Big Society, Big Oil, Muzzled Universities (II)
by ecologics
Please note: this post is part of a series. Click on any of the titles below to see the rest of the posts.
Part II (this post)
In this post I argue that John Browne, BP’s former CEO, led a managerial process that instituted an extraordinary disjunction between BP’s public image and the reality of the corporation’s cost-cutting growth into one of a handful of oil ‘supermajors’. In my opinion, even as Browne’s BP claimed to be becoming more accountable and more ‘green’, it engaged in actions which arguably made BP less accountable, and less green. An analysis of this contradiction provides insights into what we can expect from Browne in his more recent role as the head of a supposedly ‘independent’ review of the funding of Britain’s higher education—and as the Liberal Conservative coalition’s ‘Business Tsar’.
Update 29 October 2010: After reading this post, you may wish to read the latest news, that appear to confirm that the BP disaster was the outcome of cost-cutting on BP’s, and now it also seems Halliburton’s, part. See ‘BP was warned about cement at gulf disaster well’ See also Halliburton and BP Knew of Cement Flaws
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‘…in any institution, in any walk of life, the crucial thing is trust. Here in the U.S., in particular, that trust is not based on your background but on a track record of performance and on an ability to speak plainly — to confront difficulty and even conflict rather than hiding behind ambiguities and what is now called “spin.”’ John Browne, speaking at Stanford University, California
No sooner had the oil begun to disappear into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico than commentators began to offer revisionist accounts of the disaster. On the 28th of July, the Washington Post asked if Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, ‘was right after all’(1), and a few days later Barack Obama himself was quoted as suggesting that ‘the vast majority of the spilled oil has been dispersed from the water’(2). Alas, scientists not attached to BP—or indeed the White House—accused Obama and his advisers of spinning the NOAA report that ostensibly justified the President’s new-found optimism(3). Charles Hopkinson, a researcher at the University of Georgia, suggested that up to 79 percent of the 4.1 million barrels of oil that were calculated to have gushed from BP’s broken well remained in the Gulf(4). Still, President Obama made a show of bathing in the Gulf with his daughter in scenes that may well have reminded Britons of the time when John Gummer, the former Minister of Agriculture, had himself filmed whilst giving his daughter Cordelia a hamburger at the height of the Mad Cow Disease ‘scare’.
In this, the second of my three-part series about Britain’s higher education in the post-New Labour era, I want to offer an analysis of what some might describe as ‘historical spin’—and if so, spin on a truly epic scale. Back in the late 1990s, British Petroleum embarked in a series of takeovers that transformed it into the oil ‘supermajor’ that it is today. At more or less the same time, BP engaged in a remarkable effort to transform its public image: the company effectively declared itself to be, if not green, then perhaps in the process of becoming green. As part of the makeover, BP substituted ‘British Petroleum’ for ‘Beyond Petroleum’, and adopted its now infamous logo. John Browne, its chief executive at the time, declared that ‘Business is not in opposition to, but has a fundamental role in delivering sustainable development – to meet the needs of today’s world without depriving future generations of their means to do so’(5). It was Browne who led BP’s apparent transformation, and who reportedly decided that the company’s new slogan should be ‘Beyond Petroleum’.
Readers may wonder why I am interested in British Petroleum, aka BP, in a series of posts about the UK’s higher education. The reason is that the very man who transformed BP into an ‘oilstar’ is the same man whom the UK’s former New Labour government chose to lead a key review of its higher education policy. More recently, the Liberal Conservative coalition have given Browne the pivotal role of Whitehall ‘super-director’; this ostensibly to inject—perhaps we should say ‘deep-water drill’—a ‘business ethos’ into the heart of government(6).
At least one observer has referred to Browne’s new role as that of the Liberal Conservatives’ ‘Cuts Tsar’(7), and an alternative way of interpreting Browne’s new-found role might well evoke the metaphor of removing the cap on the well of jungle capitalism that post-war (and progressive) Britons had hitherto managed to keep sealed.
In my opinion, Browne’s dual role as New Labour’s and Dem Tories’ free market provocateur virtually guarantees that the UK’s so-called ‘Independent’ Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance will be anything but that. On the contrary, it will be dominated by the kind of ethos that may well have led Time magazine to put John Browne at the very top of its list of the ‘Dirty Dozen’ executives and politicians whom it effectively blamed for the Gulf of Mexico disaster. From this point of view, Browne’s intervention in higher education is bound to be guided by the kind of neoliberal politics that Browne enacted in the context of the ‘new’ BP. In this post I would thereby like to offer an interpretation of that ethos, and of its consequences for BP’s corporate culture.
