Women in maritime career: Are they still discriminated?

Fast-track maritime career is a topical question worldwide due to the shortage of seafarers in maritime industry. Assuming that the fast-track career officers’ relevant common characteristics in adolescence could predict future maritime career speed, the research questions of this research are: What were the common characteristics of fast-track career officers when they were 16-18? Were there any statistically significant differences between the fast-track career groups and the officers with a slower career at that age? A questionnaire survey involving 175 maritime officers was conducted in Latvia in January – October 2016, regarding officers’ family context, school achievement, involvement in sports, and personality traits when they were 16-18. Fast-track career officers perceived themselves as more conscientious, calm and more leadership oriented than the whole group in adolescence. Statistically significant differences among career-speed groups were found regarding family socioeconomic status, family atmosphere and family career support at that age. Based on those communalities among maritime officers with a fast-track carrier when they were 16-18, maritime education and training institutions could better find and give appropriate career guidance to prospective maritime officers. Even if maritime career speed is a very individualized phenomenon, family characteristics could be studied further as a potential good predictor of fast-track maritime career. Keywords: career success predictors, fast-track career, maritime career, maritime officers.

By means of extended archival research and the help of the recently-developed open access repository that goes by the name of Reading Experience Database, (UKRED), Helen Chambers has achieved a number of firsts with this book. She is the first to have systematically explored the reading life of Joseph Conrad from his early years in occupied Poland, through his maritime career, to his life as a multicultural writer in South-East England. Given that Chambers is almost as well-travelled a biblio...

Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio) Robert Hampson. Joseph Conrad. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781789143071. Joseph Conrad by Robert Hampson adds lustre to a collection of ninety-eight critical works at its date of publication (2020) in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives Series, devoted to “the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period” (pre-title page). This highly readable volume accomplishes an interpretive feat in just over two hundred pages that much larger critical biographies, such as Frederick Karl’s formidable Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979), accomplish in over a thousand. This enviable gift of Hampson’s is no less than we have come to expect from his pen. From the outset, elements of Conrad’s life and literature in their historical settings are integrated in ways imparting to the reader a common-sense wholeness. Early in chapter 2, about Conrad’s maritime career, for instance, Hampson approaches Heart of Darkness by way of noting poignantly that Henry Morton Stanley returned from Africa via Marseilles in 1877, in Conrad’s [End Page 95] “murkiest period,” thus inferentially drawing a line from Conrad’s boyhood romance with Burton and Speke’s accounts of African exploration through his despondency leading to his purportedly deliberate botching of a suicide attempt the following year (Hampson 37),1 and on to his disillusion and depression in the Congo a dozen years later. We find these and other kinds of linkages—international affairs and publishing history—throughout this exceptional critical biography. THE AUTHOR The authorship of Joseph Conrad is signal enough that it is both required reading for Conrad specialists and an intriguing entry-level text for the Conradian tyro: Professor Robert Hampson, FEA, FRSA,2 Professor Emeritus, Royal Holloway, University of London, and currently Research Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, is author of three previous works of similar merit: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992); Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000); and Conrad’s Secrets (Palgrave, 2013). His work has been described in acclaimed critical sources as “striking and inventive” and “an indispensable resource for specialists and enthusiasts alike.”3 Through the 1990s until the present Robert Hampson has become, as it were, a household name among Conrad specialists. He has edited and co-edited works by Conrad, was editor of Conradiana for seven years, and in 2017 was awarded the Ian P. Watt Prize for Excellence for his lifetime’s work on Conrad. THE VISUALS Our first encounter with the paperback version of Joseph Conrad is the cover’s photo-portrait of Conrad, familiar to Conradians as originating in 1904 in his forty-seventh year, still dark-bearded and with the eyes of the sea dreamer late come from his true home afloat. Not yet a decade from the seas, he remained largely unsung and undiscovered by the popular readership.4 A frontispiece shows Conrad nine years later in 1913, the grey-bearded mature artist, posed self-assuredly at his desk as if interrupted in writing a line of Chance, the book published that year which ended his obscurity and thrust him into the forefront of British novelists with Henry James and H. G. Wells. Most of the other visuals are known to Conrad scholars, but whereas they commonly appear in glossy pages bunged into the center of biographies, Hampson has judiciously had them placed appropriately where they unobtrusively illuminate the particular subject of the moment. [End Page 96] THE STRUCTURE As to the external mechanical aspects of the book, presumably the editors of the Reaktion series impose house protocols. Thus, for instance, Joseph Conrad contains a Select Bibliography of Conrad’s works at the end (202), but no chronology and, regrettably, no index. Oddly, the Acknowledgements are at the last. But assuredly these lacunae and eccentricities are not by the author’s design. More important, though, is the internal structure of Joseph Conrad, unique among critical biographies, that imparts coherence of meaning to Conrad’s life and work.5 Hampson’s structural apparatus throughout matches Conrad’s life experience to the literature, to “make us see,” so to speak, how...

