12 - Business History in Greece: The State of the Art and Future Prospects

Summary

Business history is a relatively new area of interest in Greece. The first steps toward its introduction were made only in the late 1980s. Ten years later, it would be fair to say that although the results have not been spectacular, business history has found a place on the agenda of the country's academic researchers. New ground is beginning to be broken in terms of new perspectives and issues.

These developments do not seem to have induced, however, any greater integration within the scientific community. Business history research has remained the pursuit of individual researchers and academics, mainly historians and social scientists. Systematic teaching and team projects in the field remain elusive. The number of monographs and articles produced is small, and there are virtually no full-fledged ongoing case studies of individual big firms. Nor has the publishing of any specialized journal been attempted. Papers tend to appear selectively in the three or four general historical journals published in Greece.

The slow development of the subdiscipline is due to several factors. Low institutionalization in the area of economic history itself has been partially responsible for the problem. The long dominance of political history in the curricula of history departments that, moreover, have traditionally included as well the study of archaeology, has hindered the blossoming of economic history and related areas of knowledge. Students of history are usually unprepared to take courses in economic theory or the social sciences.