Eco-Identity as Discursive Struggle: Royal Dutch/Shell, Brent Spar, and Nigeria.

This paper addresses eco-discourse by the corporate rhetor that emerged in the wake of two environmental disputes. While such green business rhetoric might be conventionally viewed as a category of crisis communication, it is treated here as an instrument of corporate sensemaking and discursive

struggle. Specifically, I analyze the "language games" between the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and its critics that arose over Shell UK's plans to decommission the Brent Spar and Shell Nigeria's operations in Ogoniland, a tribal community in the Niger Delta. I demonstrate that Shell's rhetorical contests had constitutive effects on its environmental and human rights policies and practices and led to its cautious embrace of the language of sustainable development. Combining sensemaking and Foucauldian approaches. I argue that such local conflicts over meaning-making around the natural environment must be understood in terms of discursive struggle at the sociopolitical level where they both reflect and influence the dynamics of cultural and institutional change.

Keywords: Eco-Discourse, Green Rhetoric, Corporate Sensemaking, Discursive Struggle, Environmental & Human Rights

In 1995 the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, [1] one of the largest petroleum products companies in the world, was twice targeted by international protest and the threat of boycotts--first, because of Shell UK's proposed action to dispose of the Brent Spar, an enormous superannuated oil storage and loading platform, in the deep waters of the North Atlantic; and later, because of Shell's failure to take a high-profile public stance against the Nigerian government, Shell Nigeria's local business partner, when it executed nine Ogoni environmentalists including Ken Saro-Wiwa, an internationally acclaimed journalist and writer who had spearheaded protest against Shell. These incidents engaged the company and its critics in "language games" (Wittgenstein, 1958, quoted in Mauws & Phillips, 1995, P. 332), or discursive contests, over the environment and associated human rights that were played out publicly in a variety of forums. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty Internat ional, the media, and other stakeholders in Shell's socio-political milieus drew on discourses alternative to Shell's and thus introduced dissident voices that disrupted Shell's institutionalized ways of seeing and acting. The shocks to Shell's image served as precipitating events, or "social dramas" (Pettigrew, 1979, p. 570-571), that foregrounded questions of identity for the company (Knight, 1998; Lawrence, 1999a, b; Mirvis, 2000) and challenged its modernist rationality (see Welcomer, Gioia, & Kilduff, 2000).

My paper starts from the perspective of social constructionist and identity/enactment theory (Cheney & Christensen, 2000; Weick, 1979; see also Huff, 1983; Trujillo, 1985). According to this approach, language--which constitutes reality in particular ways--has shaping effects on practice in a process that is recursive. In terms of the examples here, Shell's crises led the company to talk about and thus reconceive its social and environmental responsibilities (see Lawrence, 1999b; Mirvis, 2000). They moved the company from a taken-for-granted discourse of economic development toward cautious adoption of the language of sustainable development, which attempts to balance interests of economic development with environmental well being. Similarly, Shell opened itself to such potentially democratizing discursive forms as stakeholder engagement, dialogue, and "social" reports (i.e. reports on corporate social and environmental performance). These discursive moves were both shaped by and constitutive of company acti on and practice.

Foucauldian discourse theory provides a basis for explaining what Shell itself understood and acknowledged (Herkstroter, 1996b; Knight, 1998, p. 2)--namely, that Shell's eco-crises raised issues of institutional legitimacy. In other words, Shell's corporate culture change can be understood as reflecting, and attempting to bridge, a clash of different discursive orders and domains. In this paper I focus on the language games between Shell and its critics and argue that they were rooted in a discursive struggle central to late 20th century society around what the proper relationship among corporations, communities, and nature should be (Hajer, 1997; see also Beck, 1992). On the one hand, the discourse of development reflected the structures, institutional relationships, and stories underpinning the economic paradigm; and on the other side, voices of environment and environmental justice attempted to de-center the taken-for-granted progress myth, assuming to speak with and for nature, and for the right to life in all forms, now and in the future. Insofar as Shell's critics challenged the metanarrative of progress as expressed in the neo-classical economic paradigm (Lyotard, 1984; see Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992), these discursive struggles had repercussions not just for Shell, but for the entire oil industry--and indeed, for business more generally. The language of sustainable development, to which the company was eventually moved, served Shell's identity needs and contributed to preserving, though in revised form, the progress myth that underpins modern corporations and a market economy.

Thus, in this paper, I adapt, and adapt, Mauws and Phillips' (1995) use of Wittgenstein's term "language games." I move beyond their original meaning of the term to argue that Shell and its critics drew from and shaped particular socially constructed and, within their respective domains, socially agreed upon and uncritically accepted meanings. By comparing the texts of Shell and its critics, I emphasize the socially contested nature of discourse respecting the natural environment and economic development and point toward its effect upon Shell's emerging eco-identity. "Games" evoke the scene of ancient rhetoric-in the sense of an agonistic contest of words between competitors in a public forum (see Billig, 1996)--but I extend the notion here to highlight the relationship between local discursive contests and shifts at the societal level. The language games here are not just reflections of, and a shaping force in, Shell's culture and its external environment narrowly conceived; they also play a role in the soc iopolitical framing of the ecological problematic (Hajer, 1997). By examining contrapuntal texts of Shell and its critics, I demonstrate the dynamics of Shell's corporate identity formation and, more importantly, suggest what is at issue in the discourse of sustainable development itself.

Theoretical Framework

While management communication scholarship might approach the texts of Shell's corporate rhetor (see Cheney, 1992) from the perspective of crisis communication, I start from the interpretive (Bruner, 1990; Geertz, 1973) and social constructionist (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) perspectives that have increasingly been employed in recent studies focused on the constitutive role of language in organizations (e.g., Barrett, Thomas, & Hocevar, 1995; Boje, 1991; Cheney & Christensen, 2000; Cheney & Vibbert, 1987; Gephart, 1996; Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983; Smircich & Stubbart, 1985). Moving then to a complementary frame of analysis, I apply Foucauldian theory and discourse analytic methods.

Green Talk as Corporate Cultural Performance

Public relations has traditionally relied on classical rhetoric to explicate the processes involved in the firm's symbolic management of its external environment, whether by way of issue advocacy (i.e., shaping public issues such as the natural environment in a manner favorable to the firm; see Crable & Vibbert, 1983) or crisis management and response. For instance, when environmental (ecological) crises--or criticisms--strike, organizations adopt a range of rhetorical strategies to influence public perceptions about such events and the firm's relationship to them. The firm is thus conceived of as managing or controlling its "publics" by creating, or restoring, "goodwill" (Gibb, 1961; Ice, 1991; Tyler, 1992; see also Shrivastava, 1987). Ice (1991) likens firms' crisis responses to forms of apologia, distinguishing strategies that separate the firm from outside claims and demands (e.g., denial) from those that promote identification between the corporation and its publics (e.g., bolstering; see Ice, 1991, pp. 343-344). Interesting tensions among strategies can sometimes develop as firms in crisis, particularly multinational firms, try to address the different needs of assorted stakeholder-audience groups ranging from home and foreign governments to shareholders, customers, and victims.

Meznar and Nigh (1995) have similarly postulated that corporate public discourse serves either to defend the organization against or to provide a bridge to its external environment (p. 976). They see both buffering and bolstering as forms of defense that, when successful, protect the firm against outside pressures and secure its legitimacy. On the other hand, bridging, according to Meznar and Nigh, may actually "promote internal adaptation to changing external circumstances" (p. 977). While both strategies may be simultaneously employed, Meznar and Nigh predict that firms will be more likely to defend in circumstances where they have market power and control of vital resources (e.g., energy), unless the leadership adopts a pioneering approach. This theory somewhat begs the question of what forces might foster pioneering attitudes in managers. Nevertheless, their approach has been fruitfully applied to analysis of Shell's rhetoric in the wake of Spar (van den Bosch & van Riel, 1998).

Though useful, such theories do not sufficiently emphasize the reflexive and constitutive nature of corporate discourse as conceptualized in recent communication scholarship (e.g. Cheney & Christensen, 2000; Cheney & Vibbert, 1987; Smircich & Stubbart, 1985; Trujillo & Toth, 1987). According to these studies, the social reality of the organization is created and maintained for internal and external stakeholders through language and symbolic action; by "making" and "remaking" the organization for its multiple audiences, communication "creates and maintains systems of shared meanings that facilitate organized action" (Smircich & Stubbart, 1985, p. 724). In this way, rhetoric serves the ends of strategic management (Huff, 1983) and ensures institutional legitimacy (Brunsson, 1989). Thus, whether identity saving (defensive) or identity serving (accommodating), Shell's discursive moves must be seen as meaning-making, as constituting a social reality.

