Shipping as a Knowledge Industry: Research and Strategic Planning at Ocean Group

This chapter approaches the question of how transformations in the world of shipping relate to wider trends in business and general history through the lens of knowledge. It will investigate how technological and managerial knowledge was created, developed and exploited as a corporate resource from the 1950s onwards in Ocean Transport and Trading, one of the UK’s leading liner shipping firms. The chapter will, first, briefly discuss the resource-based view of the firm and the importance of knowledge as a corporate resource. It will then examine Ocean’s use of technological and operational knowledge in the post-war era. The following section examines the introduction of modern management concepts at Ocean from the late 1960s and their impact on corporate strategy. In conclusion, the chapter will argue that the introduction of managerial concepts of knowledge contributed to Ocean’s gradual withdrawal from shipping and transformation into a provider of global logistics services and that analyzing shipping as a knowledge industry helps make sense of the transformation of the industry

Gerschenkron revisited: The new corporate Russia

© 2015, Journal of Economic Issues / Association for Evolutionary Economics. Our analysis is based on firm-specific data compiled from the Russian Trading System stock exchange and SKRIN (CKP-H in Russian) database. We seek to identify the factors behind Russias dramatically improved corporate sector performance from the beginning of the 2000s to December 2007. We argue that improved long-term corporate performance was a consequence of several policy initiatives associated with the state-dominated banking sector, which enabled statesubsidized investment funds to be channeled from a structurally reengineered energy sector to targeted investment projects located in other industries. We claim that Russias industrial strategy closely conforms to Alexander Gerschenkrons catch-up theory

Angling in modernity: a tour through society, nature and embodied passion

This article investigates an under-researched area in the tourism and leisure literatures, recreational freshwater fishing, which has become a significant cultural activity and a tourism industry in its own right. Within the last 30 years many destinations across the globe have developed fishing packages/products designed for the enthusiast able to afford the trip. Similarly, a new generation of tour operators has emerged in the West to offer a world of choice that was hardly imaginable a few decades ago. The article maps important developments in the modern history of fishing from a social constructionist viewpoint, examining how fishing, and by extension fishing tourism, enlists and promotes certain performative codes of practice and being, and how certain gazes on nature, destinations, fishing technologies, skills and quarry are produced and reproduced in very particular ideological ways. The article also considers the embodied nature and the materiality of fishing and fishing tourism and advances conceptual directions on how fishing leisure and tourism combine to produce an identifiable actor-network that is made up of sub-networks. Here, the analysis focuses on how the community of fish, anglers, technology, destinations and travel are held together to create a material–semiotic set of spatial practices and performances that are contested, impassioned and networked in relational space–time. The overall aim of the article is to offer a contextual and theoretical account of this important area of tourism and leisure and point to fruitful avenues for future research