ABSTRACT
We have referred to the importance of shipbuilding enterprises as agents in the struggle for national and regional shipbuilding viability. It is now opportune to address, directly, the issue of industrial organisation. In other words, it is now appropriate to raise the question of how the shipbuilding enterprise, as an industrial organisation, comes to bear on the industry's fortunes. As was remarked upon in Chapter 2, the shipbuilding enterprise occupies a middling position in shipbuilding affairs, coming between the operations of the macro-level structural environment and the micro-level concern of shipyard production methods. It was, in fact, conceived therein as performing an intermediary function, transforming economic conditions, as reflected through trade cycles and technological advances, into hard policy decisions affecting the activity levels of individual shipyards. As such, the enterprise is accorded the scope for relative flexibility in actions aimed at changing the economic milieu as well as those designed to counter the excesses of that milieu. The range of options available to the enterprise are manifested through strategies of growth and rationalisation of the industrial organisation along with the associated concerns of whether the enterprise should be steered towards diversification rather than employing itself in specialised activities. From the point of view of growth and rationalisation, we have already touched upon the outcomes of such actions via the shipyard site model of Chapter 3. In practice, however, issues of growth and retrenchment affecting shipyards cannot be separated from the greater context of the firm's relationship to the economic milieu at large, including its relations with other firms. It is at such a level that question of specialisation versus 254diversification tend to prevail. All of these concerns are germane to any industrial organisation, of course, and some indication of the behaviour of industrial organisations as a whole needs airing before attention can be focused on shipbuilding enterprises alone. Consequently, the initial part of this chapter provides a refresher of the structural contingency model and suggests the means by which such a formulation has relevance to an understanding of the strategies available to shipbuilding enterprises. Subsequent components of the chapter isolate the actions (and reactions) of shipbuilding enterprises in terms of the possible options common to all industrial organisations. The logic underlying these strategies remains that outlined in the descriptive model of Chapter 2; namely, that firms have either to initiate or respond to changes in the economic milieu (changing demand or changing technology) by attempting to improve their factor costs position. Frequently, as we have noted, this entails the cooption of Government. The state, indeed, usually assumes a major role vis-à-vis shipbuilding enterprises, for, not only may it take on the guise of a shipbuilder in its own right, but it also acts as a key player in regulating the demand for ships. It is obvious, therefore, that shipbuilding enterprises must nurture careful relationships with the state regardless of the geopolitical context within which they find themselves. The various ways by which the state intervenes in the policymaking of shipbuilding enterprise is elicited in this chapter through an examination of state shipbuilding enterprises in several countries and an overview of partial state involvement in shipbuilding enterprises in several more.
