Female take on a unique way of life.

(From Lloyds List)

Byline: Seafaring life is extraordinary and even more so sometimes for the lone woman on board, writes Jennefer Tobin

ALL at sea those were the terms for my research contract; the entire data gathering had to done in ships under weigh. So on that basis I began an extraordinary task for the General Council of Shipping.

The terms were to 'define and describe the management content of officers' jobs in the British merchant navy.' This was part of a project to improve working conditions for merchant seamen because in the 1960s they had become so bad for UK-flagged ships that seamen would not go to sea. While the work ashore was done in Plymouth, supervised by Dr David Moreby, the observations and discussions with sea staff had to be on passage.

There was very little available to work from, though with hindsight there was probably company data that we could not access, so we 'made it up' as we went along. This became a huge data-gathering exercise through observation and discussion on board and with many organisations ashore; then followed a process of inductive reasoning.

Deduction is relatively straightforward compared to induction; however, we did come to a conclusion.

We identified 10 areas of management responsibility, then 80 sub-tasks done by ships' officers that delivered their responsibilities. Then we identified the factors that influenced how these tasks could be carried out in different vessels.