Joseph Conrad's short novel The Shadow-Line: A Confession (1917) is one of the key works of early twentieth-century fiction. This edition, established through modern textual scholarship, and published as part of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, presents Conrad's only major work written during the First World War and its 1920 preface in forms more authoritative than any so far printed. Correspondence reveals that the part- and chapter-divisions present in the historical editions lack authorial sanction, and this edition of The Shadow-Line offers a continuous text for the first time, restoring to the narrative a fluency and dramatic intensity not hitherto found in any printing. An Introduction and Explanatory Notes, as well as maps and illustrations, enrich this volume. The Appendices publish materials relevant to Conrad's maritime career and to the publishing of the American serial, and the Apparatus allows the reader to follow the creative process. - Publisher's description

For seafaring personnel, who are at the beginning of their maritime career on board ships, maritime companies provide informal guidance, which is part of the maritime tradition, within practical training courses/cadetship courses. Starting from the existing realities in the structure of seafaring personnel in the merchant marine, this paper presents the particularities of mentoring for a career in the maritime field. Among the aspects identified and highlighted in the mentoring process, the research focuses on the process of understanding maritime risks and the importance of safety culture on board ships, both by cadets and junior officers, who are at the beginning of their careers at sea. The investigation is based on a survey conducted on a significant number of subjects between 2018-2023. The developed research methodology was used to underlie the items in the questionnaires, on the basis of which the survey was carried out. The questionnaires were established by the data triangulation method and by consulting maritime stakeholders. Considering both the common aspects, specific to life at sea, but also the particular elements, which relate to the responsibilities on board the ship, the proposals received from all departments on board the ship were centralized. The questionnaires were developed based on the contributions received from: representatives of companies in the maritime industry, seafaring personnel at managerial and operational level (from the deck, engine and electrical departments), responsible in the field of risk and safety in the maritime industry, cadets and junior officers, at the beginning of their career at sea. The results of the survey were centralized, analyzed and interpreted to establish the level of understanding and perception of maritime risk and safety issues. The resulting conclusions can be used by the interested factors for the development and consolidation of appropriate, adapted and customized projects in the field of maritime safety and risk management on board ships, dedicated to cadets/ junior officers.

Despite the central importance of the Malay Archipelago for Conrad's maritime career and literary oeuvre, the translation and reception of his writings in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have received no critical attention. After summarizing Conrad's recorded views on the principles of effective translation, this essay offers a detailed examination of Rustam A. Sani's translation of Gaspar Ruiz and Almayer's Folly into Malay in the mid-1960s. Situating them in relation to Lawrence Venutti's theories of translation and nationalism, it connects both texts to Sani's involvement with the Malaysian language movement. Through close comparison of translation and original, this essay shows how Sani's methodology was influenced by contemporary political efforts to construct a modern national identity.

Seafaring as an occupation, and the maritime community as a whole, is still a male-dominated industry. In order to encourage more women to engage in a career at sea, a number of campaigns have been launched by various stakeholders. Since gender gaps in education generally are larger in the developing world, while steadily closing in the developed countries, it is both understandable and appropriate that efforts largely have been directed towards enabling women in developing countries to engage in professional education and training, may it be maritime or other. However, is opening the door and encouraging women to participate in maritime training sufficient to keep and encourage women to embark on a maritime career? In this paper, we set out to examine how gender equality is addressed in the curricula of maritime education. A document analysis was performed, examining official study plans and curricula from eight maritime universities in Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Philippines; all nations ranked in the top five in the Global gender Gap Index. The results show that gender issues are not explicitly mentioned or addressed in these documents, indicating a lack of clear strategies for these matters. Educational institutions are important bearers of societal norms and values. Without effective gender-inclusive strategies and pedagogical and didactic approaches, there is a risk of reproducing inequality, instead of producing equality. Increasing numbers of female students will not alone close the gender gap in the maritime industry. Gender issues must be well defined, operationalised and included in educational policy and curricula-making at individual, structural as well as symbolical levels.

