General Introduction

Abstract

Editors of collections of essays such as this always face a problem in organizing the material so as to present the reader with manageable and coherent entities while, at the same time, preserving the overall logic that gave rise to the collection in the first place. In this case, by concentrating on the offshore oil industry¹ and then dividing the papers into those that focus on work and those that focus on the family, we stub our toes on two major problems, one of which is the question of treating the industry as if it were unique in all respects; the other of reiterating the conventional separation between ‘family’ and ‘work’.

We would like to acknowledge the substantial help given to us by Arnlaug Leira in writing this introduction.