Enactment theory (Weick, 1979, 1995) becomes relevant here. From this perspective, organizations, especially large organizations, are not seen simply as objects of their environments (Cheney & Vibbert, 1987); rather, they "actively put things out there that they then perceive and negotiate about perceiving" (Weick, 1979, p. 165). In other words, through communication, a corporation symbolically enacts particular "realities," thus constituting and coming to terms with its own identity and its relationship to the outside world (Cheney & Christensen, 2000). This approach thus problematizes the notion of boundaries. As Cheney and Vibbert (1987) argue, "Because of the creative and evocative power of language, the very 'essence' and 'boundaries' of the organization are things to be managed symbolically; thus the organization's identity is the issue for public relations activity" (p. 176, italics original). The process is reflexive, for the organization seeks both to influence its external audiences and to construc t them. Thus, they serve as an ideal reference point by which to confirm the company's vision of its own goodness, for example, through opinion polls (Cheney & Christensen, 2000, pp. 246-47, 250). Issue (here, the natural environment) and identity become very much intertwined; meanings made become legitimating ideologies, the basis for future deed.

So understood, public eco-discourse by corporations has performative effects (see Cheney & Christensen, 2000; Cheney & Vibbert, 1987; Weick, 1979, 1995)--that is, by representing the natural environment in particular ways, it opens the possibility of constructing new forms of relationship between the firm and nature, which in turn may engender new forms of corporate environmental behavior (see Clark & Jennings, 1997; Fineman, 1996; Livesey, 1999, 2000; Sharma, Pablo, & Vredenburg, 1998; Vertinsky & Zietsma, 1998; cf. Crane, 1995) and new relationships with external stakeholders. What Shell "put out there" about itself, however, was also dialectically tied to existing historically evolved discourses--namely, the discourses of development and environmentalism. To contextualize Shell's eco-meaning making and explain its socio-political dynamics, we must turn to discourse theory and studies of environmental discourse.

Environmental Rhetoric as Discursive Struggle

Although there is much disagreement as to what falls under the rubric of discourse theory (e.g., Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000; Fairclough, 1992; Hajer, 1997, p. 43; Wetherell & Potter, 1992, pp. 88-89), some common assumptions underpin the approach, including the constitutive force of language. From the Foucauldian (1972) perspective, both the discoursing subject (individual or institutional) and the objects of conversation--for example, "madness," "freedom," "literacy," or in this case, "progress," "nature," or "ecological crisis"--are constituted through discourse (see Fairclough, 1992, pp. 41-43). In other words, discourses make up the "common sense of a culture" (Fairclough, 1992, pp. 89-90) and the taken-for-granted aspects of social life and become a disciplinary force by permitting--and limiting--the achievement of particular meanings and the performance of particular actions. In this manner, discourses reflect and sustain social practice and institutional forms by helping to arrange the world in specif ic ways that then come to be accepted (Fairclough, 1992; Foucault, 1972, 1977, 1980; Hajer, 1997; Potter & Wetherell, 1993; Wetherell & Potter, 1992).

The discursive space, however, is not stable. Different discourses interpolate one another (see Fairclough, 1992, pp. 46-47). In Foucault's (1972) words, "there can be no statement that in one way or another does not reactualize others" (p. 98). As a result, discourses often have embedded within them conflicting or contradictory elements, and actors located within particular discursive domains may experience different subject positions, social and institutional practices, normative understandings, and ways of organizing. Practically speaking, this means that organizations, like other actors, must ceaselessly compete, in a process that is social and political, to reproduce their discourses--that is, to sustain their stories and their definitions of, for instance, progress and development, or their notions of the boundaries and legitimate activities of the firm (Hajer, 1997; Tsoukas, 1999; see also Peterson, 1997). The urge to hegemony--to fix meaning and gain rhetorical control of the discursive space--is con tinually defeated. Contradiction and what Foucault (1980) refers to as the play of discontinuity over time offer the possibility of discursive struggle and change. New discourses and discursive forms continue to emerge (Fairclough, 1992; see also Harre, Brockmeier, & Muhlhausler, 1999, p. 4). This process both facilitates and reflects social and institutional change (Fairclough, 1992). My focus here is on the clash and transformation of discourses regarding the natural environment.

Discourses of Environment

The natural environment has become a site of discursive struggle arising out of alternative representations of the nature/society interface. According to Hajer (1997), the central question in modern society is how the current ecological "crisis" is to be understood. Certain management theorists have identified three competing discourses respecting the proper relationship between humans and the biosphere: the traditional development paradigm (or "dominant paradigm"), radical environmentalism, and reform environmentalism with its concept of sustainable development (e.g., Egri & Pinfield, 1996; Gladwin, Kennelly, & Krause, 1995; but see Purser, Park, & Montuori, 1995; Shrivastava, 1994, who suggest further discursive types). [2] Each of these frames relies on conflicting cognitive commitments, assumptions, and norms about how we can know and appropriately engage with (develop practices around) the natural world.

The traditional discourse of development postulates progress in terms of an economic paradigm (see Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992, citing Lyotard, 1984; Prasad, Elmes, & Prasad, 1999). Employing a utilitarian, anthropocentric view of nature as resource and sink, the development model sees nature as separate, knowable, and susceptible to control (Egri & Pinfield, 1996, p. 462). Such confidence arises out of a modernist, technocentric ethos (Egri & Pinfield, 1996; Gladwin, Kennelly, & Krause, 1995; Shrivastava, 1994), which privileges expert knowledge, the methodologies of "hard science," and the bureaucratic procedures through which expert determinations are made (see Peterson, 1997; Williams & Matheny, 1995).

Radical environmentalism represents an array of eclectic interests united by a common rejection of the development paradigm in favor of an eco-centric view. Environmentalists believe that nature and humanity are interdependent. In its extreme versions, radical environmentalism assigns a moral existence to nature and says that it must be understood on its own terms. It places nature on an ontological par with human existence (e.g., Shrivastava, 1994; see Egri & Pinfield, 1996, pp. 463-464). Radical environmentalists are sometimes portrayed as simple Luddites. In fact, however, they exploit the very science, technology, and expert knowledge systems that they debunk to support their most effective critiques. [3] Their approach is epistemologically heterodox insofar as it validates not just disciplines of science but also lay practice and aesthetic and spiritual experience as legitimate sources of knowledge (Peterson, 1997; Shrivastava, 1994; see also Shrader-Frechette, 1990; Slovic, 1991).

In the late 1960s, new discourses of radical environmentalism began to contest the hegemonic hold of the progress myth and development ethos (Hajer, 1997; Harre, Brockmeier, & Muhlhausler, 1999). Environmental criticisms helped to erode the dominant authority of science and technological knowledge, as well as that of the businesses and governments whose interests these disciplines seemed to serve. Technology, however, also contributed to its own discrediting through ecological disasters such as Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. Such incidents exposed the hubris of technology, as well as the risk entailed in industrial processes (Beck, 1992; see also Hajer, 1997, p. 3). Increasing public mistrust was reflected in local struggles around environmental justice and in the passage of a host of environmental laws at local, national, and international levels that restricted corporate activity and forced public disclosure of the ecological and social impacts of business activity. The problem of the natural environment thus encroached into heretofore insulated business domains.

In the mid 1980s, reform environmentalism emerged as a third discourse. It was grounded in the concept of sustainable development, which offered the possibility of consensus by balancing human development needs against environmental well-being (Egri & Pinfield, 1996, p. 465; Peterson, 1997; Westley & Vredenburg, 1991). The Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), the product of a United Nations special committee on environment and development, called for an integrated, global approach to the environmental problem and gave the notion of sustainable development wide currency (see Hajer, 1997, pp. 8-9). But the report defined the notion itself in broad and vague terms; it conceptualized development as meeting the needs of present generations while not preventing future generations from meeting theirs, and as "promot[ing] harmony among human beings and between humanity and nature" (WCED, 1987, p. 65). This has led to continuing argument over what sustainable development can mean (e.g., Krupp, 1986; cf. Dowie, 1995; see also Hajer, 1997; Peterson, 1997). [4]

In summary, business eco-talk serves as a symbolic platform from which the organization can address organizational sensemaking and identity--namely, "the question of what the organization 'is' or 'stands for' or 'wants to be'" (Cheney & Christensen, 2000, p. 232) in its relationship to the natural environment and, by extension, to its stakeholders and society at large. As such, it entails the de-institutionalization/re-institutionalization of organizational environmental practice (Clark & Jennings, 1997). However, environmental sensemaking per force draws on, and is constitutive of, extant, historically evolved, societal discourses such as the language of development and environmentalism. Applying the frame of discourse theory provides the means to explore the political and cultural character of corporate eco-identity formation and the social contexts within which it occurs. The following analysis of the discursive battles between Shell and its critics illustrates these dynamics.

