At the intersection of economic history and contemporary regional development: insights from a Swedish ‘bruksort’

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore contemporary regional development in a historic industrial region. Specifically, we unpack the influences of industrial history and culture, built up over several centuries, on contemporary regional development dynamics and issues. In doing so, we draw on an evolutionary perspective within economic geography and perspectives from deindustrialization studies to understand how the past shapes the present. We combine these with theories of agency to understand how key actors comprehend the industrial heritage of a place, and how this is incorporated into contemporary regional development efforts. We explore this combination of conceptual lenses through an in-depth case study of Karlskoga, in Sweden, one of the country’s ‘bruksorter’ (mill towns) that grew up around the production of iron and steel, leading to it eventually becoming one of the largest arms manufacturing cities in Europe, home of the well-known Bofors company. However, all has not been plain sailing, and Karlskoga has experienced the challenges of de-population, industrial restructuring, and shocks to the sector upon which the town is reliant. By analysing these mixed fortunes we develop new insights into how regional development is intertwined with structural, institutional, and cultural industrial legacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional development
• industrial heritage
• path development
• agency
• peripheral regions

1. Introduction

It is clear that what has happened in the past shapes what is currently taking place, and what is to come. The field of economic geography has been increasingly interested in the concept of ‘path dependence’ and how future development trajectories are indeed shaped and somehow determined by previous predominant modes and characteristics (Martin 2010). The sub-field of ‘evolutionary economic geography’ firmly cemented this longitudinal perspective (Boschma and Frenken 2006, 2018). Yet, there have been calls for a better integration of historic perspectives into the contemporary economic geographical analysis (Martin and Sunley 2015). This subfield has been dominated by research that prioritizes firm-level processes and technological dynamics, in part because this was the goal as established in the seminal paper by Boschma and Frenken (2006). Though the authors themselves, and various other contributors, have since then argued that institutions or place-based factors should also be taken into account (Boschma and Frenken 2009), they have in comparison received less attention, in large part because they are harder to measure and test empirically.

A key contribution of this paper is thus to introduce the Swedish concept of a ‘bruksort’ into the mainstream (English) economic geography parlance and illustrate through a specific case study, how this concept can help us understand processes of change and development in specifically industrial (and post-industrial) regional contexts, drawing on an appreciation of past events. Karlskoga, a small city in central Sweden, is currently undergoing an interesting change in its regional path development away from being a one-company dominated town, with one strong industry, to a more diverse and dispersed industrial context. The decline of Bofors, one of Sweden and indeed the world’s oldest and most famous companies (in the sphere of defence) has led to a break in the predominant historical path trajectory of the town, and the opening of new development paths and perspectives, albeit through quite a turbulent and complex process. How exactly a ‘bruksort’ (traditional mill-town society) responds and adapts to changing path trajectories, and how a strong history and culture built up around industrial heritage influences this, are the key points of interest at the heart of this paper.

Through an in-depth discussion of this case, and the ‘bruksort’ concept, we contribute to contemporary debates in regional economic geography around the actualization of regional path development via change agency and agential processes (Grillitsch and Sotarauta 2020), the role of institutions (Marques and Morgan 2021), and institutional work (Fløysand et al. 2022). Taking a step out into the wider human geography sphere, we use our case to discuss how the geographical imagination of a place (Harvey 1990; Daniels 2011), as expressed through the bruksort concept, shapes contemporary regional development discourses and agendas. The research question we answer with this work is: How can the concept of the bruksort help us to unpack the complexities around institutions and agencies driving change in regional economic paths?

2. Theoretical underpinnings

This paper hinges on the concepts of ‘bruksort’ and ‘bruksanda’. A Bruksort (the ‘mill society locale’) is a particular type of locality with industrial heritage, and associated social organization centred around the presence of a mill. The bruksanda is the ‘spirit’ or mentality associated with this, which contextualizes life and culture within the bruksort. These terms are well used and understood in the Swedish language, but which does not translate directly to English. Nevertheless, they capture a range of economic, historic, cultural, social, and political elements that we associate with industrial and post-industrial settings. In order to understand the concepts better, it is useful to ground them in the case we are studying here.

