This paper explores different representations of the corporate life of oil labour in the 1950s at a crucial juncture of the history of oil companies as industrial/neo-colonial enterprises. Focusing on Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait it examines how indigenous employees featured in the public relation exercise orchestrated by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) and the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) in order to counter mounting labour and nationalist opposition. Using documentary and visual materials (company publications in Arabic and in English, photographs and films) and drawing on a growing body of literature on the construction of space as a place of discipline and social control, the paper discusses how these oil companies used a variety of propaganda tools in order to promote new spatialities of labour bureaucratisation and indoctrination, most notably by framing workers’ lives in particular urban, suburban and industrial settings. It is argued that the history of this new type of propaganda offers an important reading of the local, national and global power struggles that characterised the Middle Eastern oil industry in the 1950s, complementing grassroots approaches to labour mobilisation. More specifically the paper is going to discuss: 1. The rhetorical and visual fields created by this propaganda, its different mediums, and the emblematic experts that coordinated it as part of the newly-created Public Relations Departments of IPC, KOC and BAPCO; 2. How this propaganda profiled the lives of up and coming company employees, entering their personal sphere of family life, leisure and pleasure, and manipulating their past and present social realities; 3. How by prescribing particular modes of corporate socialisation oil companies popularised the connection between the ‘model’ company employee and distinctive urban and sub-urban settings and lifestyles that reflected the developmental and ‘civilising’ rhetoric of the oil industry in the turbulent 1950s; 4. The new glamorous built environments promoted as the harbingers of a new work and family ethic and the symbols of modern oil life: the township, the nuclear family resident unit, the dormitory, the workshop and the company canteen.