Language Games: Contending Voices in Brent Spar and Nigeria

Located at the crux of the environmental debate, the energy business is critical for the study of corporate ecological and social responsibility. Because Shell adopted a new policy of communicative openness and transparency in the wake of its 1995 crises, its case affords researchers easy access to a wealth of materials which discuss with unusual frankness the company's emerging eco-identity and increasing social and environmental sensitivity. I consider the Brent Spar and the Nigerian incidents together in part because, according to Shell itself, it was the fact of two successive crises that fostered the ensuing corporate culture change (Knight, 1998; Lawrence, 1999b; Mirvis, 2000). Examination of both incidents also provides a more complex and rounded view of the problems of environment and environmental justice.

While Shell's environmental communication campaign was (and still is) ongoing, this paper will focus primarily on company texts published between 1995 and 1997, as well as earlier and contemporaneous texts of Shell's critics, [5] that deal with Spar and Shell in Nigeria. The corporate texts illustrate the early and middle-stage responses of both Shell's local operating companies and the Shell Group to the issue of environmental and social responsibility and anticipate the symbolically important moment of publication of the Group's first annual social report, Profits and Principles--Does There Have To Be a Choice? (Knight, 1998). Citations in Shell's literature to particular groups guided my choice of texts critical of the company. I have relied on prior scholarly research and case studies on Brent Spar and Shell in Nigeria, especially Lawrence (1999a, b), for background information. Space limitations require that I focus here on issues of environment and environmental justice, rather than on the human rights issues. Nevertheless, the Shell case demonstrates the inseparable connection between the natural environment and human rights broadly interpreted to include basic rights to clean air, water, and earth.

I approached this study with a view to theory generation rather than hypothesis testing, an appropriate method where theory is emergent (Yin, 1989). Methodologically, I borrow from techniques of discourse analysis that operationalize Foucauldian theory. Particularly useful to the analysis below is Wetherell and Potter's (1992) concept of "interpretive repertoires" (pp. 89-98), by which they mean historically evolved discourses that serve as resources upon which subjects draw for sensemaking. Discourses of neo-classical economics/development and radical environmentalism constitute such interpretive repertoires. Also useful for my analysis are methods of Foucauldian analysis developed by Fairclough (1992), especially his borrowing and extension of Bakhtin's notions of intertextuality (cited on pp. 84-85). Intertextuality, as conceived by Fairclough (1992), explicates the dynamics of Foucauldian reactualization by showing how texts borrow from or reference one another, explicitly or implicitly, both to sustain and alter meaning, as well as the social relationships they imply. Intertextuality also applies more broadly to the blurring of boundaries between different discursive domains. For instance, discursive forms or conventions usually applied in one discursive order or domain may be carried over into another, as when business borrows from environmentalist discourse (e.g., business adoption of what I call a "discourse of care" about nature) and vice versa (e.g., the business concepts of market-based environmentalism as applied to the notion of ecological sustainability). Fairclough (1992) characterizes this more general intermingling of discursive practice as "interdiscursivity" (pp. 84 ff.). Taken together, these methods of discourse analysis provide the means to link close textual analysis, microsociological/interpretivist views of social practice, and macrosociological analysis.

In the sections below, I describe the contrasting modes of discourse and interpretive repertoires of Shell and its critics--the language games--around Shell's plan to dispose of the Brent Spar and its attempt to position itself as a neutral and innocent party within the political and environmental struggle in Nigeria. Then, I turn to a discussion comparing the two examples. I take them both as instances of attempts to sanction and save--or, in the case of corporate critics, de-sanctify and change--the narrowly economic view of the appropriate relationship of business to its natural and social settings.

The Brent Spar--"Best Practicable Environmental Option" or "Toxic Time Bomb"?

Shell's first crisis arose in May 1995 when Greenpeace occupied the Brent Spar in order to mobilize resistance to Shell UK's dumping plan. Major media coverage (see Anderson, 1997) and public protest, especially in continental Europe, eventually led several European heads of government to criticize Shell and the British government, which had approved the Shell proposal. At first rejecting criticism, by the end of June 1995 Shell had agreed to retrench its plan, much to the government's dismay (see Anderson, 1997; Tsoukas, 1999).

Alleging that harmful chemical residues and radioactive wastes remained in the Spar's storage tanks, Greenpeace called it a "toxic time bomb" (Knight, 1998, p. 41) and a platform "laden with toxic cocktails" (Greenpeace, 1995a, [paragraph]12). [6] It accused Shell of "contempt for public concern about its operations, fishermen's livelihoods and for the health of the North Sea" (Greenpeace, 1995c, [paragraph]4) and said that the company was hiding behind a "veil of secrecy" (Greenpeace, 1995d, [paragraph]5). It belittled Shell's profit motive, characterizing its decision as a cheapskate alternative to responsible decommissioning" and a way of "chasing cash at the expense of the North Sea marine environment" (Greenpeace, 1995c, [paragraph]5). In a similar vein, Greenpeace criticized the British government for its "shortsighted" decision, simply the "latest example of governments allowing industry to treat the seas as a toxic dump" (Greenpeace, 1995a. [paragraph]7). The media, picking up on these messages, ran a headline, "Murder at Sea. . ." (Fay, 1996, [paragraph]1). The company was also accused of "litter louting" [7] (Wybrew, 1996, [paragraph]8).

Articles by John Wybrew (1995, 1996), Director of Public Affairs and Planning at Shell UK, published on Shell's website and in a British public relations journal capture the company's interpretation of Spar, echoing key themes and language found in other Shell materials. Even though the company had by then rescinded its original plan, Wybrew defended it, arguing that the "case" for deepwater disposal had been "sound" ([paragraph]3). From the corporate perspective, ocean dumping represented the "Best Practicable Environmental Option," or BPEO [8] (Wybrew, 1996, [paragraph]5; see also Faulds, 1996; Fay, 1996; Rothermund, 1996; Wybrew, 1996), the applicable criterion under British regulatory procedure. Using cost-benefit analysis, Shell had concluded that sinking the Spar would have "negligible impacts on the marine environment, but the safety and occupational health risks of injury during onshore disposal would be six times higher" (Wybrew, 1995, [paragraph]2). Wybrew said that "painstaking analysis and over 30 studies" supported this assessment, and it had been "endorsed by independent experts and oceanographers, and supported by environmentalists, conservationists, and fishermen during extensive consultations" ([paragraph]2). He criticized Greenpeace for relying on "'single-issue' campaigning which freely exploited dramatic visual stunts, and was adept at packaging misinformation in ready-to-use word snips" ([paragraph]3). He also rebuked the media for what he saw as its uncritical acceptance of Greenpeace's exaggerated and erroneous accounts and pointed to later media admissions of being "led by the nose" (Wybrew, 1996, [paragraph]7).

Wybrew (1995) characterized the incident broadly as follows:

In many ways, this was an unusual clash between the head and the heart--a conflict in which scientific reason and careful judgement were set against the power of emotion, fear, and even myth.... Greenpeace succeeded in turning the Brent Spar into a symbol ... of man's misuse of the oceans, irrespective of the reality. They aroused powerful emotions connected with 'litter-louting' on a grand scale, of David and Goliath, heroism and derring-do. And--frighteningly--the arousal of such powerful emotions brought in its wake escalating violence [e.g., three violent attacks on Shell service stations in Germany and physical damage to others] and echoes of anarchy. ([paragraph]3, emphasis added; see also Wybrew, 1996)

Wybrew's language reveals much about Shell's taken-for-granted assumptions and the epistemologies and social relationships upon which they were based. It employs the positivist interpretive repertoire of scientific management and realist assumptions that deny the rhetorical aspects of science and of the arguments of "independent experts." It calls on Enlightenment dualities--with their explicit oppositions and implicit hierarchies--of head and heart. Here, in contrast to Shell's world, reasoned argument could not compete with reckless emotion (Hajer, 1997; Peterson, 1997; see also Fairclough, 1992). Rather, symbolic significance and "visual stunts" overpowered "reality." Procedural regularity gave way to "echoes of anarchy," or popular protest resulting in some instances in destruction of property.