The old industrial region of Bergslagen entered a specific industrial development path at a very early stage, largely based on rich natural resources for iron works. Over the centuries the regional economy has seen upturns and downturns, and in that sense, both positive and negative ‘lock-in’ effects. The path that the region embarked on has for a long time shaped socio-cultural characteristics of the area, creating a specific set of informal institutions, and features such as low levels of entrepreneurship, traditional gender contracts, strict social hierarchies and low levels of social mobility, and low levels of educational attainment. It’s debatable whether this ‘local/regional culture’ is still a strong force in the region, but many scholars agree that it has played an important role over the years (see Ekman 1996; Bergdahl, Isacson, and Mellander 1997; Berger, Lundmark, and Strömberg 2006; Isacson et al. 2009; Hedfeldt and Lundmark 2015).

The idea of a ‘company town’ is of course not specific to the Swedish experience, and there are many documented cases in the literature from North America (Agrawal, Cockburn, and Rosell 2010), but also other parts of the world such as Namibia (Littlewood 2014), the Middle East (Ehsani 2003), and Russia (Commander, Nikoloski, and Plekhanov 2011). Bruksort most often gets translated as ‘mill society’, and it is worth highlighting that a Swedish ‘mill town’ usually refers to steel mills (such as in the Karlskoga case) as opposed to textile mill towns that are more commonly referred to in the British literature or wood and paper mills in North America (e.g.: Miller 2006; Swanton 2010; Bond 2011; Bullock 2013). For the discussion we advance here, these semantics are not crucial: the main point is that it refers to a city with single industry employment (most often with one large company at the center), normally in a traditional sector, and we find such communities, especially in more peripheral regions.

The Bergslagen region is made up of a large number of company towns, defined by longstanding relationships between the main employer and the small locality. These bruksorter were essentially hierarchical societies, where workers received a certain amount of social security from the employer in a highly patriarchal system. Among other things, workers and their families were provided with housing, some medical care, pension funds and support for widows, and access to credits at the local food store, normally controlled by the company. This relationship created a strong, but not necessarily equal, dependency between employer and employees, permeating both work life and social life in the, often geographically quite isolated, localities in the region. As a result, a specific spirit or mentality developed in these places: ‘bruksanda’ or sometimes ‘bruksmentalitet’. This mentality is often portrayed as having both positive and negative connotations. On the positive side, we find ideas about a sense of loyalty, sense of duty, and solidarity between social groups, and a strong feeling of community. On the other hand, it is also often claimed to include conservatism, lack of initiative and narrow-mindedness. The concept is genuinely elusive and hard to define, and, perhaps for that reason, has caused some controversy from time to time.

The mill mentality is normally described as a local and place-based culture, where locals identify, not only with the place itself but also with the dominating company, collective norms and values, a common history, and nature. However, in the Swedish literature on ‘bruksandan’, there are several unresolved issues. Most researchers would perhaps agree that ‘bruksandan’ was most influential during the twentieth century, roughly between 1930 and 1970 – the heyday of the Swedish steel industry, but there is less consensus on whether it still has an impact on life in the old industrial towns of Bergslagen, and whether that impact is positive or negative for future development (Bergdahl, Isacson, and Mellander 1997, 122–132). Also, workers and inhabitants in the localities are much more mobile compared to the industrial heydays of the single-company towns in the 40s and 50s.

Another debate has revolved around the importance of ‘bruksandan’ as a template for the establishment of the Swedish welfare model (in Swedish often referred to as ‘folkhemmet’) during the 1940s and 1950s. Some argue that there was a relatively strong consensus and understanding between social classes, and between employer and employees, while others insist that the single-company towns were in fact important arenas for class conflicts and struggles between unions and employers organisations, as in the metropolitan areas in Sweden (Magnusson 1997).

There are thus multiple ways in which past and present, as well as local, regional and national scales are intertwined in Bruksorter. As such, bruksort – both as a site and concept – offers a potentially fruitful and novel way to explore the ways in which future development trajectories are shaped by previous predominant modes and characteristics. As bruksorter have both distinct economic/industrial as well as cultural characteristics, centring this concept enables us to bridge between traditionally distinct academic literature and perspectives. In the next section we will situate our research against a broader and more international literature on path development and agents of change; and culture and identity. Each of these concepts offers some conceptual clarity and a piece of the puzzle for understanding regional development. We will then continue with our analysis to demonstrate how a bruksort-focus has the potential to bridge between these concepts in order to demonstrate how structural, institutional, and cultural industrial legacies shape regional dynamics.

