Page 18 - Mellinato, Giulio, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2022. Complex Gateways. Labour and Urban History of Maritime Port Cities: The Northern Adriaticin a Comparative Perspective. Koper: University of Primorska Press.
P. 18
plex Gateways
Nevertheless, besides being gateways and nodes within internation-
al transport networks, seaports are also complex organizations in them-
selves, interconnecting functions, operations, and roles with material
and immaterial flows of merchandise, people, and information. How do
they really work? What are the essential organizational instruments pro-
cessing and making operative all the complex interplay required for a sea-
port to be efficient? Finally, who really governs them? What are the real
conditions granting an efficient functioning of an urban seaport?
Usually, mainstream economics portrays port systems following re-
search paradigms largely included within the umbrella definition of func-
tionalism, focused on the explanation of the actual situation, the rational
choice approach, and quantification, substantially in line with a positiv-
istic approach (Woo et al. 2011), along the same lines of the entire trans-
portation research field (Modak et al. 2019). More or less the same could
be said for other specialized research fields, such as Transport Geography
(Ducruet, Panahi et al. 2019), Global Economic Relations (Michie 2019;
Vivares 2020), and International Trade Studies (Martin 2015).
Sometimes, looking forward to future research, the necessity of a
more empiric and real case-based approach is remembered (Buckley, Doh,
and Benischke 2017), but the great majority of papers remain linked with
a theoretical and mostly abstract view, giving little room to considera-
tions concerning the real operational conditions in seaports. Even when
the focus of the research is on the broader conditions allowing higher
performances in the best-equipped seaports, the topics remain inside a
dehumanized conception of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘services’ (Gani 2017),
where the human and the labour factors are substantially missing.
Surprisingly, the human factor is considered mostly exogenous, even
in papers where the aim of the research deals with more labour-related
issues, and then discarded from the set of eligible topics worth consider-
ation. For example, in the case of social sustainability, the bibliography
is not only scarce, but also interested in topics like management and per-
formance (Lim et al. 2019), rather than the working conditions, the work-
ers’ motivation, and the social footprint seaports can produce on the sur-
rounding areas, contributing to the dynamics of the human environment
well beyond the waterfront and the dock areas. Researching the trans-
portation system in the light of their resilience, scholars privileged math-
ematical modelling and simulations. In a review of the available bibli-
ography about port-system resilience, real-case studies were counted as
18
Nevertheless, besides being gateways and nodes within internation-
al transport networks, seaports are also complex organizations in them-
selves, interconnecting functions, operations, and roles with material
and immaterial flows of merchandise, people, and information. How do
they really work? What are the essential organizational instruments pro-
cessing and making operative all the complex interplay required for a sea-
port to be efficient? Finally, who really governs them? What are the real
conditions granting an efficient functioning of an urban seaport?
Usually, mainstream economics portrays port systems following re-
search paradigms largely included within the umbrella definition of func-
tionalism, focused on the explanation of the actual situation, the rational
choice approach, and quantification, substantially in line with a positiv-
istic approach (Woo et al. 2011), along the same lines of the entire trans-
portation research field (Modak et al. 2019). More or less the same could
be said for other specialized research fields, such as Transport Geography
(Ducruet, Panahi et al. 2019), Global Economic Relations (Michie 2019;
Vivares 2020), and International Trade Studies (Martin 2015).
Sometimes, looking forward to future research, the necessity of a
more empiric and real case-based approach is remembered (Buckley, Doh,
and Benischke 2017), but the great majority of papers remain linked with
a theoretical and mostly abstract view, giving little room to considera-
tions concerning the real operational conditions in seaports. Even when
the focus of the research is on the broader conditions allowing higher
performances in the best-equipped seaports, the topics remain inside a
dehumanized conception of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘services’ (Gani 2017),
where the human and the labour factors are substantially missing.
Surprisingly, the human factor is considered mostly exogenous, even
in papers where the aim of the research deals with more labour-related
issues, and then discarded from the set of eligible topics worth consider-
ation. For example, in the case of social sustainability, the bibliography
is not only scarce, but also interested in topics like management and per-
formance (Lim et al. 2019), rather than the working conditions, the work-
ers’ motivation, and the social footprint seaports can produce on the sur-
rounding areas, contributing to the dynamics of the human environment
well beyond the waterfront and the dock areas. Researching the trans-
portation system in the light of their resilience, scholars privileged math-
ematical modelling and simulations. In a review of the available bibli-
ography about port-system resilience, real-case studies were counted as
18
