Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the global oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.

While most people live far from the sites of oil production, oil politics involves us all. Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.

Examining Argentina's conversion from a state-controlled to a private oil market, Elana Shever reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. This engaging ethnography offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. It reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.

"Resources for Reform presents a rigorous, nuanced ethnography of how a diverse array of actors were actively involved in reshaping their families, communities, and selves during the privatization of Argentina's oil industry. In tracing the ways in which private corporations built upon kinship bonds nurtured by the preceding state-owned industry, Shever demonstrates convincingly how affective and calculative techniques of governance are merged in supposedly rational regimes of rule. This impressive study scrutinizes the material practices and meanings of both the production and consumption of oil in Argentina to effectively challenge theories of global transformation that overlook the continuities between neoliberal regimes and those they have supplanted."