2.1. Path development and agents of change

The first concept we discuss here, path development, offers a valuable way of understanding the link between historical, contemporary, and future development processes. Contributions around path development are concerned with processes and dynamics surrounding the emergence and growth of new activities and industries at the regional level (MacKinnon et al. 2019). Path dependence has a long presence in the literature and is based on the idea that past events generate cumulative and self-reinforcing dynamics that condition future development opportunities (Henning, Stam, and Wenting 2013). This concept had previously been used to understand dynamics such as lock-in and economic decline (cf. Hassink 2005), but also renewal in the context of old industrial regions (Tödtling and Trippl 2004). There is also an interest in how paths may be renewed or created (Micek et al. 2022) in the context of the ‘developmental turn’ in the wider discipline (Martin and Sunley 2015). Path creation in old industrial regions has recently been identified as a particularly fruitful area for research, due to the potential for both theoretical and pragmatic (i.e. policy) benefits from exploring this theme and context in conjunction (Micek et al. 2022).

In terms of the established path dependence literature Henning, Stam, and Wenting (2013) already provided a comprehensive literature review article, tracing the evolution of this sub-field from its geography and economics origins. They provide a solid definition of path dependence as a concept, hanging around three elements (2013, 1350): 1 – ‘improbable events have a long-run effect on economic structures’; 2 – ‘mechanisms such as increasing returns or network externalities persistently reinforce the situations created by chance events, a phenomenon often known as lock-in’; and, 3 – ‘external shocks can disrupt the persistence of the locked-in pattern’. They conclude, basically, that ‘history matters’ (Henning, Stam, and Wenting 2013, 1350). In terms of ways of undertaking research into path dependence, they find four predominant modes, namely micro-level (i.e. firms or entrepreneurs), network level, particular technologies, and institutions (Henning, Stam, and Wenting 2013). Our analysis here generally falls into the latter camp.

The recent trend towards identifying path creation places a stronger focus on change and new paths (Trippl, Asheim, and Miörner 2016), but also on the interdependence between path evolutions (Frangenheim, Trippl, and Chlebna 2020). This literature identifies different trajectories, including path extension, which takes place when an industry or region maintains an economic trajectory building on the same specialization, through incremental innovation or finding new market niches for its firms, for example (Isaksen 2015); path renewal, which is close to the concept of related variety, and happens when new but related specializations emerge in a region, usually because new sectors of economic activity can draw on existing skills (Njøs and Jakobsen 2016); path creation, in turn, refers to unrelated diversification, which means the emergence in a territory of industries that are new to the region (Binz, Truffer, and Coenen 2016). The conceptual efforts made in EEG would be useful to add some rigour to a concept such as mentality, which is central to Bruksort as mentioned previously.

In turn, the concepts of Bruksort and Bruksanda help highlight that path dependence must be understood in a broad sense as the result of not only economic but also social, cultural or institutional factors. In line with Martin and Sunley (2015), these concepts demonstrate that a narrow focus on economic variables such as industry structure or skills composition leads to a neglect of fundamental social or cultural dynamics. These dynamics, otherwise also known as informal institutions, influence factors such as entrepreneurialism, educational choices, or openness to external knowledge, and as such are fundamental to understand how regional economic structures evolve over time (Farole et al. 2011).

To help us further unpack these dynamics of change, we consult the concept of ‘agents of change’, which unpacks the individuals, organizations, and institutions involved in driving change at the regional level. This includes, for instance, individuals’ skills and knowledge, organizational routines, network interdependencies between individuals and organizations, and institutions (Grillitsch and Rekers 2016). We need more contributions unpacking the micro-dynamics of these processes (Asheim, Grillitsch, and Trippl 2016; Uyarra et al. 2017; Grillitsch and Sotarauta 2020). Grillitsch and Sotarauta (2020) find three main change agency types (Jolly et al. 2020). The first type of change agency (Schumpeterian) refers to innovation in firms, particularly that which brings about ´creative destruction´, and as such is capable of generating new paths for an industry or a whole region. The second type, institutional entrepreneurship, is more diffuse and it refers to people who, while operating within a set of institutions, can enact change to those same institutions in a way that leads to different socio-economic outcomes. The third type is based on individuals who are embedded in a specific territory and are capable of mobilizing actors towards specific ends, usually through policy or some form of collective action. The temporality of change agency is highlighted as an overlooked aspect in the research to date (Grillitsch, Asheim, and Nielsen 2022), specifically ‘how short- and long-term intentions motivate different types of agency, how different types of agency affect short  – and long-term regional development outcomes and which conditions enable or constrain different types of agency’ (Grillitsch, Asheim, and Nielsen 2022 107).

