Business-as-unusual: Exploring port stakeholders’ time tactics for mediating recent disruptions at the Port of Rotterdam

Abstract

Seaports function as infrastructural nodes at which the disparate rhythms of global logistical flows are synchronized toward just-in-time management. Port disruptions challenge this regular time regime. This article explores the role of infrastructures and time tactics in mediating port disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Building on three interrelated notions of time—infrastructural time regimes, infrastructural rhythms, and infrastructural time tactics—our analysis of stakeholder interviews revealed that to manage port disruptions, port stakeholders applied various time tactics to certain processes: activating or deactivating, prioritizing or downgrading, continuing or discontinuing, and increasing or decreasing. By employing these time tactics to maintain, adapt, and transform port rhythms in response to disruptions, port stakeholders attempted to resynchronize disrupted port rhythms into a different time regime. We demonstrate that this time regime is “hybrid,” as it comprises not only elements of just-in-time management but also elements of just-in-case management. This finding introduces a more nuanced understanding of the temporary hybridization of time regimes during periods of disruptions and highlights the role of infrastructures in mediating time.