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Though KIBS constitute only a small proportion of all services, researchers frequently accord them a significance beyond that indicated by their share in employment or value added (Tether & Hipp, 2002; Gallouj, 2002). For example, KIBS are held to play ‘an increasingly dynamic and pivotal role in ‘new’ knowledge-based economies’ (Howells, 2000, p. 4), as sources of important new technologies, high-quality, high-wage employment and wealth creation (Tether, 2004). Unfortunately, while much of the rhetoric seems intuitively reasonable, one inevitably encounters definitional difficulties in delimiting the specifics of innovation in KIBS, with a variety of, more or less operational, working definitions employed by the academic literature (Wong & He, 2005).

The focus of the chapter is on disputes around corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the fossil fuel industry and how media and social networking technologies are deployed in a virtual war between oil corporations and dissident, activist and protest groups.

Communications by BP, Shell, and their opponents in this virtual war are compared, especially in relation to the creative use of the internet, digital technologies, and social media. Through a case study approach, the chapter shows how communications often center on contested notions of CSR and claims by the oil giants about their environmental impact, which opponents dismiss as “greenwashing.” The various techniques deployed by both sides in this wide-ranging “PR war” are explored and contrasted in detail.

The findings for each case study reveal the diverse, complex, and changing nature of the relationship between the oil industry and its critics. The chapter concludes by arguing that if CSR is seen as “greenwashing” by the public, it is only likely to fuel widespread skepticism of the oil and gas sector and of corporate claims about the environment more generally.

The research offers a snapshot of online and social media campaigns and PR strategies and tactics within the oil and gas industry rather than empirically grounded set of findings that can be easily applied to other fields.

Practical implications include attention to inflated or understated claims and the use of citizen testimony and humor to puncture CSR “rhetoric.” There is consideration of use of digital technologies by activists and attention to the way public debates and consultations are conducted. The need for a more respectful engagement with local communities by all parties engaging in public relations is underlined.

The chapter applies the concept of “asymmetrical warfare” from conflict studies within the media and communications tradition to provide a fresh revaluation of the term “PR war,” It offers a rare focus on online efforts by activist to subvert CSR-related branding, marketing, and communications. Discussion of the use of parody alongside factual and emotional arguments to challenge corporate hegemony also provides revealing insights.

The historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us that the settler colonial logic of eliminating native societies to gain unrestricted access to their territory is not a phenomenon confined to the distant past. As Wolfe (2006, p. 388) writes, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” In the Gulf of Carpentaria region in Australia’s Northern Territory this settler colonial “logic of elimination” continues through mining projects that extract capital for transnational corporations while contaminating Indigenous land, overriding Indigenous law and custom and undermining Indigenous livelihoods. However, some Garawa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa peoples are using creative ways to fight back, exhibiting “story paintings” to show how their people experience the destructive impacts of mining. We cannot know yet the full impact of this creative activism. But their body of work suggests it has the potential to challenge colonial institutions from below, inspiring growing networks of resistance and a collective meaning-making through storytelling that is led by Indigenous peoples on behalf of the living world.

In this section we shall give a brief account of the elementary concepts of set theory – elementary in the sense that they are concepts which students might meet in the first week of a mathematics foundation course at a university; and elementary also in the sense that everything else in mathematics is dependent on them. The concepts are at once both extremely simple and extremely abstract.