Nonetheless, despite encompassing different actors and logics, the framework of the trinity of change is useful because it provides us with a heuristic that considers the role of public, private and third sectors as agents of change and how each can contribute separately and/or in combination to the emergence of regional growth paths. In other words, regional development is thought to occur as the result of the interplay by many different actors and processes, and not one ‘hero’ alone (Bristow and Healy 2014; Grillitsch and Sotarauta 2020), and as such it aligns well with the concept of the bruksort.

The discussions around change agency are pushed forward by scholars examining the concept of ‘institutional work’ and how this work enacted by individual agents of change impacts institutions, which in terms shape regional development trajectories, defined as ‘physical and mental efforts aimed at affecting an institution or set of institutions’ (Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca 2011, 55; cited in Fløysand et al. 2022). These authors illustrate how exploring institutional work can help us understand how institutional entrepreneurs can legitimize patterns of behaviour which can lead to maintenance, change, or creation of paths of regional development. We also argue that the concept of Bruksort offers a good basis to discuss this notion of institutional work because it encourages the researcher to look at a place as the result of multiple institutional and organizational dynamics.

2.2. Regional development in old industrial regions

Both concepts of path dependency and change agency have the potential to highlight the key ways in which change in industrial regions is enacted or inhibited. However, with their roots in economic geography, these concepts do not necessarily fully capture the cultural dynamics at play in bruksorter, and which we theorize, play an important role in shaping regional development. We therefore introduce a third body of literature, rooted in deindustrialization studies. This literature highlights how economic activity in some places creates not only place-based economic dependencies, but also social ones, (Linkon 2018), and how these social dependencies shape the connection between past, present and future.

For our purposes, this body of literature offers two important contributions. First, we see the consideration of a wider range of factors that shape post-industrial towns’ relations with their industrial heritage, specifically questions of identity (both place-based and worker-based) that continue to linger long after industries have closed. Previous research on steel towns has already demonstrated that work forms both an important part of worker identities and the communities they are part of (MacKenzie et al. 2006; McLachlan, MacKenzie, and Greenwood 2019). This sense of identity is amplified by strong attachments to location and personal networks, which makes it difficult for workers to imagine a future outside of their industry, but also for them to leave their locality for new employment opportunities (Carley, Evans, and Konisky 2018, 136). However, such identities can also be collectively held, through the identification of e.g. a ‘coal town’ or ‘steel town’. What characterizes this literature is its focus on lived experiences, social relations, and the everyday. Sociological research on the affective dimensions of deindustrialization highlights the painfulness of these processes of loss, and how people seek to make sense of the world around them in the face of the loss of both their livelihoods and their sense of self (Strangleman and Rhodes 2014). It thus draws attention to the uncertainty and tenacity of lived experiences (Mah 2017) with industrial transformation, both at the individual level as well as it is collectively experienced within places and communities. This set of literature thus highlights the social, cultural, and affective dimensions of path destruction and creation.

A second strand of research that is relevant for our purposes here is the focus on the role of memory and nostalgia, which problematizes the straightforward linear temporalities of path dependency. There is a dominant perception across much of the social sciences and humanities of the future as being entrenched in the past (Heller 2016). Here, we call for recognition of a more dynamic relationship between the past, the present, and the future. This means considering both the cyclical and unfinished nature of deindustrialization processes. As Mah (2017) notes, disposals of the past are always incomplete, and memories of past industries and remnant social relations can shape the present as much as the more tangible aspects of those industries shape the present. Indeed, and as we described above, the most important feature of the literature on deindustrialization is centred on memory and how workers, families, and communities deal with industrial loss. While industries can become physically absent, they have the potential to return to haunt, for example through certain forms of nostalgia (‘smokestack nostalgia’) for a past that no longer is. Additionally, researchers have argued that while industries change, ‘industrial structures of feeling’ can often remain: ways of life, attitudes, and expectations associated with earlier industrial change and which continue to shape the character of post-industrial communities (Mah 2012). This second, related, set of literature is similar to the first, but with a slightly greater emphasis on the time aspect, highlighting the multiple/complex ways through which past and present are intertwined.