‘Beyond Petroleum’
John Browne was once, and by some accounts still is, regarded by Britain’s elite as a corporate superstar. Between 1995 and 2007, Browne was the Group Chief Executive of BP (I will simply use the term ‘CEO’). During that period, he was voted ‘Britain’s most admired chief executive’ not once, but three times. The financial press described him as the ‘Sun King’, and even Peter Sutherland, the former chairman of BP’s board whom by one account forced Browne to retire early from his post, claimed that Browne was the ‘greatest businessman of his generation’(8). It was not just the other high flying executives and the financial press that loved Browne; leading members of the New Labour government had dinner engagements with him, and Browne is said to have grown so close to Tony Blair that some media accounts began to suggest that Blair might acquire a position in ‘Blair Petroleum’ after he retired from politics(9).
In is nonetheless my view—and as always, posts in this blog are a matter of my opinion—that Browne’s defining legacy as the CEO of BP was that he led a management process that instituted an extraordinary disjunction at the heart of BP’s operations: a disjunction between BP’s public representation of its corporate aims and aspirations, and the reality of most of its day-to-day operations. It was during Browne’s first five or so years as BP’s CEO that the company embarked in what is possibly the most ambitious image makeover ever attempted by a transnational corporation. But it was also during Browne’s watch that BP engaged in practices that were condemned not just by environmental activists, but by official environmental, health and safety agencies in the U.S. I would thereby like to compare and contrast the image that Browne sought to project of his company, and the reality of the company’s operations during and soon after his period as BP’s CEO.
British Petroleum’s makeover had three inter-related aspects, and it now seems clear that Browne played a key role in each and all of them—indeed, we might describe him not just as BP’s CEO, but also as its ‘Semiotician In Chief’(SIC).
A first aspect of the makeover involved a change in public stance vis-à-vis anthropogenic climate change. In 1997, at a time when oil companies were actively trying to undermine what many still regarded as the ‘thesis’ of climate change, Browne gave a bold speech at Stanford University that accepted that climate change was, after all, an issue. He suggested that ‘…it would be unwise and potentially dangerous to ignore the mounting concern…The time to consider the policy dimensions of climate change is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively proven … but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously by the society of which we are part’(10).
These and many other passages in the speech were not exactly unambiguous. They may have been meant to be read primarily as an acknowledgment of the reality of climate change. But they could also be interpreted as an acknowledgment of the changing business reality of climate change. From the latter perspective, Browne was also winking and nodding at shareholders and at financial markets; in future, oil corporations such as his own would have to adopt what might be described as a far more hegemonic practice. I use the last term to refer to a form of politics that exchanges simple opposition, or opposition involving brute force (e.g. the kind of practices associated with the Coalition for Climate Change), for a strategy premised in part on making tactical concessions.
A second, related change involved a shift from an explicitly technocentric, and environmentally exploitative public image—until Browne, the ‘oilstars’ made no bones about being in the business of extracting oil—to one that professed the need to engage in a more sustainable form of enterprise involving alternative energy sources. This too, can be interpreted as a part of the broader hegemonic turn. At Stanford as in a variety of other venues, Browne suggested that BP was keen to adopt a more ethical stance vis-à-vis the problem of sustainability: ‘we are all citizens of one world, and we must take shared responsibility for its future and for its sustainable development…I believe that we’ve now come to an important moment in our consideration of the environment: the moment when we need to go beyond analysis to seek solutions and to take action. It is a moment for change and for a rethinking of corporate responsibility’(11).
This claim was apparently backed up by some changes in corporate policy. For example, it was during Browne’s time that BP instituted the equivalent of a Kyoto Protocol-like carbon trading system within its own operations. It also invested $45 million in the acquisition of Solarex, a solar power company. But of course, these shifts can themselves be interpreted in a far more critical manner than Browne and BP might have wished. A carbon trading scheme within a company devoted to the extraction and commodification of crude oil is paradoxical, to say the least. The best parallel I can think of is the announcement made earlier this year that Weight Watchers had agreed to endorse some of McDonalds’ products in New Zealand(12).
