representation and as a broader analytical category referring to basic structural challenges. For this, we need new middle range theories and explanatory models. Our endeavour, however, is not only theoretical. Rather, we have developed the new paradigm in the context of interdisciplinary empirical analysis of the five major macro-level challenges of Russian modernization.
From the vested interests that have held back the promulgation of Nigeria's petroleum industry for more than 17 years, to the sporadic stoppages that often frustrate attempts by the Kenyan government and Tullow Oil to truck oil from the Turkana region; grand schemes for petroleum resources often get entangled in a complex web of contentious politics. Nonetheless, the basic instinct of the predominant literature on oil governance has been to confine these contentious processes to the 'black box' of elite consolidation. Based on an in-depth account of the distinctive political economy drivers of reform in Ghana's oil industry and the complement of Abdul Raufu Mustapha's interpretation of the 'multi-ple publics' governing Africa's public sphere, this article offers a pushback against this dominant narrative. It argues that the constitutive processes that drive institutional and policy reform reflect the impulses of contentious politics, instead of elite reflexes.
This paper analyzes the transformations induced by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the extractive sector, through an ethnographic study of villages neighboring an oil-drilling site in the Peruvian Amazon. It examines the materialization of a specific CSR device—the communal enterprise—which involves the majority of village members in the extractive industry as workers, owners, and managers of a subcontractor that provides services to the oil company. The paper highlights the importance of work and socialization to assess the transformative power of this original CSR device. After an opening section on how to study extractive governmentality “at work,” the paper presents a genealogy of the communal enterprise. It then examines how communal enterprises tend to transform indigenous inhabitants into workers and entrepreneurs and thereby impact the everyday organization of the entire community. By examining the ways residents adopt these social technologies, the paper shows how the partial normalization of individual bodies and collective organization induced by CSR technologies is an ambivalent mix resulting from a process of mutual appropriation between the industrial milieu and the villages. In doing so, it contributes to governmentality studies related to extractive capitalism, corporate strategies for disciplining dissent, and the social transformations they generate locally.
Cet article analyse les transformations induites par la Responsabilité sociétale des entreprises (RSE) dans le secteur de l'extraction par le biais d'une étude ethnographique des villages voisins d'un site de forage pétrolier d'Amazonie péruvienne. Il examine la matérialisation d'un dispositif de RSE spécifique : une entreprise communautaire qui implique la majorité des villageois dans l'industrie de l'extraction en tant que travailleurs, propriétaires et gérants d'un sous-traitant fournissant des services à la compagnie pétrolière. Cet article souligne l'importance du travail et de la socialisation pour évaluer le pouvoir de transformation de ce dispositif de RSE original. Après une section introductive portant sur la façon d’étudier la gouvernementalité de l'extraction « au travail », cet article présente une généalogie de l'entreprise communautaire. Il examine ensuite la manière dont les entreprises communautaires tendent à transformer les habitants indigènes en travailleurs et en entrepreneurs et ainsi à impacter l'organisation quotidienne de l'ensemble de la communauté. Cet article montre en quoi la normalisation partielle des corps individuels et de l'organisation collective induite par les techniques de RSE est un mélange ambivalent résultant d'un processus d'appropriation mutuelle entre le milieu industriel et les villages en examinant la façon dont les habitants adoptent ces techniques sociales. Ce faisant, il contribue aux études de gouvernementalité liées au capitalisme de l'extraction, aux stratégies mises en œuvre par les entreprises pour discipliner la dissidence et aux transformations sociales qu'elles génèrent localement.
En este artículo se analizan las transformaciones impulsadas por la responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) en el sector de la extracción mediante un estudio etnográfico de las aldeas que se encuentran cerca de un sitio de extracción de petróleo en la Amazonía peruana. También se examina la materialización de un método específico de RSC, la empresa comunal, en la que la mayoría de los miembros de la aldea participan en la industria como trabajadores, propietarios y administradores de un subcontratista que presta servicios a la compañía petrolera. Además, se destaca la importancia del trabajo y la socialización para evaluar el poder de transformación de este método original de RSC. Después de la primera sección, donde se explica cómo estudiar la gobernabilidad extractiva ``en el trabajo'', en el artículo se presenta una genealogía de la empresa comunal. En esta se explora la forma en la que las empresas comunales suelen transformar a los habitantes autóctonos en trabajadores y emprendedores y, por lo tanto, modifican la organización establecida de toda la comunidad. Al analizar las formas en las que los residentes adoptan estas tecnologías sociales, en el artículo se muestra cómo la normalización parcial de los cuerpos individuales y de la organización colectiva producida por las tecnologías de RSC es una mezcla ambivalente que se produce como consecuencia de un proceso de apropiación mutua entre el entorno industrial y las aldeas. Este análisis contribuye a los estudios de gobernabilidad relacionados con el capitalismo extractivo, las estrategias corporativas para disciplinar la disidencia y las transformaciones sociales que generan a nivel local.
