Halliburton: Cementing Wells and Relationships

By Marilyn J. Matelski.

Published by The Organization Collection

Format	Price
Article: Print	$US10.00
Article: Electronic	$US5.00

From its inception, Halliburton (in its varied corporate forms) has always prided itself as a political networking powerhouse first; with business practices a distant second. Unfortunately, this distinction has sometimes trumped quality control concerns, ethics and public responsibility. In fact, when asked about commercial ethics and practices, Eric Palmer Halliburton once said, “Don’t ever tell me I cannot do something because it will infringe on somebody’s patent. I started in business infringing.”
The 2008 exposure of Halliburton’s alleged criminal behavior in Iraq had still not been resolved when the company found itself in the center of yet another fiasco—the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. Trying to repair an already tarnished image amidst a new calamity proved to be a profound challenge.
Focusing specifically on Halliburton’s involvement in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this paper explores both crisis communication as well as corporate responsibility, especially when the business of “cementing” relationships becomes more important than the business of providing quality products and service.

Keywords:	Halliburton, Deepwater Horizon, Communication, Corporate Responsibility

International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp.1-10. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 814.994KB).

Dr. Marilyn J. Matelski

Professor, Communication Department, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

Dr. Marilyn J. Matelski is a tenured full professor at Boston College, having received her B.A. from Michigan State University, as well as M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has taught in the Communication Department at BC since 1978, where she served as Chairperson from 1995 to 1998. Her scholarly interests include areas of intercultural communication, cultural diversity and media studies. She has authored and/or co-authored fourteen books, more than a dozen journal articles and numerous convention papers on topics ranging from soap operas to Vatican Radio. Most recently, she has concentrated her research efforts on social change in China, Cuba and parts of Eastern Europe, emphasizing the impact of media and education in reformulating a nation’s cultural landscape.

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