Reviewed by: Joseph Conrad’s Critical Receptio by John G. Peters Cedric Watts (bio) John G. Peters: Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xiii + 274 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-03485-3. This volume summarises a vast amount of Conradian criticism, beginning at 1895 and continuing to 2012. The book constitutes a great tribute to Conrad and, in part, to the burgeoning of higher education internationally since 1945. John G. Peters, already well known to Conradians, has selected what he deems to be the most important writings of those published in English, and has proceeded to précis hundreds of books and articles. The entries are divided chronologically. His selection seems to me to be as fair and representative as the scope of a 274-page book permits. Perhaps room might have been found [End Page 86] for T. P. O’Connor, who in 1895, having read Almayer’s Folly ‘with rapture’, proclaimed Conrad’s genius in the ‘Book of the Month’ columns of the Weekly Sun on 9 June 1895. (O’Connor, an Irish nationalist sympathetic to the Polish cause, later serialised Nostromo.) The reader of Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception should be impressed by Peters’ sheer stamina, diligence and patience. The summaries are generally clear and fair-minded. Inevitably, Peters offers some evaluative comments, particularly of early Conradian items; but, in the main, he has endeavoured to suspend judgement when offering the paraphrases: he refrains from arguing with the selected critics. Considering that some of the material was highly abstruse, and other items were provocatively contentious, his diligence and restraint have been remarkable and usually commendable. On pp. 98-9, for instance, he renders well the cryptic, paradoxical and epigrammatic arguments of Terry Eagleton in Criticism and Ideology. He does not, however, cite Eagleton’s own allegation, in the same book, that those arguments illustrate ‘partial and reductive reading’. Earlier, on pp. 38-9, Peters has condensed to less than one page F. R. Leavis’s influential account of Conrad in The Great Tradition, but that précis seems quite accurate in rendering Leavis’s commendations and qualifications. So often, Peters manages to be concise while yet respecting the details of the arguments he summarises: he maintains a vigilant diligence and an unflagging stamina. Peters’ volume will be a very useful resource for students and teachers. The admirably lengthy index (with such entries as ‘ecocriticism’, ‘Feminist criticism’, ‘Post-Freudian Psychology’, ‘Queer studies’, and ‘solipsism’) will make the material readily searchable. On the whole, then, I’m inclined to offer congratulations to Peters on completing a task so formidable that, at times, he may have felt like a warrior battling a hydra-headed monster, as Conradian studies proliferated and many a critical thesis seemed predictably to evoke its antithesis. In his succinct ‘Afterword’, Peters explains why Conrad has lent himself to such a diversity of approaches. We are reminded of Conrad’s Polish ancestry, his polylingualism, his maritime career, and the great range (geographical, cultural, moral, philosophical) of the literary works which varied between relatively slight items and magnificent achievements such as Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. Conrad has provided exceptionally rich material for biographers, for close textual analysts, and for a diversity of approaches: psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, post-colonialist, feminist and narratological, for example. And there is no sign yet that commentary is exhausted. For instance, as this book reminds us, valuably innovatory recent developments have included Richard J. Hand’s defence of Conrad’s plays (The Theatre of Joseph Conrad), Stephen Donovan’s Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture, [End Page 87] Anthony Fothergill’s study of Conrad’s influence in Germany (Secret Sharers), Robert Hampson’s Conrad’s Secrets, and the four-volume reference work, Joseph Conrad: The Contemporary Reviews (2012), which collects approximately two thousand contemporaneous reviews (the industrious John Peters being one of the five editors of that vast collection). Peters also presents with lucid aplomb a range of recent studies which postulate modes of homosexuality or homoeroticism in the Conradian texts. Repeatedly, then, Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception illustrates the old rule of critical commentaries: ‘Where much has been written, more shall be written.’ Fortunately, the ‘more’ still...

The conducted research was induced by the lack of research into the motivation for choosing a maritime career in Croatia, which is a traditional maritime country. The main objective of the research was to examine the reasons for enrolling in secondary school programs and undergraduate studies related to two maritime orientations (nautical navigation and marine engineering) in Croatia. The survey involved 403 students from seven secondary schools and 264 students of undergraduate studies. The reasons for enrolling in maritime education are categorized into two groups; motivation related to choosing a maritime career and motivation unrelated to a maritime career. The analysis of the obtained data indicated that the choice of maritime education orientation was dominated by the motivation underlying the selection of the maritime profession (79 % in the secondary and 93 % in the higher education students' sample). The identified reasons (strong interest in the nature and dynamics of the maritime profession, employment opportunities, wage rates and tradition) were categorized according to the level of autonomous regulation in selection. The reasons for choosing a maritime course of education unrelated to the maritime profession are particularly prevalent in the sample of secondary school students.