By combining these various perspectives from different strands of literature both within and outside mainstream economic geography, we present a more rich and nuanced discussion of industrial regions economic development, hanging around the concept of a bruksort to help us understand the myriad ways in which the past influences the present and what is to be.

3. Case and methods

Our case study is of Karlskoga, the town that has long hosted the famous defence manufacturer Bofors, which began life as a mill town. Karlskoga has experienced several of the trends that have been noted in other post-industrial towns globally, namely: similar patterns of industrial restructuring, loss of employment, followed by outmigration, budget shrinkage, and decline of liveability (Gunko et al. 2021). A more detailed explanation of the evolution of the Karlskoga industrial and population situation can be found in Lundmark and Pugh (2020) and Beckmann (2023): in short the last few decades of decline in the industry and out-migration have been turned around, and the city is at least stabilizing and looking to grow its population in the coming years. Due to recent conflicts, there is a sudden uptick in demand for military equipment which positively effects many of the companies in Karlskoga.

Following years of declining production, and high-profile scandals related to Bofors and its arms sales (see. Råssjö 2020), the Swedish defence industry is doing well, and new industries emerging in the town are helping to restart economic growth. However, its social situation is lagging behind: following years of decline and outmigration, services and housing remain large challenges, and municipal planners are struggling to attract residents. Many workers in local industries prefer to commute in from the larger and growing cities of Örebro and Karlstad, which leaves the Karlskoga municipality with a budget problem since local taxes in Sweden corroborate with place of residence and not work location. Problems with the town’s schools, hospital closures, and lack of decent quality housing were all cited by interviewees as major challenges facing the municipality, whereas the economic situation was not the major concern in the sense that there are jobs to be filled in Karlskoga.

Because we promised our participants anonymity as part of our research ethics, we have used pseudonyms and a simple moniker that identifies whether they work in industry, government or university. Due to the small size of the town and the tight social links, we simply cannot provide any more information without exposing our respondents and going counter to the ethical process we followed. We can say that all were in senior positions  – managers, directors, programme leaders or retired senior individuals – and could be described as change agents following the precedent set out in previous research (Rekers and Stihl 2021; Grillitsch et al. 2023). We used a snowballing approach to identify interviewees, beginning with a key respondent in each of the spheres – university, industry, and government  – who helped us reach other relevant stakeholders and assisted us in setting up meetings, site visits, and interviews. Although part of a larger study, the data we draw upon in this paper is derived from 12 interviews with key stakeholders, undertaken during 2018 and 2019 in Karlskoga by the first two authors. All were recorded and transcribed, and translated from Swedish to English, in the cases where interviews were conducted partly or completely in Swedish. Pro-formas were used with open ended questions to elucidate each respondents perspectives and experiences regarding the economic development of Karlskoga. The approach was akin to what Döringer (2021) calls the ‘problem-centred expert interview’. The first author analysed and coded the interviews using a trees and branches structure to organize themes and topics which emerged inductively. The result of this analysis was the emergence of the bruksort as a vital explanatory factor in understanding Karlskoga’s contemporary development, which inspired us to dig deeper into this context, both in terms of the literature, but also in terms of going back to the data to understand it better and how it is seen to impact contemporary industrial development.

4. Analysis

4.1. The Bruksort: What it is and why it is important for understanding regional development

When we spoke to people who live and work in Karlskoga, the term ‘bruksort’ came up constantly. The concept is key to understanding how the town and the people within it view themselves, but also how they understand their own history and culture. Additionally, it is of central importance when trying to understand contemporary and future regional development paths because these are felt to be strongly shaped by the mill town mentality. Having non Swedish native speaking researchers in the team meant that we asked about this word, what it meant, how it was translated, and as a result gathered some interesting data about what this concept means to those who live and work in industrial contexts and how they understand it as part of their contemporary development.

It became clear that the dual concepts of bruksort and brukanda invoke a sense of pride, rooted in local place and community. Our interviewees would allude to both a historical element, rooted in a somewhat romanticized view of the town’s industrial heritage, as well as a contemporary one. Here interviewees would draw on their pride in the town’s industrial history to explain how it carries through in the ways different actors – ‘community, politics, and leading persons’ (Larry-government)  – would come together:

It’s all about knowledge, in all processes, to work together, to develop. To have the force to develop and want to improve things … You have this proudness of the area, of being part of this. (Karin-industry)

In the Karlskoga case, the town’s spirit, or bruksanda, and the pride it instilled is inextricably linked to its dominating company – Bofors:

