The Finlandisation of Shipbuilding

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The Finlandisation of Shipbuilding is written by Saara Matala and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 9526083873 (ISBN 10) and 9789526083872 (ISBN 13).

The Cold War shaped industrialisation through the politicisation of technology. This thesis examines the expansion and downscaling of the Finnish shipbuilding industry from 1952 to 1996, which has been claimed to be a contingent rather than merely correlated result of the Finnish-Soviet bilateral trade relationship. By exploring the agency of a small country navigating the period of international confrontation and competition, this study contributes to our understanding of the material and economic consequences of the global Cold War. The Finnish shipbuilding industry is conceived as a techno-economic system --a heterogeneous web of components that contributed to the profit-driven building of maritime technology. The conceptualisation draws from studies of Large Technological Systems (LTS), but it adds to the LTS theory an equally strong economic dimension alongside the technological one, and examines industrial transformation as dynamics between system stabilisation and change. The study addresses three specific research questions: How the shipbuilding system developed its structure and national style; how it interacted with the state; and how it disintegrated during the latter part of the Cold War. The study contributes to the LTS theory by showing how the system disintegration re-politicises elements that had established as ordinary. Consequently, the end provides a way of re-considering the politics embedded in the mature system as well. The gravity of the empirical research lies in the five case studies that approach the techno-economic system from five perspectives: technopolitics of shipbuilding, non-commercial cooperation, bilateral institutions of trade and payment, industrial reorganisation, and state aid and financing. The study shows how the Finnish shipbuilding adopted certain elements and gained momentum because Finland's position next to the Soviet Union introduced a novel set of constrains and opportunities. Critical for the industrial development was