This article demonstrates how the security of an extractive corporation is related to the governance of the lives and deaths of local inhabitants living in the area around a large coalmine and its railway in Colombia. Making legible the corporate security technologies that manage railway mortality and work along a spectrum from “hard” to “soft”, this article explores the productivity of corporate security in relation to the lives and deaths of local populations. Offering a specific lens on corporate railway security, it shows how corporate security technologies influence not only the lives of local residents but also their deaths. The findings also suggest that deaths and/or suicides be understood as both a product of and a productive force for corporate territorialization. Drawing on conceptualizations of ‘social death’ from genocide studies and Foucauldian ideas about death and technologies of power, I discuss the implications of corporate sovereignty (deciding over lives and deaths) as a technology of the corporate protection of mining infrastructure that normalizes corporate territorialization and justifies corporate social control.
The Pechora River valley lies to the west of the Ural Mountains in the Komi Republic in northern Russia. The Komi people of this region have increasingly been contesting the way that oil extraction takes place in the north of the republic, namely in Izhma and Usinsk districts. 1 Lacking legal protection of their rights as indigenous people from the Russian government, one of their concerns includes the lack of involvement in decision-making about oil projects that affect them. This chapter illustrates the experiences of northern Komi communities regarding consultation and engagement prior to industrial activities carried out close to the communities and the areas that they depend on for their livelihoods. The Russian oil company Lukoil-Komi has been at the heart of the issues we discuss, and it is the only oil company currently operating in Izhma district, although several other companies operate in neighbouring Usinsk district. We use a relational justice approach 2 as the analytical lens to place emphasis on the “relations” and “processes” of community engagement and consultation.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has led to an efflorescence of interest in the heritage of the “Silk Road,” both in China and abroad. In this article, I approach the BRI and its associated “Silk Road fever” ethnographically, discussing its effects on a particular region of China. What was once characterized in official discourse as a “remote border region” is now recovering its history of camel-based connectivity, and using this to imagine its future development. I situate this Silk Road discourse within the context of the politics of land, ethnicity, and the environment in a Chinese border region. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in this region, and analysis of local publications, the article shows how this discourse provides ethnic Mongol elites in the west of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with resources to defend pastoralist livelihoods threatened by the state’s recent grassland conservation policies. I thus show how the BRI’s spatial imaginary is “domesticated” in a particular part of China, and shine a light on the spatial politics which this imaginary – and the nonhumans involved in it – affords.
Purpose: The development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the construction sector is slow, thereby leaving many opportunities for further development. To enable operators in the construction sector to effectively capitalise on the opportunities to promote the development of CSR in the sector, this study employs the practice viewpoint to take the stock of CSR activities in the sector. The aim is to reveal the state of CSR practice in the construction sector. The study also draws from the development of CSR in the manufacturing, mining and banking sectors to inform the state of CSR practice in the construction sector.
Method: This study carries out a systematic literature review of 56 journal publications that were published between the years 2000 and 2016. The deductive coding of the publications was done to identify four themes of CSR research that constitute the practice view of the state of CSR in the construction sector.
Findings: The implementation of CSR is the major emphasis in the state of CSR practice in the construction sector. The implementation of CSR is wrapped in the perception of operators about CSR potentials, dimensions of CSR implemented, strategies for implementation and the effects of the implemented CSR practices on performance. The sector characteristics and rganisational structure are attributes for comparing the CSR practices between the construction sector and the manufacturing, mining, and banking sectors.
Originality/value: This study provides a researchers’ view of the state of CSR in the construction sector. Additionally, the study draws from the development of corporate social responsibility in the manufacturing, mining and banking sectors to inform the state of CSR practice in the construction sector.
