2020_andersson_Ghost in a Shell - Énergies, Temps & Cosmotechniques

Ghost in a Shell: The Scenario Tool and the World Making of Royal Dutch Shell === > [!tldr] Tags > #discipline/histoire #cat/énergie #cat/modélisation #cat/prospective #cat/pétrole #cat/scenarios #cat/future #org/shell #org/OPEC #org/ClubDeRome #type/journalArticle > [!info] Meta Data >**FirstAuthor**:: [[Andersson, Jenny]] > **Title**:: Ghost in a Shell: The Scenario Tool and the World Making of Royal Dutch Shell > **Year**:: 2020 > **Citekey**:: [[2020_andersson]] > **itemType**:: journalArticle > **Journal**:: *Business History Review* > **Volume**:: 94 > **Issue**:: 4 > **Pages**:: 729-751 > **DOI**:: 10.1017/S0007680520000483 > **ISSN**:: 0007-6805, 2044-768X > > [!Cite] > Andersson Jenny, « Ghost in a Shell: The Scenario Tool and the World Making of Royal Dutch Shell », _Business History Review_, 2020, vol. 94, no 4, p. 729‑751. > > %%[@2020_andersson]%% > **URL**:: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0007680520000483/type/journal_article . > > **Related**:: %%[@1993_schoemaker.vanderheijden]%% ([[1993_schoemaker.vanderheijden_Strategic planning at Shell]]) , %%[@2014_wilkinson.kupers]%% ([[2014_wilkinson.kupers_]]) , %%[@2015_andersson.rindzeviciute]%% ([[2015_andersson.rindzeviciute_The struggle for the long-term in transnational science and politics]]) , %%[@2019_andersson]%% ([[2019_andersson_The Future of the World]]) . > > **Attachment**::[Andersson - 2020 - Ghost in a Shell The Scenario Tool and the World .pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/RYSUK4X8). --- > [!important] Synthesis > **Contribution**:: > > [!Abstract] > > This article examines the history of the Royal Dutch Shell scenarios, from the first horizon scan exercise in 1967. It proposes that forward-looking scenarios were integrated in planning at Shell as tools for managing uncertainty in global time and space relations of oil after 1967. Specifically, the article proposes that Shell strategically used the scenarios to respond to arguments, emanating both from OPEC and from the Club of Rome, of oil as a limited resource. Shell used the scenarios to create images of a future oil market dominated by innovation, creativity, and sustainable solutions. >> --- # Note. --- # Annotations%% begin annotations %% ### Imported: 2024-02-06 1:05 pm Quote > This article examines the history of the Royal Dutch Shell scenarios, from the first horizon scan exercise in 1967 Quote > Specifically, the article proposes that Shell strategically used the scenarios to respond to arguments, emanating both from OPEC and from the Club of Rome, of oil as a limited resource. Shell used the scenarios to create images of a future oil market dominated by innovation, creativity, and sustainable solutions. ### Imported: 2026-09-23 5:51 pm Quote > MNE historians have considered the period from World War I until 1979 as the era of deglobalization, during which nationalist and protectionist responses to crises obstructed the mobility of capital Quote > In political and intellectual history, the 1967-to-1976 moment is understood quite differently. The period from the mid-1960s on saw the breakup of essentially colonial legacies of commodity and monetary arrangements that underpinned postwar economies Quote > At the same time, Western industrial societies entered into a period of social turmoil and labor unrest, marking the end of stability in welfare arrangements and industrial relations of the immediate postwar period Quote > This discrepancy between business and political historians in interpretation of the period raises the question of how business actively sought to navigate the end of one world and the dawn of another Quote > The direct relationship between the Third Worldist claim to resource sovereignty, expressed in the New International Economic Order (NIEO) adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974, and the debate that erupted after the publication of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report in 1972 is essential to this clash of future visions Quote > In fact, the scenario archives contain almost no mention at all of the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels, which supports the conclusion that the scenarios were not used to discuss atmospheric effects of CO2 until the late 1980s Quote > Inertia can be a form of strategic behavior, as can the active production of doubt, but the scenarios show yet another strategy: the attempt to move beyond problematic visions of the limits of natural resources by projecting visions that go far beyond such limits Quote > Marten Boon, “A Climate of Change? The Oil Industry and Decarbonization in Historical Perspective,” Business History Review 93, no. 1 (2019): 101–25. Quote > Scenarios were transnational artifacts that circulated in a field between international organizations, multinational corporations, and national planning commissions Quote > a term taken from Science and Technology Studies as territorialization techniques directly shaped by the need to manage complex global time-space relations in oil Quote > Wack’s disciple Peter Schwartz continued the mythologization of scenarios, bringing the scenario tool from Shell to the Global Business Network (GBN) in the 1980s Quote > At GBN, scenarios were used as training and consultancy techniques for leaders of the world’s largest MNEs.17 Quote > “Territorialization” refers to the way in which economic actors manage time and space relations through future-oriented activities such as investment, speculation, and prospection Quote > Capital, Mitchell says, set the future in the present, by pushing for a constant forward