This paper presents findings from three workshops focused on the physical, organizational and social work environment of service crew working on board Swedish passenger vessels. The first workshop aimed to identify underlying causes of long-term sick leave among employees in the service department, and potential measures that can be taken to reduce ill-health. The second and third workshop explored knowledge of available methods to identify occupational safety and health risks, and suggest health-promotion strategies at individual, team and company levels. A total of 58 persons from the Swedish maritime cluster participated in the workshops. During the workshops, open and structured brainstorming was used to create affinity diagrams to systematically summarize the identified causes, risks and strategies. Although the results presented in this article stem from a research project focused on Swedish passenger vessels, many of the findings may be transferable to an international maritime setting towards a deeper understanding of seafarers’ work environment and working conditions.
Today, the shipping industry faces important environmental challenges to reduce the impact of sea transport to the marine environment. In order to enhance compliance and encourage safe and efficient maritime operations, the implementation of a safety culture in both shore organisation and on board ships has been advocated. Similarly, it can be argued that a conscious ‘greening’ of an organisation’s culture may be necessary in order to meet legislative and societal demands, as well as embrace environmentally responsible values, beliefs and behaviours. The present pilot study describes the development and evaluation of a model designed to capture attitudes and perception among seafarers with regards to proactive environmental work in the shipping industry. The overall aim of the model is to enable measurement of the extent to which a ‘green culture’ is present within the shipping industry, and to identify factors that either facilitate or act as barriers to a green culture. Evaluation of the model was done through qualitative individual and focus group interviews with, in all, 13 active Swedish seafarers during the autumn of 2014. The findings show that the model captures the sought after mechanisms fairly well and shows some promise. Future work is needed to further refine and test the model in a larger setting, in order to provide a robust picture of the seafarers’ view on ‘green’ shipping.
This study takes its departure in the difficulties to recruit and retain qualified senior seafarers in the Swedish shipping sector. The study focus is on seafarers’ motivation at work for the specific shipping company (organizational commitment), and seafarers’ motivation towards their occupation (occupational commitment), in times of flagging out. It was hypothesized that the youngest seafarers and the oldest may be most sensitive to foreign registration of ships. Statistical analyses were employed, using a survey material of 1,309 Swedish seafarers randomly collected in 2010 from a national register of seafarers. The results of the analyses show that flagging-out imposes a significant decline in organizational commitment for all seafarers. This decline is related to the perception of the social composition of crew. In addition, the oldest seafarers (age 55+) demonstrate diminished occupational commitment under a foreign flag. This decline is related to the degree of satisfaction with the social security structure. Occupational commitment among the youngest seafarers (age 19-30) is not affected by the nationality of flag. However, this type of commitment is decreasing by the time served on the same ship. This effect is partly related to a decline in satisfaction with the work content. In the concluding discussion, the findings are discussed in more details and recommendations are put forward.
Construction Grammar holds that unpredictable form-meaning combinations are not restricted in size. In particular, there may be phrases that have particular meanings that are not predictable from the words that they contain, but which are nonetheless not purely idiosyncratic. In addressing this observation, some construction grammarians have not only weakened the word/phrase distinction, but also denied the lexicon/grammar distinction. In this paper, we consider the word/phrase and lexicon/grammar distinction in light of Lexical-Functional Grammar and its Lexical Integrity Principle. We show that it is not necessary to remove the word/phrase distinction or the lexicon/grammar distinction to capture constructional effects, although we agree that there are important generalizations involving constructions of all sizes that must be captured at both syntactic and semantic levels. We use LFG’s templates, bundles of grammatical descriptions, to factor out grammatical information in such a way that it can be invoked either by words or by construction-specific phrase structure rules. Phrase structure rules that invoke specific templates are thus the equivalent of phrasal constructions in our approach, but Lexical Integrity and the separation of word and phrase are preserved. Constructional effects are captured by systematically allowing words and phrases to contribute comparable information to LFG’s level of functional structure; this is just a generalization of LFG’s usual assumption that “morphology competes with syntax” (Bresnan, 2001).
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