There can be two main reasons why actors delay in responding
to changes in an international business environment. One reason is
past success, as the evolutionary perspective has well documented;
successful practices tend to be preserved over time and
repeated more often (Nelson & Winter, 1982; Nelson, 1994). As the
history of Japan’s port industry shows, the actors enjoyed
prolonged growth for more than three decades since the late
1950s. However, under the slow growth in the 1990s, no
fundamental port reform was proposed. Witt (2006) argues that