Until this book was published little had appeared on the matter of the organization of production in oil gathering. This book:

• Describes the global offshore oil supply industry and its features on one of the world's major offshore oil services bases
• Draws on the theory of the multinational corporation to explain why buyers and sellers should have internationalized themselves into a symbiotic relationship
• Discusses the preference of the oil companies for vertical disintegration
• Explains the transaction cost paradigm
• Integrates the largely American literature on the transaction cost paradigm with the literature on the multinational corporation (which is largely British).