search for future rent Quote > capital is also a “forward looking valuation,” a prospective speculation on a future economy Quote > As an alternative to Levy’s conception of futurity as a function of capital, we may consider that futurity is part of the agency of capital and that future expectations and the management of temporal risk reflects specific interests of economic actors Quote > By prospecting futures of risk, rent, and interest, the entrepreneurs and business entities that perform Levy’s capital function actively shape economic futures Quote > Scenarios perform a kind of prospection that is different from the geological prospection of oil ventures, which shifted the gaze toward the political and social relationships that might affect the futures of the oil industry Quote > While this was the innovation and newness of the scenarios from 1967 on, there were nevertheless historical precedents to such attempts at temporal prospection within the longer history of capitalism Quote > The scenarios were intended as communicative devices that demonstrated possible futures of the global territories of oil Quote > The suggestion could therefore be that scenarios were tools of influence for an era in which the influence over specific territories could not be backed up with armed force in the same way as before and in which the symbolic influence over images of the future thus became important Quote > Oil was becoming a “political mineral,” with properties that had to be managed in the realm of values and expectations.35 Quote > By the 1970s, the international oil companies were considered no longer as protectors of the oil market but as market interests in a larger conflict of positions between producers, companies, and consumers. This loss of position changed the system of petroknowledge. Quote > Oil forecasts came to play a new role: that of managing expectations in the oil market, by setting out images on the long-term future of oil Quote > The first scenarios produced by Shell can therefore be understood in the context of a shifting system of oil forecasts. A new role for oil knowledge was to set out expectations on the long-term development of oil and help redefine world market interest as well as which actor held the moral virtue of defending this interest Quote > The corporate scenarios project at Hudson involved the world’s largest multinationals in an exercise that entailed simulating a number of possible future business environments, or “worlds.” The scenarios listed a range of variables that included raw materials, political change, cultural values, and developments in the international system Quote > scenarios were a useful tool with which to move beyond immediate strategic concerns and shape new images of the future of oil. Quote > The role of the scenarios was to create a “Lichtbild—an inner image of future success for the corporation, Quote > In the third set of scenarios, by the mid-1980s, ideas of confrontation with OPEC had given way to a new co-existence with producer Quote > countries around the idea of a shared market interest. Quote > Oil had proven to turn “revolutionaries into pragmatists.”62 Quote > Thus, against a “Divided World” scenario stood once again a global scenario of a unified and prosperous world organized around a universal market interest and a dominant position of international oil companies Quote > In the 1980s, such joint scenarios were important in a new regional dialogue with OPEC and the IEA, and in the coming decade Shell itself started producing global development scenarios.65 Quote > The scenarios said: “There is no longer any sense of compatibility between the self-interest of private companies and the public interest of the countries in which they operate. . . . This (relationship) will continue to deteriorate due to the way that a proportion of oil revenues appear to be unearned.”71 Quote > From the mid-1980s, the scenarios were increasingly defined inside Shell as a tool for changing corporate culture in such a way as to teach managers to identify this new wave Quote > Scenarios were viewed as tools of learning in a changing environment, not least by Stewart Brand Quote > Oil companies were relics unless they devoted themselves to new energy futures. Seminars and activities at Santa Fe rejected the idea of limits, as did many other sites of both business and counterculture in the United States.85 Quote > Meanwhile, the message of the GBN scenarios was that of a bright new future for the oil industry on the other side of the oil mountain. The “Next Wave” scenarios were about innovation, creativity, and value change and emphasized MNEs as leaders of transition. Physical limits to natural resources would not put constraints on capitalist growth: “potential is only limited by the capabilities of the people.”89 Quote > Strategic opportunists . . . who do not ask what their government can do for them but realize that they have to create their own future” Quote > argue that this globalized world was in fact organized on the basis of the multinational corporation. The nation-state was doomed to wilt, but the corporation could be expected to promote cultural leadership and shape political change for the common good Quote > a 1997 talk to the GBN WorldView meeting, the management consultant Peter Schwarz argued that the future capitalist world would no longer be inhabited by citizens but by consumers. This turned the relationship between multinationals and people into the crucial social axis, requiring a new form of business social responsibility and eliminating the need for politics.95 %% end annotations %% %% Import Date: 2026-09-23T17:52:17.166+02:00 %%