‘Störst och värst I hela Bofors’ The best and the biggest in Karlskoga or in Bofors, that’s the saying. You don’t need to compare [yourself] to others if you are good enough here. Then you really have the pride. (Larry  – Government)

However, this pride became problematic in recent years with the scandals that rocked Bofors (and indeed rocked the national governments of Sweden and India when high-level politicians were implicated in illegal kickbacks relating to arms sales in the 1980s and 1990s), given the long-standing connection between the town’s identity and the company. Several respondents spoke of the scandals and how they impacted the view of the town and the company from a Swedish and international perspective, and some even reported that the scandals were a deciding factor in them leaving the company and joining smaller businesses or setting up their own companies.

The Bruksort culture may be perceived as closed, too focused on the past, and not welcoming enough to new people and ideas. In economic geography terms, this might be considered a form of ‘lock-in’. Karin (industry), saw both positive and negative sides to the mill mentality when she explains that there were downsides to growing up in such a heavily industrialized town, with links to the defence industry:

When you are frightened by these signs that tell you it’s a restricted area of Bofors, you know there could be grenades, bombs, and so on … Explosions … That’s part of growing up in Karlskoga … Du vet att du är från Karlskoga! (You know you are from Karlskoga!)

4.2. Changing path trajectories

An element of the mill society that we were especially interested to unpack, given the contemporary interest with path trajectories in old industrial regions, was how it influences current path developments. We devoted a large section of our interviews to asking our participants about changes that had occurred to the town and its industry in recent years, and how these changes had come about and been experienced by those working there. As already illustrated (Lundmark and Pugh 2020), there was a big shift in the last 30 years away from manufacturing employment dominated by the old Bofors company into several smaller companies, and a more diverse and dispersed employment structure in the town. In some ways, the town was in a good position to open up entrepreneurially and into new sectors and avenues of path development precisely because of the bruksanda and traditions and cultures built up over hundreds of years. With the technological advancements at Bofors, Karlskoga was no longer a typical bruksorter due to its engineering intense and high-tech characteristics leading to some contradictions in its characterization thus by stakeholders, whilst displaying many characteristics of high-tech cluster type locations.

As Benny (industry) explains, part of the bruksort spirit was the existence of an experimental and entrepreneurial approach based on the technical and mechanical competences of the large industrial workforce.

Karlskoga was a lot of people working in Bofors daytime. But in the evenings they had their own shop at home, in the garage they start up some milling machines or whatever, one or two machines and worked another shift and sold the stuff to Bofors. And from that it started here a tradition with lots of suppliers of machining, milling, turning, that type of sheet metal, that type of things

When Bofors declined in the 1990s, there was a large movement of people starting or joining smaller companies, or becoming self-employed. We interviewed some of them to gain their experiences of this time. For example, Martin left Bofors in the 1990s and set up a series of companies with former colleagues from the same company, developing novel technologies ranging from new envelope printers, to digital product labels, to innovative trailers. It is clear that although one large company had long dominated employment structures in the town, the skills and culture around tinkering and experimenting with industrial processes and materials put the workers in a good position to move into related domains later. In this sense, this is a typical case of path creation through related variety. Today, the town is blossoming in the spheres of 3D printing and medical technologies, drawing on many of the inventions and knowledge acquired by the Bofors workforce in previous years. Simon (industry) explains this trajectory of new technology development over time:

I think it’s fascinating to see so many different technologies being developed, starting with the forest industry, and then early iron production, and now developed into high technology when it comes to weapons, when it comes to medicine, when it comes to advanced metal production, when it comes to 3D printing, tooth implants … Yes so many different things

On the other hand, change did not always come easily in a bruksort such as Karlskoga, where there are various social dynamics encouraging lock-in rather than renewal. One of our interviewees (Daniel  – University) mentioned that especially the older generation often look to the past, and would like everything to be the same as it was in the 1960s – a time when the town and the company were perceived as one and the same, and if you worked at Bofors you could expect the company to take care of you for life.

This change from being a one company town to a more diverse economic constellation thus provides both opportunities and challenges. Change makers need to be able to adapt to this more complex scenario, as participants explain:

There is this move from being like one company where everything is kind of done within the walls of the company, so to speak, so the current situation is now tens of companies, all that are part of this system, and can be traced back maybe in some way to the original company. (Rikard, industry)

One of our participants from the university sphere (Charlie) explained how this shift can be complicated to manage from a policy perspective. The rise of new sectors of economic activity implies the need for institutional adaptation, namely in terms of the type of services provided by the municipality and new planning requirements, which is not an easy shift to make.

