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

‘There Can Be No Other Sun in the Sky’ : Political Myth, Spirituality and Legitimacy in Contemporary Kazakhstan

With the elimination of Soviet state communism in the early 1990s, the ideational foundation of politics in the five Central Asian former Soviet republics had to undergo fundamental rebuilding. Instead of the defunct basis of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism, the rulers of the suddenly independent Central Asian states urgently had to identify other ways and means of legitimizing their hold on power. The following is an analysis of how this quest has fared in the case of Kazakhstan, a resource-rich state with regional great-power aspirations