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Since much of the design work for vessels and offshore installations occurs in countries other than where the vessel may operate or where the installation may be located, it is particularly important that the expected user be considered and accommodated through the design and operational phases of a project.

Within the framework of engineering design and marine operations, this chapter will discuss “soft” issues, such as organizational and line management decisions and personnel selection procedures, as well as “hardware” issues related to design of living and working environments. In particular, the chapter will address how culture should be considered while identifying “user” needs and requirements.

This chapter presents a framework which is accessible to port authorities to assess the potential environmental impact of maritime operations. Pursuant on globalisation, increased numbers of ship movements have generated more frequent routine maritime operations in ports but few formal approaches exist for assessing their environmental impact, which potentially could be significant. In a novel framing of environmental assessment a business process modelling technique is deployed in a systems approach which highlights inputs, service processes and outputs. In an initial focus, primary processes at strategic level are defined which affect the environmental assessment of present and future operations and their potential impacts. Later, tactical service processes define the integrity of processes that guarantee service level and quality. Finally, outputs are defined by operational processes. The contribution of applying the systems approach to plan more sustainable maritime operations is assessed in a case study of Falmouth Harbour Commissioners (FHC) which regulates much of Falmouth Harbour and hosts the UK's largest offshore marine bunkering operation. Following EU designation of a North Sea Sulfur Oxide Emissions Control Areas (SECA) Falmouth recently recorded a significant rise in the number of vessels calling, and volume of fuel sold as more passing vessels take onboard low-sulfur fuel. The systems approach which empowers FHC to mitigate potential risks and assess development proposals proactively is easily transferable to other ports.

This chapter explores the unknown territory of a lost project: an ethnography of a public swimming pool. The discussion is contextualised within my broader sociological theory of ‘nothing’, as a category of unmarked, negative social phenomena, including no-things, no-bodies, no-wheres, non-events and non-identities. These meaningful symbolic objects are constituted through social interaction, which can take two forms: acts of commission and acts of omission. I tell the story of how this project did not happen, through the things I did not do or that did not materialise, and how I consequently did not become a certain type of researcher. I identify three types of negative phenomena that I did not observe and document – invisible figures, silent voices and empty vessels – and, consequently, the knowledge I did not acquire. However, nothing is also productive, generating new symbolic objects as substitutes, alternatives and replacements: the somethings, somebodies and somewheres that are done or made instead. Thus finally, I reflect on how not doing this project led me to pursue others, cultivating a different research identity that would not otherwise have existed.

Purpose – This chapter examines the expectation that because the developmental trajectories of cultural frontiers are often seen as being tied to that of their more complexly developed neighbors, increases in interregional interaction provide frontier communities with previously unavailable political-economic opportunities that promote social change.

Design/methodology/approach – This expectation is examined using data from archaeological excavations at the site of El Dornajo in southwestern Ecuador. Models based on external conditions like interregional interaction are considered alongside those based on internal conditions like environmental perturbations.

Findings – The results suggest that increased interregional interaction promoted the emergence of a regional prestige economy that symbolically legitimated (and perhaps made possible) the co-option of traditional risk buffering strategies during a time when the availability of subsistence resources had changed due to local conditions.

Practical implications – This chapter supports the notion that the emergence of institutionalized inequality requires control over both internal and external relationships. Furthermore, it suggests that examining models based on both internal and external conditions of change may help to explain the timing and pace of that change.

Originality/value – Much of the archaeological literature is dichotomized between models based on internal conditions and those based on external conditions. Few archaeologists would take exception to the notion that both conditions matter, but equally few archaeologists are looking at both kinds of conditions in the same case study.