Dissertations in economic and business history in Nordic countries in 2016

Abstract

The discussion article by Ekberg and Jes Iversen in this number of the Scandinavian Economic History Review raises a number of important questions on the present state of business history research in the Nordic countries. To a certain extent, these concerns are generalisable to the wider economic history community in the Nordic countries, especially as regards the lack of relevant teaching and challenges in recruitment. Ekberg and Iversen suggest that a possible solution might be to intensify Nordic collaboration. Time and again the need for such collaboration has been raised as an issue, also on the pages of this journal (Ojala & Sogner, 2015). Nevertheless, the wake-up call by Ekberg and Iversen is something to be appreciated within the community. What, then, is the exact situation within the field in the Nordic countries? From the SEHR point of view, the number of submissions to the journal has increased, and we have also been able to publish more content than previously. Researchers in economic and business history are presumably currently engaged in preparing their papers for the coming conference season, to be opened at Jyväskylä at the turn of May and June 2018 with the 43rd Economic and Business History Society (EBHS) conference (http://ebhsoc.org/), culminating in the 18th World Economic History Congress in Boston in June/August (http://wehc2018.org/), and continuing with the 22nd European Business History Association congress in Ancona in early September (http://ebha18.univpm.it/) – to mention just a few of the largest ones. One might therefore assume that during the following years a number of papers prepared for these conferences will be submitted to journals and book compilations. Moreover, the number of Nordic participants in these conferences is, hopefully, quite a significant one. The editors of the Scandinavian Economic History Review are on hand at these conferences to discuss the possibilities of publishing research in the Journal. One way to analyse the current state of affairs within the economic history community is to analyse the number and content of doctoral dissertations. The previous analysis was published in the Journal a couple of years ago concerning dissertations published in 2014 and 2015 (Ojala, Hemminki, & Nevalainen, 2016). In the following, we update this dataset with information from 2016 – unfortunately, we have not yet received comparable data for last year. As in the previous survey, we requested Nordic universities and business schools to provide lists of dissertations addressing economic and business history topics during the year 2016. Most likely our survey did not reveal all dissertations within the field, even though we tried to be as inclusive as possible. Our survey yielded altogether 26 dissertations defended in 2016 – moreover, we found two dissertations defended in 2015 that were missing from our preceding survey. As in that survey, the topic of the dissertations (neither the department, nor the discipline) was used to determine if the dissertation was to be included to our survey (on definitions see Ojala et al., 2016). After compiling the list, we approached the authors to requesting a brief summary of their dissertations. These summaries are included as an Appendix to this editorial – our webpages provide direct links to all dissertations available on the Internet. We could not, unfortunately, reach all the authors; thus, in those cases, we used the publicly available abstracts. However, as not all abstracts were available publicly, they do not appear here in the Appendix.