Critical-Geography-Forum-Online

Micheal Woods

 
This paper aims to explore questions concerning power and resistance in modern academe, by interrogating the debate over Shell's sponsorship of the RGS-IBG as a political conflict. Although the reactionary political-economic structures and conventions of educational institutions and intellectual discourse have been effectively deconstructed by feminist, post-colonialist and radical economic scholars, not least in Geography (see Baruffalo & Berman 1998; Domosh 1991; Rose 1995; Said 1978; Schoenberger 1998), there has been far less reflexive application to the academic sphere of ideas developed in research on power, resistance and political action. However, by drawing on this work to analyse the RGS/Shell debate as an all-too-rare instance of explicit political engagement within academe, I hope to posit wider conclusions about the operation of power within academe, and the potential for political action.

My analysis will be constructed around four 'lessons' about power culled from current ideas in political theory and political geography:
 

Lesson One: Power is not only exercised when decisions are taken, but also when decisions are not taken.
 
Lesson Two: Power is not a property but a capacity to act which must be achieved through the construct of associations and networks of actors and resources.
 
Lesson Three: Power produces its own discourses, and discourses of power help to legitimate the position of actors and organisations and set the parameters of political discussion.
 
Lesson Four: Power is not rational, rather rationalisation follows power such that power defines reality.
Lesson one is the thesis of non-decision power developed by Bachrach and Baratz (1970) in the context of community power studies. Lesson two draws on both Stone's (1989) ideas in urban regime theory and Latour's (1986) writing on associational power.  Lesson three develops Foucault's (1980) ideas on discourse and power, with resonances of Gramsci's (1971) notion of hegemony. Lesson four is derived from Flyvbjerg's (1998) discussion of rationality and power.

Employing these lessons, the remainder of the paper examines how the relationship between the RGS-IBG and Shell contributed to empowering both parties, before exploring the challenge from critical geographers as a political strategy and concluding by discussing wider issues of activism in academe.
 
The RGS-IBG and Shell: a relationship of power?

The RGS/Shell debate of 1995-6 centred on the ethics and desirability of a ú45,000 per annum contribution made by Shell International to the Expeditions Advisory Centre of the RGS-IBG. Although not a condition of the sponsorship arrangement, Shell's contribution was recognised in its designation as a 'Corporate Patron' of the Society, and the reproduction of its logo on RGS-IBG letter-paper and publications. This relationship was defended by the Council of the RGS-IBG as placing no obligations on the Society, which taken at face value, was correct. Shell's sponsorship was not conditional on any return and did not seek to influence or restrict the Society's activities. However, to represent it as a power-neutral relationship is mistaken. Rather it was an arrangement which contributed to establishing for both Shell and the RGS-IBG leadership a capacity to act in certain ways.

Thus, Shell's patronage of the RGS-IBG formed one (very small) element of complex networks of associations, actors and resources which created for the company a capacity to act, both with regard to its underlying objective of profit-generation, and with regard to the pursuit of specific corporate and operational strategies in Nigeria. According to allegations made by Shell's accusers, these strategies including maintaining lower environmental standards that would be acceptable in a European or North American context. The contribution of the RGS-IBG to these networks was that of a symbolic resource - environmental legitimacy. Although Shell requested and received no formal endorsement from the RGS-IBG, its public association with the RGS-IBG as a respected and established environmental authority, was important. Alongside other environmental initiatives sponsored or promoted by Shell, it helped to create and maintain a public image of Shell as an environmentally-responsible company. This image was reinforced by, for example, Shell being voted top for 'dealing with environmental issues' by a poll of chief executives (Financial Times, 18/9/96). In turn, these associations and awards were represented by Shell as evidence of its environmental record, and thus became the grounds on which a Western public - distanced from events in Nigeria or, in the case of Brent Spar, the North Sea, and lacking comprehensive first-hand information - were asked to trust and believe Shell's account against those of its detractors. (This poll of Chief Executives was used by the RGS-IBG Council as evidence of 'Shell International's strong record' in arguing for maintaining the sponsorship arrangement. Similarly, sponsorship by Shell of community and environmental programmes in Nigeria was presented as evidence that 'Shell is making considerable efforts to improve environmental conditions and to involve local people'. These assertions were based on statements from Shell and did not acknowledge alternative narratives presented by groups such as Envrionmental Rights Action and the Ogoni Freedom Campaign)  Therefore, Shell's sponsorship of the RGS-IBG helped to protect its operations from more direct, intensive scrutiny which may have limited its capacity to act.

