Centre for Business History in Scotland

Research Projects

The Centre's associates and affiliated postgraduate research students are involved in a wide range of individual research projects. Please see the Staff and Postgraduate research pages for details (links below).

In addition, the Centre is pursuing a range of projects in conjunction with its remit to carry out high-quality original research in business history. All of them address one or more of the four main focal points of the Centre's current activities:

. internationalisation of business enterprise 
. business, energy and the environment 
. the role of business in innovation systems and policy
. the evolving relationship between the state- owned, state-influenced and private sectors.

FUNDED

 

A History of the International Industrial Gases Industry

Business and economic historians have long since concerned themselves with the emergence and development of the industries of the so-called "second industrial revolution" - chemicals, electrical goods, and other research-intensive industries - and their component companies. However, one of the industries of the second industrial revolution has been virtually ignored in this scholarship to date: the industrial gases industry, aptly termed the "invisible industry" in a short overview published by its main international trade association.

 
This relative neglect is somewhat ironic in that industrial gases, produced by a handful of specialised firms, have been critical to enabling innovation and development in more prominent industries ranging from chemicals and semiconductor manufacturing to steel production, oil refining, and food processing. This project seeks to give a fuller and more nuanced picture of the history of research-intensive industry over the long term by exploring the history of the industrial gases industry through business history of its component firms from its inception in the late 19th century to the present. Led by Ray Stokes of the Centre for Business History, it is funded by Linde AG, and involves cooperation with the University of Frankfurt Department of Economic and Social History and the German Society for Business History (Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte). The research team, comprised of Stokes, postdoctoral fellow Dr Ralf Banken, and PhD student Matthias Pühl, will produce a number of scholarly articles over the project's four-year duration, culminating in a research monograph to be completed in 2011.

More detailed overview of the History of Industrial Gases Project

Constructing the waste management business in the United Kingdom and West Germany, 1945 to the early 1990s

An ESRC grant has been awarded in support of the above project.  This is a three-year project which commenced in September 2007.  Dr Sambrook will be the postdoctoral research fellow during the project, which will also support an additional research fellow based in Germany for 18 months.

Waste collection and disposal in 1945 was carried out at the local level and dominated by the public sector, although private companies occupied important niche markets. An indication of the status of the activity in the mindset of the time is its non-appearance in official reporting: there was no discrete entry for waste collection and disposal in national industrial or economic statistics, something which began much later. By the early 1990s, this had all changed, and the industry featured a number of private firms, many with high levels of turnover and often operating internationally. How and with what consequences did waste collection and disposal become "waste management"? Why did this process differ from country to country, and indeed from locality to locality?

These are significant questions which this project will address by examining the causes, course and consequences of the emergence of this new industry in two countries, the United Kingdom and West Germany, from the end of World War II until the early 1990s. Writing such a history offers a rare opportunity for sustained attention to the interconnections between business, technology, economy, politics and society as they changed through time.

A funding proposal for this project has been developed based on generous seedcorn funding made available by the Aggregate Foundation, which also provides on-going funding of the costs of the Centre's infrastructure.

UNDER DEVELOPMENT

Foreign direct investment in Scotland, 1945-present

In the years after WWII, industrial production across the globe became more mobile. The relative significance of transport costs fell, standardised flow production procedures became more prevalent and more professionally managed firms were organised along divisional and subsidiary lines. These changes allowed the separation, when profitable, of the production unit of a firm from its other key functions, which usually remained at the location of the company's headquarters. Over the ensuing decades, these enterprises evolved through a number of iterations, from managing stand-alone production units, to globally integrated monoliths, to widely dispersed network systems. The relationship between these corporate structures, the economic changes that drove them, and their impact on one particular host economy, Scotland, is the subject of this research project, which presents a closely-integrated suite of research strands, each of which will shed significant light on the Scottish (and by extension wider UK, European and global) experience of integration with the international economy of the post-WWII era, but which, by bringing together a team of acknowledged experts from across a range of disciplines, as well as former policy practitioners, will represent significantly more than the sum of the individual parts. It engages with a variety of academic literatures and perspectives, but has as its major and unique strength the genuinely multidisciplinary approach.

A funding proposal has been developed for the project, which is led by Dr Duncan Ross and features input from the CBH, the Glasgow University School of Business and Management, the Fraser of Allander Institute of the University of Strathclyde and the Centre for Public Policy for the Regions at Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde.

 

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