A similar point can be made about Solarex. One cannot say that a $45 million investment is insignificant. But when compared to the multi-billion dollar investments that Browne/BP made in Amoco and other giant oil firms, it was, frankly, peanuts. While BP eventually suggested that this was just ‘a start’, in 2009 BP shut down its ‘alternative energy HQ’ in London. It accepted the resignation of its ‘clean energy’ boss, and imposed budget cuts on this sector of its business. As the Guardian noted, the moves were ‘likely to be seen by environmental critics as further signs of the oil group moving “back to petroleum”(13).
A third shift was doubtless meant to symbolize the aforementioned changes, or apparent changes, in the context of everyday consumer culture—in the forecourts of BP/Amoco petrol stations, and in the numerous billboards, TV, and newspaper ads that BP launched as part of its rebranding campaign in the early 2000s. The most emblematic aspect of this change (literally and figuratively) was the new BP logo, which many environmentalists read as a shameless palimpsest of the emblem of Canada’s Green Party. Whether there was a semiotic heist or not, Browne attempted to jettison British Petroleum’s identity as a British firm—an identity that stretched back to the times when Britain and the U.S. still were colonial, and then neo-colonial powers in Iran. ‘British Petroleum’ was replaced not just with ‘BP’, but with what many regarded as an unbelievably cynical slogan (or what is now known as a ‘tagline’), ‘Beyond Petroleum’.
It might be objected that this was not so much Browne’s work, but the work of BP’s advertisement and public relations agency, Ogilvy & Mather. But Tom Bower, an investigative journalist and author of the recently published The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century, noted in an article in the London Times that ‘The slogan [Beyond Petroleum] was originally intended merely for internal use, but Browne seized on it to relaunch the corporation. The new BP, his mission statement would explain, intended to “reinvent itself as an energy company people can have faith in and inspire a campaign that gives voice to people’s concerns, while providing evidence of BP’s commitment, if not all the answers”…. [Browne] was thrilled by the stunning logo, [and his] intellectual strength and dogmatism smothered the dissenters. This was personal. “Beyond Petroleum” captured the spirit of the times, emphasising Browne’s insightful understanding of the future’(14).
After the first phase of the campaign was launched, it was met with a combination of incredulity, anger, and then derision on the part of environmental activists, especially when it emerged that BP was also seeking to open up Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil exploration. In many activists’ opinions, it was bad enough that an oil corporation was apparently attempting to masquerade as an ‘ethical’ or ‘sustainable’ business; but that this should be happening at about the same time as BP lobbied the U.S. government to allow it drill in one of Alaska’s last pristine wildernesses seemed simply outrageous. The high management of BP itself reportedly began to have some doubts that it was laying itself open to more criticism, and backtracked on aspects of the second phase of its campaign. In what many interpreted as a less than convincing wink and nod to widespread scepticism, BP started to put ‘It’s a start’ in its advertisements(15).
What interests me is just how it is that BP, with John Browne quite clearly at the helm, thought it could get away with this campaign. If we take the campaign at face value, we have to ask if Browne and the rest of the BP public relations machine thought they could so blatantly ‘spin’ about the nature of BP’s activities. (I take it that Browne, who lead BP’s exploration arm before he became CEO, would have known enough about BP’s actual operations to realise that there was a massive disjunction between the image being projected, and the reality of day to day operations.)
If we don’t take the campaign at face value, and assume it was part of a more complex calculus, then perhaps a more interesting question is, what precisely was the logic behind a campaign that was so clearly not based on the reality of BP’s main operations and its effective raison d’etre?
The Real BP
If anything, BP arguably became less accountable, and by some criteria rather less green after Browne took over as CEO. I have already referred to BP’s efforts to gain access to the National Wildlife Arctic Refuge. But let us examine some of the other equally, if not more important ways in which Browne’s BP flatly contradicted its own image makeover.
One message that could be taken from Browne’s speeches was that, henceforth, BP as a corporation would be more accountable for its actions. In at least one respect, the opposite happened: after Browne took over, BP engaged in a series of mergers that made the company, already a giant corporation, into one of the oil industry ‘supermajors’. In late 1998 BP merged with Amoco, and then BP/Amoco acquired Arco and Burma-Castrol. As a result of these actions, BP not only became an almost unbelievably vast enterprise, but arguably forced other oil giants to follow suit. In 1999, Exxon and Mobil merged, and in 2001 Chevron acquired Texaco.