The relationship between Shell and the RGS-IBG was based on and policed by non-decision power incumbent on both partners. For Shell, the importance of its associations with environmental organisations and projects enforced a degree of self-regulation not to be seen to be acting in manner which might compromise those relationships. For the RGS-IBG, the importance of funding from corporate patrons, and the interest in the continuation of sponsorship, produced an inherent inclination both of generosity towards its patrons and against acting in any way which might provoke a withdrawal of sponsorship.

The two-way nature of this power relation is significant, as the RGS-IBG was also empowered by Shell's sponsorship. Materially, the financial grant created a capacity to act by funding projects of the Expeditions Advisory Centre. Symbolically, too, the RGS-IBG's association with major corporations such as Shell, British Airways and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation reinforced its status as a respectable and authoritative organisation in certain policy and public circles.

As such, the association between Shell and the RGS-IBG must also be examined in the context of wider power relations. The associative perspective on power followed above highlights the contingent and unstable nature of power relations. In order for the routine exercise of power to be achieved, the networks and associations involved need to be stabilised. This is achieved in part through formal arrangements, such as corporate sponsorship; but it is also produced at a more personal, informal level, through the incorporation of key actors into tight-knit, exclusive, elite networks.

In this way, the ties between Shell and the RGS-IBG were personal as well as professional. A former Chairman of Shell (and former Managing Director of Shell Nigeria) was a member of the RGS-IBG Council (although he did exclude himself from all discussion of the sponsorship issue); and a second member had worked for Shell. More indirectly, several members of the RGS-IBG Council and directors of Shell were connected through an elite network mediated through London clubs, company boards and the Civil Service. Were these contacts used to discuss or influence the RGS-IBG's attitude towards Shell? Almost certainly not, and the question is irrelevant. What is important is that by inhabiting the same social, cultural and professional circles, the members of the elite network share a common habitus (Bourdieu 1990), which will inform their political attitudes, ethics, assumptions and understandings. This is not accidental. By appointing members from the establishment elite network, which reaches into the higher echelons of government and commerce, both organisations were hoping to enrol those informal channels of communication and influence to serve their interests. But it also meant buying into the establishment's discourses of power, and it was through these discourses that the RGS-IBG Council constructed its 'reality' of its relationship with Shell.

A number of discourses were important here, some of them contradictory. So, though the discourse of academic authority helped to empower Shell through its association with the RGS-IBG, in considering calls to end Shell's sponsorship, the Council of the RGS-IBG drew instead on a different discourse which prioritised the 'practical', 'real-life' of businesspeople, diplomats and ex-military officers, above the 'esoteric' concerns of academics. Alongside this a discourse of objectivity and neutrality was employed both to argue that Shell could not intervene in Nigerian politics, could not oppose the military regime and therefore was absolved of any charges of complicity in human rights abuses; and that the RGS-IBG also was unable to adopt a political position. This was linked by some Council members to a further discourse of royal patronage, by which the Royal Geographical Society could not adopt opinions relating to the politics of foreign governments, for fear of embarrassing the Queen.

The mobilisation of these discourses allowed the RGS-IBG leadership to define the problem facing it in its own terms. This rationalisation was articulated in an editorial of The Geographical Magazine in March 1996 (Sykes, 1996) which distilled the Strathclyde debate to three points: that the question was primarily one about the ethics of sponsorship in general, together with the opinion that 'whatever the source of the money, it goes to a good cause.'; that the 'feel-good' factor of ethical debate should not be allowed to over-ride responsible financial management; and that calls to end Shell's sponsorship were a 'knee-jerk reaction', whereas a learned society had an intellectual responsibility to explore all sides of the debate and make an informed decision.

This rationalisation was reinforced by letters printed in subsequent issues of The Geographical Magazine. These letters mobilised three discourses to marginalise the anti-Shell argument. Firstly, a discourse of the irrationality of radical politics was used to suggest that the vote taken at Strathclyde was irrelevant: 'is [the vote] just the first in a series of outbursts of political correctness from a few disgruntled academics..?' (Robinson-Ferrars 1996). Secondly, academic knowledge was positioned as inferior to practical experience:
 

'very few of these young people have had real experience of life in a developing country like Nigeriaà. So, do they really understand that justice is inevitably swifter and more violent there than hereà?' (Wright 1996)
 
'there is a considerable gulf in perception between those who have done and those who sit in ivory towers contemplating how things may be done.' (Renshaw 1996)
 
