Prepare for the worst: The importance of research design

• Background:
o In the past, employment in organizations was based on the bureaucratic principle, where individuals developed their careers for life, organizations invested in these individuals and their employment was secure. In the last four decades, processes of flattening started occurring in organizations, and careers in organizations started to become more flexible, meaning that people developed their career through multiple organizations, developing their skills in order to advance their careers.
o Career choices were becoming more individual, but this had a price – where individuals were no longer secure in their employment.
o The situation in the maritime industry, which is considered one of the most global and flexible organizations in the labour market, is similar. Although shipping companies work on a hierarchical basis, the employment of seafarers is contractual and mostly temporary, thus seafarers do not seem to have secure and stable employment.
o Seafarers’ conditions onboard the merchant ship include long hours of work, working and living in the same location, distance from the family and isolation from the society ashore, all of these factors lead to high levels of fatigue and to declining numbers of employees, specifically officers, joining the maritime industry.
o I became interested in the reasons for seafarers to join this industry, and I found that the existing literature, including managerial, social and economic studies, does not cover seafarers’ career development and career trajectories, both from individual and organizational points of view.
o These gaps in the understanding of seafarers’ employment lead to the research questions I intend to focus on during my current study.