Shell's immediate "lesson ... learned" was that businesses would have "to come to grips with an area of deep-seated emotions, subconscious instincts, and symbolic gestures," not just the "views and rational arguments of all concerned" (Wybrew, 1995, [paragraph]5). At this point, the "real debate" for Shell centered on "the role of emotive, single-issue campaigning" and "... how, within a democratically established framework of reasoned discussion, painstaking evaluation, and thoughtful consultation, the best practicable environmental solutions can truly be reached" (Wybrew, 1995, [paragraph]6, emphasis added).

This approach appears to assume a "right" answer; it implicitly authorizes particular sets of experts (guided by the "practicable" approach of cost-benefit analysis; cf. McCloskey, 1998). Clearly, the company felt that it was right on the science--or sciences, since several disciplines (e.g., various natural and environmental sciences, technology, and economics) were involved--but had lost on the art. In terms of the elements of classical rhetoric, it had won on logos, but lost on pathos. It believed that ultimately Greenpeace's emotion-stirring tactics, which it claimed were less successful in the UK than on the continent, would be discredited, its exaggerations and inaccuracies exposed, and the media chastened (see, for example, Fay, 1996; see also Anderson, 1997). Shell's apparent goal at this point was to gain better control of the rhetorical space in order to assert its particular version of "truth."

Shell's dualities of "head and heart," however, conceal an important aspect of the discursive conflict here; that is, ethos, the third element of classical rhetoric. Considered thus, these language games demonstrate the increasing influence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as institutional and discursive shifts arising in part out of schisms within the scientific community. Drawing on the symbolic capital (Tsoukas, 1999) and social legitimacy that the environmental movement had achieved over more than 20 years, Greenpeace was arguing explicitly for the principle that environmental costs should be internalized and the rule that the polluter pays. It held that Shell, having "made millions of dollars from oil production in [the] region," should "pay for the clean up of the mess" and "own up to the full cost of the products they produce from cradle to grave" instead of having the "public pay ... for the aftermath" (Greenpeace, 1995b, [paragraph]5). In other words, Greenpeace would not let Shell d isown (externalize) particular aspects of its identity (i.e., waste production and the environmental degradation that it entailed).

To bolster its moral argument against representatives of the "modern western industrial consumer culture" like Shell (Greenpeace, 1995e, [paragraph]6), the NGO leveraged a nostalgic vision of a pristine and innocent Edenic world. Thus, one of the "Spartans"--Greenpeacers who occupied the Spar- wrote in the daily diary that was communicated ashore:

... we see seabirds such as bonxies ... and gannets. The fundamentals represented in the sea, in wilderness, and never echoed in the technical reasoning of Shell or any of the other representatives of our modern western military industrial consumer culture. They, the rapists of Nature are in the ascendant, the fundamentals are getting shaky. ... This campaign is so clear, and we are on the right side, the side of nature, of the wilderness, our brother and sister species, the children of future generations, all the little people who have no voice to fight the Shells of this world. So we here are fortunate to be called to represent all these, our own lovely planet. (Greenpeace, 1995e, [paragraph]6)

This is the interpretive repertoire of radical environmentalism, with its particular constructs of good and evil, weak and strong. It embodies the eco-perspective that sees an intrinsic value in nature and wants to level the (material/economic) power hierarchy by inverting the species hierarchy. It risks itself for, and thus places itself at one with, nature and the creatures within it, including "the little people" of our own species who are powerless--the poor and future generations. Greenpeace thus asserted a "fundamental" truth and ontological stance radically resistant to Shell's.

Greenpeace, however, could, and in fact also did, engage Shell on its own discursive terrain. Here the political struggle occurs in and over the discourse of expertise and risk assessment (see Fairclough, 1992, pp. 55-56). The NGO, for instance, attacked Shell's BPEO document and its Environmental Impact Hypothesis, claiming "unsubstantiated assumptions, minimal data and extrapolations from unnamed studies" (Shell Expro, 1995, [paragraph]1). It used its own scientific expertise to assert the inadequacy of expert knowledge and experience in assessing the risks of dumping to deep-sea ecosystems. These technical arguments about the quality and quantity of data and the reliability of scientific judgments come from the interpretive repertoires of scientific discourse and show its rhetorical aspects. Importantly, however, in terms of my approach, Greenpeace's anti-Spar campaign also changed the rules of the technicist language game by interpolating alternative discursive conventions in terms of both text construct ion and dissemination (see Fairclough, 1992). In contrast to Shell, Greenpeace restricted itself neither to the specialist discourse of risk assessment nor to the discursive spaces of bureaucracy (see Clark & Jennings, 1997; Peterson, 1997); rather, it used vernacular rhetoric and visual imagery (see DeLuca, 1999) and employed it in the public spaces provided by the media and on its own website. This de-professionalized and made colloquial and accessible the language of risk; using language more familiar to the lay public, Greenpeace promoted closer identification and solidarity with it (see Fairclough, 1992, p. 109, for an analysis of how colloquialisms are similarly exploited by the popular press).

Metaphors of "time bomb" and "toxic cocktail" are borrowed from the apocalyptic strains of environmental discourse (see Killingsworth & Palmer, 1996). Greenpeace used them to develop a rhetoric of irony and resistance that transformed Shell, and the oil industry, from the distant and somewhat abstract but beneficent Prometheus of the progress myth (Crable & Vibbert, 1983) into the modern terrorist. This reinforced the notion that modern industry threatened the very society it purported to support (Beck, 1992). In this light, neither Shell's assessments nor its risk management plans merited trust. On the other hand, "litter louting," a vernacular usage, reduced Shell to the village oaf. From one perspective, this metaphor dismissed, and thus deflated, the technical superiority of Shell's claim. From another, it emphasized the inappropriateness of Shell's action by suggesting that it planned to dispose of a 14,500 ton oil platform with the casual abandon of a person throwing away a popsicle stick; it would use its economic and technical muscle to do something that for others was proscribed. This made Shell's management option seem plainly ridiculous. Here, perspective by incongruity (Burke, 1984a, b), the deconstruction of conceptual categories through the incongruous juxtaposition of words--or in Foucauldian terms, the interpenetration of discursive orders--ironically reactualized Shell's central texts, bringing to the surface their underlying ambiguities and contradictions and exposing the vulnerability of the subject position of "expert" that Shell had tried to appropriate for itself.

In these ways, Greenpeace did not simply emotionalize the debate, but also politicized and democratized it. Its discursive moves exposed the normative aspects of risk (social choices about risk management), separate from its "objective" dimensions (risk assessment) (Rodrigue, 1998; see also Peterson, 1997, p. 25). In other words, Greenpeace demonstrated that Spar involved not only questions of scientific rationality but also social questions--issues of whether we want the oceans used this way (Tsoukas, 1999, p. 505). As Shell discovered, these social decisions are not necessarily achieved within bureaucratic discourses or through the governmental authorities where environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are usually evaluated. Although Greenpeace eventually publicly admitted that some of its "facts" had been mistaken, the iconography of sea-savior warriors struggling against a mighty corporation became a carrier for the larger environmental and political issues associated with an industry that was publicly pe rceived as risky, dirty, and nonsustainable (see Anderson, 1997; Tsoukas, 1999). Simply put, Greenpeace had managed to reinforce an image of corporate arrogance; thus, it de-centered the dominant discourse expressed in the narrowly economic terms of cost-benefit analysis.

While Shell was still in the throes of resolving the problems of Spar, the crisis in Nigeria came to a head over the execution of Saro-Wiwa. This crisis, to which I turn next, uncovered the very different yet related dimensions of environmentalism in the nonindustrialized world and highlighted the socio-political tensions between developed and developing nations implicit in globalization. Since oil and gas production rely heavily on operating in the developing world, this dispute represented an even more fundamental threat to Shell's identity and social license to operate.

Nigeria: Ecological Warfare Versus Development in the Niger Delta

Shell, the biggest producer of oil in Nigeria, operated as a joint venture with the government through its local company, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC, or Shell Nigeria). In 1995, SPDC accounted for about 14% of the Shell Group's total oil production worldwide, while the Nigerian government derived 80% of its federal revenues and 90% of its foreign exchange from royalties and taxes provided by multinational oil companies (Lawrence, 1999a, section 4). The ethnic minority communities, such as the Ogoni, who live in the Niger Delta where most (about 80%) of the oil was produced, saw almost no return of these revenues.

