UCBH Workshop

The Uppsala Centre for Business History (UCBH) invites you to participate in the second Uppsala Workshop in Financial and Business History. The workshop will take place in Uppsala, Sweden, on the 9th and 10th of June, 2023. The workshops have been made possible by funding from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation, Handelsbanken.

Call for Papers - Uppsala Workshop in Financial and Business History 2023

Environmental Regulation and Sustainable Business

Keynote address by Prof. Geoffrey G. Jones, Harvard Business School

This workshop is the second in a series of three that will be held every other year. This second installation of the series will focus on the theme “Environmental regulation and sustainable business”. The relation between business and the natural environment has become a more prominent issue in business history over the past two decades, and in light of the unfolding climate and ecological crisis, will likely continue to be so for years to come. Recent business history research has studied both business responses to environmental regulatory pressure (e.g. Jones & Lubinski, 2014; Bergquist & Söderholm, 2011: Pitteloud, 2020), the impact of environmental regulations on industry pollution levels, technological development and competitiveness (Weiss & Anisimova, 2019; Söderholm et al., 2022), as well as business efforts to create new regulations to support the growth of green markets, including the importance of green finance (Jones, 2017).

Yet, the current literature is still quite limited with respect to its coverage of country and industry cases, and much remains to be done (Bergquist, 2019). For example, the evolution of public environmental regulations has over time taken various forms in different countries. They have shifted in direction and scope over time, from being dominated by command-and-control approaches in the 1970s to a gradual shift toward market-based regulations, such as taxes and tradable permits, from the 1980s, but also toward subsidies as well as support for business self-regulation programs at both national and transnational levels. 

We invite researchers who investigate different aspects of the interplay between environmental regulations and business strategies and outcomes. Papers can be either comparative or concern specific country/industry/firm-cases. Our idea is to bring together current historical research on the relation between business and the environment and to give a chance for researchers and PhD-students to have their work in progress ventilated and discussed in a workshop-environment. The organizers will provide for one night of accommodation and meals during the workshop, and there will be no fee for attending.

If you are interested in participating then send a 500-word paper abstract, with your affiliation and contact details, no later than March 15 2023. Decision and notification regarding acceptance will be sent out in early April, 2023.

Scientific committee: Anders Ögren, Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Åsa Malmström Rognes, Lars Karlsson (Uppsala University)

All correspondence and submissions should be addressed to the UCBH Director Anders Ögren at: ucbhworkshops@ekhist.uu.se

Last modified: 2023-02-10