Thirdly, a discourse of geography as travel and exploration was used to nullify any ethical worries as lying outside the remit of what 'real' geography should be concerned with:
 
'I reject [the] conception that national inequalities are one of the central concerns of geography. For many RGS Fellows, geography is about travel and explorationà. In my opinion, these aims are not compromised by the considerable support we receive from our corporate patron, Shell.' (Robinson-Ferrars 1996)
 
In this way the interests of power created a rationality about the nature of Geography, the nature of the RGS-IBG, and its relationship with Shell, which allowed the RGS-IBG leadership to construct a distinctive 'reality' of the challenge facing it. Within this 'reality' it was the criticisms of Shell, not the defence of the sponsorship arrangement, which had to be justified. The review of corporate sponsorship and the Open Forum meeting on Petroleum and Nigeria's Environment were hence designed to test the criticisms, allowing the Council to conclude that corporate sponsorship was not unethical in principle and that Shell's record in Nigeria was improving, and consequently to rationalise that the termination of Shell's sponsorship would be an inappropriate action.

Within the bounds of its own reality, the Council was quite right to conclude that there was nothing wrong in accepting sponsorship from Shell. However, it is equally clear that ethical objections could be justifiably raised if the relationship was rationalised differently. Moreover, as the symbolic resource of environmental legitimacy which Shell gained from the arrangement was dependent on the RGS-IBG being a valid representative and translator of the professional expertise and authority of its members, then it can be argued that members who constructed the reality of issue differently had a moral responsibility to dissent from their enrolment in the network of power.

The Critical Geography Challenge

Like the RGS-IBG's defence of Shell's sponsorship, the challenge from critical geographers was not a rationalised response, but was motivated by a range of personal political and ethic reactions and proceeded by the way of ad hoc rationalisations and mis-rationalisations. The challenge developed through four distinct stages, its rationale and strategy changing each time as its participants learned the limits of their agency and constructed a capacity to act.

Firstly, letters were sent to officers of the RGS-IBG demanding that Shell's sponsorship should be terminated in protest at the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. These representations were translated in a second stage into a series of proposals presented to the RGS-IBG Council by the RHED. These included establishing a review of corporate sponsorship and writing in protest to the Nigerian Government. However, these proposals wrongly rationalised that the Council would be sympathetic to such ethical arguments. Instead, the Council not only refused to be enrolled into a network of action, but used its response to the proposals to begin to construct its own rationality of the issue.

Hence, the third stage was an attempt to strengthen the protest network through the presentation of a motion at the Strathclyde Conference. This challenge had the immediate objective of enrolling enough support to win the vote, and attempted to do so through a rational argument which stressed both political and ethical dimensions. Whilst the challenge was successful in winning the vote, it was again mistaken in supposing that the Council would be responsive to an overwhelming vote by a section of its membership. Rather, the Council had already rationalised the Strathclyde vote as irrelevant.

The Strathclyde vote did, though, allow a fourth challenge, in that it enabled the RGS-IBG's bye-laws to be enrolled with the effect of empowering members to dispute the Council's response to the motion and demand that it be put to a vote of all the Society's members. Significantly, the Critical Geography Forum e-mail discussion list was enrolled to enable such a demand to be made. However, the challenge failed because it failed to construct a network with the power to win the ballot. And it failed to construct that network because it failed to enrol the majority of non-academic members of the RGS-IBG. Or, put another way, the RGS-IBG Council succeeded in enrolling a majority of the non-academic members into a network in support of its defence of Shell's sponsorship - because those members more readily accepted its rationalisation of the question, of its association with Shell, and its representation of the Society's interests than those proposed by the anti-Shell lobby.

Conclusions: Postmodern Politics in Academe?

In exploring and analysing the debate over Shell's sponsorship of the RGS-IBG as a political conflict, this paper has revealed the paradox that confronts activism in academe in the 1990s. On the one hand, if we follow the lessons on power outlined earlier, then we have to acknowledge that our specialist knowledge, skills and resources as academics contribute to empowering universities, learned societies and other 'representatives' of academe, to act in the way they do. Furthermore, if in an increasingly commercialised world, those universities or societies form associations or alliances with, or accept sponsorship from, corporations or other bodies, then those corporations may in turn enrol something of our academic agency into creating a capacity to act. This description of power has particular ethical consequences. It militates against the argument that the personal/political and the professional can be separated, because it indicates that our professional lives are inevitably and involuntarily political. Therefore, if our academic agency is being enrolled to legitimate or facilitate outcomes which we cannot morally support as individuals, then we have a responsibility to dissent at our silent and unauthorised complicity.