By describing the long trajectory of petrochemical industrialization in a Mediterranean area in southeastern Sicily locally known as the triangle of death, this article discusses how the widespread, long-term, and nearly invisible nature of everyday forms of catastrophe generate effects that at times are even more insidious than a major disaster. Indeed, like the fumes rising from an industrial smokestack, oil culture seeps into the imaginaries and epidermises of the people for whom petroleum represents both a blessing and a curse.
The German Rhineland is home to the world's largest opencast lignite coal mine and human-made hole – the Hambach mine. Over the last seven years, RWE, the mine operator, has faced an increase in militant resistance, culminating in the occupation of the Hambacher Forest and acts of civil disobedience and sabotage. The mine provides a European case study to examine the repressive techniques deployed by RWE to legitimise coal mining in the face of a determined opposition. Drawing on political ecology literature and work on corporate counter-movements, this paper peers into extractive industries and their corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagements through the lens of corporate counterinsurgency. We first provide some background to the mine and RWE's unique position in the German political economy. After explaining the rise of resistance, the paper then discusses counterinsurgency in relation to CSR by outlining the different techniques used to win the ‘hearts’ and ‘minds’ of people around the mine. This includes securing the support of political leaders, lobbying, involvement in social events, infrastructure projects, astroturf groups and ecological restoration/offsetting work, which combine with overtly repressive techniques by public and private security forces that together attempt to legitimise the mine and stigmatise, intimidate and criminalise activists. This paper contents that counterinsurgency techniques are becoming normalised into the everyday operations of RWE, naturalising its image as ‘good corporate citizen’ and legitimising and invisibilising the violence towards (non)human nature inherent in the corporate-state-mining-complex, as mining is becoming part of the ‘green economy’ and made ‘sustainable’.
This paper explores the relationship between men and mining technology in an Estonian oil shale mine. It traces the linear time of socialism and postsocialism, arguing that for Estonian miners, the end of socialism might not have been as radical of a change as changing the mining technology in early 2000s. The introduction of the new technology changed the nature and perception of miners’ work, as well as the opportunities of controlling the everyday tempo of work. The way miners talk about new technology (novaia tekhnika) opens a window for exploring the different temporalities of socialism and capitalism. It allows seeing the way the time, through the state and the market, shapes small time of the everyday, the tempo of and rhythm of work. The wider changes from socialism to neoliberal capitalism which alter workplace relations, and create new class structures, are most acutely experienced at the nexus where new technology changes the rhythm and pace of work, the bodily activity of production which Bourdieu calls tempo. Furthermore, the introduction of new technology has implications to the job security and health of miners.
The rentier state and resource curse concepts understand oil and uranium as fixed resources generating economic rents. In doing so, these theories largely ignore the social, economic, political and technological arrangements essential for a material substance like oil or uranium to become a resource. By comparing the diachronic and synchronic entanglements of the different socio-technical arrangements of oil and uranium in Niger, the assumption of the resource curse and rentier state theories, that resource revenues foster authoritarian tendencies, is revisited. Exploring the concept of resource assemblages, this article analyzes how political configurations are related to the process of resource exploitation. This perspective reveals that a new resource-political configuration in Niger has emerged since the beginning of oil production. Whereas Niger’s uranium-political configuration has long been characterized by a neocolonial discursive formation, the emerging petro-political configuration has produced a new resource nationalism in public opinion and governance which is transforming politics in Niger.
The article examines the spatial, economic, political and socio-cultural transformations induced in the process of Niger becoming a new oil producer in 2011. It does so by analyzing entanglements of Western and Chinese ‘oil zones’ in Niger, which are understood as trans-territorial spaces of assemblage. I argue that the specific properties of these two oil zones have triggered the emergence of a particular ‘petro-political configuration’ in Niger. The argument proceeds through four stages. Firstly, looking at economic entanglements, I argue that the Chinese oil zone enabled the Nigerien economy to develop so-called upstream and downstream oil industries, something the Western oil zone had not allowed. Secondly, analyzing political and socio-cultural entanglements, I argue that, by being co-opted into former Nigerien president Mamadou Tandja’s political project for constitutional amendment, China’s oil diplomacy has become a kind of ‘soft power’ in Niger, something Western political rhetoric has failed to achieve. Thirdly, focusing on geopolitical and military entanglements, I argue that the militarization of global space should ensure capitalist accumulation, especially in situations in which the translation of transnational governmentality has failed. Finally, I use these entanglements to identify the heterogeneous elements of Western and Chinese ‘oil zones’, and the specific capitalist properties these assemblages generate.
