"From Command Economy to Public Private Partnership: The History of Post-Socialist Shipbuilding"

In a dispersed value chain and on a global market, the studying of the national framework of shipbuilding companies still is highly important. Due to practices of subsidization, debt conversion into stocks, risk-taking, and further forms of government support, the actors of the shipbuilding industry are closely linked to the state environment. In this respect, the historical turnaround in 1989 did not necessarily constitute a critical juncture in the business history of my two case studies: the shipyard Gdynia (PL) and Uljanik (HR). Although the analysis exposes that the political transformation did not touch the consensus of soft budget constraints in this industry, the relevant state actors and their roles and competencies have considerably changed since late socialism. The historical analysis is based on oral history and document analysis and emphasizes that the hierarchical control of the command economy has already been crumbling in late socialism. After 1989, instead of a hierarchical government structure with a dominant state actor (the responsible ministry), pluricentric networks developed. The result was decentralization in the public management of state-owned/controlled-enterprises and a permanent re-configuration of the organizational field. After 2000, the state actors' responsibilities were outsourced to enterprises or new intermediary organizations. At the same time, ownership as a control factor has been weakened and partly superseded by factors such as supervision and coordination.
I argue that a public-private partnership has developed, founded either on ownership or political legitimacy, instead of one-way directives as in the command economy. This partnership is the continuation of the socialist coalition between government and shipyards in a new organizational form. Only the accession of Poland and Croatia to the European Union represents a major challenge for this traditional coalition and places the partnership on a new legal basis.