Thesis (M. A.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1999. / Bibliography: p. 202-209.

Corporations are increasingly using social media as a tool for communicating Corporate Social Responsibility. Marketing researchers have conducted ample research on the topic, however, a communication perspective is missing. In order to fill this gap and gain a nuanced understanding of how corporations are communicating CSR and potentially enacting power relations, this thesis focuses on linguistic elements in CSR- related Facebook posts. A content analysis was performed on the Facebook pages of three oil corporations, covering a total of 120 posts. Results demonstrate that all three companies aim for engagement with the audience, using various semantic and sensory interactivity elements, and maintaining an informal writing style. Despite the latter seemingly contradicting the assumption that corporations are enacting power, there are elements that support this claim. The corporations implement a constraint of content in their posts through the use of abstract writing, and include a constraint on positions through the narrative styles of accounting and advertisement, which offer limited encouragement for participation. Regarding rhetoric, the ethos included in the posts carried significant interconnection with the CSR topics discussed, through which the companies seemed to enforce constraints of content. Shell and Total emphasize certain environmental issues, while not focusing on other impacts. BP does not not target environmental issues and mainly highlights positive social impact. Although the enactment of power is not present in each of the linguistic structures of the posts, there are elements that indicate the presence of power relations, which could offer groundwork for further research.

In the Gulf of Mexico offshore exploration and production (E&P) industry, oil company decision-makers desire to drill wells for exploration or development purposes. While a number of organizational arrangements are employed by firms in the E&P industry, most drilling arrangements can be categorized as one of two types of organizational structure based upon the allocation of planning and supervision responsibilities. Companies can employ internal drilling organizations (best-efforts) to plan and manage their drilling operations or choose to contract externally (turnkey) for these activities. The decision made by the exploration and production company as to which organizational form to employ can have significant impacts on the efficiency and profitability of any given well or drilling campaign. This research examines this choice of governance structure. This paper will examine the drivers of this decision using the theory of transaction cost economics. Regression models are specified and estimated for the turnkey drilling decision, and for the underlying cost functions of best-efforts and turnkey drilling. Results provide support for the transaction cost hypothesis as significant in the choice of governance. / text

Safety leadership is emerging as a key factor in determining organisational safety performance at all levels of management (Zohar, 2002; 2004). This PhD addresses the relevance and challenges of conducting safety interventions in the workplace. It started out as an evaluation of a safety leadership course in the oil and gas industry, and moved on to conceptualise the underlying difficulties inherent in those conversations and the success factors that help supervisors and managers overcome these challenges. Study One and Study Two focused on attitudes and attitude changes in course participants with increasing focus on attitudes towards safety interventions. Utilising questionnaires designed according to the theory of planned behaviour (Ajzen, 1985) and Bandura’s concept of selfefficacy and analysing qualitative data, the studies showed that participants’ general safety attitudes, attitudes towards rules and procedures, control beliefs, intentions to perform safety interventions, general self-efficacy and self-efficacy to perform safety interventions would increase from before to after the course. Study Three and Study Four aimed to evaluate participants’ behavioural changes with regard to performing safety interventions. A behavioural rating tool and statistical analysis were utilised in the third study. Results obtained showed a skill gap in managers’ and supervisors’ ability to perform safety interventions 6-12 months after they had attended the course. This skill gap indicated that – despite acknowledgement of the importance of safety interventions and participants’ intentions to frequently perform safety interventions – people did not perform these conversations at the worksite as often as they had intended. Results also indicated that two particular communication strategies, the use of open ended questions and the creation of ‘what-if’ scenarios, were crucial for a positive safety conversation outcome. In the fourth study, discourse analysis techniques and the application of a derived framework on social interaction allowed for a further understanding of the success factors and challenges of safety interventions. Results obtained emphasised particular face keeping strategies that were associated with the successful performance of safety interventions. However, strategies which, once applied, would lead to the failure of a conversation could also be extracted. It could also be shown that the conversation ‘scheme’ that had been taught during the training course was not fit for purpose as it did not enable participants to successfully conduct safety interventions without upsetting their conversation partner.

This study comprises an analysis of the development of oil and gas in the Scottish sector of the North Sea and its impact on the Scottish economy between 1967 and 1989. It first examines the creation and extension of the power of the multinational oil companies. It discusses the decline of that power as nationalism in the Middle East forced the multinationals to make concessions. The result was a weakening of multinational firms which culminated in the movement to explore for oil in more stable areas. Subsequent OPEC activity drove the price of oil up and created an oil boom in the North Sea, lasting until the end of 1985. The high oil prices that triggered the oil boom in the North Sea had a tremendous impact on the British economy. Increasing oil import prices seemed likely to drive Britain to the brink of bankruptcy, if not into bankruptcy. Consequently, successive British governments adopted a policy of developing Britain's North Sea assets as rapidly as possible, to avert economic disaster. These two factors combined to create a window of opportunity for industry that lasted about ten years. It was expected that Scottish industry would benefit greatly from this unprecedented development. That it did not can be attributed to several reasons including, among others: the lack of abiity to adapt to the specifications of the oil and gas industry; the lack of government action to force greater Scottish content; the well developed, interlocking infrastructure of the major international petroleum suppliers, service companies and operators; and the lack of time to respond before the boom was over. The result of these negative factors was a Scottish content in Scottish Sector North Sea oil and gas development of less than twenty-five percent.