In this article, which is based around two case studies of extractive multinationals in Bangladesh we show how the multinationals concerned worked with states, local elites and national NGOs in order to gain access to land and resources. In negotiating these complex relationships the multinationals often found themselves in potentially contradictory positions, requiring the muscle of the state where land had to be forcibly acquired but also the partnership of national NGOs in order to carry out development programmes as part of their policies of ‘community engagement’ or ‘uplift’. As this implies, whilst the state-corporate nexus is central to land appropriation in South Asia, we must also consider the role of NGOs and other development agencies, especially in a context such as Bangladesh where NGOs have taken on the role of ‘shadow state’ (Karim, 2011: xviii) . Indeed, the growing links between NGOs, private finance and corporate interests requires urgent attention.
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.
Some scholars suggest that the Middle East's oil wealth helps explain its failure to democratize. This article examines three aspects of this “oil impedes democracy” claim. First, is it true? Does oil have a consistendy antidemocratic effect on states, once other factors are accounted for? Second, can this claim be generalized? Is it true only in the Middle East or elsewhere as well? Is it true for other types of mineral wealth and other types of commodity wealth or only for oil? Finally, if oil does have antidemocratic properties, what is the causal mechanism?
The author uses pooled time-series cross-national data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997 to show that oil exports are strongly associated with authoritarian rule; that this effect is not limited to the Middle East; and that other types of mineral exports have a similar antidemocratic effect, while other types of commodity exports do not.
The author also tests three explanations for this pattern: a “rentier effect,” which suggests that resource-rich governments use low tax rates and patronage to dampen democratic pressures; a “repression effect,” which holds that resource wealth enables governments to strengthen their internal security forces and hence repress popular movements; and a “modernization effect,” which implies that growth that is based on the export of oil and minerals will fail to bring about die social and cultural changes that tend to produce democratic government. He finds at least limited support for all three effects.
This article considers the way that a single substance, olive oil, bundles together a set ofqualisigns including luminosity, liquidity, spreadibility, durability, capacity to cleanse, capacity to seal or preserve, capacity to insulate, and notably, a lack of miscibility in water. These qualisigns allow olive oil to operate in several discrete religious contexts in the Mediterranean although the interpretations and the specific qualisigns made salient by particular semiotic metadiscourses are always changing, even though the material substrate remains the same. In contemporary Western discourses of distinction, the positive qualities of olive oil are not those primarily registered by the ordinary senses of taste, touch, and smell, but rather those that are established discursively by expert opinions of various kinds, which attest to olive oil's ‘healthful’ qualities.
Approaches to the semiotics of brand are troubled by the lack of any accepted analytic definition of the phenomenon, as well as capacious, almost metaphysical, extensions in which brand becomes identified with semiosis as such, and thus everything is a brand. In addition, studies of brand tend to focus on highly visible or successful brands, as often as not as a proxy for a real object of analytic interest that lies elsewhere. Brand discourse defines brand in opposition to the material properties of the product, leading to a dematerialization of brand, which erases the messy materialities, contingencies, and hybrids that continually arise in the material semiosis of brand. Rather than attempt a definition of brand, the recent literature on brand semiotics is explored along several material and semiotic dimensions of the variousness of its relationship to its universes of circulation and in different professional discourses and historical and cultural contexts.
Oil has turned out to be something of a curse. Most developing petrostates have found that their economies have worsened, their political regimes have become more authoritarian, and their conflicts have intensified. Further, this curse is a bit crazy because oil brings wealth, which would seem to bring peace and prosperity, not the trouble that so often accompanies it. The goal of this introduction is to propose a research strategy for the anthropological analysis of oil. It does so by examining existing oil literatures, discussing the implications for research arising from the articles contained here, and, finally, formulating an anthropology of oil in a turbulent world. This formulation proposes a 'crude domination' approach to explain oil's crazy curse.
Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy-- the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. -- Book jacket.
