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Champions of Brexit have employed a large arsenal of arguments to boost their case for a Britain better off on its own, freed from its current European entanglements. All kinds of supposed ills have been linked to the country’s EU membership in British public debates over the years, ranging from petty bureaucratic absurdities, such as directives regarding crooked bananas, to heavy-handed rulings on higher matters of domestic and foreign policy. Lamentations about continental meddling have been accompanied by grand, nostalgic visions of an unfettered future Great Britain, ready to return to its proper, independent role on the global stage once it manages to cast off the shackles imposed by Brussels. Although these types of considerations undoubtedly contributed to the outcome of the British EU membership referendum of June 2016, arguably the main factor behind the narrow victory of the Brexiteers lay somewhere else: in fears of incoming migrants and dreams of simple solutions that would keep them out. peerReviewed

”Vallankumous kuvaruudussa”: Kasettitelevisio ja keskustelu teknologisesta uutuudesta 1970-luvun alussaArtikkeli käsittelee videon varhaishistoriaa 1970-luvun alussa, jolloin suomalaislehdistössä käytiin keskustelua kasettitelevisiosta. Tuolloin mediateollisuuden toimijat esittelivät vielä tuotekehittelyssä olleita tallennuslaitteita ja kasetteja suomalaiskuluttajille television seuraavana vaiheena. Artikkelin aineistona on suomalaisen sanoma- ja aikakauslehdistön kasettitelevisiota käsitteleviä juttuja 1970-luvun alusta, jolloin keskustelu aktivoitui ja oli huomattavan laajaa. Olemme analysoineet media-aineistoa laadullisen tutkimuksen keinoin. Juttujen uudelleen luennassa merkitykselliset teemat nousevat analyysimme ja kontekstoinnin kohteiksi.Artikkeli kytkeytyy teknologian kulttuuriseen ja kulttuurihistorialliseen tutkimusotteeseen. Mediateknologiasta käydyn keskustelun analyysissä hyödynnetään toimijamaailman käsitettä. Se kuvaa mediateollisuuden toimijoiden uudelle teknologialle ennakoimaa käyttöä ja kontekstia. Teknologinen innovaatio rakentui kulttuurisesti ennen todentumistaan kulutustavarana.Ulkomailta Suomeen välittynyt kirjoittelu aktivoi kotimaisen joukkoviestinnän kentän. Keskustelussa olivat mukana laitevalmistajat, insinöörit, yhteiskuntatutkijat ja mediayritykset. Alan ensimmäiset liiketoiminnalliset aloitteet sähköistivät ja puoluepolitisoivat keskustelun. Ajalle tyypillisesti puolueiden viestintäpoliittiset kannat jakaantuivat oikeisto-vasemmisto-akselin mukaan. Oikeisto kannatti uusien teknologioiden myötä audiovisuaalisen viestinnän mahdollisimman vapaata markkinataloudellista kilpailua, kun taas vasemmisto toivoi valtionohjausta. Artikkeli osoittaa, että teknologioiden varhaisvaiheiden tutkimus antaa ymmärrystä siitä, miten mediateolliset ratkaisut ovat seurausta eri toimijoiden ja ideoiden kamppailusta. “A Revolution on the TV Screen”: Cassette television and discussion about technological innovation in the early 1970sThe article explores the early history of video technology in the beginning of the 1970s. There was a short period of time during which the Finnish press talked intensively about cassette television. The discussion included, in equal proportion, actual and imagined recording devices and cassettes. At the time, active development of the equipment was ongoing and its future use was introduced to Finnish consumers as the next stage of television.Research material of this article consists of the stories of the Finnish press and periodical press which process the cassette television since the beginning of the 1970s. Methodologically, the research material is analyzed from a cultural historical point of view, using qualitative content analysis. Moreover, the analysis uses the concept of actor–network theory (acteur réseau) to describe how actors of the media industries anticipated the use and the contexts of the new technology. It is evident that the technological novelty, cassette television, was culturally constructed before it existed as a material product available for consumers.Technological news concerning cassette television came from international sources and activated Finnish media. The debate on cassette television involved equipment manufacturers, engineers, social scientists, and policy-makers of the Finnish media companies. As early as 1971 there was the first initiative to form cassette technology to businesses. When this became known to the public, the discussion turned into party politics. At the time, Finnish parties were active in communication policy, which was strictly divided into the sides of the political right and left. Concerning new audiovisual communication technologies, the political right advocated for free competition on the media market, while the left wanted strict control by the state. Through the examination of the cassette television debate, the article demonstrates how an analysis of the early stages of a certain technology can help in understanding how choices and solutions made by media industries are typically results of activities of, and struggles between, several actors.

