Centre og andre forskningsenheder

The project discusses the importance of economic espionage for corporations and their countermeasures to protect themselves against illegal knowledge transfer. Since the late 19th century, a technological "lead" has increasingly been regarded as one of the factors responsible for an uneven distribution of market and political opportunities of states in a global competition. Governments and corporations therefore cooperated closely in the area of a "knowledge policy," which included espionage by national intelligence agencies in favor of the national economy as well as concerted safety precautions by state and corporations against industrial espionage.

In my talk I discuss Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and History of the Emotions approaches and ask how these approaches can be used to analyze advertising culture in Germany throughout the twentieth century. Based on several examples I will show how I use analytical tools to examine the following research questions: How were consumers and advertisers enacted in advertising culture? How did the processes of making up consumers and advertisers influence product qualities and characteristics as well as the techniques of offering products? And vice versa: How did these techniques rework the makeup of advertisers and consumers?

In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly interested in the promise of using historical sources and reasoning in entrepreneurship research. History, it has been argued, can be valuable in addressing a number of limitations in traditional approaches to studying entrepreneurship, including in providing multi-level perspectives on the entrepreneurial process, in accounting for contexts and institutions, in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic change, and in situating entrepreneurial behavior and cognition within the flow of time. Historical methods, in this regard, point the direction to both valuable sources and data for addressing such questions and to a body of historical theory from which to conceptualize context, time, and change analytically. Indeed, it is for many of these same reasons that Schumpeter called for theorists and historians to collaborate in the study of entrepreneurship.