The article “Social License for Ports” by Ircha discusses the rising requirement for ports to minimize the social costs which burdened host community and the consideration of steps ports may take to maintain these requirements. The goal of this article is highlighting the urgent needs of a global sense of social responsibility for ports, and providing an effective approach to gain support from local residents. The focus of ports is to maintain an effective port-community communication along with generating the mutual benefits between two parties. In particular, the alternatives for ports include a number of steps they may take to build a good relationship with host communities. Ircha believes that port-community conflicts arise when a port brings significant negative externalities, and can be solved when trust is built. The focus on ways that companies can gain a social license is to benefit both the port and community. To generate an effective access to social license, Ircha surveys a number of ports on the steps they takes to gain social support from the local stakeholders. He concluded that a three-stage approach was best. The first stage is to establish legitimacy with regard to all members of the community. The second stage is to maintain the credibility by consistently disclosing trustful information to members of the community. The last stage is building trust, which reflects a good relationship based on shared experiences from working together. The strength of this article is its logic, depth, and the features of the problem it addresses. The article is well structured and presented logically. The author clearly lists the issues existing in the port-community relationship and analyzes the essential causes of these issues; meanwhile, he adequately analyses both the negative externalities and positive externalities of the port to the community. Also, the author presents the concept of “social license” and the subsequent analysis smoothly and with logical thoughts. In addition, the topic of social responsibilities of corporations is hot, because people are becoming more aware of the impact of some industries like transportation on the environment and other aspects of daily life. The article provides a proof of this trend. The weakness of this article is that the author does not use any charts or diagrams. It would have made the article more convincing if the author had used some charts such as tables to interpret the relationships between the profitability of ports and the possibility of having conflicts with the local community. He may have used some charts to compare the approaches used to affect