Epäonnistunut yritys suomalaisen digitaalisen peliteollisuuden käynnistämiseksi: Amersoft 1984–1986Amer-yhtymä teki lyhytkestoisen ekskursion pelialan julkaisutoimintaan vuosina 1984–1986. Sen perustama tytäryhtiö Amersoft oli ensimmäinen suomalainen yritys, joka pyrki laajamittaisesti julkaisemaan kotimaisia tietokonepelejä. Liiketoiminta osoittautui kuitenkin nopeasti kannattamattomaksi. Artikkelimme tarkoitus on syventää suomalaista pelihistorian tutkimusta käsittelemällä sittemmin valtavaksi kasvaneen digipeliteollisuuden hapuilevia kotimaisia varhaisvaiheita.Kirjallisen tutkimusaineiston lisäksi lähteemme koostuvat Amersoftin entisten työntekijöiden haastatteluista. Kartoitamme ja analysoimme osatekijöitä, jotka johtivat epäonnistuneeseen yritykseen suomalaisen peliteollisuuden käynnistämiseksi 1980-luvun puolivälissä. Liiketoiminnan kannattamattomuus johtui pääasiallisesti kotimaisten pelimarkkinoiden pienuudesta, johdonmukaisen yritysstrategian puutteesta, laajalle levinneestä ohjelmistopiratismista, ulkomaisten pelien maahantuonnista, aineettoman pääoman puutteesta sekä julkaistujen pelien puutteellisesta laadusta. A failed attempt to launch Finnish digital game industry: Amersoft 1984–1986The Finnish conglomerate Amer Group made a short-term excursion into computer game publication business in 1984–1986 by founding Amersoft. The subsidiary was the first Finnish company that aimed to produce and publish domestic computer games. However, the business proved to be unprofitable quite quickly. The objective of this article is to delve into the precarious initial steps of Finnish game industry.In addition to the literary research material, our sources consist of interviews of former Amersoft employees. We will examine, explicate, and analyse factors that led to the failed launch of Finnish game industry in the mid-1980s. These multifaceted constituents comprised primarily of the small size of domestic game markets, lack of coherent corporate strategy, importation of foreign games, all-encompassing software piracy, absence of intellectual capital, and low quality of game design.

This article deals with the relationship between television – a new form of media technology in 1950s Finland – and the introduction of the Donald Duck comic book. The article analyses the three most essential imaginary perspectives on the uses of media technology: interactivity, publicity seeking and tinkering with a television. On one hand, the article introduces the various ways in which the comic book represented and introduced the media format to the Finnish public, and on the other hand, how it actively participated in the contemporary public debate on the meanings of television and its use that took place at that time.

This article sheds light on the period of revolutionary turbulence by demonstrating how the concept of revolution was introduced in the Finnish print culture through foreign news reports du...

National bibliographies have been identified as a crucial resource for historical research on the publishing landscape, but using them requires addressing challenges of data quality, completeness, and interpretation. We call this approach bibliographic data science. In this article, we briefly assess the development of book formats and the vernacularization process in early modern Europe. The work undertaken paves the way for more extensive integration of library catalogs to map the history of the book.

