Page 21 - 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. 21
Complex Gateways: The North Adriatic Port System in Historical Perspective
es increasingly interesting all the traditional productive sectors, starting
from the 1980s and 1990s.
The question of port-work organization has remained debated over
time, as the port reform process continued during the 2000s and 2010s,
directing a lively interest towards the analysis of seaport governance,
management, and organization. Particular attention has been devoted
to understanding the origins of the new level of conflict triggered by the
continuous reforms in work organization (Cole and Hart 2018; Bottalico
2019). Several papers followed more or less the same scheme: the contain-
erization process and the development of global supply chains led to a
substantial disruption of local port-work habits and organizations, seen
in various ways as consuetudinary and culturally driven or linked to priv-
ileges and benefits. As Peter Cole has effectively summarized, in the port
workers’ eyes, the transformation was so revolutionary that they were
unable to say if they were ‘working the containers, or getting worked by
them’ (Cole 2018, 191). Subsequently, the reforms sparked quite harsh re-
actions by the workforce, especially the less specialized levels, and thus
those more at risk of expulsion from the new high-performative logistic
structures (see Tonizzi 2014; Bottalico 2017 for the Italian case), some-
times reproducing situations of conflicts already experienced during
other periods of techno-organizational deep changes (Hamark 2014).
Unfortunately, the examination of these historical precedents does not
seem to have attracted much scholarly interest.
At least in one case, the port-city relationship has become the prima-
ry issue of the research, but from a clear urban-sociological point of view
(Mah 2014). Other scholars have analysed the evolution of the port-city
interrelation using different paradigms (Konvitz 2013), oftentimes un-
derlying the inner tensions between port systems and the surrounding
urban areas (Nogué‑Algueró 2020), but a synthesis is still missing.
This is quite disappointing, because some of the most researched
tropes, such as ‘flows’, ‘circulation’ and ‘connectivity’, are intrinsically re-
lated not only to the connection of different spaces and activities, but
also to a very wide and comprehensive perception of the backgrounds re-
quired and the outcomes produced by trade and transportation activi-
ties. Thus the question: why are these activities so transversally stretched
within different economic sectors and social environments, and the re-
search about them is not?
21
es increasingly interesting all the traditional productive sectors, starting
from the 1980s and 1990s.
The question of port-work organization has remained debated over
time, as the port reform process continued during the 2000s and 2010s,
directing a lively interest towards the analysis of seaport governance,
management, and organization. Particular attention has been devoted
to understanding the origins of the new level of conflict triggered by the
continuous reforms in work organization (Cole and Hart 2018; Bottalico
2019). Several papers followed more or less the same scheme: the contain-
erization process and the development of global supply chains led to a
substantial disruption of local port-work habits and organizations, seen
in various ways as consuetudinary and culturally driven or linked to priv-
ileges and benefits. As Peter Cole has effectively summarized, in the port
workers’ eyes, the transformation was so revolutionary that they were
unable to say if they were ‘working the containers, or getting worked by
them’ (Cole 2018, 191). Subsequently, the reforms sparked quite harsh re-
actions by the workforce, especially the less specialized levels, and thus
those more at risk of expulsion from the new high-performative logistic
structures (see Tonizzi 2014; Bottalico 2017 for the Italian case), some-
times reproducing situations of conflicts already experienced during
other periods of techno-organizational deep changes (Hamark 2014).
Unfortunately, the examination of these historical precedents does not
seem to have attracted much scholarly interest.
At least in one case, the port-city relationship has become the prima-
ry issue of the research, but from a clear urban-sociological point of view
(Mah 2014). Other scholars have analysed the evolution of the port-city
interrelation using different paradigms (Konvitz 2013), oftentimes un-
derlying the inner tensions between port systems and the surrounding
urban areas (Nogué‑Algueró 2020), but a synthesis is still missing.
This is quite disappointing, because some of the most researched
tropes, such as ‘flows’, ‘circulation’ and ‘connectivity’, are intrinsically re-
lated not only to the connection of different spaces and activities, but
also to a very wide and comprehensive perception of the backgrounds re-
quired and the outcomes produced by trade and transportation activi-
ties. Thus the question: why are these activities so transversally stretched
within different economic sectors and social environments, and the re-
search about them is not?
21