Thesis (M.M. (Finance & Investment))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, 2013. / This paper analyses the provision of development finance to oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) firms through Development Finance Institutes (DFIs) in Africa. The paper aims to determine the state of equity markets and development finance in Africa and the level at which they contribute to the financing of oil and gas projects in Africa. The main question to be answered: is small firm participation sustainable in the oil and gas industry if equity markets do not develop to meet the financing needs in Africa? It is found that development finance contributes a small proportion of capital into oil and gas deals and financial equity markets play an even smaller role in garnering finance for capital intensive projects in the oil and gas industry as most finance is sourced externally or from internal cash flows. Small firms tend to reduce their interest in oil and gas projects based on lack of access to domestic finance through equity markets and limited development finance availability.

Esta dissertação tem como objetivo estimar a renda de informação apropriada pelos vencedores dos leilões para exploração e produção de petróleo e gás natural no Brasil. Assume-se um modelo estrutural de leilão de valor privado independente. Foram estimadas as distribuições dos lances e dos valores privados dos lançadores de forma não-paramétrica, assumindo assimetria entre os participantes (Petrobras+OGX versus outros). Para isso, explorou-se um banco de dados construído a partir de informações de todos os leilões realizados entre 1999 e 2008. Tal estudo é relevante por tentar avaliar o sucesso do governo brasileiro e das empresas licitantes nestes leilões, principalmente diante da discussão do novo marco regulatório do pré-sal. Os resultados sugerem que a Petrobras e a OGX obtiveram rendas de informação significativamente maiores que as demais concorrentes. Tais rendas variam entre 14% e 63%, dependendo do número de competidores e de seu tipo. De maneira geral, o governo tende a extrair maior parte do preço de reserva do vencedor do leilão quando este não é a Petrobras ou a OGX e quanto maior for o número de concorrentes. / This dissertation aims to estimate the information rent grabbed by the winners of auctions for exploration and production of oil and natural gas in Brazil. It assumes a structural model of independent private values for the auctions. We estimated non-parametrically both the distributions of bids and the distribution of private values from bidders, assuming asymmetry between the participants (Petrobras + OGX versus others). For this, we explored a database with information about all the auctions held between 1999 and 2008. This study is relevant since it tries to assess the success of the Brazilian government and bidders in these auctions, especially before the discussion on the new regulatory framework of pre-salt. Results suggest that Petrobras and OGX obtained information rents significantly higher than other competitors. These rents vary between 14% and 63%, depending on the number of competitors and on their types. In general, the government tends to capture most of the reserve price of the winning bidder when it is not Petrobras or OGX and the greater the number of competitors.

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Drawing attention to the material politics of the Saudi regime, this dissertation genealogically explores the ways in which the imperatives of the modern state and its oil economy came to structure the production of Arabia's history, social life, built urban environment and concepts of nationhood and religiosity. It examines cultural artifacts and commemorative spaces as evidentiary networks through which official historical knowledge moves and becomes visible. It does so first through a study of the construction and memorialization of "official" Saudi history via textbooks and archives, and of historical elisions therein. In order to discern how breaks with the past are configured within disciplinary history, the dissertation begins with a sociocultural history of late Ottoman Arabia on the eve of Al Sa`ud's territorial conquest. It reveals the ways in which early twentieth-century Arabia's shared transregional histories and emergent socio-intellectual and political worlds were transformed with the aim of developing Al Sa`ud's territorial empire into a petro-state. In the second venue of inquiry, I analyze spatial transformations characteristic of Saudi Arabia's oil modernity as central to practices of statecraft and capital accumulation by comparing the urban and cultural redevelopment plans of Riyadh and Mecca. The erasure of alternative accounts of state formation through commemoration in Riyadh and destruction in Mecca is, at heart, a continuation of Al Sa`ud's imperial project and its deep-seated violence to the everyday, the spiritual and the temporal. This dissertation is a material and spatial reading of the regime's mechanisms of political legitimation, one that focuses on the infrastructure of Saudi petro-modernity and on sites that are rarely considered in discussions of the state, despite their centrality. From the mundane lifeworlds of archival and planning documents and the spaces that house them to the spectacular commercial and archeological megaprojects, these simultaneously constitute monuments to oil modernity and serve as pillars of political governance. The projects of historical memorialization and urban planning are material realizations of the regime's late twentieth-century strategies for political legitimation and economic diversification, especially following the crisis of the 1990 Gulf War. In highlighting everyday practices of state making, I suggest new sites and modes for reading the Saudi state as an unfinished, unstable work-in-progress. I argue that oil capitalization (which produced the theory of the rentier state) is being eclipsed, increasingly, by speculation, real estate and distinctive logics of built form.