Moreover, because of weak environmental regulation, these indigenous peoples who live traditionally by fishing and farming suffered severe ecological and health impacts from oil. According to Oil Spill Intelligence Report, for instance, between 1982 and 1992, 40% of Shell's total spills worldwide had been in Nigeria (cited in Rowell, 1994, fn. 88). Further, in Nigeria in 1995, 75% of gas by-products from oil drilling was flared--burned off in the open air-as compared to a world average of less than 5%, and less than 1% in the United States (see Lawrence, 1999a, section 8a). Flaring in Nigeria not only caused some of the worst local environmental pollution but also contributed adversely to global warming as a result of the greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) released through combustion (see Essential Action & Global Exchange, 2000, fn. 7). Similarly, oil spills and exploration, which cut through mangrove swamps, threatened one of the largest and most ecologically sensitive wetlands in the world (see SPDC, 1997a, p. 15).

In 1993, a massive nonviolent protest organized by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) against Shell and other oil companies led Shell to withdraw its staff and close operations in Ogoni (SPDC, 1997b, p. 2). The Nigerian government blamed the MOSOP leadership for local resistance, which not only affected Shell's most valuable production sites in Ogoni but also set an unsettling precedent for other Delta tribes (MOSOP, 2000b). Ultimately, Saro-Wiwa and others were tried by a kangaroo court of the military tribunal; nine Ogonis, including Saro-Wiwa, were executed on November 10, 1995 (Lawrence, 1999a; MOSOP, 2000b).

For Shell's critics, the trial and executions symbolized what was seen as the deadly effect of Shell's presence in Nigeria. Shell said that it had pursued quiet diplomacy with General Sani Abacha, the Nigerian dictator, but MOSOP and international NGO groups blamed Shell for doing too little to intervene. Human rights and environmental organizations, church and writers' groups, progressive companies (most prominently, The Body Shop), and individuals protesting at Shell's London headquarters and elsewhere accused Shell of murder and called for boycotts of the company. They demanded Shell divestment in Nigeria and environmental clean-up of the Delta (see Lawrence, 1999a). Among other things, [9] attention to oil company operations in Nigeria precipitated more investigative studies. [10] The analysis that follows focuses first on early protests of MOSOP and indigenous tribal leaders and NGO texts critical of Shell. Then it moves to later responses from Shell Nigeria and the Shell Group.

The land, in Saro-Wiwa's words, was the Ogoni's "ultimate heritage" (Saro-Wiwa, 1995b, [paragraph]1). It gave the Ogoni not only their sustenance but their identity, as expressed in the local languages, which have no distinct words for the land and the people (Saro-Wiwa, 1995a). From early in the 1990s, Ogoni environmental activists and Delta tribal chiefs had documented the environmental degradation stemming from oil company activity. Their accounts were taken up in the African media and elsewhere.

One newspaper story (Niboro, 1993), for instance, described Ogoniland as a "hydrological vice grip: impure rain water, impure stream water, but no pipe born water" ([paragraph]15) and night skies "[lit] up like one huge torch" from flaring ([paragraph]12). Delta Rivers Chiefs testified at the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples on Environment and Development at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Their testimony, subsequently incorporated into a Greenpeace report, gave the following picture of ecological calamity:

... apart from air pollution from... emissions and flares day and night, producing poisonous gases that are silently and systematically wiping out vulnerable airborne biota and otherwise endangering the life of plants, game and man himself, we have widespread water pollution and soil/land pollution... [which] result in the death of most aquatic eggs and juvenile stages of life of fm-fish and shell-fish ... whilst ... agricultural lands contaminated with oil spills become dangerous for farming, even where they continue to produce any significant yields.... (Dappa-Biriye, et al., 1992, pp. 59-60, quoted in Rowell, 1994, Section 3, [paragraph]20 & fn. 44)

In a film made by environmentalists, which was cited in an NGO webpage, a chief from the village of Korokoro explained:

When crude oil touches the leaf of a yam or cassava, or whatever economic trees we have, it dries immediately, it's so dangerous and somebody who was coming from, say, Shell was arguing with me so I told him that you're an engineer ... I did not got to the university, but I know that what you have been saying in the university sleeps with me here so you cannot be more qualified in crude oil than myself who sleeps with crude oil. (Chief GNK Gininwa, quoted in Essential Action, 2000, [paragraph]7 & fn. 6)

Such examples show how texts are reactualized, and social and institutional alliances (here, e.g., between environmental groups and indigenous peoples) are cemented, through a process of re-production of one text by another in the manner that Fairolough (1992) suggests. The language itself expresses Ogoni connection to their natural surroundings and the immediate and personal impacts of pollution. In Chief Gininwa's passage, where the oil on the leaf became the oil that he slept with, lay experience, the evidence of the body, is set against the theories of science and economics and used to resist the arguments and assurances of expertise. In the testimony of the Rivers Chiefs, the suffering of plants and animals is linked to humans; all are endangered species. The metaphors of silent poisons (reminiscent of Carson's [1962] Silent Spring), hydrological vicegrips, and impurity constitute a rhetoric where actions, by implication, are assigned a moral dimension (see Peterson, 1997). This is the discourse of gras sroots environmentalism, persuasive because it shows familiarity with particularities of local settings and persistent in the face of its devaluation in bureaucratic settings because there are no alternatives to the harsh realities its speakers endure (see Peterson, 1997, esp. pp. 86 if. & 119 ff.).

MOSOP described the Ogoni plight in more explicitly political terms when it accused Shell of "heartless exploitation" (Ake, 1994, [paragraph]4), "ecological war" (MOSOP, 2000a, [paragraph]2), and complicity in the "extinction" of the Ogonis (MOSOP, 2000b, [paragraph]5). Saro-Wiwa (1994) said that the Ogoni problem embodied "the root of the Nigerian malaise and must be rooted out if coming generations are to find peace and progress. The union between international capitalist and local oppressors which denigrates our people must now be broken" ([paragraph]14). Like the language of the tribal chiefs, the metaphor of ecological war here expresses the connection between community and land, but a connection that has been perverted. Nature's despoliation was resulting in "extinction" of the indigenous people. Saro-Wiwa's language, on the other hand, resists and thus reactualizes the traditional progress myth. In his view, the "union" between Shell and Nigerians--that is, development according to the historical West ern paradigm--was nefarious: it made some local Nigerians their brothers' "oppressors." Here the discourse of past-colonial political struggle penetrates the discourse of environment; it contests not only the allocation of environmental bads as in the rhetoric of environmental justice (see Beck, 1992) but also the allocation of environmental goods, thus reflecting pre-Brundtland political debate over competing rights of North and South in the development of emerging economies.

The Ogoni situation was bitterly ironic. By their estimates, $30 billion of oil had been pumped from Ogoni territories by 1990 (MOSOP, 2000; Niboro, 1993), but "our wealth has become a nightmare" (Ake, 1994, [paragraph]1). "Black gold" had "despoiled" their environment and become "a curse for them while feeding others fat" (Ekeocha, 1993, [paragraph]2). Metaphors of nightmare and the "curse" of "black gold" suggest the unnaturalness, as well as inequity, of the turn of events that had led to the harm of both land and people." This language gave voice to the passions and emotions of those contending with abject poverty (malnourishment versus "fat") and the sense of moral outrage that supported MOSOP's position that "Ogoni (like hundreds of other small ethnic groups in Nigeria) deserved to control its own resources, environment, and the right to rule itself" (MOSOP, 2000b, [paragraph]11). The Ogoni were dealing with the vast inequities in wealth and concomitant distortions produced in tribal life by a market e conomy, where legal ownership rather than historical co-presence determined the flow of nature's benefits.

Through the metaphor of "heartless exploitation," the Ogoni inverted the head and heart hierarchy that Shell had used to frame the rhetorical struggle in Spar. To Shell UK the heart led to unruly emotion, even echoes of anarchy, instead of scientific reason, careful judgment, painstaking evaluation, and thoughtful consultation. To the Ogoni, values of the head seem unconscionable to the heart. Inherent in this concept of heartless exploitation is a profits and principles antagonism. Undoing such antagonism between profits and principles, and between head and heart, became the rhetorical goal of Shell's first social report (Knight, 1998; see Livesey, 2000).

Like Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP, Greenpeace (Rowell, 1994) identified Ogoni suffering with international capital, saying that the Ogoni situation raised "uncomfortable questions" for Shell and exposed the need for "proper policing" of "Big Oil" in developing countries ([paragraph]6, [paragraph]7). Greenpeace, however, further characterized "the brutality waged upon the Ogoni ... [as] a byproduct of society's increasing consumption of natural resources" and argued that Ogoniland demonstrated in "microcosm ... what we are doing to the entire earth--just less visibly" ([paragraph]7). Greenpeace's rhetoric echoes the Ogoni's insofar as it does not distinguish between brutality toward people and earth. Here, however, radical environmentalism leverages the visibility of local environmental calamity in Ogoni to challenge global consumerist ideology more generally by emphasizing the negative side effects of consumption required to support an economic ideal of unfettered growth.

