Evaluation document, KoF11 Part A: Strategic aspects on research ...

Uppsala University 3<strong>KoF11</strong>Individual researchers and smaller research groups at a number of universities carry outfinancial history research. An increased interest in this area after the financial crisis in 2008-09 has opened up new possibilities for comparative research. The Department of EconomicHistory has had close contacts during the last decades with especially researchers in Norwayand Denmark (BI in Oslo and Copenhagen Business School), but also with for example theGeneva University and several research centres in Paris. Moreover, there are largepossibilities to increase the co-operation with for example the university in Glasgow.Concerning the area of the labour market and welfare, most of the labour market research atthe department is conducted from a historical, neo-institutional perspective, but othertheoretical points of view are used as well, on their own or as a complement. For instance, agender perspective has successfully been used in several research projects, as well as classand ethnicity. In the past few years, industrial relations and the functioning of the labourmarket have been major fields of interest. The discussion on economic integration andespecially the development of the European Union in terms of a changing working life havealso been in focus. Further, the editorial office of the international referee journal Economicand Industrial Democracy, published by Sage, is located at the department. The globalacademic impact of this journal gives the department and the labour market research anoutstanding academic position. One promising future development was a conference entitled“Challenges and Opportunities in Ageing Society” in Tokyo 2009 organized by thedepartment. The aim of the conference was to share experiences about achievements and ongoingresearch between Swedish and Japanese scholars in a multi-disciplinary setting, in orderto promote future cooperation.Since its start a main focus of the research conducted at by Uppsala STS has been thechanging view of the role of science in society. An overall research question concerns hownatural and social sciences are affected by an increasingly economist view of science, i.e. bydemands for a measurable outcome and for contributions possible to exploit directly in acommercial setting. Another important research question concerns the principles thatcontemporary research policy is resting on; its sources and influences. A third prioritizedresearch question is how research-based knowledge is used in society and business. A specialfocus is directed to the tension among innovation journeys which in the contemporary highlyspecialized business landscape stretch across company and national borders, whilegovernmental policy expects innovation benefits on a national level.Research in social and general economic history has been renewed during the last years as aresult of KoF-07. Since 2009 cultural economy has become a more accentuated research topicat the department. This is manifested by the new seminar series, and the network of KultEkohas positioned itself at the intersection of culture and economy and aims to gather historiansand other social scientists working in the borderland of economic research and culturalstudies. This interdisciplinary field is consciously interpreted in two different ways: 1. theeconomy of culture, which is the various economic contexts of cultural life, e.g. aesthetics inrelation to the social organisation and financing of culture or the impact of cultural heritage onthe economy (for nations, regions, companies). 2. economy as culture, or the study of theeconomy as one of many cultural practices. These approaches are theoretically different, butin many ways overlap and interconnect in the research practice.2011-02-28 Dept of Economic History v 1.0