Yet on the other hand, our power as academics to prevent the misuse of our academic agency is severely restricted. A discourse of academic authority or expertise is usually enrolled at a collective or discursive level, such that the dissent of any one individual is not normally sufficient to break the chain. Furthermore, there are other networks of non-decision power which prevent us from acting - disciplinary mechanisms to impose sanctions on dissident members or employees; or, more indirectly, the fact that our uncritical acceptance of our enrolment in some networks of power may be necessary to ensure the participation of other actors (the university, the RGS-IBG, funding bodies etc.) in networks which create a capacity to act with regard to objectives we want to achieve (a research project, a conference, a promotion etc.). Theoretically, these obstacles may be overcome by sufficient collective action, but as the RGS/Shell case study shows, collective action against the established status quo is always at a disadvantage. The protesters need to construct a new network of power. They need to be able to identify the right objectives which will further their cause, and they need to be able to enrol the right actors to enable those objectives to be achieved. This may mean battling against institutional structures and regulations of which they have little knowledge; it may mean overcoming the compartmentalisation of academe to enrol actors from other disciplines, or other universities, or from outside academe; and it may mean struggling against established and widely accepted discourses of power which will seek to marginalise and discredit their argument.

Can this paradox be resolved? Maybe. In contrast to the radical modernist politics of thirty years ago, when academe awakened to show solidarity with workers and women's activists and others in revolutionary projects to 'change the world', academic activism in the 1990s is rather an expression of the 'post-modern politics of resistance'. As Routledge (1997) describes, 'such a politics mounts symbolic challenges that are extensively media-ted in order to render power visible and negotiable, and to attract public attention.' (pp 371-372).

Critical geographers cannot change the world. They cannot force Shell to adopt more environmentally-friendly and humanitarian approaches in Nigeria. They cannot even, on the evidence of the RGS/Shell debate, change the RGS-IBG, or prevent their academic agency being used to legitimate actions they cannot approve. Yet the very act of protest and dissidence produces results in itself. It can attract media attention, it can disperse knowledge, it can challenge and weaken dominant discourses - it can create a capacity to act, if not a capacity to achieve. It is on this plane that the challenge to Shell's sponsorship of the RGS-IBG must be judged.
 

References

Bachratz, M. & Baratz, M. (1970)  Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Baruffalo, R. & Berman, L. (1998)  'Corporate Ideology Strikes the Ivy League: Worker and Community Resistance'. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geograpers, Boston, March 1998.
Bourdieu, P. (1990)  The Logic of Practice. (Cambridge: Polity).
Domosh, M. (1991)  Toward a feminist historiography of geography. Transactions of the IBG, 16, 95-105
Flyvbjerg, B. (1998)  Rationality and Power. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Foucault, M. (1980)  Power/Knowledge. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf)
Gramsci, A. (1971)  Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (London: Lawrence & Wishart)
Latour, B. (1986)  'The powers of association', in J. Law (ed) Power, Action and Belief: A new sociology of knowledge. (London: Routledge).
Renshaw, G. (1996)  'An equal say.' Letter to The Geographical Magazine, May 1996, p 12.
Robinson-Ferrars, I. (1996)  'For the defence.' Letter to The Geographical Magazine, May 1996, p 12.
Rose, G. (1995)  'Tradition and paternity: same difference?' Transactions of the IBG, 20, 414-16.
Routledge, P. (1997)  'The imagineering of resistance: Pollock Free State and the practice of postmodern politics.' Transactions of the IBG, 22(3), 359-377.
Said, E. (1978)  Orientalism  (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Schoenberger, E. (1998)  'Inside the Corporate University: Work, Identity and Social Power.' Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston, March 1998.
Stone, C. (1989)  Regime Politics  (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press).
Sykes, L. (1996)  'Struggling with Shell.' The Geographical Magazine, March 1996, p 5.
Wright, J. (1996)  'Older and wiser?' Letter to The Geographical Magazine, April 1996, p 12.
 
 

About  Micheal Woods:  I am a lecturer in Geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, with research interests in political geography. I was the postgraduate representative on the Council of the RGS-IBG from January 1995 to June 1996, and subsequently was responsible for liaising with the RGS-IBG on behalf of the group of Fellows who requested the Special General Meeting.
 
EMAIL:  ZZP@ABER.AC.UK
 

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