Saro-Wiwa's martyrdom forced a high-profile public relations response from Shell, which had to deal with the executions as well as its corporate environmental record and history in Ogoni. Both the Group and the local company immediately expressed "shock" and "sadness" over Saro-Wiwa's death (Knight, 1998, p. 2; Lawrence, 1999a; SPDC, 1997b, p. 7). In the first instance, they also relied, however, on discourses of development and managerialist rationality to minimize and displace blame for both the political and ecological problems in Nigeria--even though this position was ultimately mitigated by Shell's desire to make a gesture of reconciliation and compromise.

The Brief (SPDC, 1997b) published by Shell Nigeria in 1997, like Wybrew's article on Spar, is representative of the local company's public posture. As its title indicates, this document was mainly argumentative and defensive in nature. Overall, Shell characterized itself as victim, positing that it had been "unfairly used to raise the international profile" of the MOSOP campaign against the Nigerian government (inside front cover). While the company acknowledged environmental problems, it downplayed them. For instance, Shell admitted that its facilities needed upgrading, but blamed sabotage rather than the corrosion of aging flowlines for the bulk (2/3 in 1996) of oil spills (p. 9). It said that Ogoni claims of environmental "devastation" were grossly exaggerated (SPDC, 1997b, p. 8), [12] citing conclusions of journalists who said that Shell's limited presence in the Delta area meant that the damage was only a tiny "fraction" of that "routinely claimed by campaigners" (The Independent, November 8, 1996, cite d in SPDC, 1997b, p. 6). This argument disregards the boundary-defying nature of ecological harm. In addition, Shell cited a 1995 World Bank study that characterized the problem of "oil pollution . . . only of moderate priority" in comparison to other poverty-related factors that contributed to environmental deterioration (i.e., population growth, deforestation, erosion, and over-farming cited in SPDC, 1997b, p. 8). It further relied on the World Bank study and a report by the World Health Organization to dispute the connection between gas flaring and health. Thus, it claimed lack of "evidence" that such problems as asthma and skin rashes were due to oil company activities (p. 10). This strategy of arguing lack of "factual" data [13] to support causal relationships is commonly invoked by business in environmental disputes (e.g., global warming). More importantly, the Brief demonstrates how intertextuality--the referencing and reactualizing of studies by multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and th e World Health Organization--is employed by Shell to demonstrate solidarity with these institutions and thus leverage their legitimacy.

Rules of local law, as well as basic economic principles, were also used to rationalize Shell's practices. For instance, "responsible citizenship" was demonstrated by reparation agreements "signed by all parties," plus company willingness to "discuss" conflicts and "revisit [agreements] . . . where new leaders of communities emerge and want to change" (SPDC, 1997b, p. 11). This argument, however, ignored the power relations implicit in institutional procedures and structures. According to Human Rights Watch (1998), Nigerian government laxity vis-a-vis oil companies meant that the companies effectively controlled the process of valuation, negotiation, and payment of compensation (p. 3) [14] Similarly, Shell's justification for using technologies that were "acceptable" in facilities built mostly in the 1960s and 1970s (SPDC, 1997b, p. 9) reflects an economic rationale supported by public policies designed to protect corporate capital investments more than communities.

As to questions of law and human rights, Shell Nigeria claimed that it had "some influence" with the government but that "force" was impossible: "What force could we apply--leaving aside the question of whether it would be right for us to do so?" (SPDC, 2000 [Influence], [paragraph]3). This mirrored the position of Shell Group Chairman Cor Herkstroter, who defined Shell's role as strictly economic and commercial and said that the company lacked "license" to interfere in politics or the sovereign mandate of government (e.g., Herkstroter, 1996b, 1996c; Knight, 1998, p. 2). Accordingly, Ogoni demands for respect for human rights and environmental justice could elicit corporate sympathy but would not lead to action because they were simply placed at the wrong door--outside Shell's proper domain of authority. To Shell's critics, such claims were disingenuous coming from the main provider of revenues upon which the Nigerian regime depended. And Shell failed to address the fact that it (and its first-world consumer s) were advantaged by Nigerian governmental choices.

A speech at the 4th African/African-American Summit in Harare in July 1997 by Phil Watts (1997a), Shell Group Managing Director, provides perspective on the Group's posture in respect to development in Africa generally and illustrates the importance of development discourse in the corporate leadership's framing of Shell's position. Watts said, "Development is the key challenge for the people of this continent. Supporting this development is a major challenge for the world community" ([paragraph]1). From the Shell perspective, economic growth was thus represented to be the primary cure for poverty and social deprivation. According to Watts, political liberalization (in this case the opening of markets) meant the ability to attract "capital flows--and associated transfer of skills--which have been so important for progress elsewhere" ([paragraph]3). As to environment, Watts described "no easy choices or instant solutions," but rather the need to "make constant trade-offs, decide on priorities and focus on long -term improvement" ([paragraph]36). He characterized costs of environmental upgrades in older facilities such as those in Nigeria as having "inescapable economic and fiscal implications." Finally, in Watts' view, corporate social responsibility would be realized through community development and skill transfer. Ultimately, he envisioned "long-term partnership with the peoples and governments [of Africa]--creating companies that are rooted in African society" (1997a, [paragraph]33). [15] In many respects, Watts' speech, with its emphasis on economic development and notions of charitable contribution to community, appears to be heavily influenced by the conventions of development discourse. In this story, historical arguments (e.g., such have been the costs of development historically) and promises of future progress (e.g., present poverty will eventually yield to the comforts of consumer society) are used to shield the corporation from blame for present harms in the form of the devastating effects of lack of e conomic power on weaker groups in a market system. MOSOP, environmental groups, and the media surfaced the contradictions in this progress myth by collapsing time and space, juxtaposing the costs of the poor against the benefits of the rich, and arguing for a fairer and more immediate share of nature's benefits (see Tsoukas, 1999).

Like the Shell Nigeria Brief (SPDC, 1997b), Watts' account contrasted starkly with the immediacy of the Ogoni's insider story of a ruined nature and community, the embodiment of the negative effects of "progress" as realized through market mechanisms. In terms of Foucauldian analysis, both the Brief and Watts' speech show the marks of bureaucratic dis-course, a mode which compartmentalizes and fragments knowledge to fit institutional forums and formulas--legal, economic, and scientific (see Fairclough, 1992; Peterson, 1997). Shell rendered "reality" in terms of expert categories, "proofs," and limits on corporate jurisdictional powers (i.e., license) that seem far removed from the felt "reality" of the executions and everyday life in the Niger Delta. Furthermore, this discourse reveals Shell's predilection, like that of corporations generally, to constitute itself as apolitical (Cheney & Christensen, 2000, p. 234)--that is, as a subject and neutral party rather than an agent in the political order and in the market.

Importantly, however, Watts' (1997a) discussion is couched within a broader claim that development in Africa had to be "sustainable" in order to provide "long-term value" ([paragraph]4). Explicitly referencing Brundtland (1987), Watts (1997a) defined sustainable development in terms of "three essential pillars--economic development, human development and environmental sustainability" ([paragraph]4; see also Watts, 1997b), a metaphor subsequently adopted in Shell's 1998 social report (Knight, 1998). Watts' speech demonstrates an important change in Shell's discourse--the fact that earlier in 1997 the Group itself had revised its General Business Principles by moving toward a commitment to the notion of sustainable development (see Herkstroter, 1997). By embracing this concept, even in terms that express tension, ambivalence, resistance, and contradiction, Shell accepted that the narrowly economic terms of the progress myth and the development paradigm were no longer adequate to demonstrate responsible corpora te citizenship.