This issue of the Scandinavian Economic History Review features a list of dissertations published in the Nordic countries in 2017 and 2018 (Appendix). As in our previous surveys (Ojala, Hemminki & ...

Recent developments in Europe and the United States (US) attest to an increasing fascination with and nostalgia for the strong leaders of the past – especially those that emerged in the aftermath o...

Over recent years, there has been a growing academic interest in the history of psychological disciplines and mental health in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. This article explores psychological sciences and social planning in post-Stalinist Hungary after 1956. The focus is on the psychology of work as a socially- and historically-situated discourse. The article demonstrates how psychologists started to promote their expertise to reform the practices of management and to “humanize” the conditions of work. They suggested practical remedies for everyday problems of worker motivation and social adjustment and introduced concepts from social psychology to improve the state of interpersonal relations at the workplace. The study argues that the workplace was a particular context in which a post-Stalinist reassessment of the government's ideology was acted out. To elaborate this more fully, both published texts and archival materials are analyzed in the framework of the governmentality thesis, as developed by Nikolas Rose. In this context, the concept of the “human factor” crystallized different but reconcilable interests between psychology experts and party politicians.

Kirja-arvio Maija Koskisen väitöskirjasta "Taiteellisesti elvyttävää ja poliittisesti ajankohtaista – Helsingin Taidehallin näyttelyt 1928–1968 (Helsingin yliopisto, 2019).

In Northern Europe, barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) has been cultivated for almost 6000 years. Thus far, 150-year-old grains from historical collections have been used to investigate the distribution of barley diversity and how the species has spread across the region. Genetic studies of archaeobotanical material from agrarian sites could potentially clarify earlier migration patterns and cast further light on the origin of barley landraces. In this study, we aimed to evaluate different archaeological and historical materials with respect to DNA content, and to explore connections between Late Iron Age and medieval barley populations and historical samples of barley landraces in north-west Europe. The material analysed consisted of archaeological samples of charred barley grains from four sites in southern Finland, and historical material, with 33 samples obtained from two herbaria and the seed collections of the Swedish museum of cultural history. The DNA concentrations obtained from charred archaeological barley remains were too low for successful KASP genotyping confirming previously reported difficulties in obtaining aDNA from charred remains. Historical samples from herbaria and seed collection confirmed previously shown strong genetic differentiation between two-row and six-row barley. Six-row barley accessions from northern and southern Finland tended to cluster apart, while no geographical structuring was observed among two-row barley. Genotyping of functional markers revealed that the majority of barley cultivated in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was late-flowering under increasing day-length, supporting previous findings from northern European barley. Funding agencies: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters / Jutikkala Trust; Kone Foundation

Finnish commercial television company Mainos-TV co-produced a string of documentary and entertainment programmes with television broadcasters in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary and Polan...

In this paper, I study the history of corporate training in the Finnish retail industry from the beginning to the last quarter of the 20th century. In this effort, I search for answers to questions...

In Finland the material aspects of magic have long been of marginal interest to scholars. Still, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several magical objects were gathered into ...

During the first half of the 1970s, the European Community became a recognisable actor at the United Nations [UN]: The Community itself became a permanent observer, and it was customary for Community member-states to express common positions on most of the issues discussed within the organisation. It was a remarkable development for the Western European states—yet one not satisfactorily accounted for by the existing literature. The perspective adopted in this analysis highlights the connexions between the growing activity of the Community at the UN and the increasing co-ordination of its member-states even on matters falling outside the Community’s purview, as well as the connexions between the affirmation of the European Community at the UN and other major contemporary developments in European political integration. In this way, this analysis sheds light on some fundamental motives, features, and limits of Western European co-ordination on the international stage.