The end-result of these and other mergers was that already large corporations with vast resources now arguably became unassailable megalodons which could swallow whole (or use lawyers to fight their way past) virtually anything that might get in their way. As evidence for this, we might point to the fact that after Exxon was initially told to pay a fine of $5 billion for the Exxon Valdez disaster, Exxon Mobil succeeded in reducing this figure to $500 million(16). One influential environmental blogger noted that more than 20 years later, Exxon Mobil was still engaged in further appeals(17). (As an aside, few realise that BP itself played a key role in the botched clean-up effort that followed the Exxon Valdez’s spill[18].)
A similar point might be made with respect to BP itself; after an explosion caused by lax safety practices at one of its refineries led to the death of several of its employees (more on this below), internal and external reports criticised BP’s safety-related practices and suggested that the firm needed to drastically revise its policies. About a week ago, it emerged that BP would be fined a record, but still relatively paltry $50 million for lingering safety problems at the refinery in question(19); either the corporation was slow, or not particularly worried about the fines, or perhaps both. It might finally be noted that, until the end of the 20th century, it would have been almost inconceivable for a company to sustain and survive damages in the region of $20 billion or more (let alone near-universal opprobrium). But after Browne, BP will simply have to sell some of its assets to plug a financial gap estimated to be this size; we should note, though, that like Exxon Mobil, BP may well find ways of using lawyers to significantly reduce the amount of money it has to pay. (In the first part of this series, I referred to reports that even now BP is assembling a court-beating group of scientists to further its aims in any upcoming lawsuits.) Browne might argue that this is a sign of a superb management legacy; but in so far as no BP board member seems likely to end up bankrupt, let alone in jail as a result of the spill, we might take this self-same ‘success’ as an indication of how flatly Browne’s own work has ended up contradicting his self-professed ethics of environmental accountability.
I have thus far focused on the question of corporate accountability following Browne’s rise to the position as CEO of BP. But equally if not more grievously, Browne has been repeatedly identified as being the CEO that led BP in the generation of a corporate culture which may have resulted in a series of catastrophic oil spills, as well as disastrous health and safety lapses. Here again, the account offered by Tom Bower provides a critical insight to the other side of John Browne’s rise to corporate stardom. In an article for the Spectator, Bower noted that
‘To his credit, Browne transformed BP from a dying corporation in the early 1990s into the world’s second largest oil behemoth. He refocussed BP on ‘elephants’ — the big oil reservoirs — and ruthlessly cut costs.’
‘Cutting costs became BP’s obsession. The philosophy was ‘More for less’ — 100 per cent of a task would be completed at a cost of only 90 per cent of the previous resources. Conscious of its Orwellian overtones, Tony Hayward [Browne’s successor] condemned the penny-pinching approach in 2006 as ‘a management style that has made a virtue out of doing more for less’.
‘Browne’s casualties included BP’s engineers. Hundreds were fired and replaced by subcontractors. Just as ExxonMobil was hiring engineers because “drilling is the core of our business”, Browne was ditching BP’s in-house expertise, which could second-guess every technical operation on land and under the sea. This saved money but changed BP’s culture. Instead of oil engineering, Browne pursued financial engineering’(20).
John Browne may well dispute this account, but it appears to be more than backed up by the findings of reports and judgements produced by different official U.S. entities. The following is a by no means exhaustive list of such reports, and the events that they refer to:
- In 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a news release in which it announced that ‘BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. today [23 September] pleaded guilty to one felony count related to the illegal disposal of hazardous waste on Alaska’s North Slope, and it agreed to spend $22 million to resolve the criminal case and related civil claims, the Justice Department announced. (…) BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc., or “BPXA,” admitted in U.S. District Court in Anchorage that it failed to immediately notify authorities of a release of hazardous substances to the environment, and it agreed to pay the maximum criminal fine of $500,000. As part of the plea agreement, BPXA also admitted that it failed to provide adequate oversight, audits and funding to ensure proper environmental management on Endicott Island, Alaska’(21).
