Authors: Alexandre Lavissiere; Laurent Fedi; Mary Catherine Lavissiére; Tibor Mandják
Port is a business interface between actors of the multimodal cycle of activities and as such, it represents an interesting field of investigation for business-to-business research (Harrison & Håkansson, 2006 Mandják & Lavissière, 2017). Moreover, port marketing seems to be a field of research to develop considering recent studies (Parola et al, 2017). Traditional studies on port business are developed through the lens of Supply Chain Management (SCM) theories in which the chain can and needs to be drawn tight in order to optimize factors. Reality seems more complex and one optimized supply chain is probably only part of a coat of mail. In 2014, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN body in charge of safety and environmental protection in the shipping industry, adopted the Resolution MSC.380(94) on the Verified Gross Mass (VGM) of packed containers in order to enhance maritime and port safety operations. Since 1 July 2016, shippers have been henceforth obliged to provide the weight of packed containers prior to loading operations. This new activity that had to be performed along the supply chain showed how intertwined port actors are on several layers. This paper aims at identifying the characteristics and links of what is known as port community but is hardly defined in the literature. IMP Approach of business networks is used to provide a new perspective from traditional SCM literature. The methodology relies the case of VGM Implementation in French ports. This case study is based on recollection of secondary data as well as a set of interviews within both ports of Le Havre and Marseille. A content analysis and a linguistic analysis of the verbatim provides strong data to understand the structure of port community as a network. Results show that port community is not organized as a linear chain, but rather as a network of actors, called “port community”, that can be considered as client of the port, supplier of the port, stakeholder of the port, and member of the port depending on the perspective of the network picture.
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Publish Year: 2018
Conference: Marseille, France (2018)