As a result of the First World War several new nation-states emerged on the map of Europe. One of them was the Republic of Estonia, emerging from the ruins of the Russian Empire. As Estonians had never had their own state before, the establishment of the parliamentary republic, its institutions and a national identity was a big challenge for its small elite. First and foremost, the ambition was to do things differently from the previous rulers. The Estonian economic geographer Edgar Kant played an important role in the development of his country between 1920 and 1940. His geography was politically motivated, innovative and pragmatic as the rapid development of the state required new theories and methods. The methodological basis for Kant's ‘innovative geography’ became Walter Christaller's central place theory, and he was the first in the world to understand the importance of applying it in empirical research, doing so in the 1930s in the reform of Estonian rural municipalities. In September 1944, Edgar Kant fled from Estonia to Lund and Christaller's theory spread more widely through Kant's interactions with Torsten Hagerstrand in Sweden and later Edward Ullman and Brian Berry in the United States. This paper reviews the relatively unknown geography, and the complicated life, of Edgar Kant, who, it is argued, strongly influenced the trajectory of the triumph of the ‘new geography’ in the 1950s. Through this example it will be shown how peripheral actors and places can play key roles in innovation diffusion and intellectual history.

The Late Neolithic Corded Ware Culture (c. 2800–2300 BC) of Northern Europe is characterised by specific sets of grave goods and mortuary practices, but the organic components of these grave sets are poorly represented in the archaeological record. New microscopic analyses of soil samples collected during the 1930s from the Perttulanmäki grave in western Finland have, however, revealed preserved Neolithic animal hairs. Despite mineralisation, the species of animal has been successfully identified and offers the oldest evidence for domestic goat in Neolithic Finland, indicating a pastoral herding economy. The mortuary context of the goat hair also suggests that animals played a significant role in the Corded Ware belief system. The Late Neolithic Corded Ware Culture (c. 2800-2300 BC) of Northern Europe is characterised by specific sets of grave goods and mortuary practices, but the organic components of these grave sets are poorly represented in the archaeological record. New microscopic analyses of soil samples collected during the 1930s from the Perttulanmaki grave in western Finland have, however, revealed preserved Neolithic animal hairs. Despite mineralisation, the species of animal has been successfully identified and offers the oldest evidence for domestic goat in Neolithic Finland, indicating a pastoral herding economy. The mortuary context of the goat hair also suggests that animals played a significant role in the Corded Ware belief system.

This article explores the Hawthorne studies, an industrial research programme conducted at Western Electric Company from 1924 to 1933. The analysis focuses on the longest-running experiment, in which female workers in their twenties operated a relay assembly in a room specially designed for the experiment and were monitored by a group of engineers and industrial researchers. Based on the authoritarian setting, this research situates the experiment in the wider history of making workers through complex systems of value attributions, such as classifications and technologies of characterisation. However, examination of previous research and accounts of the Hawthorne studies suggests that the relay assembly test was also an ambivalent research setting characterised by negotiations and strategies which converged into the dynamics of knowing and being known. This article thus offers a new critical perspective on the experiment by regarding the operators as active players in an industrial labour process game rather than cooperative, adaptive laboratory subjects.

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. nonPeerReviewed

Drawing on a database of 193 football (soccer) grounds and 115 indoor arenas, as well as press releases and media reports associated with them, this study charts the diffusion of sporting and entertainment facility name sponsorship across metropolises, cities, towns, and smaller settlements in six European contexts. Our results show the emergence of naming rights deals in the 1990s, their peak in the mid-2000s, and the current situation with a steadier growth of name sponsorship. Thus far, the corporate re-branding of venues has remained less prevalent in Italy, Norway, and Scotland than in England and Wales, Finland, and above all Germany. In financing newly built venues, however, the corporatized landmark language in focus has become a practically invariable part of local growth, austerity and (re)branding policies. Despite voices of resistance in all regions studied here, pressure towards the corporate renaming of even hereditary, communally endorsed football stadiums is increasingly being felt by municipal and private-sector venue owners.