Corporate Reflexivity

The 1995 Brent Spar and Nigeria crises became instruments of reflexivity in Shell's "culture change" process (Hamilton, 1998; Lawrence, 1999b), or what Shell referred to as its "Transformation" (Knight, 1998, p. 2). Change, however, did not occur quickly or uniformly across the organization. Elkington, who later became Shell's sustainability consultant, resisted Shell's invitation to help until 1997 because he believed that before that, many Shell executives were still "in denial" about company shortcomings (Knight, 1998, p. 46). In part, Shell blamed its problems on the fact that it operated in a "global fishbowl" (Herkstroter, 1996c, [paragraph]39) and that "modern communications can quickly run local shortcomings into international issues, affecting reputation everywhere" Herkstroter, 1997, [paragraph]24). On the other hand, in a mode of introspection and self-criticism, the company turned to outsiders to find out how to interpret itself (see Cheney & Christensen, 2000). The Group undertook extensive mark et research and stakeholder consultation in 1996 to discover how it was perceived and what society expected from it in terms of environmental and social performance. Its reaction to its findings was one of cognitive dissonance: "We looked in the mirror and we neither recognized nor liked some of what we saw. We have set about putting it right ..." (Knight, 1998, P. 2).

In a remarkably candid speech to explain why Shell had "stumbled" (Herkstroter, 1996b, [paragraph]54), the Shell Group Chairman interpreted Spar and Nigeria as institutional challenges, saying that "modern demands [on companies] are ... somewhat different to the traditional ones" ([paragraph]21) and that "the institutions of global society are being reinvented" by social and technological change ([paragraph]65). Accordingly, Shell had to learn to operate in "a very fluid world ... in which the technological and communications revolution is redefining our perceptions of reality; of authority, and of what is appropriate and what is not" ([paragraph]46). Shell characterized the consequences of this change as a move from a "trust me" to a "show me" world (Knight, 1998, p. 2; see also Faulds, 1998). As Herkstroter (1996b) realized, where "the more traditional structures [of business and government had] failed to adapt," NGOs ("private groups organised around themes or issues") had "gained an authoritative voice" ([paragraph]45). Here, the Chairman appears to be recognizing and responding to discursive struggle and its institutional effects.

Herkstroter self-critically attributed Shell's failure to note the signals of change to its "technological arrogance" ([paragraph]58), which he defined as follows:

Most of us at Royal Dutch/Shell come from a scientific, technological back-ground. That type of education, along with our corporate culture, teaches us that we must identify a problem, isolate it and then fix it. That sort of approach works well with a physical problem--but it is not so useful when we are faced with, say, a human rights issue. For most engineering problems there is a correct answer. For most social and political dilemmas there is a range of possible answers[paragraph]almost all compromises. (Herkstroter, 1996b, [paragraph]59).

Here Herkstroter seems to acknowledge differences among, and the interpolation of, discursive domains (e.g., science and technology, environmentalism, local discourses). In hindsight, he recognizes that Shell could not maintain rhetorical control of the discursive field; the language games over environment could not be contained within a narrow discourse of technical expertise or by the conventions and structures of bureaucracy. Rather, the argumentative others--in this case, Greenpeace, other NGO groups, and Nigerian tribal leaders--offered alternative constructions of reality that forced the company to address difference through dialogue and processes of discursive struggle. Herkstroter (1996b) admitted that "alone we could never have reached the right approach--that we should have discussed them [Spar and Nigeria] in a more open and frank way with others in order to reach acceptable solutions" ([paragraph]2). Of course, Shell was also explicit about its plan to tell its own story better--to revitalize and reactualize the discourse of development within the discourse of sustainability (e.g., Knight, 1998, p. 2; Wybrew, 1996) in addition to listening to outside views.

The twin crises also appear to have been sufficient to have provoked a change in Shell's rhetorical style. Following the advice of a post-Spar editorial in The Economist, Shell began to incorporate a discourse of care, showing itself to be "sensitive" to the ecological and social concerns (e.g., Knight, 1998, inside cover, p. 2). Further, Shell executives presented themselves not just as icons and symbols of the corporation itself but as individuals with feelings, morals, and places in their communities (e.g., Knight, p. 48). In this way, Shell interpolated its expert discourse with a colloquial language of the heart (e.g., Knight, 1998).

The discursive struggle had impacts on Shell's material practices as well. In 1999, the Spar, which had been dismantled and cleaned, was recycled as the base for a quay in Norway--at double the costs (41 million pounds) of sea disposal (Shell Expro, 1999). In Nigeria, the company put in place and publicized plans to track and report environmental problems, to upgrade its Nigerian facilities, to reduce flaring, and to minimize the impacts of its future exploration activities (see SPDC, 1997a, 1998). In addition, changes were implemented in the Group's corporate structure, its programs related to environmental management, and its General Business Principles and policies on environment and human rights. Most importantly, however, Spar and Nigeria had produced a transformation of Shell's traditionally secretive and inward-focused culture and discursive practices. In addition to the appearance of the language of sustainable development (e.g., Jennings, 1997; Rothermund, 1997; Watts, 1997b), themes of transparency , more open and wider communication, and listening better to the concerns of outside stakeholders, including critics, began to permeate Shell's texts. In Shell's words, its decision processes had been transformed from DAD--decide, announce, deliver--to DDD--dialogue, decide, deliver (see e.g., Rothermund, 1998). Thus, the company began to experiment with new, unfamiliar, and potentially democratizing forms of communication, including websites dedicated to discussion and debate on Spar, Nigeria, and other issues (e.g., global warming).

Discussion

Hajer (1997) contends that "argumentative interaction is a key moment in discourse formation that needs to be studied to be able to explain the prevalence of [and change in] certain discursive constructions" (p. 54) that have controlling effects over how environmental problems are understood. Brent Spar and Nigeria constitute such argumentative interactions. Most remarkable about the Brent Spar and Nigerian episodes in this regard is the fact that neither of them arose as a consequence of a particular industrial accident--unlike, for instance, the Exxon Valdez, or Union Carbide and Bhopal. Shell had not done anything "wrong" in the normal sense, but rather was engaged in activities that had been formerly accepted as "business as usual." This emphasizes the discursive nature of

Shell's conflicts. Because of "society's changing expectations" (Herkstroter, 1996b; Knight, 1998, p. 2), Shell had to defend its image and prove its trustworthiness, to account not just for the production of goods and services but also for the risks and harms resulting from its activities (Beck, 1992; Shrivastava, 1995).

My analysis has shown how the interpolation of alternative discursive constructions--language games over both Spar and Nigeria--problematized Shell's discourse and behaviors and, by implication, those of international capitalism. In terms of discursive struggle, however, the Nigerian conflict differed from Spar in several respects. The disposal of the oil platform involved interpretive struggle over whether or not there was significant ecological risk and whether society should assume them; the risks themselves--the health of the ocean and of future generations--were abstract, invisible, in the future. Nigeria, by contrast, involved "industrial legacies" (Knight, 1998, p. 40) very tangible and thus difficult to deny. Here the interpretive struggle over whether the world would suffer future environmental harms was entangled with a more central concern about whether the promises of development were "real." Causality and blame for obvious social and environmental degradation, rather than the likelihood of risk, were the main issues in the Nigerian debate.

Despite differences in context and focus, however, Shell's critics in Spar and Nigeria made common demands for the natural environment and for social equity--namely, that the "invisible be made visible" within the economic paradigm (see Clark & Jennings, 1997; DeLuca, 1999; Shrivastava, 1995). This challenged Shell's subject positioning--its interpretation of itself and the story of its industry, as well as the story of development and the market economy. At issue in the struggle around nature were contradictory constructions of foundational symbolic categories such as capitalism, the market economy, democracy, participation, the public interest, and social justice (see Prasad, Elmes, & Prasad, 1999). A strictly economic version of the metanarrative of progress (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992, p. 130) and the expert competence and knowledge that it had traditionally privileged could no longer ground businesses' license to operate. The "neutral" categories of effectiveness, efficiency (see Shrivastava, 1995) an d cost-benefit analyses that had served well in bureaucratic governmental forums and among conventional stakeholders did not promote identification (Burke, 1984b) between Shell and its publics. To the contrary, they contributed to an image of Shell as a faceless institution (see Knight, 1998, p. 29) in the discursive domain of the media where the environmental ethos had interpolated a discourse of care.

We could conceptualize the language games between Shell and its critics as a kind of forced "dialogue," with the parties corralled into proximity in the semiotic space provided by the media. As it moved forward, Shell preferred dialogue on a voluntary basis. Either way, these conversations would have transformative effects on Shell's conception of, and relationship to, the natural environment. Specifically, from 1997 Shell began to adopt--and adapt--the discourse of sustainable development. Shell's transformation, however, cannot be assumed to be either a linear or unambivalent process (see Mayhew, 1998). Sustainable development is a notion that, in itself, commands dialogue between ecological well-being and development. Its allows for the play of contradictory, fragmentary, and ambiguous meanings, including the ambitious idea that a company in the unsustainable business of extracting finite natural resources such as oil and gas could describe itself as contributing to a sustainable future (e.g., Rothermund, 1997; Watts, 1997b; see Elkington, cited in Knight, 1998, p. 46). Though the search is for consensus and common ground, that dialogue is bound, at the very least, to reflect the tensions among the diverse--some would say, competing--interests of commercial economic development, human society, and the earth.

