Investigating the Impact of Non-Existing Industrial Strategy on Steel Manufacturing Productivity: An Integrative qualitative sy

Wednesday, July 30, 2025, 12:00 PM

Session: Poster Session (30th of July, Afternoon/Evening)

This paper aims to investigate how the absence of an industrial strategy in the UK steel sector influences steel manufacturing productivity. This issue arose from semi-structured interviews designed to understand how policy integration affects UK steel manufacturing productivity. During these interviews, UK steel businesses highlighted that the lack of an industrial strategy for the sector adversely impacts business responses, decisions, and strategies. Without a clear industrial strategy, there can be no roadmap to guide the steel industry's direction. Their statements also suggested that the absence of industrial policies has damaged the competitiveness of steel manufacturing. The recent decline confirms this. Since industrial policy fosters a competitive entrepreneurial environment and addresses issues that hinder interactions among industry components, examining its influence on the industry's future regarding productivity and the entrepreneurial ecosystem is important. Therefore, this paper demonstrates how abstracting and causal loop modelling can help to represent the relationships between industrial policy variables and productivity indicators. Are these assertions supported by existing scholarly work? If so, how can we validate the impact of the lack of an industrial strategy on manufacturing productivity?