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Marine experts have recognised the importance of on-board teamwork for a ship’s safe operation. The purpose of the study is to develop a framework of “on-board team effectiveness” as perceived by the seafarers with the help of conceptual categories discovered from the study. It describes and explain how members of floating shipboard team operates in a global environment which is dynamic, complex and full of challenges.

Qualitative research design was used to study wherein the grounded theory approach was adopted for data analysis. A purposive sample of 44 Indian seafarers covering all ranks and departments of the shipboard team were selected for the study. Primary data were collected through long interviews and focused group discussions with the respondents. Secondary data were collected through industry periodicals.

Ten conceptual categories were developed, and their interplay was identified to understand various aspects of shipboard team working in different contexts.

The insights gained from the study can be used to enhance shipboard team’s working and safe operation of the ship.

The study is unique in addressing team effectiveness issues of shipboard teams. Understanding teamwork effectiveness of a culturally diversified shipboard team shall facilitate safe working practices and act as a deterrent to human errors, which causes accidents and incidents.

The purpose of this paper is to present the ways in which underlying social and organisational factors and employment relations underpin the practice of incident reporting in the international shipping industry.

The paper uses a qualitative case study method involving field trips to two shipping organisations and sailing on research voyages on two ships of each of the organisations. It draws on empirical data using semi‐structured interviews, notes from fieldwork observations and documentary analysis of company policies, procedures and practices.

In the two companies studied there were significant gaps between the policy and practice of incident reporting, which were present primarily due to the employees' fear of losing jobs. It is shown that these findings were manifestations of deeper sociological issues and organisational weaknesses in the shipping industry. In particular ineffective regulatory infrastructure, weak employment practices, the absence of trade union support and lack of organisational trust were the key underlying concerns which made incident reporting notably ineffective in the shipping context.

While the weaknesses in the practice of incident reporting in the shipping industry were reported in the past, previous studies did not offer further explanations. This paper addresses the gap and provides another illustration of the need for looking into deeper sociological underpinnings for practices in the workplace. The author also hopes that the study will have a positive impact on policy makers in the shipping industry.

The cruise industry has witnessed steady growth, with passenger volume increasing from 17.8 million in 2009 to 30 million in 2019. In the context of global competition and an uncertain business environment, competition in business has changed dramatically from battles of “firm versus firm” to “supply chain versus supply chain”. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to understand the cruise industry from a chain perspective, which has not drawn widespread research attention.

This paper brings together the insights, opinions, concepts and frameworks from a literature review of different disciplines (maritime shipping, tourism management, logistics management, operations management and supply chain management) and analysis results from 22 semi-structured interviews to make an early attempt to conceptualise the cruise supply chain (CSC).

The cruise supply chain is elaborated on the process, the role of each entity and its characteristics by comparing with the maritime supply chain and tourism supply chain. Based on the understanding of the CSC, two specific characteristics of the Chinese CSC are examined, which need further investigation.

The CSC is articulated with detailed processes and characteristics based on the literature review and empirical study. The findings of this paper not only advance the knowledge of the supply chain in the cruise industry but also highlight the importance of further research on the CSC.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the lessons of globalization from the standpoint of Norwegian seafarers' career experiences. An isolated and multicultural shipboard social milieu provides a unique context for examining the challenges and impacts associated with globalized work.

Descriptions of the historical contexts of globalization, Norwegian shipping and seafaring are followed by the use of on‐line qualitative methodology to access globally dispersed and mobile informants.

By studying the historical development of globalization and analyzing seafarers' accounts, the “material realities” of global impacts may be better understood.

The shipboard context provides scholars and practitioners with an opportunity to learn lessons about the economic/social/historical values of certain occupations. Globalization has rendered multicultural workforces both at sea and on land. Seafarers have knowledge claims about managing and working technologically advanced and diverse work environments. “Male‐only” seafarer respondents limit understanding about the availability of Norwegian women seafarers to meet the recruitment and retention challenges faced by the shipping industry.

The IMO has stressed that the human element, seafarer response and cooperation, is critical to the effectiveness of global maritime security initiatives. Norwegian seafarers believe that policy‐makers tend to make decisions that reflect misguided assumptions and age‐old myths about sailors and shipboard organizational life. The paper raises awareness about the “business of seafaring”; which Tony Lane, UK seafarer turned sociologist, once argued is quite different from the “business of shipping”.