4.3. Agents of change in the Bruksort

Another element of the literature we were eager to interrogate using our Karlskoga case was that of agents of change. In the bruksort concept, there is an inherent reference to society working together, or place-based leadership, according to our participants. For example, Karin (industry) tries to put this concept into words:

You need to tell the people why and where you are going and so on, and then they use the force, the union, so we do it in cooperation – samförstånd. And that bruksanda and proudness is very important, don’t give it up, never give up.

As Karin’s quote indicates, and as was also confirmed by other interviewees, the labour unions had a key role in this process. They have a traditionally strong presence in the bruksort, not only in the company but also in the town´s politics, further cementing the link between industry and town. Nonetheless, it also became clear that one group or actor is not enough to bring about change, unless it can mobilize other stakeholders around common goals. Solving sticky problems such as labour shortages and outmigration requires this type of coordination, according to Tim (industry):

Our focus now is to try to get skilled people here, because we have made research to say how many people do we need here in the next five years? We are working on forming different programmes … And in order to do that we have to put together the companies, the community, the university, the region.

Bringing different stakeholders together is a challenging task, because of the culture and tradition in Karlskoga, but also in Sweden more generally, according to Martin (industry):

The whole of Sweden is very stove piped (in English – siloed), in everything administration, government, very stove piped. And the whole of Swedish society is stove piped, and someone needs to do it on a horizontal level

This is precisely where place-based leadership is necessary, since it refers to change agents that can work across different spheres and get a variety of stakeholders to work towards a common goal.

In the Karlskoga case, there was a huge amount of discussion about the workforce, and how an evolving industrial setting requires ‘feet on the ground’ to actually work in the existing and new industries. Respondents cited large skills shortfalls and struggles to recruit highly skilled workers to the town, with Shaun and Willy (Industry) suggesting 3000 more workers are immediately needed to help the industry grow. The town has historically relied on importing people to fill the gaps for workers, but this process is quite tricky to implement because of the immigration and security requirements which are decided at the national Swedish level.

If you look back in history, we had certain periods in Sweden where we imported huge numbers of people … So we have imported workers … Now we need more skilled people. But of course, Sweden needs to be much better at taking care of the people who have come now, some of them has immigrated … From Syria this big, highly educated, really good educations … Then we have this problem in Karlskoga especially we are dealing with defense industry that you have to be Swedish citizen. (Martin  – industry)

Another interviewee, Karin, also highlighted the importance of immigrants if we look back at the history of Bofors and Karlskoga, stretching right back to the late 1500s when Walloon immigrants came to work in the mills and forges of Sweden bringing their special and valuable knowledge to the industry. She drew a direct link to the more recent history, explaining how Bofors not only took in Walloon migrants in the 1500s but also Italiens and Vietnamese in the twentieth century. Without immigrants, the industry might not have been able to evolve and survive by bringing in new ideas, skills, and technologies. Today, this problem is a big one facing the town and its future, and the local government is attempting many different approaches to try to attract more people to live and work in the town and replace previous decades of population losses (Lundmark and Pugh 2020; Karlskoga Kommun 2019, 2020; Pugh and Andersson 2023).

5. Discussion and conclusions

Having presented the empirical work we undertook in the Karlskoga bruksort, and how employing this special Swedish concept has helped us to analyse this case of old industrial region development from the various lenses of our theoretical framework, we now turn to crystalizing the contributions this paper makes. We re-state the empirical context of our work as the key element we hinge our contributions around, in line with Gunko et al. (2021, 219) who highlight that in old-industrial towns, ‘emerging change is dialectically intertwined with structural, institutional, and cultural legacies of industrial specializations (van Agtmael and Bakker 2016; Cooke 1995)’.

We argue that the bruksort and related bruksanda concept is vital in understanding processes of regional development in old industrial regions in Sweden. We also posit that our research has a relevance that extends beyond the specific case. Particularly, we argue that these concepts also offer the opportunity to bridge between economic and culturally-oriented approaches to regional change processes, which can pluralize the ways in which we understand the ways in which the connections between past, present and future shape regional development.

