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Organization & Environment
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The Exxon Valdez oil spill in the context of US petroleum politics

Robert Gramling

Department of Sociology, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, LA 70504, USA

William R. Freudenburg

Department of Rural Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was not merely the result of the actions taken on a single tanker on a single evening; the full range of causal factors included ac tions not just of the tanker crew and the Exxon corporate hierarchy, but also of governmental institutions. Over time, government "ownership" of mineral re sources led to a situation where governmental agencies came effectively to have a profit motive, not vastly different from the profit motives of private firms, in promoting oil extraction. In addition, military interests wished to encourage domestic, rather than international petroleum-extraction activities, further in creasing the attractiveness of Alaskan reserves. As would be predicted by Stone's model of "systemic power" (1980), while powerful pro-development interests faced opposition during the period when pipeline issues were publicly salient, the pro-development interests subsequently eroded the safeguards that had ini tially been implemented, ultimately increasing the probability of an accident of the sort that actually occurred.

Organization & Environment, Vol. 6, No. 3, 175-196 (1992)
DOI: 10.1177/108602669200600302
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