Making and exchanging a second-hand oil field, considered in an industrial marketing setting

Abstract

Marketing researchers have begun exploring actor network theory as a way of understanding how marketers and marketing concepts contribute to the shaping and developing of markets. This paper strikes out in a new direction by considering the development of a market in an industrial setting, namely for mature or second-hand oil and gas fields, especially in the UK, since the mid-1990s. The market is thin and has no standard mode of exchange. Buyers and sellers develop valuations only in part because oil and gas fields are objects in markets, also representing them as situated in networks of production. Hence, different versions and valuations persist throughout an episode of exchange. The paper suggests that in industrial settings, concerns of production are taken into account in order to support something like a market exchange, rather than spilling over and becoming potential sources of later surprise and upset to otherwise well-ordered exchanges.