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Transnational corporation (TNC)-led oil investments have been widely encouraged as a mechanism for the development of the Global South. Even though the sector is characterized by major accidents, oil-based developmentalist narratives claim that such accidents are merely isolated incidents that can be administratively addressed, redressed behaviorally through education of certain individuals, or corrected through individually targeted post-event legislation. Adapting Harvey Molotch’s (1970) political economy methodology of “accident research”, this paper argues that such “accidents” are, in fact, routine in the entire value chain of the oil system dominated by, among others, military-backed TNCs which increasingly collaborate with national and local oil companies similarly wedded to the ideology of growth. Based on this analysis, existing policy focus on improving technology, instituting and enforcing more environmental regulations, and the pursuit of economic nationalism in the form of withdrawing from globalization are ineffective. In such a red-hot system, built on rapidly spinning wheels of accumulation, the pursuit of slow growth characterized by breaking the chains of monopoly and oligopoly, putting commonly generated rent to common uses, and freeing labor from regulations that rob it of its produce has more potency to address the enigma of petroleum accidents in the global south.

Using the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, I argue that the catastrophe was less an example of a low probability-high catastrophe event than an instance of socially produced risks and insecurities associated with deepwater oil and gas production during the neoliberal period after 1980. The disaster exposes the deadly intersection of the aggressive enclosure of a new technologically risky resource frontier (the deepwater continental shelf) with what I call a frontier of neoliberalized risk, a lethal product of cut-throat corporate cost-cutting, the collapse of government oversight and regulatory authority and the deepening financialization and securitization of the oil market. These two local pockets of socially produced risk and wrecklessness have come to exceed the capabilities of what passes as risk management and energy security. In this sense, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was produced by a set of structural conditions, a sort of rogue capitalism, not unlike those which precipitated the financial meltdown of 2008. The forms of accumulation unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico over three decades rendered a high-risk enterprise yet more risky, all the while accumulating insecurities and radical uncertainties which made the likelihood of a Deepwater Horizon type disaster highly overdetermined.

While much of the debate and discourse on sustainability and environmentally friendly practices have focused on privately owned and operated organizations, enterprises owned by the state have escaped scrutiny. This study focuses specifically on the oil and gas sector to explore the drivers that propel state-owned oil and gas producers, the national oil companies, to embrace sustainability practices. We find that the proportion of independent directors, international exposure, and international involvement influence sustainability practices.

Roger Cagle, the co-founder and deputy CEO of SOCO International, watched the dreary London rain outside his office window one February morning in 2015. Never had SOCO, the oil-and-gas exploration and production player that ranked among Britain’s top 200 companies, experienced such a public backlash against its operations. For nearly 20 years, Cagle had helped steer his company’s projects around the world—often in volatile regions where others feared to tread, such as Vietnam, Russia, and Yemen—while delivering significant returns to investors. But the international uproar surrounding SOCO during the past year had been nothing short of mind-boggling.

The purpose of this study is to identify the challenges, the benefits, the risks and the motives of petroleum companies in the Persian Gulf toward outsourcing strategy. While the petroleum companies are faced with massive costs of operation that stem from the aging infrastructure, human capital deficit, inefficient fragmented business processes and lack of access to new technologies, outsourcing strategy toward cost savings and the overt and covert resistance of management and employees are significant barriers for creation of continuous process.

Based on the review of existing literature, the industry ' s archives and in-depth personal interviews with senior executives of the national oil and gas companies in five Gulf countries and seven global outsourcing companies and 87 survey responses, this study develops a methodological framework which substantiates or refutes the hypotheses based on the objectives: industry challenges are the driving forces behind outsourcing strategy; the potential risks of cost savings of outsourcing outweigh the consequential loss in control over the product or service, companies ' safety and security of the region.

The findings indicate that the oil and gas exporters have mixed but broad positive view of outsourcing strategy. While outsourcing could provide savings across the entire supply chain, it also generates a distracting resistance due to the fear of unknown in a complex range of culture, infrastructures and sequential processes that requires resiliency for continuity of operations.

