Slow growth and revolutionary change. The Norwegian IT industry enters the global age, 1970-2005

The article concludes that although the Norwegian IT industry has been lacking in export success the last 30 years, it has been important for the development of the Norwegian economy. Several IT companies have been on the verge of international breakthroughs, but have been stopped by rising costs and guided by national opportunities. The rise of the important oil-sector has been both a hindrance and an opportunity for the Norwegian IT industry. Specialised products for national markets rather than general mass-market products have become the norm for the Norwegian IT industry. This development had to a remarkable degree been associated with continuity in terms of organisations and people. The firms these people and organisations have been attached too, however, have experienced turbulence, bankruptcy and change, making the whole development from 1970 until today a seemingly messy and problematic affair. But this has really been a period of IT industry growth, and in the end the national development is reasonably successful.

The accession games: a comparison of three limited-information negotiation designs

We analyze the European Union enlargement process from a rational institutionalist perspective and argue that the accession negotiations are designed to resolve the uncertainty that the existing EU members have in terms of the candidates preferences. We model the negotiations as a Bayesian game and demonstrate how exactly the design in place helps the Union in gathering information about the candidate country. Our model also enables us to compare alternative negotiation designs in terms of their ability to alleviate informational problems. We compare the resulting equilibrium payo¤s under di¤erent negotiation designs to see whether there is any ground for a player to prefer a particular design over others. Our analysis supports the earlier arguments in the literature about the informative role of accession negotiations, and demonstates how exactly the negotiations carry out this role

Creating and Protecting paths. Learning in an entrepreneurial state

This paper discusses how a Norwegian entrepreneurial state has performed over more than seventy years, based on an analysis of state involvement in Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk/the Kongsberg Group from 1945 and to 2015. Mariana Mazzucato has argued that bold technological investments by the state has long-term beneficial effects. The development of the Kongsberg companies adds nuance to this picture. On the one hand, the defense company Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk failed as a company in 1987 and was unbundled into a number of new companies independent of one another. On the other hand, some of the successor companies have been very successful, both in the oil and gas sector and within defense. Taking the defense and oil and gas company the Kongsberg Group as a case, this paper argues that a new style of entrepreneurial state developed in the 1990s and that it proved very successful. The old entrepreneurial state was heavy-handed, bold, and very long-term in its aims; the new entrepreneurial state was cautious, many-headed, and worked through the management of the company. The new entrepreneurial state combined state ownership, stock listing, and procurement considerations and was supported by both the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Defense. This new governance structure facilitated a stable corporation that over time integrated other Norwegian maritime electronics companies, which themselves had a checkered history under the old entrepreneurial state. A new corporate governance regime emerged and managed both to protect old and established product lines and to facilitate innovation both in defense and maritime electronics.publishedVersio

A Disrupting Strategic Metal: The Norwegian Aluminium Industry Meets World War II

This article offers a new interpretation of the coming of state ownership in aluminium-related big businesses in Norway. It shows that the Norwegian aluminium business of the late 1930s and the 1940s was undertaken by a Scandinavian business elite fully capable of filling capital requirements after the war. This elite had, however, entangled itself in the German war effort in Norway mainly by supporting the building of new aluminium plants under the German occupiers’ control. This left it morally vulnerable to the increasing emphasis during the war on aluminium as a strategic metal. The Allied war effort—especially evident in US attitudes—had come to see the cartelized aluminium industry of the 1930s as working against the national interest by impacting national production capacity in a negative way. The Allies bombed the major new plant in Norway in 1943, and after the war the US acted restrictively toward Norwegian capital assets in the US. By pursuing ownership after 1945, the Norwegian state performed strategic ownership roles in large corporations, thereby also protecting these entities from the possible wrath of the US against private owners.publishedVersio

A Critique of the Defense: Considering Moving Away from Shame and Towards Pudeur

I denne bacheloroppgaven ser jeg på skam og undersøker i hvilken grad det er en sosial emosjon. Jeg tar utgangspunkt i boka In Defense of Shame (2012) av Julien A. Deonna, Fabrice Teroni and Raffaele Rodogno. De stiller seg kritiske til at skam er en sosial emosjon, selv om de mener at det ligger en sannhet i utsagnet. Først forklarer jeg deres teorien deres imens jeg reflekterer over den og kritiserer den. Videre ser jeg på Luna Dolezal og J. David Velleman sine teorier om skam. Deonna, Teroni og Rodogno vil bruke skam som et middel til å være moralske, det mener jeg er galt. Dolezal viser blant annet hvordan skam kan bli brukt til å skape følelsen av kjærlighet og tilhørlighet. Jeg diskuterer hovedsaklig om det er mulig å fjerne skam, og heller kjenne på noe som pudeur, eller en sans for hva som burde holdes privat.The topic of this bachelor’s essay is shame. More precisely, I investigate to what extent shame is a social emotion. Primarily, I consider and criticize Julien A. Deonna, Fabrice Teroni and Raffaele Rodogno’s theory of shame. This theory is most clearly presented in Ch. 4 of their book In Defense of Shame (2012). They criticize the claim that shame is a social emotion, although they believe it has a grain of truth within it. I will first explicate their theory of shame and their view on the social side of shame. Thereafter, I bring in other philosophical theories of shame. Although Deonna and Teroni bring up a lot of important points about shame, they go wrong in one important way – or so I shall argue. They want to use shame as a means to be moral, which I disagree with. I bring in philosophers like Luna Dolezal and J. David Velleman to show how shame rather may be used to create feelings of love and belonging. I will discuss whether it is possible to move away from shame, and toward something like pudeur, or a sense of what should be kept private

The European idea : the Scandinavian answer : Norwegian attitudes towards a closer Scandinavian economic cooperation

Aineisto on Opiskelijakirjaston digitoimaa ja Opiskelijakirjasto vastaa aineiston käyttöluvist

Fertility trends by social status

This article discusses how fertility relates to social status with the use of a new dataset, several times larger than the ones used so far. The status-fertility relation is investigated over several centuries, across world regions and by the type of status-measure. The study reveals that as fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation. Those with high income/wealth or high occupation/social class switch from having relatively many to fewer or the same number of children as others. Education, however, depresses fertility for as long as this relation is observed (from early in the 20th century)

The Determinants of International Migration in Early Modern Europe: Evidence from the Maritime Sector, c. 1700–1800

This paper offers the first multivariate regression study of international migration in earlymodern Europe. Using unique eighteenth-century data about maritime workers, we created adata set of migration flows among European countries to examine the role of factors related togeography, population, language, the market and chain migration in explaining the migrationof these workers across countries. We show that among all factors considered in ourmultivariate analysis, the geographical characteristics of the destination countries, size of porttowns, and past migrations are among the most robust and quantitatively the most importantfactors influencing cross-country migration flows