- In 2005, there was a tremendous explosion in BP’s Texas City oil refinery, which killed 15 people and injured 180. It was followed by additional accidents with further fatalities. A subsequent investigation into BP’s safety practices by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSHIB) produced an extraordinarily damning report which is worth quoting at some length. The report noted amongst other points that ‘Cost-cutting, failure to invest and production pressures from BP Group executive managers impaired process safety performance at Texas City’; that ‘The BP Board of Directors did not provide effective oversight of BP’s safety culture and major accident prevention programs. The Board did not have a member responsible for assessing and verifying the performance of BP’s major accident hazard prevention programs’; that ‘BP Texas City lacked a reporting and learning culture. Personnel were not encouraged to report safety problems and some feared retaliation for doing so. The lessons from incidents and near-misses, therefore, were generally not captured or acted upon. Important relevant safety lessons from a British government investigation of incidents at BP’s Grangemouth, Scotland, refinery were also not incorporated at Texas City’; that ‘Safety campaigns, goals, and rewards focused on improving personal safety metrics and worker behaviors rather than on process safety and management safety systems. While compliance with many safety policies and procedures was deficient at all levels of the refinery, Texas City managers did not lead by example regarding safety’; that ‘Numerous surveys, studies, and audits identified deep-seated safety problems at Texas City, but the response of BP managers at all levels was typically “too little, too late”’(22). In what was perhaps the most damning aspect of the report from the point of view of Browne’s own responsibility, the CSHIB suggested that BP as a whole was to be held responsible (as opposed to just the managers at the Texas City refinery), and that ‘The BP Chief Executive and the BP Board of Directors did not exercise effective safety oversight. Decisions to cut budgets were made at the highest levels of the BP Group despite serious safety deficiencies at Texas City. BP executives directed Texas City to cut capital expenditures in the 2005 budget by an additional 25 percent despite three major accidents and fatalities at the refinery in 2004’(23).
- In 2006, news emerged of a major oil spill from a BP pipeline in Prudhoe Bay, in Alaska’s North Slope area. It was later discovered that parts of the BP Exploration pipeline from which the spill had occurred were severely corroded. Members of a U.S. congressional committee that investigated the disaster were ‘told that the causes of the spillage – which happened at a time when BP was making huge profits – shared “striking similarities” with the problems that led to the 2005 explosion at a Houston refinery in which 15 people died’. The Republican Bart Stupak, chairman of the House Energy subcommittee on oversight and investigations, stated that ‘My review of the mountain of circumstantial evidence can only lead me to the conclusion that severe pressure for cost-cutting did have an impact on maintenance of pipelines’. BP was forced to suspend use of the pipeline, and told to replace 16 miles of it, at an estimated cost of US 250 million. Even Robert Malone, the chairman of BP America, was quoted as admitting that there ‘“was a concerted effort to manage the costs [at the Alaska fields] in response to the continuing decline in production at Prudhoe Bay”’(24).
To my knowledge, another set of events was never officially investigated, but may provide further insight to BP’s activities. In 1996, BP Exploration began work on the construction of the Ocensa oil pipeline in Colombia. This project, which involved a consortium of companies led by BP, also generated controversy. According to the Independent newspaper, ‘As soon as the construction work began … the farmers said they noticed an impact on the local water table. Natural springs that local people had relied on for hundreds of years began to dry up, while other farmers complained of flooding. Crops failed, fishponds became unsustainable and livestock perished in the fields. Colombia’s oil pipelines have also become targets for insurgent groups. To stem the attacks, government-aligned paramilitaries have been deployed close to the pipelines. The soldiers have killed farmers’ livestock for food and, when the farmers objected, soldiers claim they were threatened’(25). BP denied the validity of farmers’ claims, but in 2006 agreed to pay what is believed to be a multimillion pound settlement after the farmers instructed lawyers in Britain to bring a human rights challenge in the High Court in London, in support their claim for compensation of £15m. In 2009, another such claim was brought against BP.
And so to the present. BP’s current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico took place a good three years after John Browne was forced to resign from his position as CEO. Even if he were still the CEO, a case might be made that this environmental disaster, like the rest of the ones produced by BP and other oil giants, must have been the outcome of a complex concatenation of events—and indeed organisations—which should share the blame. On some level, this must be true. But in my opinion, the question is not whether any individual (e.g. Browne, or Hayward) was single-handedly to blame, but whether some individual managers pursued policies that played key roles in establishing the necessary, if not the sufficient context for a disaster to take place. It is on this level that a number of critical observers have suggested that it was under Browne’s leadership that BP acquired a corporate culture premised partly on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and deficient safety control—the very practices which will almost certainly be blamed for the Deepwater Horizon’s explosion.