Conclusions and Future Research

Studies of environmental rhetoric by communication theorists have illuminated the constitutive function of language in framing problems and disputes related to the natural environment (e.g., Cantrill & Oravec, 1996; Carbaugh, 1996; DeLuca, 1999; Hajer, 1997; Harre, Brockmeier, & Muhlhausler, 1999; Herndl & Brown, 1996; Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992; Myerson & Rydin, 1996; Peterson, 1997; see also Hajer, 1997). An emerging management literature on green business talk inside the firm illustrates the breakdown of heretofore socially constituted boundaries between business organizations and their once-ignored natural settings (see Clark & Jennings, 1997; Fineman, 1996; Sharma, Pablo & Vredenburg, 1998; Vertinsky & Zeitsma, 1998). However, the subject of this paper, eco-talk by the corporate rhetor--including executives speaking on behalf of the company, the corporate "we," and corporate literature (see Cheney, 1992)--has received virtually no attention. Using the Shell case as an example, my study has sought to c lose this gap, while highlighting the tensions between local and global meaning-making in business environmental controversies.

Business eco-speak is a discourse that is being enacted by firms more and more. The study of this public corporate discourse in its various dimensions (crisis communication, issue advocacy, public relations, advertising) is rich in potential, for the problem of the natural environment illuminates where practices of the competitive market and democracy collide. As corporations (see e.g., Business Week, 1999; Knickerbocker, 1998) and the environmental consultancy literature (e.g., Elkington, 1998, 1999; Spencer-Cooke & Elkington, 1996) adopt and transform the discourses of environment, the crucial question will be what impact the discourse of business has on shaping the discourse of sustainable development and thus on our understanding of the environmental problem itself.

In the ecological age (Beck, 1992), the function of corporations has become, willy-nilly, political, and the production of green ideologies may be as important to competitive survival as the production of goods and services. Corporate discourse about the natural environment provides dramatic and salient examples of, and new perspectives on issues of boundary blurring that are of interest in the literature on corporate identity (e.g., Cheney & Christensen, 2000; Cheney & Vibbert, 1987) and institution theory (see Brunsson, 1989). As Levy (1997) has argued, the symbolic aspects of material practices typically referred to as environmental (green) management are important for preserving the firm's license to operate. Though not nearly so well recognized by management scholars, how corporations discourse about the natural environment is both integral to environmental management itself and a critical aspect of business sustainability in Levy's meaning of the term.

Finally, and perhaps most interesting for communication scholars, this case illustrates the emergence of new discursive forms--websites, stakeholder dialogue and engagement, social reports--which are valuable as indices of institutional and social change. Technological innovations in communication (e.g., the hotlinking of websites) have taken "argumentative interaction" (Hajer, 1997, p. 54) to a new dimension. In the Shell case, whatever the original audience (e.g., of executive speeches, corporate reports, corporate "briefs"), the materials have all been made publicly available on Shell's website. Uniquely, in the name of openness and transparency, Shell has also included on its website responses from stakeholders, broadly interpreted to include not simply the traditional groups (employees, shareholders, customers) but also NGOs or parties critical of Shell. Study of the interpenetration of discourses found in these materials has much to offer. Not least it may provide better understanding of the dynamics a nd potentially democratizing power of language games and, in particular, their effect on the public mandate for corporate social responsiveness related to one of the most significant issues of our time--the protection of the natural environment.

Sharon M. Livesey is an Associate Professor in the Communication and Media Management Department at Fordham University Graduate School of Business Administration. Research for this paper was done under the auspices of a grant from the GBA Research Committee of Fordham University. Related papers have been presented at the 1999 Fifth Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE), Flagstaff, Arizona, and at the 2000 annual meeting of the Academy of Management in Toronto. The author acknowledges the help of her research assistant, Valerie del Rosario, and the generosity and encouragement of her friends and colleagues George Cheney, Lars Christensen, Andrew Crane, Julie Graham, David Levy, Nick Mayhew, and Nell Talbot. She also thanks M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Interim Editor Kathryn Rentz, and the two anonymous JBC reviewers for their helpful advice.

NOTES

(1.) Shell operates through local companies (e.g., Shell UK, Shell-Nigeria) that are owned by parent companies (Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company), which in turn hold shares in the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies (the Group). The parent companies and the Group have overlapping executive committees.

(2.) Political theorists Williams and Mattheny (1995) identify three discourses of social regulation as follows: (a) managerial, (b) pluralist, and (c) communitarian. Their first category relates most closely to the dominant paradigm of development. Their account is interesting insofar as it recognizes distinct forms of social engagement in terms of discursive diversity, with different power relationships implied.

(3.) For instance, environmental texts--most famously, Rachel Carson's (1962) Silent Spring--used science to galvanize public interest in ecology (see Peterson, 1997, p. 46). Space technology expanded public awareness of the fragility of existence on earth by providing iconic images of our tiny floating globe (Hajer, 1997, p. 8). Groups such as Greenpeace exploited the technology of mass media to disseminate "image events" (DeLuca, 1999) that challenged the traditional human/nature hierarchy.

(4.) See Hajer (1997, p. 1) who cites Brooks' (1992) study noting that a minimum of 40 working definitions of sustainable development had appeared within five years of the Brundtland Report (p. 408).

(5.) I interpret "texts" broadly. Thus, I include in the analysis here segments from corporate reports and "briefs," executive speeches, journal articles, media reports, and other materials publicly available from the external affairs departments and websites of the Shell Group and of Shell UK and Shell Nigeria and from the websites of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), particularly Greenpeace, MOSOP, and Human Rights Watch, who were Shell's chief critics on environmental matters.

(6.) Where website locations of text are available, I have included them. Brackets in citations indicate section headings on web pages. Since website addresses are rapidly outdated, it can be difficult to find materials in hyperspace. Materials can therefore be obtained by writing to the Group's External Affairs Department in the London headquarters and requesting the materials by date and title and/or from the author.

(7.) "Litter lout" is the equivalent of "litter bug" in American vernacular.

(8.) "Practicable" appears to be the British equivalent of the American "practical."

(9.) In addition, the World Bank withdrew funding for an important natural gas project, certain charitable groups rejected Shell funding (Lawrence, 1999a), and the Metro Toronto Council rejected a Shell contract (Greenpeace, 1995f). By 1997, shareholders associated with a nonprofit group dedicated to responsible investing had put forward a resolution demanding environmental and human rights policy changes and associated revisions in corporate structure, environmental management, and reporting practices at Shell's Annual General Meeting (Lawrence, 1999b).

(10.) See reports by Human Rights Watch (1998; Manby, 1999), Project Underground and Rainforest Action Network (1997), the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organizations (1995), the World Council of Churches (Robinson, 1996), and the United States Department of State (1998).

(11.) The extreme contrast of those "fed fat" to those "cursed" by "black gold" suggests tribal envy and rivalry, which, according to Ogoni leaders, was encouraged by Shell and the central government.

(12.) See also SPDC, 2000 [The Environment], ID=4.

(13.) SPDC, 2000 [The Environment], ID=4. On this count, Shell attempted to show its good faith through its sponsorship of a Niger Delta Environmental Survey, funded by the oil industry (SPDC, 1997b, p. 10), but because of the funding, the Ogoni viewed the Survey with suspicion and its key representative quit the panel (MOSOP, 2000a, [paragraph]17). See also SPDC, 2000 [Ecology]. Peer review of first round results of the Survey, according to Shell, showed that it "had significant shortcomings as a scientific document" (SPDC, 2000 [FAQ], [paragraph]26).

(14.) The Shell Brief (SPDC, 1997b) provided a figure of $16.6 million for oil spill compensation, aggregated for all Nigeria, paid between 1992 and 1996, but no data as to the average compensation amounts paid in Ogoni (p. 9).

(15.) Contrast Watts' use of this metaphor of roots, which implies a vision of development as an organic bond of identity with host countries and communities, to Saro-Wiwa's reference to the union between Shell and the locals as the "root" of the Nigerian "malaise" that needed to be "rooted out." The different usage of the metaphor captures the ambiguities of the relationships implicit in development and the conflicting interpretations of the Ogoni and Shell as to whether such roots as Shell put down were healthy for the people and what this kind of imported transplant might mean.

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