At få sjælen med: En narrativ analyse af danske containersøfolks erindringer, fortidsbrug og identitetskonstruktioner

In the literature, the historical development of container shipping is described as both a revolution and a transformation of international shipping. The technological and organizational changes of life at sea which followed with container shipping has also meant a transformation of maritime cultures and a challenge to then established seafarer identities.
This thesis deals with the memories, uses-of-the-past and identity constructions of Danish container seafarers and investigates, how the seafarers narrate themselves in relation to their lived experiences with container shipping. In the thesis, I analyze the seafarers’ retrospective interpretations of the past as a means to better understanding changed seafarer identities.
Analytically, the thesis applies a subject perspective which regards the past as present and open through the oral histories’ interpretations and meaning negotiations of past experiences. I view the narrative construction of the personal, autobiographical, history as an identity shaping use-of-the-past, which expresses the subjectivity of the narrator. With a memory and subjectivity approach to the oral histories of the seafarers, I investigate, how we as humans understand ourselves through the stories, we tell about ourselves.
Empirically, the thesis is based on a number of in-depth oral history interviews with Danish seafarers, all with experience from international container shipping.
In the analyses of the thesis, I show, how the seafarers justify and legitimize their choice of becoming seafarers in the first place and later to work on board container ships. I show, how the seafarers narratively negotiate different kinds of experienced loss of meaning and actively seek to apply new, useful meaning to their work and the community on board the ships. At the same time, I show, how the personal narrative is constructed through a dialogue with culturally dominating perceptions and narratives. Such perceptions and narratives offer the narrator an available language to give expression to personal experiences but can also function as limiting if the experiences and understandings of the narrator do not fit into the dominating images. In such cases, what the thesis terms ‘discomposure’ can occur, which shows as frustration and a breakdown of narrative coherence.
As a general methodological point, the thesis demonstrates how the intersubjectivity of the interview is co-constructing the narrative that is being told. The personal meeting between narrator and historian and the cultural contexts of the interview affect in different ways the constructed narrative. Instead of claiming a neutral and objective interview setting, the thesis makes active use of this intersubjectivity and writes the meeting between the seafarers as narrators and me as interviewer into the text as an integrated part of the historical representation. This is both a narrative and a methodological choice to ensure transparency in giving the reader insight into both how the narratives and my interpretations came to be.
With its approach and its analyses, the thesis makes several contributions to the existing literature. Through the personal stories we gain greater insight into the lived lives of the seafarers and their experiences with the historical development of container shipping. The thesis offers a human perspective on the history of international container shipping, which contributes to our knowledge about the significance of the development for the identities of the men and women who lived through the historical changes on board the ships.
The thesis is a business history which takes oral history seriously both as research field, methodology and genre. With its memory and subjectivity approach to oral history the thesis contributes to the renewed conversation between the research fields oral history and business history. The thesis brings in methodological and theoretical insights from the memory tradition to business history and through its own narrative style it shows the potential of a historical representation that puts subjectivity and memory at the center of its analysis.
In this way, the thesis further contributes to the narrative turn in business history by not only applying a narrative lens to the stories of the seafarers, but also by taking itself seriously as a narrative construction.