To be sure, even before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, and a good two years or so before Browne left BP, the corporation had already been involved in another oil platform incident—one that could itself have produced another major disaster. On July 11, 2005, the Thunder Horse, a $1 billion oil platform, was found listing dramatically after a hurricane swept through the region. Such platforms are built to withstand hurricanes, and so the question at the time was why the platform had failed. According to the New York Times,
‘A valve installed backward had caused the vessel to flood during the hurricane, jeopardizing the project before any oil had even been pumped. Other problems, discovered later, included a welding job so shoddy that it left underwater pipelines brittle and full of cracks. (…) “It could have been catastrophic,” said Gordon A. Aaker Jr., a senior engineering consultant on the project. “You would have lost a lot of oil a mile down before you would have even known. It could have been a helluva spill — much like the Deepwater Horizon”’(26).
The same article went on to link the near miss to BP’s corporate culture:
‘The problems at Thunder Horse were not an anomaly, but a warning that BP was taking too many risks and cutting corners in pursuit of growth and profits, according to analysts, competitors and former employees. Despite a catalog of crises and near misses in recent years, BP has been chronically unable or unwilling to learn from its mistakes, an examination of its record shows. (….) “They were very arrogant and proud and in denial,” said Steve Arendt, a safety specialist who assisted the panel appointed by BP to investigate the company’s refineries after a deadly 2005 explosion at its Texas City, Tex., facility. “It is possible they were fooled by their success.”’
As Bower noted several years later in the Spectator,
‘At Tony Hayward’s [congressional] inquisition in Washington last week [in June 2010], the hapless BP chief executive resisted the temptation to condemn his predecessor, Lord Browne of Madingley, by name. Instead, pressed repeatedly to explain why BP had breached safety regulations on over 700 occasions, Hayward described 2006 as the corporation’s worst year. That was John Browne’s last full year as chief executive. He left the job humiliated, having been exposed for signing an untruthful court statement. Ever since, Browne has defended that dishonesty as a unique aberration. But as the American investigation of the Gulf catastrophe develops, the blame for the poisonous legacy inherited by Hayward will increasingly be heaped on Browne’(27).
The precise sequence of events, and the exact causes of the Gulf of Mexico disaster remain to be determined and judged. But on the basis of the evidence that I have at my disposal, I join those who believe that, as BP’s CEO, Browne may well have played a key role in allowing, if not in actually generating key aspects of the context in which the Gulf disaster could happen, and perhaps was even more likely to happen. I am reminded, in this sense, of the paradoxical nature of a claim made by Browne in his autobiography, Beyond Business, in which he noted that he ‘had spent my whole working life dealing with probabilities – after all, that is what oil exploration is about’(28). The key question is, did Browne also calculate that BP could get away with cost-cutting? As I began to note earlier, on June 10, 2010, Time magazine put not Tony Hayward, but John Browne at the top of its list in an article titled ‘Dirty Dozen: Whom to Blame for the Oil Spill’. As Time put it, ‘The former CEO presided over a period of dynamic expansion at BP, but his cost-cutting may have contributed to the company’s checkered safety record’(29).
John Browne and the Society of Spectacle
I would like to conclude this post by standing back from the events—and indeed from Browne himself—in order to analyse the broader culture in which the disjunction emerged. In the third and last post in this series, I will then analyse why Browne’s record—or at least what I regard as the more grievous aspects of his record—have been ignored by New Labour politicians, and now by the members of the Liberal Conservative coalition.
The first point that I should make is that, in one sense, there is nothing new about Browne’s practices, or indeed, Browne’s BP. One does not have to be familiar with the critical history of business firms offered by Alfred Chandler in The Visible Hand(30) to know that large business organisations have long been unaccountable to the people they ostensibly serve. It is not exactly a secret that many, if not most such organisations routinely contradict the free marketeering discourse that they profess to adhere to; they use underhanded methods to disable competitors, and lobby government officials to either look the other way, or to pass laws that make legal practices that effectively curtail competition. From this perspective, what has changed is not so much the politics, but the sheer distance that separates a John Browne from the fabled man (or woman) on the street. As the corporations have grown, it seems that they have also acquired a capacity not just to inflict, however accidentally, the environmental disasters of the kind seen in Alaska, in Bhopal, and now in the Gulf of Mexico. Equally if not more seriously, they have acquired the means with which to effectively thwart any efforts to bring the firms, or their leading managers, to book.