In a small village beside a reed-lined lake in the Russian north, a cluster of farmers has lived for centuries -- in the time of tsars and feudal landlords; Bolsheviks and civil wars; collectivization and socialism; perestroika and open markets. Solovyovo is about the place and power of social memory. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in that single village, it shows how villagers configure, transmit, and enact social memory through narrative genres, religious practice, social organization, commemoration, and the symbolism of space. Margaret Paxson relates present-day beliefs, rituals, and practices to the remembered traditions articulated by her informants. She brings to life the everyday social and agricultural routines of the villagers as well as holiday observances, religious practices, cosmology, beliefs and practices surrounding health and illness, the melding of Orthodox and communist traditions and their post-Soviet evolution, and the role of the yearly calendar in regulating village lives. The result is a compelling ethnography of a Russian village, the first of its kind in modern, North American anthropology.
The issue of energy supply revolves around not only hydrocarbon resources but also their delivery. This is a new way the international politics of oil and natural gas crucial to any explanation of the tensions involving Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, China and, indeed, Europe.
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
Cet article explore les diverses manieres par lesquelles le nettoyage de la pollution due au petrolier Exxon Valdez et le travail patrimonial et identitaire des Alutiit se sont articules autour de conseils d’experts universitaires. Les types de connaissances et d’evaluations a travers lesquels l’identite, le patrimoine et le nettoyage des cotes polluees ont pu etre administres suggerent que ce sont les technologies elles-memes de la realisation patrimoniale et identitaire des Autochtones de l’Alaska qui se transforment. Elles sont a present de plus en plus liees au paysage politique americain au sens large, au capitalisme, a l’autorite scientifique et a l’intervention de l’Etat, autant qu’a une sensibilite propre et un attachement a l’autorite locale. L’identite et le travail patrimonial autochtones sont negocies, contingents, ouverts et provocateurs, mais sous certaines conditions.
Resumen
Existen pocos objetos que provocan tanta discusión de finales radicales que el petróleo, la materia prima industrial más importante del mundo. En este artículo, examino la pérdida asociada con el petróleo a través de una exploración de la medida en la que su extracción llega a ser “desastrosa” para las vidas y las tierras de los pueblos que habitan las regiones productoras de petróleo. En Ecuador, país miembro de la OPEP, el símbolo más visible del poder destructivo del petróleo es el pueblo cofán. Varios artículos, documentales, sitios web y juicios representan al territorio cofán como una tierra ecológica y socioculturalmente devastada. Para contrarrestar el espíritu derrotista y el cierre analítico de las narrativas de la asolación, propongo un marco conceptual alternativo que reconozca la presencia indeterminada del petróleo en el discurso y la práctica del pueblo cofán. Mucho más que una historia sencilla de pérdida, una fenomenología cofán del petróleo combina la realidad de la destrucción con una serie de elipsis, contradicciones y oportunidades que permiten que los cofanes nieguen su destrucción mientras que también la prevengan. [ecología/medio ambiente, desarrollo, pueblos indígenas, política, antropología social]
The introduction to this special issue of Current Anthropology calls for more anthropological attention to how the corporate form shapes and is shaped by daily life. It also traces anthropologists’ engagements with corporations over time. We present transformations in traditionally corporate arenas, such as mining and textile production, alongside parallel developments in transnational cooperatives, organic production systems, and ethnic deployments of the corporate form. We consider corporate influence in unexpected sectors, from conservation to poverty alleviation to cancer survival. Furthermore, we analyze corporate norms and practices in relation to broader governance trends, from fair-trade dynamics to shareholder activism and from corporate social responsibility initiatives to the spread of accountability measures and the impact of corporate sovereignty. This issue brings together the voices of anthropologists, social activists, NGO managers, corporate executives, financial planners, and entrepreneurs. It is the product of a 5-day international symposium held in August 2008 at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) campus in Santa Fe, sponsored by both SAR and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
This article opens up the category of the shareholder, who conventionally sits as a stick figure at the heart of popular explanations for why corporations ruthlessly seek to maximize profits. Following the logic that a gift may be seen as an extension of the giver’s self, we take up the possibility that investment portfolios might be viewed as reflections or extensions of shareholder personhood. We examine how three shareholder activist movements in the United States—socially responsible investment, shareholder value, and responsible investment—address the relationship between shareholder personhood, values, and investments. The divergent ways in which these shareholder movements have grappled with the contradictory entailments of share ownership illuminate the contestation at the heart of corporate ownership over the nature of the capitalist person.
