ABSTRACT
Peter Drucker is generally credited with delimiting concisely and comprehensively the goals that motivate corporate managements. These goals rest on the basic notion of enterprise survival and stress such aims as profitability, innovation, market standing and social responsibility.1 In auspicious times, growth is the corporate watchword; inauspicious occasions, in their turn, are greeted with sombre appeals to belt tightening and retrenchment. The accent placed on the different goals varies according to the state of the economic environment, but beyond dispute is the fact that the mix of goals is constantly dedicated to safeguarding the survival of the corporation. Such goals are evidently as relevant to shipbuilding enterprises as to any other corporation, although their relative importance may diverge from the current preoccupations of other members of the corporate sector. For example, there was considerable heart-searching by shipyard managers at the social consequences of unemployment arising from cutbacks in the later 1970s. Other industries, spared both the depth of cuts and the extreme localisation of labour pools that were commonplace among ship builders, could afford to pay comparatively less attention to this issue. Again, the trend towards public ownership in shipbuilding during the 1970s - in part a legacy of its geographical concentration in unemploy ment blackspots - forced shipbuilding managers to be alive to the goal of social responsibility. This issue was touched on in the previous chapter where it was seen to lurk behind the reasons for piecemeal bail outs of individual shipbuilders in a number of countries (to wit, Sasebo Heavy Industries and Nakskov Skibsvaerft, to give but two .examples) and, indeed, may be held accountable for much of the inclination to indulge in wholesale nationalisation in other countries which had tried fragmentary bail-outs and found them wanting. The formation of BS in
the UK, for instance, was justified on the grounds of preserving an industry, but nevertheless served to protect some of the more spatially isolated builders caught up in its net. Thus, in allocating orders among the yards to keep up activity levels, BS contrived to save the Troon yard from certain closure for an extended period and, in so doing, provided an uplift for the job-scarce Ayrshire district of Scotland. Moreover, when left with no choice but to close yards, the state enterprise may undertake to shepherd alternative activities to the moribund sites so as to absorb the surplus labour. Sweden’s government, for example, ensured that regional investment grants were sufficiently generous to induce car makers Volvo and Saab-Scania to erect plants on former shipyard premises at Uddevalla and Malmo after Celsius Industries could find no further use for them.2