What this ‘quantity, not quality’ argument misses is a form of public representation that is qualitatively different from the old, and which requires both use of, and complicity on the part of the mass media. One account of this change was offered some years ago by Guy Debord in his book The Society of Spectacle(31). A detailed account of Debord’s thesis is beyond the scope of this post. It suffices to note that, according to Debord, the society in question is dominated by an ‘immense accumulation of spectacles’ in which ‘all that once was directly lived has [now] become representation’. Debord further suggests that in such a society, the representations are increasingly ‘detached from every aspect of life’, ‘apprehended in a partial way’, and conducive to a ‘concrete inversion of life’: ‘reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation’(32).
In my opinion, executives like Browne appear to have understood this phenomenon, and have hired advertisement agencies to try to exploit it. Anyone interested in learning about the contorted ethics of the advertising people who work behind the scenes to enact this process could do worse than read the interesting account penned in the New York Times by John Kenney. Kenney is an advertising executive who worked on aspects of BP’s campaign, but who seems to have had second thoughts about the campaign. What I find most astonishing is that Kenney apparently expects us to believe that he was a kind of Browne ‘convert’, somebody who effectively fell hook, line and sinker for all the razzmatazz about the ‘new’ BP—but this even as he acknowledged (back in 2006) that advertisement is ‘a funny business. You get to help shape the personalities of huge companies. Most often it’s for cellphone service or credit cards or fast food or paper towels. Rarely are you faced with whether you “believe” in a product or service’(33). In my view, it is in this dynamic, known by critical scholars as commodity fetishism, that we find one of the keys to the politics and indeed the ethics behind the kind of image makeover instituted by Browne, and by advertising more generally. Never mind the reality behind the product; just choose an image, and try to sell it; if insufficient voices are raised against it, and if the ‘target audience’ is not itself familiar with the reality in question, then an attractive new image might well displace the old, and we will have what Debord rightly identified as ‘a pseudo-world apart’, one that exists solely as an ‘object of contemplation’.
Interestingly, at about the same time as Kenney was taking distance from his own earlier work, Ogilvy and Mather were becoming involved in what, in my view, was an analogously misleading public relations campaign. This campaign was for the giant timber business, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). The parallels seem striking: if with BP it was ‘beyond petroleum’, with APP it was ‘conservation beyond compliance’. And yet, just as BP would be shown to be anything but ‘beyond petroleum’, APP was itself anything but ‘beyond compliance’—or rather, possibly it was beyond compliance in the sense that the company may have felt that it was able to get away with destroying environmentally sensitive areas even as it put up ‘green’ ads in major newspapers, and as it signed agreements with the WWF. Nazir Foead, the WWF-Indonesia’s former director of policy & corporate engagement, was quoted as saying in 2007 that ‘Apparently the company [APP] has decided to run a global propaganda campaign rather than protect forests with high conservation values’(34).
Of course, an order of representation such as the one deployed by BP (or APP) can only prevail in the absence of a train of events that interrupts the ‘contemplation’, that shatters the pseudo-world created by the representations. I would argue that, while aspects of Browne’s and BP’s ‘Beyond Petroleum’ inversion did appear to work at first, from the mid-2000s onwards a succession of catastrophic events began to undermine John Browne’s, and indeed Ogilvy and Mathers’ semiotic. Whatever was left of BP’s tattered reputation as a ‘greener’ company has now crumbled in the light of the current disaster. Even if BP does survive the Gulf spill relatively unscathed (from an economic point of view), it seems clear that in future, no oilstar will be able to pretend that that it is anything but an enterprise devoted to the increasingly risky and unsustainable business of extracting oil.
Or will they? What this interpretation does not explain is how it is that even now, after Browne has been disgraced, leading politicians in the UK continue to support him. As noted earlier, in 2007 he was exposed for signing an untruthful court statement about his relationship with his former partner. Even within BP itself, Browne’s management style and later proposals became increasingly controversial, to the point that Browne was reportedly forced to quit before he wished to (35). The question is thus how and why someone like Browne has not only survived, but has been called back to the UK government’s ‘inner circle’. At the very least, we need to specify Debord’s theory, and this will be one of my tasks in the third and last post in this series.
References
1) ‘Majority of spilled oil in Gulf of Mexico unaccounted for in government data’ in Washington Post, 29 July 2010, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806135.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
2) ‘BP oil crisis close to end: Obama’ in CBC News, 4 August 2010, http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/08/04/bp-gulf-oil-static-kill.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
3) BP’s oil spill: White House accused of spin, Guardian, 5 August 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/05/oil-spill-white-house-accused-spin, accessed 18 August 2010.
4) ‘Scientists raise queries about Gulf oil left behind’, Reuters, 17 August 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67G4ZA20100818, accessed 18 August 2010.
