ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF EAST EUROPEAN CHANGE UPON EUROPEAN COMMUNITY AND EAST EUROPEAN LINER SHIPPING

Abstract

In its attempt to analyse the impact of East European change upon the European Community and East European liner shipping industries this thesis covers an extensive range of highly topical subject areas. The wide range of non uniform information gleaned from the research and the question of spurious objectivity form the main arguments behind the use of qualitative rather than quantitative assessment throughout. The diverse study area also necessitated a narrowing to the case of Polish Ocean Lines' North Atlantic operations to enable a meaningful analysis to be carried out. The early part of the thesis examines the background to the East European situation before moving on to identify the main issues that directly affect Polish shipping, through the use of a Contextual model. Using the information gained here a newly developed Contextual Matrix Model then enables the main issues to be extracted. These issues indicate that the changes affecting Polish Ocean Lines require an exercise in repositioning. To assess this fully a framework approach is developed to determine Polish Ocean Lines' position for 1988 and 1992. A further framework is then created for the European Community competitors' 1992 position, in order that a positional comparison can be carried out with Polish Ocean Lines. The results of the comparison indicate that repositioning is taking place at Polish Ocean Lines as a direct reaction to the changes occurring throughout East Europe. The discussion concludes that this is a dynamic, volatile and topical area which raises a number of points of possible interest for further research.