Paper short abstract:

The vast might of today's global oil corporations is widely assumed. This paper focuses on the narrative and performative elements of corporate power, asking how is that power sustained in the face of increasing pressure from national governments and wider publics?

Paper long abstract:

In the world of neoliberal capitalism, we are told, innovation and future-thinking reign, sweeping away locality and history as dead weight in the drive to ever-increasing efficiencies. At the same time, the discourse of market rationalism instructs that it is capital, not culture, globalism rather than localism that rules the roost. But this dominant image of corporate capitalism overlooks the ways in which transnational corporations (TNCs) - especially extractives - are territorialized, rooted in place in ways that cannot simply be transcended. The Darwinian capacity of global corporations, and the resilience of big capital to political and social challenges, is taken for granted without showing how it is achieved, or the struggles of reinvention this involves. Critically, we fail to see the resources corporations deploy (material and discursive) when negotiating new political pressures, social challenges and legislative imperatives. While the vast might of today's global oil corporations is widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to the narrative and performative elements of corporate power on which this paper focus, asking how is that power sustained in the face of increasing pressure from national governments and wider publics? As oil corporations attempt to negotiate converging existential crises - financial, ecological and political - the pursuit of ethical valorization becomes ever harder and ever more important for millennial oil companies. Against this backdrop, sustainability emerges, not just as the latest rendition of CSR, but as a central common strategy within the discursive work of transnational oil companies.