randomoutliar

I'm an organizational behavior and human resource professor, and many of my students happen to be immigrants from Nigeria and other oil-rich African regions.

A consistent story that they all tell me is that the international oil companies keep their hands clean by subcontracting to "local" companies. These companies sometimes have complex ownership arrangements whereby the true owners are hidden. The implication being that they are, for all intents and purposes, subsidiaries of the larger international energy organizations or are privately owned companies that are at least partially owned by larger stock-holders of the internation companies. In effect, the whole arrangement exists so that the well-known international can externalize their ethical issues and costs. So my questions are:

How common is this practice in reality? And, how can it be stopped?

Have you done any follow up to determine how much your version of events matches up with the local population? I'm probably going to buy your book, give it to Nigerian students, and ask them how much your account coincides with their experience.

I have had a few students in my office lamenting the apparent hypocrisy of how I teach ethics and the behavior of western companies and their subsidiaries in their home countries. Often, they laugh and explain how if they behaved they way we teach, they would be unemployable back home (even though the oil play, as a whole, is owned by large multinationals).

I'm not familiar with the Transparency Initiative, I will have to look it up. Since I'm sitting at work at my desk right now, I can't help but be brainstorming a research project that interviews multiple stakeholder groups to determine points of and reasons for convergence and divergence in perspective. Can I have a grant? ;-)

Again, a sincere thank you for your responses, it will help my conversations with students be more complete.