5) Speaking in the Reith Lectures, 2000. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2000/lecture3.shtml, accessed 30 July 2010.
6) ‘Former BP chief gets Whitehall role’, in Guardian, 30 June 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/30/john-browne-conservatives-whitehall, accessed 18 August 2010.
7) ‘Now David Cameron shafts the environment’, Independent, 15 July 2010, http://www.johannhari.com/2010/07/15/now-david-cameron-shafts-the-environment, accessed 18 August 2010.
8) ‘The rise and fall of BP boss John Browne’, Times, 20 September 2009, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6841213.ece, accessed 18 August 2010.
9) ‘BP was nicknamed “Blair Petroleum”’, in Times, 2 May 2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1733912.ece, accessed 18 August 2010.
10) A transcription of Browne’s speech, given in September 1997 at Stanford, can be found at http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/community/bmag/sbsm0997/feature_ranks.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
11) Ibid.
12) ‘McDonalds teams up with Weight Watchers’ in Daily Telegraph, 4 March 2010 at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/lucyjones/100006931/mcdonalds-teams-up-with-weight-watchers-heaven-for-fatties-but-what-about-their-health/, accessed 18 August 2010.
13) ‘BP shuts alternative energy HQ’ in Guardian, 29 June 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/28/bp-alternative-energy, accessed 18 August 2010.
14) ‘The rise and fall of BP boss John Browne’, Times, 20 September 2009, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6841213.ece, accessed 18 August 2010
15) ‘How Green is BP?’ in New York Times, 8 December 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/magazine/how-green-is-bp.html?pagewanted=7, accessed 18 August 2010.
16) ‘Justices slash damages for Exxon Oil Spill’ in Washington Post, 25 June 2008, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/25/AR2008062500663.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
17) See Climate Progress blog, 15 June 2010, http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/15/the-exxon-valdez-spill-bp-escrow/, accessed 18 August 2010.
18) See ‘BP played key role in botched Exxon Valdez response’, in Huffington Post, 25 May 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/25/bp-exxon-valdez-response-gulf-oil-spill_n_588335.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
19) See ‘BP to pay $50.6 mln fine for Texas refinery blast’, Reuters, 12 August 2010 at http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE67B4BJ20100812, accessed 18 August 2010.
20) ‘The real villain of BP’, in Spectator, 26 June 2010, at http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/6099278/part_2/the-real-villain-of-bp.thtml, accessed 18 August 2010.
21) EPA press release, 23 September 1999, at http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/016bcfb1deb9fecd85256aca005d74df/5d61856989631e20852567f6004bbbff?OpenDocument, accessed 18 August 2010.
22) U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, ‘Investigation Report Refinery Explosion and Fire’, 20 March 2007, p. 25-26.
23) Ibid., p. 189.
24) ‘BP’s oil spill in Alaska blamed on cost-cutting’, in Independent, 17 May 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bps-oil-spill-in-alaska-blamed-on-costcutting-449167.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
25) ‘BP pays out millions to Colombian farmers’, in Independent, 22 July 2006, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bp-pays-out-millions-to-colombian-farmers-408816.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
26) ‘In BP’s record, a history of boldness and costly blunders’, New York Times, 12 July 1010, at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/business/energy-environment/13bprisk.html, accessed 18 August 2010
27) ‘The real villain of BP’, in Spectator, 26 June 2010, at http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/6099278/part_2/the-real-villain-of-bp.thtml, accessed 18 August 2010.
28) This quote also appeared in an extract of Browne’s book published by the Times Online. See http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article7014819.ece, in which Browne offers his version of the events that led up to the sex scandal in 2007. Accessed 18 August 2010.
29) For the full list, see http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1995523,00.html, accessed 18 August 2010.
30) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.
31) The Society of Spectacle, New York: Black and Red, 1984.
32) Ibid. p. 12
33) ‘Beyond propaganda’, New York Times, 14 August 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/opinion/14kenney.html?_r=1, accessed 18 August 2010.
34) ‘FSC rules in upheaval after green groups level accusations at APP’, in Print Weekly, 1 November 2007, http://www.printweek.com/news/764431/FSC-rules-upheaval-green-groups-level-accusations-APP/, accessed 6 August 2010.
35) See Bower’s account in ‘The Rise and fall of BP boss John Browne’ in the Times, 20 September 2009, at http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article6841213.ece, accessed 18 August 2010.