Bandits have been popular ‘heroic’ individuals throughout history. Many of them also proved to be quite useful figures, allowing interested parties to fill in gaps in their capacities on the quick by way of co‐opting them. Such ‘interested parties’ even included kings, whose authority still was a rather limited one. A particularly glaring gap in their authority existed at sea: keeping a fleet at the ready was quite expensive, and affordable only for a few rich exceptions. Everyone else had to make use of naval mercenaries–pirates with a license. One of the most illustrious medieval examples of such maritime entrepreneurs is Eustace the Monk. His colourful life includes being a monk, the seneschal of the Count of Boulogne, a bandit and pirate after he fell out with the count, and finally naval mercenary first for King John of England, then for King Philip Augustus of France. This contribution focuses on Eustace the Monk's maritime career. It will do so by assessing the political constellation and culture of his days which made it possible in the first place.

This article analyses the career paths of Swedish and Finnish sailors from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The article shows that, for the most of the men, the seaman’s occupation was just a passing phase before taking up a job on shore, but many of them also created a long-lasting and advancing career by going to sea. There was not necessarily, however, a clear distinction between job opportunities at sea and those on shore in those days: men worked both at sea and on shore. We therefore argue that an individual’s advancement in a maritime career was a context-specific socio-economic phenomenon. In Scandinavia, work on board ships was dependent on features that characterized the division of labour in a predominantly agricultural domestic economy on land and emerging industrialization during the turn of the century. Here we present an analysis of the career paths of almost 60,000 men recruited to serve on Swedish and Finnish merchant vessels from the 1840s to late 1940s.

Maritime transportation industry can be classified as 3D jobs; dirty, dangerous and demeaning with historically been male dominated industry. This give challenges for women to be a part of maritime sector. The imbalance gender in maritime transportation industry are still been debated over the year. Until 2016, only 1 to 2% over 1.25 million seafarers are women. Malaysia as one of the maritime nation has facing the same problem regarding the issue of imbalance gender especially in seafaring career. Concerning about this issue, this paper analyses and recommends improvement strategies of women representation in Malaysian maritime transportation industry. As a result, the primary of this paper listing the potential strategies that can be used to improve women participation in maritime career. This research also highlights the perspective and idea of solution that comes from organisation that lean to the maritime including Malaysian government, maritime institution, industry and NGOs. Firstly, the status of women seafarer in Malaysia maritime industry will be analysed. Secondly, the improvement strategies of women representation in Malaysia maritime transportation industry will be evaluated. Finally, the most effective strategies will be recommended. In order to achieve these objectives, two mathematical methods will be employed which are Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Evidential Reasoning (ER). This research is expected to contribute to the maritime industry in the interest of attracting women participation in maritime sector.

Rear-Admiral James Burney (1750–1821), brother of the novelist Fanny Burney and son of the musicologist Dr Charles Burney, is best known for his five-volume compilation of voyages in the Pacific Ocean (also reissued in this series). He began his maritime career at the age of ten, as a captain's servant. Five years later he became a naval officer, and from 1772 to 1780 served on Cook's second and third voyages to the South Seas. Following his forced retirement in 1784, he turned to his second career as an author. Published in 1819, this work summarises nine hundred years of exploration of the coastline from Northern Europe to North-East Asia, from the Norse chieftain Ochter's voyage around the North Cape in 890 CE to Captain Billings' 1790 expedition to the Aleutian Islands. He concludes with a detailed discussion of the search for a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Purpose: With reference to cadets' decision-making on a maritime career, the goal of this research is to identify the digital marketing channels in maritime education. Design/Methodology/approach: The data for the descriptive study was gathered from maritime education cadets attending in private maritime universities. Using a structured questionnaire and the convenience sampling approach, 60 respondents were chosen as the study's sample size. Findings: The results of the empirical investigation show that the target group under study has a high level of awareness regarding digital marketing channels in maritime education. Practical Implications: To be familiar with digital marketing platforms and their profound influence on cadets' decision-making in maritime education. Originality/Value: The impact of cadet decision-making in maritime education utilizing digital marketing has been examined using descriptive and t-test analysis. Type of the Paper: Empirical Study.

The most recent reports on the supply and demand for seafarers suggest that there is an increasing lack of officers for the expanding world's merchant fleet. With a focus on Brazil, this paper discusses a particular seafaring labour market highlighting specific challenges that need to be overcome. The paper looks into the current condition of the imbalance in Brazilian seafaring labour market as well as the prospects for merchant marine officers from the only two maritime schools in the country. Key issues on demand forecast and supply expectation, policy amendment, promoting maritime career, sea career commitment and maritime career empowerment are discussed to illustrate possible means to overcome the imbalance.