Through adopting a path development lens, this research has uncovered a process of change whereby an old industrial town goes through a process of fragmentation of its economy as one dominant employer declines and a number of smaller companies, self-employment, and international buyouts change (and complicate) the economic picture. As Henning, Stam, and Wenting (2013) already highlighted: taking a path dependency perspective can help us to understand industrial renewal, transformation and decline, and the hows and whys of these processes. Bringing in insights from deindustrialization studies and applying this lens to Karlskoga has helped us highlight the role of culture, identity and memory in this process. We did so by demonstrating the ways in which the mill society mentality has locked the town into certain ways of thinking and doing, even when memories of the past are not always positive (see the Bofors scandals of the 1990s). On the plus side, by drawing on the regional engineering and production traditions, and the traditions of rigour and care in industrial processes, the town has been set in a front-row position to exploit emerging regional paths around new technologies such as 3-D printing and medical technologies. As such, our case reflected all three of the key elements of path dependence found in the economic literature by Henning, Stam, and Wenting (2013) of lock-in (to an old industry), disruptive events (such as the large scandals facing Bofors), and path creation as a branching process (whereby older technologies and skills were re-applied to emerging industries). The problem today is a shortage of labour, rather than there not being enough jobs. In this sense, our case is quite different to many of the previous studies of old industrial regions where a lack of contemporary jobs leading to high unemployment is a big problem, such as the well documented unemployment and decline narratives from cases in the American or Chinese rust belts (Lequieu 2017; Hu and Yang 2018).

In terms of change agency, we have expanded discussions beyond the ‘trinity of change agency’ (Grillitsch and Sotarauta 2020) to consider two elements that emerged as important in the Karlskoga bruksort case: trade unions and immigrants. Most of the discussions thus far have focussed on different public and private actors involved in regional development in particular clusters and industries (Bækkelund 2021; Chlebna and Mattes 2020¸ Tan et al. 2020). Trade unions and immigrants could be key actors to consider when thinking about change agency and regional path development. This is interesting since it seems that foreign workers can be positively associated with innovation, as found in the Nordic context (Solheim and Fitjar 2018). In the Karlskoga case it is increasingly difficult to meet the needs of the growing high tech industrial cluster with domestically trained engineers and scientists alone.

However, the bruksort concept highlights that these are not solely processes of economic change. History, culture and identity play key roles in how people and places view themselves, and how these perceptions shape the way in which they approach regional development. Whilst we are presenting a very specific case, we see a wider relevance to towns around the world that are historically and presently reliant on a dominant, often primary or traditional industry employer, which has a very strong role in shaping the economy, but also the society and culture of the place (Miller 2006; Swanton 2010; Bond 2011; Bullock 2013). Indeed, we see the expression of industrial heritage via local culture, a-la the ‘bruksort’ and ‘bruksanda’ a vital piece of the puzzle in understanding geographical imaginations more generally (Harvey 1990; Daniels 2011) and how these shape the legitimacy and discourses around the institutional work done by actors in place (Fløysand et al. 2022) is filled in.

Through attempting to theorize the nebulous concept of the bruksort and the ‘innovation spirit in the air’ within more tangible discussions of EEG, we appreciate that we are to some extent on a wild goose chase  – how does one materially discuss such fuzzy and fluffy ideas? One way of thinking about this comes from social movement studies, where research has highlighted that identity, heritage, or the quest for autonomy can be thought of as ‘symbolic resources’, which can be invoked to help mobilize individuals and groups towards a shared goal (Bomberg and McEwen 2012). It thus complements economic geographical approaches into how change agents mobilize material resources (such as skills or finance) to forge new paths (Grillitsch and Sotarauta 2020).

Part of our desire with this paper was to introduce the Swedish concepts of the bruksort and bruksanda, the mill society mentality, to an English-speaking audience, and unpack how this helps us to understand regional development in old industrial regions. When we conducted our interviews in Karlskoga, the bruksort was cited again and again as an explanatory factor as to how and why the economy of the city, and indeed its society and culture, was to be. It became clear to us that we could not understand contemporary and future economic development in the city without gaining an understanding of the bruksanda  – the spirit in the air  – that was the cause and effect of the industrial path trajectories unfolding in the town over hundreds of years. We hope that with this paper, we can enter the bruksort and bruksanda concepts into the international discussions on regional development, and spark dialogues around similar concepts developed in different international contexts but with special local specificities and characteristics.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors of this special issue for including this paper in the collection. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments which helped us to improve the work for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas [grant number 2018-01053; 2021-01767].