Un programa de alfabetización visual para el uso y distribución de fotografías: la epistemología visual en el núcleo de una corporación privada

Este artículo estudia, desde una perspectiva histórica, el caso de un programa singular de alfabetización visual desarrollado por la Photographic Section de la compañía petrolera Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), entre 1943 y 1950. El objetivo principal es describir y analizar un conjunto de rasgos y características de ese proceso epistémico, partiendo del abordaje de las propias técnicas, reglas, instrucciones, recomendaciones y procedimientos de alfabetización visual para el uso de las fotografías, en el marco de un sofisticado sistema de distribución que se adecuó a una estrategia de comunicación visual, inédita en la historia de la comunicación corporativa, en las relaciones públicas en la industria. El enfoque metodológico, de tipo documental cualitativo soportado en fuentes primarias, establece un esquema relacional entre dos metadocumentos textuales y visuales de capacitación y entrenamiento visual, The Use of Photographs y Training Program, y un corpus amplio de documentos que permite comprender, como se logra concluir en el artículo, la conceptualización epistémica del esquema de alfabetización visual, los rasgos de su funcionamiento institucional, la descripción y el examen de las transformaciones de las técnicas propias del dispositivo de conocimiento visual que ponía a prueba, y las formas y modos de difusión y distribución de los resultados.

Las relaciones públicas, la comunicación visual y el mito del capitalismo transnacional (1943-1950)

El artículo estudia las transformaciones de las relaciones públicas (PR) internacionales, entre 1943 y 1950, en el contexto de la industria privada norteamericana, vinculado al desarrollo del Proyecto Fotográfico de la Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), que buscaba la construcción de un nuevo mito sobre el capitalismo transnacional, que conectara la economía, la sociedad y la cultura, más allá de los estados nacionales, en medio de una crisis discursiva generada por la Segunda Guerra Mundial y las ideologías populistas y folcloristas dominantes. Se demuestra que esa multinacional, buscando enfrentar una crisis de imagen, revolucionó el campo de las relaciones públicas, a partir del uso de un aparato de comunicación visual, denominado fotografía documental industrial, que permitiría conectar de manera inédita y contradictoria, en torno a la historia del petróleo, a Estados Unidos con sociedades de todo el globo, principalmente con América Latina.

Years of Arabian Peninsula gravity exploration by Chevron and its legacy companies, including discovery of the Ghawar and Burgan super-giants

Exploration of the eastern Arabian Platform in the 1930s and 1940s by Chevron and its legacy company Gulf Oil resulted in discovery of Kuwait's super-giant Burgan Field by Gulf Oil in 1938 and Saudi Arabia's super-giant Ghawar Field by California Arabian Standard Oil Company in 1948. Ghawar Field and Burgan Field are widely regarded as the first- and second-largest oil fields in the world, respectively. Gravity methods featured prominently in Gulf's and Chevron's subsurface explorations. Gravity mapping identified the Burgan structure and was important in delineating the Ghawar structural complex. Gravimetric technology continues to provide value for deep exploration in Chevron's Partitioned Zone concession in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

El poder del archivo fotográfico 'anti-icónico' y su efecto histórico de representación: Sudamérica en el mapa global moderno

Este artículo analiza el poder del archivo fotográfico, como estrategia de comunicación y conocimiento soportada en premisas objetivistas, para construir, desde un marco institucional privado, un dispositivo narrativo y discursivo que permitiera redefinir, históricamente, el papel de la industria del petróleo en la sociedad global, e insertar a culturas marginadas, como las sudamericanas, dentro de un nuevo régimen de representación visual: un mapa moderno. Metodológicamente se estudia el caso del archivo fotográfico construido, entre 1943 y 1950, por la compañía petrolera Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), mezclando métodos documentales cualitativos tradicionales y métodos de los estudios visuales, con base en fuentes primarias textuales y fotográficas. El análisis de este caso, que revolucionó la relación entre la fotografía y la historia, pone sobre la mesa un antecedente relevante para contrastar los problemas de la comunicación contemporánea vinculados al fenómeno de la posverdad y sus relaciones con la propaganda y la publicidad en la industria privada.

Roosevelt's Populism: The Kansas Oil War of 1905 and the Making of Corporate Capitalism

The map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

Black Gold and America Shape Iran and Saudi Arabia

The discovery of oil near Masjid-e-Suleiman in Iran in 1908 by a British company aroused interest in Britain and America to explore the wider region for it. Standard Oil Company of California (Socal) secured oil concessions in Saudi Arabia from King Ibn Saud in 1933. The subsequent Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) struck oil in 1938. The importance of Saudi petroleum increased when, following Iran’s nationalization of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1951, Western countries boycotted Iranian oil. The political turmoil in Iran ended with the restoration of the briefly deposed Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to the throne with the assistance of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in August 1953. He leased the rights to Iran’s petroleum to the consortium of four Western oil companies for twenty-five years. With that, the United States became the prime Western influence in Tehran. By then Riyadh had forged military links with Washington. Soon rivalry developed between King Saud, a spendthrift ruler, and his austere Crown Prince Faisal. It ended with Saud abdicating in favor of Faisal in 1964. Four years earlier, Saudi Arabia had become one of the five founders of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC).

THE BEGINNING OF THE ROYAL DUTCH/SHELL AND STANDARD OIL COMPANY RIVALRY IN THE DUTCH INDIES 1865-1910

This paper describes the beginning of the oil rivalry in the Dutch Indies. It begins with an overview of the political and economic relationship between the United States, The Netherlands and the Dutch Indies since the mid-19th century, namely the period when the oil industries in the United States and the Dutch Indies were still at an early stage of development. Since the independence of the United States of America, the two countries had very good relations which were evident from their various co-operations, including the Treaty of Alliance which was ratified in 1782. However, the Dutch colonial government’s policies which sought to restrict the American oil companies’ investment in the Dutch Indies caused discontent amongst the American government and American oil companies, straining their relationship with the Dutch Indies.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, STANDARD OIL, AND THE RISE OF CORPORATE PUBLIC RELATIONS IN PROGRESSIVE AMERICA, 1902–1908

When the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil in 1911, it marked the end of an unsuccessful campaign by the company to improve its public standing. Standard Oil's failure to mollify public opinion in the aftermath of Ida Tarbell's muckraking masterpiece, “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” has resulted in a historiographical record that negatively assesses the company's response. This article reassesses the company response by placing it within the wider context of business history in the early twentieth century. It offers a detailed exploration of the public relations initiatives of Standard Oil from 1902 to 1908. Additionally, the article views the affair through the lens of standard corporate practices of the early Progressive Era, when large businesses had only begun to promote favorable public images. It argues that progressive reform inadvertently aided the rise of big business by teaching corporations the importance of promoting favorable public images. This wider context reveals that Standard Oil's public relations response, if unsuccessful, was not as aloof as others have argued. In fact, the company made a concerted effort to change public opinion about its business practices.