This study is the first of its kind in the Persian Gulf oil and gas industry investigating the implementation of outsourcing strategy. The result of this investigation reveals the compromise between the potential benefits in cost reduction and the security of petroleum supply. This study contributes to all who are in the industry or who are involved with it to share a clear assessment of the future.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an appreciation of the role of national oil companies (NOCs) which control roughly 90 percent of the global hydrocarbon reserves, and whose operating and investment decisions affect prices, demand adjustments as well as their countries' policy options. Given that the role of NOCs is poorly understood largely due to prevailing economic and political clichés that substitute for analysis, this paper takes an institutional economics perspective to analyse the issue of NOC governance and related issues.

The paper adopts an integrative approach. First, it introduces the language of institutional economics to broadly structure a review of NOC governance. It then links the theoretical discussion to an assessment of the macro‐economic imperatives to which the NOC and its governance may need to respond. Finally, an audit trail is used for assessing cases in their particular institutional, cultural and physical conditions. Any simple comparisons — across highly variable contexts – would not only be contentious but also run counter to institutionalist methodology.

The paper shows that NOCs need not be treated as black boxes. They constitute an institutional response to failing market coordination with international oil companies and a means for producer countries to align political and economic interests. Yet, overriding the market and creating powerful stand‐alone, state‐owned, state‐run enterprises raise efficiency and broader regulatory concerns. The paper shows how institutional economics offers a conceptual apparatus to identify options for regulating NOCs at interrelated levels of control and suggests the need for case‐by‐case assessment.

Applying the conceptual apparatus outlined in the paper may allow future research to systematically discuss particular features of NOC governance, generate more general pattern models, and thereby improve the base for decisions on NOC's strategies and regulation.

The originality of the paper lies in its integrated approach of analysis and employing the institutional economics approach to the case studies to reveal the role of NOCs in the energy scene.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how shadow constituents are redefining corporate social responsibility (CSR) through activism, and how oil companies in Nigeria are responding to this development.

This paper contributes to the conceptual framework of CSR which asserts that whereas all stakeholders of a company do not have an equal say in its strategic direction, they are affected by such direction, and must hence be considered.

The findings reveal these points: activists are gaining a strong foothold in forcing oil companies to cooperate with their vision of social change; Nigeria lacks legislation compelling oil companies to contribute to the development of their host communities; and although internal oil company documents suggest efforts to help their hosts communities have been made, no meaningful agreement between the oil companies and the indigenous communities have been reached.

The paper encourages a broader conception of CSR. Shadow constituents have become such influence wielding stakeholders in organizations today that we need to explore more fully the role they play in dictating public agenda and influencing policy globally.

Multinational corporations can develop a better understanding of strategies and techniques that can enable them to balance the interests of a wider group of stakeholders and manage the interconnected social, environmental and economic impacts of their businesses.

This paper enriches the research database on CSR.

This study aims to identify factors that influence corporate environmental disclosure (CED) quality.

Using content analysis, an index and scoring scheme were applied to annual reports, stand-alone reports and corporate homepages of a sample of 116 oil and gas companies in 19 developing countries (DCs).

The results of this study reveal that out of 12 hypothesized variables, only 5 variables (company size, foreign ownership, profitability, leverage and membership of industry’s associations) are positively related to the CED quality.

The study has implications in enhancing the understanding of CED practices by oil and gas companies in DCs and the factors that influence the quality of such disclosure. Thus, the results of the study serve as input toward the development of improved regulations concerning CED for the oil and gas industry and provide guidelines to the regulators to make relevant decisions on social and environmental information items to be incorporated in the regulatory standards.

The current study attempts to fill the gaps in the literature by examining CED quality (rather than its quantity), concentrating on environmental disclosure made on the three main mediums of reporting. The study also extends previous research of CED by investigating some factors that have the potential to influence the content-quality of environmental disclosure, such as type of company (independent or constrain company) and industry’s association membership which have never been examined in the related literature.