Exploration in a maritime context provides information of original value unavailable from other types of organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which workers employ rule breaking, rule bending and deviations from management defined norms in the workplace and the impact this has on their occupational health and safety (OHS) experiences.

The paper uses qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted with 37 seafarers working on board four vessels engaged in international trade. The data were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed using NVivo software.

The findings indicate that seafarers utilised workplace fiddles – which included rule breaking, rule bending and deviating from management defined norms – in order to engender a workable system in which they could remain safe but also profitable to those who controlled their labour. Moreover, the findings suggest that shore-side management deflected the responsibility for rule violations by deferring many of the decisions regarding features of life on board – such as the scheduling of work hours – to the senior officers on board.

The paper sheds light on where, in practice, responsibility for OHS lies in the international shipping industry, an industry in which workers experience relatively high rates of work-related fatalities, injuries and mental health conditions.

There is revolution everywhere on the maritime scene and the password is rationalization. Rationalization of work; rationalization of equipment; rationalization of dock facilities; rationalization of cargo; rationalization of ship operation. A new philosophy permeates, the whole industry, throwing up new concepts and challenging old ones. Ships are becoming more and more specialized in design and function in order to meet the need for rationalization both in its technical and commercial aspects. Giant tankers, bulk carriers, and container ships spearhead the revolution but many extremely forward looking new concepts of cargo handling and transportation systems are already in the pipeline. On the ship itself a technological revolution is progressing towards inevitable comprehensive automation as a remedy for economic ills. Diagnosis shows that the chronic shortage of certificated seagoing engineers, superimposed on the urgent necessity for increased economy and higher efficiency over the whole complex of shipboard operation, leaves little alternative to the automation prescription. It is true, of course, that automatic control of isolated individual elements of machinery has been featured at sea for a long long time. The escalation, however, in recent years from individual isolated application to overall centralized automatic control of the machinery from a control station sited inside the engine room (or outside), is indicative of the palliative and remedial action of the medicine as prescribed. It is only fair to state, however, that initiatory experience of ‘automation’ some years ago, especially in the oversell of electronic equipment by firms with no marine experience has made many shipowners justifiably sceptical about the prognosis.

In the context of organizational aesthetics, “built environments” remain under‐explored. The purpose of this paper is to enter the maritime world of ship architectures to navigate sensory‐aesthetic knowledge of a sailor's place‐based memories.

Challenges have been issued to explore the potential for artistic‐sensual methodologies to both study and represent organizational aesthetics. The authors accept these challenges in the context of “shipscapes”.

A sailor's “artworks” become artefacts through which are evoked rich, multi‐sensory descriptions of deep‐sea tug vessels. The sailor's sensible knowledge is related to seafaring practice, the aesthetic taste for ships and the aesthetic bond with them. Sensory‐aesthetic architectural memories are further connected to functional and symbolic aspects of ships as built environments.

Certain place/space shipboard knowledge remains constrained by the boundaries of an “arts‐based” sensory‐aesthetic method.

The multi‐sensed, remembered and co‐constructed nature of “shipscapes”, as celebrated through a seafarer's already created art, keeps aesthetic knowledge close to the source of both embodied experience and aesthetic meaning.

EastTech and WestComm battle for contracts to produce innovative high‐tech systems. Learning from their markets and defining an appropriate marketing strategy is a problem for both firms.

Shipping is perhaps the most internationally recognized of all the world's great industries – and one of the most dangerous. It has always been accepted that the best way of improving safety at sea is by developing international regulations that are followed by most shipping nations. Since 1993, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has adopted the International Safety Management (ISM) Code as a minimum statutory requirement for ship operating companies to establish, implement and maintain their safety management systems (SMS). This paper compares the ISM Code with the requirements of the ISO 9001:2000 quality management system and the OHSAS 18001:1999 Occupational Health and Safety Standards. It reviews the SMS registration process and discusses the problems and difficulties commonly faced by ship operating companies in the process. A 15‐step implementation strategy for SMS registration is presented. The model provides ship operating companies with a practical reference to manage the SMS registration in compliance with the statutory requirements of the IMO.