Saving energy at sea: seafarers’ adoption, appropriation and enactment of technologies supporting energy efficiency

Doctoral thesis, 2020

The shipping industry is currently facing a major challenge related to environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. New regulations and ambitious international goals that aim at mitigating carbon-based emissions with 50 %, demands on profitability, along with a growing awareness about the climate change, has prompted the maritime sector to increasingly focus on how to improve energy efficiency and reduce fuel consumption in ship operations. This thesis aims at describing and understanding the challenges of improving energy efficiency seen from the lens of crew members’ work and to investigate the adoption, appropriation and use of particular technologies, purported to support energy efficiency in ship operation. Using an ethnographic approach and drawing on various practice-based concepts and theories such as communities of practice, activity theory and the imbrication of material and social agency, the four papers (I – IV) included in the thesis were based on extensive field studies in two shipping companies and onboard 11 passenger ferries. The empirical studies revealed that the introduction of new technologies and their subsequent incorporation in and change of established skills and practices is a complex social process depending on the knowing and learning of practitioners as well as their activities, meanings, identities and norms as developed and negotiated in specific settings over time. The thesis contributes to our general understanding of the situated process of adoption, appropriation and use of new technologies in the maritime domain and the sociomaterial nature of energy efficiency.