Five years of collaboration in the UK upstream oil and gas industry

Many collaborative relationships (partnering and alliancing) between customers and contractors in the UK upstream oil and gas industry were formed in the five years up to 1998. The content of 63 practitioner papers from six specialist commercial conferences on partnering and alliancing (three from 1993\94 and three from 1997\98) has been analysed to investigate whether the industry's thinking has changed over the period. Overall, the most frequently occurring concepts are those which appear in the general literature on collaborative relationships. There was not a marked difference between the concepts used in the early conferences and those used in the later ones. The early papers did show a slightly heavier emphasis on concepts that could be said to be theoretical, whereas the later papers had slightly more emphasis on concepts that could be attributed to experience.