Despite its extensive political, economic and social ramifications, the process of energy sector transformation in the post-socialist states of Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) has received very little theoretical attention to date. In this paper, I draw attention to the multiple ways in which the energy reform experience of the past two decades has undermined established understandings of scale, reform trajectories and national boundaries in this part of the world. With the aid of concepts developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor Network Theory (ANT), I discuss the ability of energy relations and interdependencies to create material and political ‘topologies’ and ‘entanglements’ of power in post-socialism. This exploration is grounded in a discussion of the tensions between the legacies and path-dependencies inherited from the centrally planned economy, on the one hand, and the neoliberal project for energy sector reconfiguration that became the dominant reform paradigm in the early 1990s, on the other.
Although Georgia is known for its wines, industrial production of beer far outstrips industrial wine production for local markets: wine consumption occurs in ritual contexts in which new wine, typically purchased from peasant producers, is preferred; bottled, aged wines are primarily for exports. Beer, therefore, is a key area in which industrial production for indigenous consumers has been elaborated. Such goods are packaged and presented as being both ecologically “pure” and following “traditional” methods, often referencing “ethnographic” materials about traditional life in brand images, even as they proclaim their reliance on Western technologies.
Anthropologists since the 1990s have paid greater attention to the state and governmentality than to one of the most consequential forms of power in our time, the corporation. The lack of attention to corporations is especially problematic when the harm they cause is readily apparent and substantial. We propose to reorient the study of power in anthropology to focus on the strategies corporations use in response to their critics and how this facilitates the perpetuation of harm. We identify three main phases of corporate response to critique: denial, acknowledgement and token accommodation, and strategic engagement. In case studies of the tobacco and mining industries, we show how corporate responses to their critics protect these industries from potential delegitimization and allow them to continue operating in favorable regulatory environments. Finally, we connect these corporate strategies to pervasive feelings of discontent about the present and the perceived inability to change the future. Although corporations usually benefit from the politics of resignation, we argue that widespread dissatisfaction with corporate practices represents an important starting point for social change.
What might it mean to say that resources, and resource-dependency, have consequences for the conduct of politics? This article explores the research conducted under the sign of resource politics associated with the work of Michael Ross, Paul Collier and others through a detailed examination of the political economy of oil in Nigeria. Much of the resource politics work suffers from either too strong a commodity-determinism or an insufficient attention to the ways in which specific resource characteristics matter analytically with respect to politics, rule and conflict. I approach the oil question in Nigeria by using the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose and by identifying three different forms of governable space and rule (the chieftainship, the ethnic minority, and the nation state) associated with oil-based capitalism. Governable spaces as forms of rule, identity and territoriality are not necessarily fully governable (they may be almost ungovernable and wracked by internal dissent and conflict) and may not be compatible among themselves, but rather work against one another in complex and contradictory ways.
The rapid and pervasive changes of the past decade and a half have thrown the political field wide open across the former Soviet bloc. An extensive array of actors has laid claim to the mantle of the postsocialist state, seeking to siphon off its resources, to leverage its putative power, and often to do both in the same breath. At the same time, others have fled the institutional and discursive purview of the state, taking advantage of the near disappearance of centralized authority in the early 1990s to stake out powerful non- and quasi-state domains. The density of these strategies, which in practice have been complementary as often as contradictory, has made for nothing short of an ethical thicket for postsocialist citizens and state functionaries alike.
Anthropologists have long puzzled over a supposed lack of explicitly racial identification among Brazilians who face racial discrimination. Yet a clear uptick in Afro-Brazilian identification and contestation of racism is observable in Brazil today. In this article, I examine the transformation of Salvador, Brazil's Pelourinho neighborhood into a heritage center, a process that includes the commodification of residents’ lifeways, so as to link semiotic relationships encouraged by the patrimonializing of buildings, people, and their habits to alterations in racial politics. This case suggests that racial consciousness ties into popular concerns with secrets, depths, and hidden relations encouraged by heritage-based reifications of everyday habits as potentially alienable forms of property.
