The results of this approach surprised me, and I think also surprised my interviewees. They arrived nervous, expecting academic and activist cut and thrust, attack and defence, and instead here was a man who wanted to understand them, wanted to know about the choices they had made in their lives. Warm, polite, self-effacing, able to see many sides to a story, the complexity of dilemmas. And, as a result, all six women and men opened up in ways I found remarkable. I was quite unprepared for the emotions that such a process unlocked in most of the interviewees; it was strikingly like the process of counselling in some regards, as people attempted to find language for the ethical choices they had made, and reflected on different stages of their lives. Four of the six, at different moments, became visibly moved. Two of them actually cried. Finally, Alberto’s warning was borne out – I couldn’t help liking most of ‘them’, because they were not ‘them’ but six individuals. They do not (with two exceptions) give me a ‘company line’. Some were witty and self-deprecating, one even repeatedly warned me, ‘Anything I say has to be taken with a pinch of salt, from recollections so long ago, [because] you tend to remember, you know, positive things … when you did things well.’
Months later, I’m going through hundreds of pages of transcripts from these recordings, every ‘erm’, every ‘eh’, every ‘you know’, faithfully recorded by the transcriber. Those days at Birkbeck coming vividly back to life, as I experience again the words from our conversations. Although I hadn’t judged or challenged during the actual interviews, now the analysis can really begin.
From all of these hours of conversation, six moments seem particularly significant. The words of the interviewees are quoted verbatim below, as are my responses – which of course I could not express during the interviews themselves:
Moment One
Anna (ex-Shell). We’d been talking for about fifteen minutes about the executions of Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues in 1995, the Brent Spar oil-rig dumping scandal in the same year and the impacts on the company, the Shell internal response to this. And then she says this:
Shell felt literally under siege … It wasn’t just the boycotts in the petrol stations … people were firebombing the petrol stations in Germany. They were shooting at people on our forecourts with shotguns from moving cars, and I’m not exaggerating this, Dan, at all … Shell said, ‘For Christ’s sake, nobody should die over this!’ And our first deep concern was that nobody should get hurt over this.
[Anna’s comment ‘Nobody should die over this’? seems extraordinary to me. Considering we’d just spent fifteen minutes discussing the hundreds of people who had died in oil-related conflict in the Niger Delta, in the 1990s, and the executions of the Ogoni Nine. I felt she was asking me to feel sympathy for Shell with these comments – as if she wanted to turn the company into the victim here.]
Moment Two
David (ex-Shell). We’d been discussing the great controversy about Shell staying in South Africa during the apartheid years, and I’d raised the question of how affected Shell employees are by ethical questions from their own families, and people outside the company, and he described one evening, having dinner with Shell’s general manager in South Africa:
Me: So you’re getting all this pressure from outside. I mean it’s a mistake to think there’s this hermetically sealed little world, isn’t it?
David: I’ll never forget, one of the … erm … I think it was someone senior in Africa, where he was being portrayed – they did a show [a documentary] on him, and I happened to be having dinner with him and the director at that time in charge of that region, and erm, the phone rang, and he came back into the room, and he said, ‘My son has just accused me of being a murderer!’ Because, watching the television … And he said, ‘I don’t understand how I can explain to him that what is being shown is not …’ I mean, the heartbreak in this man was just … was just dreadful!
[As he related this story David began to cry. Again we see this remarkable sense of inverted reality here – the people working for Shell do not seem to see it as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, but rather as a fragile victim of unfair public judgement and disapprobation.]
Moment Three
Paul (ex-BP). We’d been talking about Paul’s role in a South American country of oil extraction, where there had been killings and serious human rights abuses, and journalists had published evidence of local paramilitaries being paid by the oil companies to supply security. Paul had been extremely articulate in the interview up to this point, but when I asked him to empathise with the affected communities, his ability to speak cogently broke down altogether:
Me: I mean, this is a more hypothetical question really … but did you … did you ever, in a way, imaginatively put yourself in the shoes of one of the villagers? Did you kind of think about what would it be like to be them in that situation?
Paul: I mean, I did go to a couple of meetings, public meetings, sat there with, you know, for … erm … where community leaders and, you know, in erm … what’s the capital of? … And of course, you know, they … some people would be, oh, he’s a guerrilla, he’s connected to the paramilitary … It’s very … not as it all seems. But yes, I mean, the answer is that’s the whole point, is erm … erm … you know, erm … you know, what’s on the ground, I mean, what we affect most on the ground affects us most on the ground, so it – you know, it really was ensuring that, you know, that the local communities felt much more comfortable.
[Fifteen hesitations in four sentences. A vivid illustration of the unease he felt trying to answer this question. Also one sentence here just doesn’t make any sense at all no matter how many times you reread it – ‘But yes, I mean, the answer is that’s the whole point, is erm … erm … you know, erm … you know, what’s on the ground, I mean, what we affect most on the ground affects us most on the ground’. I was also astonished that Paul was based in this country for two years, so the fact that in his position of seniority he only felt a need to go to ‘a couple of public meetings’ shows how little direct contact there is with impacted communities on the ground. And, of course, he hadn’t answered my question here, which focussed on the ability – or not – of the BP staff to empathise with those affected on the ground. Significantly, none of the interviewees who’d worked in developing-world contexts ever answered this question directly.]
Moment Four
Tony (ex-BP). We’d been discussing the same question – the extent of contact with villagers on the ground, and whether he could put himself in the shoes of the villagers affected.
Tony: In terms of when I got close to these sort of issues – an early [sort of] experience was being involved in a project to build a new LNG plant in N——, and it involved the relocation of a village, whose name was – this was the early 80s – F——village. I remember the name because it was such an interesting episode. And it was amazing, at the time, it was an absolute eye-opener, sort of the demands the villagers were coming up with, eh, and what had been sort of … basically, a very basic farming village, turned out to be a village which had all sorts of interesting, not just farming, fishing and, you know, all sorts of exotic forms of agriculture which there was no visible evidence of, but, of course … and an elder chief of the village, who I seem to remember sort of … who lived in basically a mud hut before the arrival of the oil companies, decided that he needed to live in a two-storey, concrete-built house with deep-pile carpeting. This is in N——. So erm. And separate bathrooms for himself and his wife. And all these, all these, basically, demands were acceded to.