I am professor of economic history at BI Norwegian Business School. I have written extensively on Norwegian businesses including companies like Tandberg, Nycomed, Simrad, the Kongsberg Group, Elkem and Orkla, as well as wealthy entrepreneurial families like Andresen, Kiær and Solberg. I have taken a particular interest in innovation and entrepreneurship when it comes to the economy, but have increasingly moved my attention to the people behind them: business leaders, engineers, as well as families. I hope to continue to study people in Norway and to take a grasp on people over time to include more ordinary people as well as the business elite. In May 2024 I published on Fagbokforlaget in Norwegian, as editor, my late father’s book «De «tvende Correlata» on Danish-Norwegian natural law in late 18th century Danish central administration, and here egalitarianism is a central element. I am also interested in comparative corporate governance, which the English language book I edited with Andrea Colli on Routledge is an example of. In a career that has gone on for a while, and that at the outset was pretty international in oulook, I am reemerging from the depth of Norwegian-language comissioned works and demanding administrative tasks to participate in international economic and business historical debates. With an eye for my Norwegian situatedness, of course. I was very happy to publish a revised English language doctoral thesis, Norway’s Pharmaceutical Revolution, with Oxford University Press in 2022, and my recent (December 2024) article on the Norwegian aluminium industry before, during and just after World War II in Business History Review extends, renews and sharpens previous work.
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.
Sogner, Knut & Sogner, Bjørn (2024)
De «tvende Correlata». Henrik Stampes dansk-norske naturrettsprogram
Sogner, Knut (2023)
Academics as teachers of business responsibility? Historians, philosophers, and the maturation of the young minds within Norwegian business schools
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.
Sogner, Knut (2021)
The Rise and Fall of Managerial Capitalism in Norway, 1895-1940
This chapter argues that Norwegian managers at the turn of the last century actively used the emerging division of ownership and control and thus were creators of Norwegian modern business – and that their role in this has been neglected. It describes the current view of the Norwegian experience of the second industrial revolution. The chapter tracks Norwegian managerial influence in an entrepreneurial phase up to about 1910 and a “coming of age” maturation stage up to the 1920s and slightly beyond. It discusses the setback for the Norwegian managerial surge in the interwar years, when shareholder influence increased and Norwegian businesses and business constellations became smaller. The threat of foreign business domination lurked in the background of the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905. Recent scholarship suggests a uniquely Scandinavian collaborative approach to corporate governance since the late nineteenth century that includes a clear perception of management’s role.
Sogner, Knut & Colli, Andrea (2021)
The Emergence of Corporate Governance: People, Power & Performance
Sogner, Knut (2018)
Creativity, innovation, and the production of wealth
This chapter offers an historic introduction to the broad field of innovation studies with an eye towards ethical matters. Four fundamental issues are highlighted. In the first section, I delineate how the concept of innovation has little place within the framework of standard economic models, yet innovation is crucial to the total economy. In the second section, I take up some theoretical approaches, emerging in the 1980s, that construe the phenomena of innovation as occurring within specific circumstances. This is the “interactive” approach. In the subsequent section, I focus on how innovation has been seen, by some, to be institutionalized within the large corporation or, in other cases, within clusters of small companies or even the nation state, noting as well how some scholars have argued for cultural or ethical frameworks as catalysts of innovation. In the final section, I canvas some of the debate as to whether or why innovation has failed to return economic growth to the wealthy nations.
Sogner, Knut (2016)
Ressursbedrifter og naturressurser
, s. 99- 112.
Sogner, Knut; Lie, Einar & Aven, Håvard Brede (2016)
Entreprenørskap i næringsliv og politikk. Festskrift til Even Lange