The transformation of Argentina's state-owned oil company into a transnational joint-stock corporation and a series of worker-owned subcontracting microenterprises in northwestern Patagonia provides an example of an actually existing neoliberal project. In this article, I illustrate how this project was as much a process of sustaining affective relationality as it was a process of fostering calculative rationality. The privatization process generated corporate subjects attached through familial associations of property, company, and family. Kinship sentiment was also the crucial force that incorporated former state oil workers into the inequitable circuits of the global petroleum industry. I argue that this neoliberal process was effective inasmuch as it worked affectively. [neoliberal, kinship, property, affect, corporations, structural adjustment, petroleum, Argentina]
I Abstract One of the most important aspects of the rise of post-1945 global capi-talism has been the call for transnational corporations to conform to basic human rights principles. This chapter reviews the efforts within the oil industry (with a particular focus on their operations in the less-developed countries) to develop corporate social responsibility and the related development of voluntary, legal, and statutory programs by governments, nongovermental organizations (NGOs), civic groups, and multilateral agencies to ensure that the oil industry is compliant with important human, social, po-litical, and environmental rights. In reviewing these developments, I outline the current political economy of the oil industry, new bodies of research on the relations between oil, violence, and human rights violations, which include case studies of the human rights records of transnational and joint-venture oil operations.
Ideology does not just exist in linguistic form; it also appears in material structures. The Soviet party-state believed architecture to have a transformative effect and promoted communal dwellings in order to mould a new socialist way of life. What was the outcome? Using the examples of the communal hostel and the courtyard, the article suggests that we should take account of the eventual everyday sociality but also go beyond it to investigate how the imagination worked in such places. The material structure did not generate the socialist values quite as intended. Imaginative literature and satire are used to show that architecture acted, rather, like a prism. Ideas were deflected from it, yet not in a random way.
This article analyzes the meanings and practices of corporate personhood through ethnographic examination of the changing relationship between the Shell oil company and residents of the neighborhood surrounding the company's refineries in Argentina. The article scrutinizes the Shell public relations staff's work to remake the company into a good corporate citizen and caring neighbor with a benevolent public “face.” It argues that Shell's shift from corporate philanthropy to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reconfigured the “legal fiction” of corporate personhood and the historical relations of patronage and paternalism. This reconfiguration was achieved through the regendering of the public face of the company.
In 2002, male village leaders and youth living near a transnational mining corporation's operation in rural Indonesia attacked a group of visiting environmental activists. I analyze the moral commitments of the corporate managers who provoked the attack and the village elites who organized and executed it, turning to the context of the burgeoning Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) industry to grasp the broader dimensions of the beliefs and practices through which managers and elites legitimized their actions. This essay shows that the CSR industry is coevolving alongside environmental advocacy campaigns and grassroots corporate security models.
In this article, I seek to identify a limitation in the analysis James Scott offers in Seeing Like a State (1998) by asking to what extent his account of the follies of schemes for planned improvement by states provides critical leverage on the present world of neoliberal global capitalism. Scott has claimed that a dynamic of standardization, homogenization, and grid making applies not only to developmentalist states but also equally to the contemporary world of downsized states and unconstrained global corporations. I contest that claim by tracing how recent capital investment in Africa has been territorialized, and some of the new forms of order and disorder that have accompanied that selectively territorialized investment. Because such investment has been overwhelmingly in mineral resource extraction—particularly in oil—a contrast will become visible between the homogenizing, standardizing state optic Scott analyzed and a rather different way of seeing, proper to the contemporary global oil company.
Many contemporary indigenous movements deploy strategies of counterglobalization that make innovative use of the architecture of globalization. This article examines an indigenous political movement that took legal action to gain compensation and limit the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Even though the campaign sought to balance the desire for economic benefits with the protection of local subsistence practices, its objectives were frequently misinterpreted. Indigenous movements that deviate from an antidevelopment position run the risk of being seen as greedy rather than green. Instead of reproducing allegories about the successful exercise of veto power over development projects, anthropologists need ethnographic accounts that analyze the complex ambitions of indigenous movements and the risks of particular strategies of counterglobalization.
This article discusses certain aspects of Peircean semiotics as they can contribute to the social analysis of material artifacts. It focuses on the concepts of iconicity and indexicality, paying particular attention to their roles in mediating contingency and causality, and to their relation with possible actions. Because iconicity and indexicality themselves ‘assert nothing,’ their various social roles turn on their mediation by ‘Thirdness’. This circumstance requires an account of semiotic ideologies and their practical embodiment in representational economies. The article concludes with a call for a richer concept of the multiple possible modes of ‘objectification’ in social life.