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Explaining the new seaport competition

University of British Columbia

In recent decades, competition has become an extremely prominent issue in the seaport industry due in large part to fundamental changes that have redefined the competitive environment. New technologies such as containerization and intermodalism are widely acknowledged to be the main factors forcing these changes, yet the broader role of more intense competition between seaports has been generally overlooked. This thesis develops a framework for examining these processes of change and uses it to explain how the new modes of shipping produced a "new" seaport competition. I deviate from the positivist-based "extensive" approach that dominates the body of research on seaports, and take instead an "intensive" approach grounded in the philosophy of realism. First, I theorize seaports as production-systems and competition as a process of managing strategic problems and solutions that are necessarily situated within a particular spatiotemporality. Second, I apply that theoretical framework to explain how the nature of competition between seaports has changed with the emergence of containerization and intermodalism. Third, I corroborate that explanation by presenting the results of interactive, minimally structured interviews with seaport officials from ports in Tacoma, Seattle, and Vancouver, on the issues of competition and change. The major finding is that containerization and intermodalism produced a "new" competition by transforming the temporal and spatial dimensions of the strategic problems for seaport production-systems in the realms of (1) customers/markets, (2) the seaport product, and (3) strategies. This research complements the existing literature by emphasizing the structures that have produced the change in seaport competition and examining the issue from the perspective of seaports rather than demand-side factors.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-06-18

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9444

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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